New Books Network

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership.

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

David Cunningham joins John to speak about his pathbreaking article about visiting each of the 113 communities that removed or relocated Confederate symbols between 2015 and 2023. After discussing his co-authored Social Problems article, “Contesting Commemorative Landscapes” which first got him thinking about monument removal, he posits that “expungement, amplification, and repositioning” are three ways contemporary communities contest the monuments of the past.. The conversation from there ranges onward through various kinds of contested removal, ending with Cesar Chavez and his ongoing de-monumentalization.

David is author of There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence and the award-winning Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK,, a member of the City of St. Louis Reparations Commission and recently has been engaged in exploring political signalling in public art and monuments, including a forthcoming article on the political and cultural work of murals in Protestant and Catholic communities and in the interface areas that connect them in Belfast. His earlier Recall This Book episodes include on racialized policing in the US, on January 6th , and also on the 2024 presidential election–and a conversation with Glenn Patterson, author of Lapsed Protestant about the mural culture and politicized spaces of Belfast and Northern Ireland.

Read the episode here.

Mentioned in the episode

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

Phil Gilbert is best known for leading IBM’s transformation as their General Manager of Design, a project that updated the work of 400,000 IBM employees across 180 countries. The transformation became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, the documentary film The Loop, and feature articles in the New York Times and Fortune magazine. Phil was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Hall of Fame in 2018, and being a native from there was named a Oklahoma Creativity Ambassador in 2019 for his achievements in the world of creative thinking and innovation. He is the author of Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success.

Wedding cakes. Birthday cakes. Cupcakes. Shit umbrellas. The baggage that comes with using the word “design” in the business world. You might get a more unique guest than Phil, but the odds would be heavily against you. With tenacity and street smarts, this guy whose start-up was purchased by IBM shares with us the unlikely story of how IBM’s CEO Ginny Rometty got behind him, unleashing the creativity that had made his smallish business unit within the company a top performer. Into business unit after unit, as detailed here, Phil tells with verve the story of overcoming the sorry state that endless rounds of cost-cutting initiatives had landed a now bedraggled company. “Empathy is the hardest word you will ever learn,” Phil told colleagues, left and right, prodding them to move forward.

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.

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

From Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist Anand Gopal, an epic and enthralling account of six Syrians fighting for a better world, in the tradition of classic works by Philip Gourevitch and Katherine Boo.
In 2011, in a northern Syrian city, a small group of men and women began a movement that overthrew a brutal dictatorship. For the next eighteen months, many of the citizens of Manbij carried out one of the most remarkable experiments in democracy in modern times.
Days of Love and Rage (Viking, 2026) details the powerfully intimate narratives of the men and women who led this struggle, and who experienced the highs of camaraderie and the lows of betrayal. Among them: a pair of best friends torn apart by political polarization, a mother who stands up to male dominance, and a worker who risks everything for the dream of equality.
Anand Gopal immerses you in the world of a single city in the throes of revolution, and lays bare the danger that inequality poses to democracy. But this book transcends the particulars of one terrible conflict to tell the broader story of rising authoritarianism in our times. Days of Love and Rage has the force, sweep, and artistry of a great novel, and is ultimately a story of our enduring human need for dignity and hope.

Anand Gopal is a writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of No Good Men Among the Living and writes about democracy, inequality, and conflict.

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.

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

Iran is, once again, in global headlines, following U.S. strikes on the country earlier this year. Operation Epic Fury, as the Department of Defense called it, is the latest twist in Iran’s modern history, starting from the coup that brought the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, through the 1956 coup against Mossadegh and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, to the present day’s tensions over Iran’s nuclear program.

Homa Katouzian looks at this history in his latest book Iran and the Revolution: A History (Yale University Press, 2026), where he posits that Iran is a “short-term society,” one that lacks long-term continuity.

We recorded this interview on May 18th, 2026.

Homa is a member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, and a visiting scholar at the Department of History, University of Toronto. He is the author of numerous books, including Iran: Politics, History and Literature (Routledge: 2012), Iran: A Beginners’ Guide (Oneworld Publications: 2013), and The Persians (Yale University Press: 2009).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Iran and the Revolution. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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

In Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838-1902 (U South Carolina Press, 2026), Dr. Mollie Barnes studies the ways women represented their own and one another's lives in their personal diaries and their biographies of their contemporaries. By reading these women writers—Black and white, obscure and well-known—in conversation, Dr. Barnes presents entirely new portraits of these freedom fighters of the nineteenth-century South Carolina Lowcountry. Like feminist and anti-racist leaders in our own moment, the women in Paper Heroines were often flawed. White women reformers sometimes created tensions, silences, revisions, and erasures within their print-culture networks, obscuring the lives and contributions of Black women. Black women developed counternarratives and counter-networks as they sought to reclaim their own life histories. What emerges from Barnes's exploration of these textual conversations is a story of complicated relationships that reveal the dynamism of women's lives in a place and time that was equally tumultuous and consequential.

Key terms and names is this episode include: close reading, archival silences, the peripheries, life writing, The Penn School, Port Royal, Beaufort, Combahee River, St. Helena, Relief Workers, Harriet Tubman, Fanny Kemble, Psyche, Teresa, Laura Towne, Charlotte Forten, Mr. Holland, and Sarah Hopkins Bradford.

Guest: Dr. Mollie Barnes is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, Vice President of the Margaret Fuller Society, and Vice President of Organizational Matters for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on 19th century women writers, and is the author of Paper Heroines, which received funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore which stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell. She is an academic writing coach and editor. She created, produces and hosts of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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

In this illuminating conversation with librarian-author Mary R. Lanni, we celebrate her brand new book, Using Nursery Rhymes with Today’s Kids: Their Legacy and Evolution (Bloomsbury, 2026). Mary is a professional librarian in Denver, Colorado, USA. She is also co-author of Early Learning Through Play: Library Programming for Diverse Communities (Libraries Unlimited, 2019). We talk about the potentially sordid history of famous nursery rhymes, and the possibility of supplanting problematic ancient poems with new, inclusive songs.

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

Transformation is hard. To be successful, it has to be human. That’s what Julie Anixter and Dan Hill mean by Business Change that Works from the Inside Out. The guests they bring forward have one thing in common - a level of mastery and a passion for making a difference.

As cohosts of this new program, Julie and Dan bring a wealth of experience and credentials. Julie comes from a lineage of Chicago entrepreneurs and has built her career at the intersection of strategy, design, and enterprise change. Through work for and collaborations with individuals (Tom Peters, Seth Godin, Scottie Pippen) and organizations (The US Military, P&G, Chanel, Morgans Hotels, AIGA), among others, she has been on the front lines of innovation and co-creation. That’s her calling card. As in Dan’s case, her blue-chip clients span multiple sectors. Dan’s signature mark has been following Daniel Goleman’s lead in applying emotional intelligence (EQ) to business issues, using Dr. Paul Ekman’s facial coding research tool to capture and quantify emotional responses, radically transforming market research. He’s

This episode introduces Dan and Julie for who they are…first and foremost as individuals devoted to making the business world both more humane and productive - the foundation for a culture that can sustain a real transformation.

Listen to this episode, and you’ll learn about their guiding principles and how they see this podcast and their other current initiatives as the capstones to their respective careers. 

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies

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

If governments provide financial support for affordable housing, should they provide support for inhabitants directly, or rather for the construction of dwellings? Dr. Max Krahé and Sara Schulte both work for the German economic think tank Dezernat Zukunft, and they aim to answer this question by looking at the past. In this interview we discuss the research design, the conclusions, and also what policy implications they draw from their analysis.

Want to know more? You can find everything about this housing analysis on Dezernat Zukunft. Additionally, Max Krahé provides an overview of Dr. Krahé's research projects.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as a policy officer in the field of housing. In his free time he juggles, raises kids, and improves his languages.

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

The Vision of the Firm (West Academic Publishing, 2025) provides a complete summary of the leading theories of business ethics today. It aims to clarify values, create ethical awareness, provide a decision-making model, show how to apply the model to cutting edge business dilemmas, and address how to build ethical business cultures. It draws on dilemmas from marketing, management, operations, finance, business economics, and technology and features many 75 vignettes for people involved in business to ponder.

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