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NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb
June 11, 2024
The Maiden of Florence
Katherine Mezzacappa
At the end of the 16th century, the powerful Medici family demanded that before marrying into the family, Vincenzo I Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, had to show his prowess by deflowering a virgin. This is her story.
June 4, 2024
Displaced Persons: Stories
Joan Leegant
Set around the globe in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, Leegant’s characters face loneliness, illness, difficult relationships, horrible memories, unfaithful husbands, and uncaring or dying parents. These are moving stories about recognizable people, all facing displacement in one way or another, trying to live their lives.
May 28, 2024
Your Presence is Mandatory
Sasha Vasilyuk
In 2007 Ukraine, following the death of her husband, Yefim Shulman, Nina finds a letter he wrote to the KGB confessing the secret he’d kept for over 50 years. If it came out that his unit was wiped out and he was taken as a prisoner of Germany during WWII, he would have been considered a traitor to the USSR.
May 14, 2024
The Truth Against the World
David Corbett
The Truth Against the World (Square Tire Books, 2023) is a brilliant literary fantasy about a divided, dystopian America on the verge of war. Shane, a former Irish combat soldier with a murky past, wants to save his young friend Georgie O’Halloran, who turned his stories of Celtic history and folklore into a beautifully illustrated book.
May 7, 2024
The Blameless
Ryan Kenedy
Virginia is a single mother of an autistic child with a disinterested ex-husband and a demeaning, dead ended job as an adjunct professor on three different college campuses. She struggles, barely able to get by with no end in sight. Then she learns that the man who murdered her father when she was a little girl, has just gotten paroled despite his life sentence. Virginia remembers the day her life changed because of Travis Hilliard and decides to confront him. She brings her gun.
April 16, 2024
The Forgetters
Greg Sarris
Greg Sarris, PhD and tribal leader serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, about his latest story collection, The Forgetters. The stories are connected to two sister crows who sit all day and night on Sonoma Mountain talking about the creation of the world, human frailty, silliness, and suffering. One crow sister can only ask the questions, and one can only answer in tales about Native American Indians struggling to remember the stories that made them who they are.
April 9, 2024
No More Empty Spaces
D.J. Green
No More Empty Spaces (She Writes Press, 2024) opens with Will Ross, an engineering geologist, who shares custody of his three children with his ex-wife, taking his 1953 Cessna up for a spin. It’s 1973, and he’s decided to take his children to a remote area of Turkey where he’s been hired to analyze the site of a damn.
Off to Join the Circus
Deborah Kalb
In Deborah Kalb’s debut adult novel Off to Join the Circus (Apprentice House Press 2023) it’s 2018, Howard Pinsky’s sister Adele, who ran away in 1954, as his parents said, “to join the circus,” is suddenly, 64 years later, in Bethesda wanting to be a part of the family.
March 19, 2024
The Stark Beauty of Last Things
Céline Keating
The Stark Beauty of Last Things (She Writes Press, 2023) is set in Montauk, the far reaches of the famed Hamptons, an area under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land.
March 5, 2024
Inside the Mirror
Parul Kapur
INSIDE THE MIRROR centers on twin sisters growing up in 1950s Bombay, who aspire to become artists. The family is still recovering from the Partition of India in 1947, especially the twins’ grandmother, who once fought for justice against the British regime.
February 20, 2024
Secrets of the Sun
Mako Yoshikawa
Mako Yoshikawa's Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir (Mad Creek Books 2024) contains a host of essays about her difficult, brilliant father. Shoichi Yoshikawa grew up in a wealthy family in 1930s Japan, but his mother died when he was five, and he died alone on the eve of Mako’s wedding.
February 13, 2024
Cravings
Garnett Kilberg Cohen
Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s 4th story collection is about people of all kinds who confront past failures, previous mistakes, or moments they wish they could do over. A man recalls a fall that changed his family’s life, a woman thinks about an abortion that went bad, an aging hippie confronts the death of his best friend – these are detailed, well-told, poignant stories that will stay with you.
February 6, 2024
Mrs. Lowe-Porter
Jo Salas
Mrs. Lowe-Porter is a fictional retelling of the life of the author’s grandmother-in-law, who sidestepped the boundaries placed on women of the early 20th century to spend over three decades translating the books and stories of literary giant, Thomas Mann. Lowe-Porter’s translations led to worldwide acclaim that earned Mann the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, but she dreamed of being a published author in her own right and struggled to find her own voice.
January 30, 2024
The Half-White Album
Cynthia Sylvester
Cynthia Sylvester's The Half-White Album (University of New Mexico Press 2023) is a collection of stories, flash fiction, and poems revolving around the journey of a travelling band, The Covers.
January 23, 2024
Nadiia
Christine Evans
Nadia is a young Bosnian refugee who has lost everyone she’s loved. In 1997 she gets into England on a fake passport and finds temp work in a shady office that might be doing something illegal. A new temp shows up and Nadia knows he’s from her country even though he says he’s Armenian. She can tell that he’s Serbian, perhaps the kind that hunted down Bosnians like her. Nadia sees danger everywhere.
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