Ukraine, 2007. Yefim Shulman, husband, grandfather and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow Nina finds a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession forces them to reassess the man they thought they knew and the country he had defended.
In 1941, Yefim is a young artillerist on the border between the Soviet Union and Germany, eager to defend his country and his large Jewish family against Hitler's forces. But surviving the war requires sacrifices Yefim never imagined-and even when the war ends, his fight isn't over. He must conceal his choices from the KGB and from his family.
Spanning seven decades between World War II and the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024) traces the effect Yefim's coverup had on the lives of Nina, their two children and grandchildren. In the process, Sasha Vasilyuk shines a light on one family caught between two totalitarian regimes, and the grace they find in the course of their survival.
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Sasha Vasilyuk, "Your Presence Is Mandatory" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Interviews with Authors about their New Books
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Modya and David focus again this week on kimutz, or frugality, through the lens of the week's Torah portion, Kedoshim (Lev: 19:1-20:27). The central question: what do the priestly and ethical laws teach us about stewardship of our resources, both as individuals and as members of a community living in a covenanted relationship to each other and to God? We hope you enjoy!
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On "Frugality" (kimutz) in Kedoshim

Brandon Taylor practices moral worldbuilding in his fiction—that means an essential piece of these worlds is the “real possibility that someone could get punched in the face.” Brandon, author of the novels Real Life and The Late Americans, joins Stephanie Insley Hershinow for a wide-ranging, engrossing, and often hilarious conversation about the stakes of the novel today. They discuss Brandon’s “Hot Freud Summer,” during which he read all of Sigmund Freud’s essential works, as an example of an intellectual journey that engages with what Brandon calls the PDFs of criticism: the histories of ideas that he wishes to track back to their origins. Along the way, Brandon reveals what he has taken away from the Romance genre (“everything”), his conviction that The House of Mirth is the prototypical social media novel, and how he tries to avoid writing characters that are just “three spritzes of a personality standing in a room.” Brandon, Stephanie, and Chris close things out with their answers to the signature question about the first books they loved, and the answers are…revealing.
Mentioned in this episode
By Brandon Taylor:

Real Life

Filthy Animals

The Late Americans

Also mentioned:

The House of Mirth

The Liberal Imagination

Georg Lukács

Frederick Jameson

Germinal

Debbie Macomber

Julianne MacLean

Johanna Lindsey

Liz Carlyle, Beauty Like the Night

Beverly Jenkins

A is for Apple, W is for Witch

Guinness Book of World Records

Gremlins: The Novelization of the Film


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What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH)

Newspaper (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Maggie Messitt is about more than news printed on paper. It brings us inside our best and worst selves, from censorship and the intentional destruction of historic record, to partisan and white supremacist campaigns, to the story of an instrument that has been central to democracy and to holding the powerful to account.
This is a 400-year history of a nearly-endangered object as seen by journalist Maggie Messitt in the two democratic nations she calls home – the United States and South Africa.
The “first draft of history,” newspapers figure prominently through each movement and period of unrest in both nations-from the first colonial papers published by slave traders and an advocate for press freedom to those published on ID cards, wallpaper, and folio sheets during civil wars. Offices were set on fire. Presses were pushed into bodies of water. Editors were run out of town. And journalists were arrested.
Newspaper reflects on a tool that has been used to push down and to rise up, and a journey alongside the hidden lives that have harnessed its power.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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Maggie Messitt, "Newspaper" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

We debut a new feature: Recall This Story, in which a contemporary writer picks out a bygone story to read and to analyze. Surely there is no better novelist to begin with than RTB' shouse sage, Steve McCauley.
And not just because he's got the pipes to power through a whole fantabulous John Cheever story. "The Five-Forty-Eight" (published in The New Yorker 70 years ago) is about sordidness uncovered, a train, and a face in the dirt. It ticks almost every Cheever box, evoking an infinitude of lives unled elsewhere while ostensibly documenting nothing more than the time to takes to down a couple of drinks, scuttle feverishly through some midtown streets, and take a lumbering commuter train out of the city.
Steve feels that in our own century, things have changed for the American short story and there's no going back to Cheever's mode. After Raymond Carver, it would be hard to embrace the proliferation (sometimes dizzying, sometimes delightful) of solid details that Cheever deploys. The two try out a final comparison to E M Forster who also quasi-fit into this society, but, Steve opines, could project himself into his female characters in a way that Cheever cannot or will not.
John Cheever works mentioned:

"The Swimmer" (also a Gregory Peck movie)

"The Jewels of the Cabots"

"Oh Youth and Beauty" and other stories that nest multiple lives within a single frame, like "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well"

Works by others:

Sloane Wilson's 1955 novel, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (and the 1956 film)

Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" ("she would have been a good woman if there had been someone there to shoot her every day of her life.")

Anton Chekov, "Lady with the Lapdog"

Richard Yates and mid-century office nihilism (eg his 1961 Revolutionary Road)

Jean Stafford's novels (The Mountain Lion, Boston Adventure) do get reprinted and re-read, Steve points out.

Raymond Carver, only partially minimalist, but reduced still further by Gordon Lish in e.g. the story "Mr Copy and Mr fix-it"

Listen to and read the episode here.
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Steve McCauley excavates John Cheever's "The Five-Forty-Eight" (JP)

China’s rise to global prominence is a pretty good contender for the most important world development in the past 30 years. But now the question is how Beijing managed to be successful on the international stage–let alone how large that success is—with fierce debates between hawks and doves in the West and elsewhere.
Jeremy Garlick tries to offer an explanation of China’s success and how Beijing is trying to remake the international system in Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Jeremy is an associate professor in the Department of International and Diplomatic Studies at the Prague University of Economics and Business and the director of the Jan Masaryk Centre for International Studies. His first book is The Impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: From Asia to Europe (Routledge: 2019), and his second is Reconfiguring the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (Routledge: 2022)
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Advantage China. 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.
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Sasha Vasilyuk, "Your Presence Is Mandatory" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

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