New Books Network

Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Marissa Nicosia asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.

Dr. Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapters include both analysis of plays and poems, as well as updated historical recipes ready for cooking. Nicosia prepares the recipes that permeate the canon—from Falstaff’s beloved capons to the cakes that invite festivity in Twelfth Night—demonstrating how the physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts, and asking what we can learn about food history by recreating historical recipes with twenty-first-century ingredients and tools.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers’, looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose’s scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today?

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University

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Denise Z. Davidson joins Jana Byars to talk about Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters (Cornell UP, 2025). The book explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement.

Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters.

By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity.

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In Canon (Viking, 2026), two unlikely heroes embark on quests to win God’s favor in this outrageously entertaining, profoundly heartfelt novel that announces an ingenious new voice in the tradition of Chain-Gang All-Stars, No One Is Talking About This, and Martyr!
Yara can’t comprehend why God has chosen them to slay Dominic, the ruthless leader of the army of Bad Guys. Cast out by their family and reeling from a destructive relationship, Yara has never felt weaker—but with nothing left to lose, they strike a deal. Abandoning their solitary days of embroidery and obsessive cleaning, Yara reluctantly embarks on a perilous odyssey designed to prepare them for the daunting mission ahead.
Meanwhile, Adrena, a disillusioned prophet with a terrifying secret power, is determined to become the hero of this story. Desperately seeking the glory of God’s approval and the promise of heaven, where she hopes to reunite with her beloved mother, Adrena must first persuade Harpo, the leader of the Good Guys, that her plan is God’s will.
As their journeys unfold in a series of unforgettable adventures, Yara and Adrena are propelled toward each other and transformative revelations about life, death, and destiny in this intensely captivating, irreverent epic from a singularly brilliant new voice in fiction. 

Paige Lewis is the author of the poetry collection Space Struck (Sarabande Books, 2019) and the novel Canon (Viking Press, 2026). They co-edited Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books, 2023) with Kaveh Akbar. Paige teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.
Recommended Books:

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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In Rainforest Radio: Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon (U Arizona Press, 2025), Dr. Georgia C. Ennis provides a comprehensive ethnographic exploration of Amazonian Kichwa community media, offering a unique look at how Indigenous broadcast and performance media facilitate linguistic and cultural reclamation in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

This work offers a critical analysis of how standardized language revitalization efforts, like the imposition of Unified Kichwa, can inadvertently perpetuate linguistic oppression. Dr. Ennis follows producers, performers, and consumers to understand the role of media in language reclamation. Through extensive fieldwork, she provides vivid portrayals of community efforts to sustain the language and cultural practices of their elders amid environmental and social upheaval.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Rainforest Radio is an essential work for anthropologists, linguists, and social scientists interested in language revitalization, Indigenous media, and environmental justice. This book showcases the transformative potential of community-driven media initiatives, highlighting the innovative responses of Napo Kichwa activists to the unique challenges they face. It serves as a powerful model for those working on similar issues worldwide, demonstrating the critical role of community media in language reclamation and cultural sustainability.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.

Jeffrey Veidlinger’s new book In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust draws upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, showing for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Join us for a discussion on this important new book featuring Jeffrey Veidlinger in conversation with Steven Zipperstein.

This book talk originally took place on November 30, 2021.

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Historian Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026) recounts the 1984 New York City subway shooting in which Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers—Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur—and became both a fugitive and, later, a celebrated vigilante figure for many Americans frustrated by the social and economic tensions of the Reagan era. The book examines how media outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and later Fox News fueled public fear and anger, transforming Goetz into a hero while casting his victims as villains. Using archival materials and legal records, Thompson revisits the shooting’s lasting impact and argues that it marked a pivotal moment in modern American politics, media, and racial attitudes.

Dr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University.

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Carlos Martins joins the New Books Network to discuss his book Fascism: Beyond Hitler and Mussolini (Desassossego, 2022) (in Portuguese Fascismos: Para Além de Hitler e Mussolini), a comparative study of fascist movements across Europe and beyond. Working from a rigorous definition of fascism based on its ideological content, Martins examines eight case studies, analysing these specific manifestations of fascism to identify what they had in common and what separated them.

In this conversation, we discuss the problem of defining fascism, the distinctions between fascism and populism and why Martins argues that not every dictatorship or radical right movement should automatically be classified as fascist. The discussion also turns to the Portuguese case, including the Estado Novo, National Syndicalism and the debate surrounding Salazarism’s relationship to European fascism.

At a moment when the word “fascism” is increasingly invoked in public debate, Martins makes the case for conceptual precision without losing sight of fascism’s historical adaptability and political force. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about ideology, political modernity and the uses, and misuses, of language.

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In a world marked by increasingly destructive ecological and meteorological upheavals, Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius (Ohio UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Rouphail offers a historical analysis of how these catastrophes shape people’s understanding of themselves, their collective history, and their relationship to the institutions that govern them. An examination of cyclonic disasters in the multiethnic Indian Ocean island of Mauritius throws into stark relief how deep histories of diasporic identity formation, of imperial governance, and of the informal practices of racial difference making graft onto how everyday people interpret these moments of loss and the futures that emerge in their wake.
Cyclonic Lives shows that disasters are not only events; they are also processes through which people evaluate and rethink the most elemental social and cultural categories that give meaning to their lives. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing until the early postcolonial era, this book tracks, for example, how Mauritians of African descent integrated these disasters into broader collective histories and memories of the Indian Ocean slave trade, how Hindu Indo-Mauritians understood cyclones’ ecological effects as material elements to be accounted for in a broader Hindu diasporic space, and how the late colonial and early postcolonial state built infrastructures—material, conceptual, and financial—to mitigate the threats posed by these storms and ensure their own long-term durability.
The increasing political, social, and economic instability that climate change has already triggered demands that humanists develop analytical geographies and methodologies that shed light on how power can modulate in asymmetrical ways at moments of crisis. If there is one central takeaway from this historical study of this small island in a big ocean, it is that catastrophic events are not things that merely happen to people; they are processes that remake them.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In 1828, a seventeen-year-old boy was found wandering the streets of Nuremberg, holding two letters and unable to say more than a few words. The locals adopted him as a kind of municipal mascot; eventually, they learned that he had been bound in darkness until his release and struggled to learn more about his past. Werner Herzog took the story as a basis for his 1974 film–not one of his trademark documentaries–and used it as a meditation on the human condition. It’s an unforgettable experience, like seeing 2001 for the first time. Join us as we discuss the film’s ideas, humor, and audacity.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

The German title of the film is Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which is also the title of Werner Herzog’s 2024 memoir.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day.

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