New Books Network

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New Books Network episodes

July 14 Sarah Rosenson, "Fan Fiction on the Book of Genesis: A Guide to Close Reading of and Creative Writing on the Bible" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2026)
Can creative writing become a form of biblical interpretation?
That is the provocative question at the heart of my conversation with Sarah Rosenson about her new book, Fan Fiction on the Book of Genesis: A Guide to Close Reading of and Creative Writing on the Bible (Cherry Orchard Books, 2026).
The modern phenomenon of fan fiction involves readers writing
creative pieces that answer questions left open in favorite works of
literature. This also describes the ancient tradition of midrash, where
readers write stories filling in gaps in the Bible. In Fan Fiction on the Book of Genesis
Sarah Rosenson discusses the questions left open in the first book of
the Bible, and every chapter includes questions for the characters in
the stories, which can serve as prompts for conversations or creative
writing.
Rosenson argues that careful reading reveals narrative gaps:
characters whose motivations remain unexplained, conversations that
never occur, ethical dilemmas left unresolved, and emotions that are
only implied. Drawing on the long tradition of Jewish midrash, she
proposes that readers can engage these silences through disciplined
creative writing, using imagination not as a substitute for close
reading but as an extension of it.
In our conversation, we
discussed some of Genesis's most familiar stories from unexpected
angles. What if Eve's pursuit of knowledge is more complex than simple
disobedience? Why does Noah never challenge God's decision to destroy
the world? What happens when Hagar's perspective becomes central rather
than peripheral? Why does Abraham argue for the people of Sodom but
remain silent when Isaac is placed on the altar? And how does the Joseph
narrative negotiate the relationship between divine providence and
human responsibility?
We also explore the broader methodological
questions raised by the book. Does describing midrash as "fan fiction"
make an ancient interpretive tradition more accessible, or does it risk
misunderstanding it? How far can readers imaginatively expand biblical
narratives while remaining faithful to the text? And what safeguards
distinguish responsible interpretation from speculation?
Whether
you are interested in biblical studies, literary criticism, Jewish
interpretation, or creative writing, our conversation offers a
thoughtful discussion of how ancient texts continue to invite new
readings. More than providing answers, Rosenson's book encourages
readers to ask better questions and, in doing so, to discover that
Genesis remains as intellectually and ethically challenging today as it
has been for centuries.
You can find more about Sarah and her work here.
Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is
an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of
religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African
diasporic communities in the Netherlands.
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59 min
July 14 John Burt, "A Moment's Surrender" (Press Americana, 2026)
It’s 1980, a decade after he dropped out of grad school, and Paul
Bishop is a lowly writing instructor at a college in Nevada. His former
best friend, Tom Corbin
is now the celebrated poet that Paul once dreamed of being, but shortly
after visiting Paul in Reno, Tom is murdered. The story focuses on
Paul’s crippling guilt, Tom’s wife’s ongoing love for her cheating
husband, and the difficult girlfriend
both Paul and Tom betrayed a decade before. After Tom’s death, all
three are forced to confront their grief and painful memories. A
Moment’s Surrender (Press Americana, 2026) is a thoughtful and literary deep dive into guilt,
marriage, and loyalty.
John Burt has taught English at Brandeis University since 1983. He
is the author of three volumes of poetry: The Way Down (1988), Work
without
Hope (1996), and Victory (2007). His scholarly books include Lincoln's
Tragic Pragmatism (2013) and Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism
(1988). He is also the editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn
Warren (1998), and Robert Penn Warren's Brother to Dragons: A Parallel
Text Critical Edition of the 1953 and 1979 versions (forthcoming). Since
1984 he has sung in an ensemble devoted to the polyphonic folk songs
and religious music of the Republic of Georgia, and he transcribes and
engraves music from Georgia for other singers and ensembles to use.
Learn more on his website.
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25 min
July 14 Thomas Smith, "The Fifth Crusade: A History of the Epic Campaign to Conquer Egypt" (Yale UP, 2026)
In
1217, the crusader states were in a highly fragile condition. The
Fourth Crusade had failed, and Jerusalem had not been recovered. The
crusaders now set their sights on Egypt. If the breadbasket of the
Mediterranean could be conquered, long-term Christian control of the
Holy Land could be ensured. Led by the rulers of Hungary and Austria,
and backed by the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, the Fifth Crusade was
launched.
In The Fifth Crusade: A History of the Epic Campaign to Conquer Egypt(Yale University Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas Smith tells the gripping
story of the crusade for Egypt. Looking at a wide range of Christian and
Muslim sources, Dr. Smith sheds new light on the brutal reality of
medieval combat on land and water. We see a dramatic beach landing, the
invention of a unique floating siege engine, and the conquest of the
crucial port city of Damietta—one of the most famous and successful
sieges of the crusades. Dr. Smith provides fresh insights into strategy,
showing how, despite early victories, foolish decision making meant
that the crusaders ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
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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59 min
July 14 Soraya Murray, "Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination" (MIT Press, 2026)
Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination
(MIT Press, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies
classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about
advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech,
military weaponry, and surveillance culture. Technothriller is
about the changing imagination of technology within an American context
and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of
modern life.
Soraya Murray
is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the visual
culture of innovation, advanced computation, and its imaginaries as
imaged in popular American films, for which technology assumes a central
role. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), examines popular video games like Assassin’s Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Theft Auto as visual culture. She currently serves as Provost of Porter College, UCSC.
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1 hr 7 min
July 14 Phillip B. Williams, "Lift Every Voice" (Penguin, 2026)
Captivating for both its grandeur and intimacy, Lift Every Voice
(Penguin Books, 2026) explores the past’s capacity to be both a source
of dread and empowerment, an unshakable reminder of violence and an
indelible testament to the endurance of love. In virtuosic poems that
are wise, musical, richly layered, and saturated with vivid imagery,
Williams honors a mother “who knew seven ways to say bitch under her
breath,” a grandma whose smile “reflects the world,” and wonders at “the
impossible lift” of forgiveness. Lift Every Voice is a
staggering tribute to personal and collective evolutions, a vital chorus
that answers only to God, community, and the empowered self.
Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, Illinois, and is the author of two collections of poetry: Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and Mutiny,
which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. Williams is also the
recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National
Endowment for the Arts. His 2025 novel, Ours, was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, People, Los Angeles Times, NPR, and more. You can find Phillip on Instagram.
Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.
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1 hr
July 14 Molly Fader, "Lady X: A Novel" (Random House, 2026)
In Molly Fader's latest novel, Lady X: A Novel (Random House,
2026), the search for a notorious vigilante exposes the secrets between
three generations of women in this propulsive novel of female
resistance and rage, sweeping from contemporary L.A. to gritty, 1970s
New York. Los Angeles, 2024. After learning that her A-List actor
husband sent explicit photos to multiple girls on social media, Margot
Cooper runs away from the world—and the paparazzi—by fleeing to her
childhood home with her teenage daughter in tow. But home isn’t the
sanctuary Margot was hoping for. In a cardboard box in the corner of the
attic, she finds damning evidence of an infamous urban legend, the
mysterious vigilante “Lady X”—including a blurry newspaper photo of a
woman who looks an awful lot like Margot’s mother. New York City, 1977.
In the midst of an infamous summer, Ginger Daughtry and her two beloved
roommates are able to shield each other from the chaos—until one of them
is assaulted. Astounded by the lack of response from police, the young
women decide to engage in some light payback, signing their handiwork as
“Lady X.” Soon copycats appear, and a movement inspired by acts of
vandalism against terrible men spirals out of control, with criminals
running amok under the guise of the enigmatic “Lady X.” When a body is
found fallen—or pushed—from five stories high, the hunt reaches a
boiling point. But Lady X has vanished into thin air.
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42 min
July 13 Jay Belsky, "Nature of Nurture: Rethinking Why and How Childhood Adversity Shapes Development" (Harvard UP, 2026)
Children who grow up in troubled circumstances―experiencing
deprivation or instability, living in a dangerous neighborhood or an
abusive family―are more prone to aggression, recklessness, and sexual
promiscuity later in life. To most of us, the lesson is clear: adverse
childhood conditions make human development go awry.
In The Nature of Nurture: Rethinking Why and How Childhood Adversity Shapes Development (Harvard
University Press, 2026), renowned developmental psychologist Jay Belsky
challenges this interpretation and offers an exciting alternative based
on Darwinian theory. There is no reason to assume, he points out, that
the psychology of “well-behaved” people is normal while that of
“antisocial” adults is aberrant. Instead, the supposedly dysfunctional
behaviors correlated with childhood adversity could well be ingenious
adaptations to harsh environments. If you are surrounded by danger and
uncertainty, then being quick to lash out at potential threats and
having lots of offspring at an early age are good ways to maximize your
reproductive chances. From an evolutionary perspective, having just a
few children and lavishing care on each works well in a stable world,
but not in a perilous one.
Belsky exposes the romanticism
underlying our idealized notions that “natural” equals “good” and that
nature intends to maximize human happiness and well-being. When instead
we take seriously the fact that humans, too, have been shaped by
evolutionary pressures, we can better understand why, how, and for whom
childhood experience shapes later life.
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43 min
July 13 Heidegger in Ruins
Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it.
In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.
This book talk originally took place on September 20, 2023.
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1 hr 5 min
July 13 Robert G Parkinson, "Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier" (Norton, 2024)
We are divided over the history of the United States, and one of the central dividing lines is the frontier. Was it a site of heroism? Or was it where the full force of an all-powerful empire was brought to bear on Native peoples? In this startingly original work Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier (Norton, 2024), historian Robert Parkinson presents a new account of ever-shifting encounters between white colonists and Native Americans. Drawing skillfully on Joseph Conrad's famous novella, Heart of Darkness, he demonstrates that imperialism in North America was neither heroic nor a perfectly planned conquest. It was, rather, as bewildering, violent, and haphazard as the European colonization of Africa, which Conrad knew firsthand and fictionalized in his masterwork.
At the center of Parkinson's story are two families whose entwined histories ended in tragedy. The family of Shickellamy, one of the most renowned Indigenous leaders of the eighteenth century, were Iroquois diplomats laboring to create a world where settlers and Native people could coexist. The Cresaps were frontiersmen who became famous throughout the colonies for their bravado, scheming, and land greed. Together, the families helped determine the fate of the British and French empires, which were battling for control of the Ohio River Valley. From the Seven Years' War to the protests over the Stamp Act to the start of the Revolutionary War, Parkinson recounts the major turning points of the era from a vantage that allows us to see them anew, and to perceive how bewildering they were to people at the time.
For the Shickellamy family, it all came to an end on April 30, 1774, when most of the clan were brutally murdered by white settlers associated with the Cresaps at a place called Yellow Creek. That horrific event became news all over the continent, and it led to war in the interior, at the very moment the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Michael Cresap, at first blamed for the massacre at Yellow Creek, would be transformed by the Revolution into a hero alongside George Washington. In death, he helped cement the pioneer myth at the heart of the new republic.
Parkinson argues that American history is, in fact, tied to the frontier, just not in the ways we are often told. Altering our understanding of the past, he also shows what this new understanding should mean for us today.
Robert G. Parkinson is professor of history at Binghamton University.
Edward J. Blum is a professor of nineteenth-century United States History in the History Department at San Diego State University.
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33 min
July 13 Jeffrey A. Marx, "Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I" (NYU Press, 2026)
Why were Jews once stereotyped as America's arsonists? In this
episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Jeffrey Marx to
discuss his fascinating book Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I (NYU Press, 2026), which uncovers a little-known chapter in the history of American antisemitism.
In the decades after the American Civil War, major insurance
companies instructed agents to deny fire insurance to Jewish customers,
claiming they were uniquely prone to arson. That accusation quickly
spread beyond the insurance industry, finding its way into newspapers,
cartoons, vaudeville, popular songs, and silent films, helping to cement
the image of the "Jewish firebug" in the American imagination.
Drawing on fire department records, insurance files, trial
transcripts, newspapers, and other archival sources, Marx untangles the
complicated relationship between stereotype and reality. He explores why
some Jewish immigrants became involved in organized arson schemes, how
insurance companies often enabled those crimes for their own financial
interests, and why Jews became the only ethnic group in America burdened
with this particular accusation. The result is a nuanced history that
reveals as much about immigrant life, poverty, and urban America as it
does about the enduring power of antisemitic myths.
Together, Marx and Katz examine how stereotypes are created, why they
persist long after the facts have faded, and what this forgotten
episode teaches us about the history—and continuing evolution—of
antisemitism in the United States.
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39 min