NovelClass

On today’s episode, Daniel Ford, author and host of the Writer’s Bone podcast, reprises his role as co-host. Daniel and host Dave Pezza sat down to discuss Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han.

Nights When Nothing Happened was published on November 17, 2020 by Riverhead Books and is Simon Han’s debut novel. Set in Plano, Texas in November of 2004, Nights When Nothing Happened follows the Cheng family, immigrants from the Chinese city of Tianjin. As the family’s matriarch, Patty Cheng attempts to live the American dream, creating revolutionary cell phone technology at Texas-based tech giant. While Patty commutes to work early and leaves late to accommodate her global team, Liang Cheng cares for the family’s two children, Jack and Annabel, while running a mall-based photography studio from home. But like all families, the Cheng’s have their own secrets and hardships, including a husband’s mysterious past, a wife’s waning love, and a pair precocious children stuck in the middle.

In Nights When Nothing Happened, Han delivers the truth about the American dream, complete with lingering doubts, disjointed familial bonds, unbridled aspirations, systemic racism, and cultural disconnects. Here, Han creates a complex family with mysterious external and internal struggles that keep the reader in a penumbra of doubt about their intentions and actions. In his debut novel, Han establishes himself as a sound architect of the human condition as well as the pitfalls of chasing success in America.

Please enjoy our discussion of Nights When Nothing Happened.

This episode is sponsored by Libro.fm.

In Episode 4.09, host Dave Pezza is joined by his good friends Guido Fargiorgio and Eric Prive. Eric, Guido, and Dave discussed The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones.

Published on July 14, 2020 by Saga Press, The Only Good Indians is the story of four childhood Native American friends of the Blackfoot Tribe and their fate years after a hunting trip gone wrong. As adults, they are not only challenged by the struggles that many Native Americans face living on a reservation, including racism, alcoholism, and poverty, but they must also come to terms their own guilt.

In The Only Good Indians, Jones offers a truly bizarre story of revenge, guilt, fatalism, and the remarkable resilience of Native American tradition and culture. Through his intriguing and challenging writing style, Jones crafts a wonderfully macabre tale that shocks, disgusts, laments, and entirely absorbs the reader in a world where actions have bitter, unrelenting consequences.

Please enjoy our discussion of The Only Good Indians.

Today's episode is sponsored by Libro.fm.

On today’s episode, host Dave Pezza is joined by Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne, author of the novel Holding on to Nothing, and they discussed A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen.

Published on January 14, 2020 by Mira Books, A Beginning at the End thrusts its readers into a world ravaged by a pervasive respiratory virus that has killed over 70% of the global population. Six years after the outbreak, the world is rebuilding.  What remains of humanity has been condensed into a string of metros, former cities where civilization endures and infrastructure and normalcy have been hastily restored. In the center of the San Francisco metro, Chen’s three main characters, Moira, Krista, and Rob, face both mundane and extraordinary challenges as they attempt to run from their past lives, rebuild their current, and face the uncertain future that binds them together.

In his third novel, Chen imagines life brought to its knees by the not only the physical devastation of a deadly pandemic but the emotional destruction as well. His impressively considered and executed portrayal of the contemporary American psyche during times of disaster and devastation allowed Chen to present a fictional United States that at times was mirrored by a real-world pandemic that spread throughout the globe only a couple months after the book’s publication. This eerie portend, in combination with his well developed and emotionally mature characters, allows A Beginning at the End to shine.

Today's episode is sponsored by Libro.fm.

On this episode, host Dave Pezza is joined by Melissa Faliveno, author of the essay collection, Tomboyland. Melissa and Dave recently chatted about The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel.

Published on March 24, 2020 by Harper Collins, The Glass Hotel is Mandel’s fifth novel, and the follow up to her 2014, National-Book-Award-shortlisted novel Station Eleven. Set in various time periods between the 1950s and the late 2010s as well as various locations, including New York City, Toronto, and British Columbia, The Glass Hotel tells the story of a young woman named Vincent whose life takes an abrupt and difficult turn after mother drowns near their home in an obscure portion of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Soon Vincent’s path crosses that of Jonathan Alkaitis, an investment genius, who plunges Vincent into his luxurious New York City lifestyle as well as the financial drama surrounding it.

Emily St. John Mandel weaves an unbridled and harrowing story that effortlessly spans vast swaths of time and place. With a terrifically specter-like narrative, Mandel creates a fantastical and at times disorienting feeling of déjà vu as she masterfully bridges her characters from city to city, year to year, and the blurry places in between.

Please enjoy our discussion of The Glass Hotel, which is sponsored by Libro.fm.

In Episode 4.06, Dave Pezza is joined by John Vercher, author of the novel, Three-Fifths. John and Dave sat down to discuss The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

Published on July 16, 2019 by Doubleday, The Nickel Boys is Colson Whitehead’s seventh novel and winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Set in a Floridian juvenile reformatory school in the 1960s, The Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood Curtis, a bright African American teenager who is arrested after accidentally riding in a stolen car on his way to class.

After being sent to the Nickel Academy, Elwood must endure all the racial and social inequalities of the Jim Crowe south in their most concentrated and insidious forms at the hands the institution’s white caretakers. Elwood and his new friends must work and survive their way through hell on earth, hoping that one day they might fair better in the free world.

Next read: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (with guest host Melissa Faliveno, author of Tomboyland).

In this special episode of NovelClass, Dave Pezza is joined by author and co-creator of the Writer’s Bone podcast, Daniel Ford. Ford returns to the show to discuss John Vercher’s debut novel, Three-Fifths.

Published on September 10, 2019 by Agora Books, Three-Fifths portrays the struggles of Bobby Saraceno, a biracial 20-something man living in Pittsburgh in the mid-1990s. As Bobby and his recovering alcoholic mother Isabel struggle to make ends meet waiting tables, Aaron, Bobby’s best friend from high school, returns from prison. But Aaron has changed and has joined the white supremacist movement while incarcerated, forcing Bobby to come to terms with his own concealed blackness.

In his debut novel, Vercher masterfully brings his readers back to the mid-1990s, amongst the O.J. Simpson trial, the King Riots, and yet another period in American history dominated by race.

This month, host Dave Pezza is joined by Kelly J. Ford, author of the novel Cottonmouths, to discuss How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang.

Published on April 7, 2020 by Riverhead Books, How Much of These Hills Is Gold tells the story of two preteen siblings, Lucy and Sam, who awaken to find their father, their only remaining family, dead. Amidst Zhang’s reimagining of the American West in the 19th century, Lucy and Sam must bury their father, make peace with their family’s past, and find their own path through this dangerous and unforgiving land they call home.

In her debut novel, Zhang depicts a harrowing story that explores race, gender, family, and the hardships of living in a hostile land. Through a unique and magical writing style, Zhang transports her readers to a time and place that seem oddly familiar but terrifying to behold.

Next read: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (with guest host John Vercher, author of Three-Fifths)

This month, Dave Pezza is joined by none other than Daniel Ford, author and host of the Writer’s Bone podcast. Daniel returns once again to NovelClass to discuss a pair of short story collections titled Men Without Women. This first is Ernest Hemingway’s famous collection, first published in 1927. The second is by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, originally published in the Japanese in 2014.

First published in 1927 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women was Hemingway’s second short story collection and is not only considered to be one of the American literary icon’s best works, but also features stories such as “Hills Like White Elephants,” which have become part of the American Literary canon. At the heart of this collection, Hemingway dissects and investigates the forlorn and difficult lives of men who have lost, misunderstood, or ben alienated from the women in their lives.

Originally published in the Japanese in 2014, Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women cleverly titles itself against Hemingway’s famous collection, deriving using many of the same themes and disillusionment. However, Murakami’s collection offers a much more nuanced look into the motivations and emotions of his male characters who continually find themselves navigating the lonely and confusing state of being a man without women.

Please enjoy our discussion of Men Without Women.

This month's episode is sponsored by OneRoom.

This week, author Gila Green reprises her role as co-host to discuss The Last Watchman of Old Cairo by Michael David Lukas. Green is the author of several novels. Her most recent, No Entry, is a young adult novel following the trials of 17-year-old Yael Amar as she explores an elephant conservation program in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. No Entry is available now wherever books are sold.

The Last Watchman of Old Cairo was published on March 13, 2018 by Spiegel & Grau. In his second novel, Lukas attempts to tell three thrilling stories that span hundreds of years and converge on the magical city of Cairo, Egypt. The novel’s primary protagonist is Joseph al-Raqb, a literature student at Berkley with a Jewish-Egyptian mother who brought him to America as a child and a Muslim-Egyptian father who still lives and works in the city of Cairo.

After Joseph’s father dies and leaves him a mystery gift, Joseph must return to Cairo and discover his father’s final wishes. Almost a hundred years earlier, two Christian sisters from England return to Cairo for another archeological adventure to undercover the rumored and historic Ezra Scroll, a perfect iteration of the Torah that has been lost for thousands of years. The sisters have journeyed far in hopes that the scroll might reside in the attic of the storied Ibn Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, one of the last synagogues in the city. Lukas brings his readers even further back in time to follow the exploits of Ali, Joseph’s ancestor from nearly a thousand years ago, whose curious duties as a Muslim night watchman of the Ibn Ezra Synagogue leads to generations of service to one of the strongest Jewish communities in Cairo.

Lukas undertakes a daunting task in his sophomore work, continually working out his own personal conflicts between his Jewish and Muslim backgrounds through his main characters. His ability to bring such a historic and iconic city out of the pages and into the readers imagination is nothing short of stunning and succeeds in bringing this complex, multi-faceted, and tumultuous city to life. Although some of his plots fall short over such an expansive narrative, Lukas undoubtedly proves his ability to weave an intriguing and evocative story that sticks with the reader for quite some time.

Next read(s): Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway and Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami.   

Host Dave Pezza is joined by Phoef Sutton, co-host of Film Freaks Forever!, to discuss The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. They also chat about the two film adaptations of the novel, the 1999 American film of the same name, as well as a 1960 French adaptation called “Purple Noon.”

Next read: The Last Watchman of Old Cairo by Michael David Lukas (with guest host Gila Green).