New Books Network

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New Books Network episodes

June 12 Stephen Spector, "God and the First Families: Parenting, Trauma, and Healing in the Book of Genesis" (Jewish Publication Society, 2026)
What if the book of Genesis is not only the story of humanity’s first
family, but also the story of God learning how to parent? In this
episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Stephen Spector to discuss his
book God and the First Families: Parenting, Trauma, and Healing in the Book of Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 2026), a provocative reexamination of the Bible’s foundational stories through the lens of parenting.
Drawing on both biblical interpretation and contemporary psychology,
Spector explores how God’s relationship with the patriarchs and
matriarchs evolves throughout Genesis. God begins as a demanding
authority figure, shifts toward a more nurturing presence, returns
briefly to authoritarianism in the binding of Isaac, and ultimately
develops a style focused on fostering moral and emotional growth.
Remarkably, Spector argues, Genesis anticipates parenting insights that
psychologists would not articulate for thousands of years.
Along the way, familiar stories take on new meaning. Cain and Abel,
Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers—each
narrative becomes a window into questions of favoritism, resilience,
forgiveness, family conflict, and healing after trauma. By reading
Genesis as a story about parenting and human development, Spector
uncovers enduring wisdom about how families flourish, fracture, and find
their way back to one another.
Together, Spector and Katz explore what the Bible can teach about
raising children, repairing relationships, and understanding the complex
bond between love, authority, and growth.
Stephen Spector is a professor of English emeritus at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Operation Solomon: The Daring Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews and Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism,
among other volumes. Spector has taught the Bible to undergraduate and
graduate students for fifty years. He has been a visiting scholar at
Hebrew University and a senior research fellow at the National
Humanities Center and the Wesleyan Center for Humanities.
Rabbi Marc Katz is the senior rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, New Jersey. He is the author of The Heart of Loneliness: How Jewish Wisdom Can Help You Cope and Find Comfort, a National Jewish Book Award finalist and Yochanan’s Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life.
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43 min
June 12 Richard Bennet and Alexander Noyes, "War at Arm's Length: How America Can Build Effective Partners Through Military Assistance" (Yale UP, 2026)
An in-depth examination of how the United States can build more effective partner militaries.
Military assistance has a bad reputation. Large-scale attempts to build partner militaries in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam cost the United States billions of dollars and ended ignominiously, with the collapse of local forces as American troops withdrew. Arms transfers of sophisticated, American-made weapons often appear to do more harm than good. Yet military assistance and support—operating indirectly through partners—when done right, can deliver remarkable strategic results for the United States and its partners. Working effectively with partner militaries is one of the most pressing national security challenges for the United States today.
In their latest book, War at Arm's Length: How America Can Build Effective Partners Through Military Assistance (Yale University Press, 2026), Richard Bennet and Alexander Noyes offer a systematic look at military
assistance in the twenty-first century, examining a frequently deployed
but often misunderstood set of tools that allows the United States to
leverage partner militaries to achieve national security objectives.
Bennet and Noyes posit that two main factors—the degree of interest
alignment on security issues and the level of institutional capacity of
the receiving force—will be the most important variables in Washington’s
ability to build militarily effective partners.
Our guests today are Doctor Richard Bennet, who is a senior research associate at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, and Doctor Alexander Noyes, who is a fellow in the Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of Volatile States in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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40 min
June 12 Kristen Abbott Bennett, "Teaching Shakespeare's Theatre of the World" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Teaching Shakespeare's Theatre of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2025) engages with one of Shakespeare's greatest thought-experiments: How does one navigate the 'theatre of the world'?
It invites students to examine how Shakespeare challenges this
metaphor's vertical hierarchies in response to shifting understandings
of cosmological order.
Teachers will find rich contextual
frameworks for exploring how Shakespeare envisions 'worlds' as emerging
from dynamic variables, raising urgent questions about how identity and
justice are environmentally constructed.
Focal plays include A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello.
Each discussion features student centered 'Explorations'.
These play-specific classroom activities can also be adapted across
Shakespeare's corpus and tailored for both secondary and
university-level students.
These exercises encourage
non-linear critical and creative thinking, inviting students to
contemplate big ideas and generate new perspectives about the shared
points of contact between Shakespeare's world and their own.
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1 hr 4 min
June 12 Radio ReOrient Season 14 Round Up, hosted by Saeed Khan, Amina Easat-Daas, Marchella Ward and Claudia Radiven
In this episode, Saeed Khan, Amina Easat Daas, Chella Ward and Claudia Radiven sit down for a round up of the season’s dynamic episodes, and take a look toward the future and the next season. The conversation drew on the manifestations of Islamophobia across many different national contexts and the connectedness of them all. Across the episodes this season we explored the structural and systemic problems facing Muslims internationally, the work being done to combat it, and how tolerance may not be so tolerant after all. In this round up the team looked back at conversations at the recent International Islamophobia Studies Research Association Conference in Malaysia as well as in the ReOrient journal and blog, ReOrientations. We also looked forward to the upcoming debates and discussions to be held at the Critical Muslim Studies Conference and Summer Programme in Turkiye.
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48 min
June 12 Ro Skelton, “Naow’s Boutique” (Spring, 2025)
Ro Skelton speaks to Emily Everett about her essay “Naow’s Boutique,” which appears in The Common’s Spring issue. The essay explores Ro’s time living and working in Dakar, where she formed a friendship in her neighborhood that eventually led to a sense of community, and then a community garden, and then a lifelong friendship. Ro also discusses how the essay fits into her focus as a writer – writing about gardening in unconventional spaces – and her memoir-in-progress on the subject, Easement.
Ro Skelton is a writer and gardener from Scotland. She is currently working on her first book, Easement, a memoir about mental health, queer parenting, and radical acts of gardening. Her work has appeared in Four Way Review, Waxwing, New Ohio Review, and Ecotone. Previously a reporter in West Africa and a member of an ocean-going rescue crew, she now lives and gardens on the Isle of Mull.
Read the essay in The Common here.
Learn more about Ro and her work at here.
The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.
Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. In 2025 her debut novel All That Life Can Afford was a Reese’s Book Club pick, and her work appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column. Previous publications include the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.
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42 min
June 12 Laurie D. Graham, "Calling It Back to Me: Poems" (Random House, 2026)
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews acclaimed poet
Laurie D. Graham about her new book of poetry, Calling it Back to Me
(McClelland & Stewart, 2026).
A poet’s clear-eyed witnessing of familial history, this is the most
personal collection yet from two-time Trillium Book Award finalist
Laurie D. Graham.
In these searching, spare, and resonant poems,
Laurie D. Graham traces the story of her great-grandmothers’ lives
before and after they left their homelands and settled on this
continent, striving to understand how she came to be here and writing
the act of colonization as it exists in her own family history. This
collection’s fractured lines, time-weathered yet alive with detail,
reflect a family’s knowledge broken by global immigration and memory
loss, both individual and collective. The result is a courageous
reckoning with the legacy of leaving home.
With tender curiosity and a determination to bear unflinching witness, Calling It Back to Me: Poems (Random House, 2026) asks: When language and memory are so tenuous, what is it that gets passed down between generations?
LAURIE D. GRAHAM grew up in Treaty 6 Territory, near
amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), and she has lived in
Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, in the Territory of the Mississauga
Anishinaabeg, since 2018, where she is a poet, an editor, and the
publisher of Brick magazine, a journal of literary non-fiction based in Toronto. Her first book, Rove,
was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the best
first book of poetry in Canada. Her second and third books, Settler Education and Fast Commute, were both nominated for Ontario’s Trillium Book Award for Poetry.
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51 min
June 12 Jake Dyble, "Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany" (Boydell Press, 2025)
Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts
of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions
that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of
early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to
redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between
all financially interested parties. For example, should one merchant’s
cargo be jettisoned to lighten a ship in a storm, the loss would be
shared pro rata by the shipper and all the cargo-owners. A risk-sharing
practice, different from the risk-shifting of marine insurance which
became established relatively late, General Average is still in widespread use.
In Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany
(Boydell Press, 2025), Jake Dyble explores how General Average worked.
It reveals the gap between
General Average in law and how it worked on the ground. It shows how
General Average partitioned a wide array of business costs, thereby
performing a significant role in structuring maritime commerce, managing
risk and promoting shipping and trade. In addition, the book discusses
how far General Average was a feature of a supposedly ancient,
universal, customary maritime law, and contributes to debates about the
evolution of institutions in economic development.
Dr Jake Dyble is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padova, Italy.
This
interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at
the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.

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36 min
June 11 Don Thomas Deere, "The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space" (Duke UP, 2026)
In The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space (Duke University Press, 2026),
Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization
in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern
structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings
of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous,
African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control
and movement. Deere demonstrates
how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid
patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as
well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a
range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and
Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement—who travels, who settles, and
who is excluded—becomes an essential component
of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial
reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency
geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where
landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity.
Don
Thomas Deere is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at
Texas A&M University. He previously taught at Wesleyan University
and received his PhD with distinction from DePaul University and BA from
Cornell University. He is a Mellon Mays fellow and the recipient of a
Mellon Career Enhancement Faculty Fellowship. His research focuses on
the intersections of Latin American, Caribbean, and Contemporary
Continental Philosophy.
Morteza Hajizadeh is
a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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47 min
June 11Deb Olin Unferth, "Earth 7: A Novel" (Graywolf Press 2026)
Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.
Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?
By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), Earth 7 (Graywolf Press 2026) is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including Barn 8 and Wait Till You See Me Dance. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and four Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Books Critics Circle Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s. She’s a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener Center, the New Writers’ Project, and she also directs the Pen City Writers, the prison creative-writing program at a south Texas penitentiary.
Recommended Books:
Victor Pelevin, Omon Ra

Jean Stafford, A Mother in History

Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth
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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55 min
June 11 Robert Templer, "The Shah's Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed (Hurst, 2026)
In 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi threw a party to celebrate the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire. It was planned to be a massive party, with tents set up in the desert, and invitations sent to just about every world leader across both the Western and Soviet blocs.
Robert Templer writes about this celebration–and how it presaged the events of the Iranian Revolution of 1979–in his new book The Shah's Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed (Hurst, 2026).
Robert Templer is a writer and former professor at the Central European University, where he also founded a research centre on post-conflict recovery. From 2011-2012, he was director of the Asia Programme at the International Crisis Group and has visited Iran on many occasions. He is the author of four books including the acclaimed Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam and A Basilisk Glance: Poisoners from Plato to Putin.
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45 min