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NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb
October 15, 2024
The Last Whaler
Cynthia Reeves
After losing their young son in a tragic accident, Astrid, a Norwegian botanist specializing in Arctic flora, decides to join her husband, Tor, at a remote whaling station in the Arctic, where he spends every whaling season hunting belugas. In heartfelt journal entries, Astrid describes being stranded in a whaling hut through the dark season of 1937-38.
October 8, 2024
Blood on the Brain
Esinam Bediako
Today I talked to Esinam Bediako about here novel Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024).
October 1, 2024
Anyone But Her
Cynthia Swanson
In 1979 during her freshman year at Denver East High School in 1979, Suzanne’s mother was murdered by an armed robber while working in her record store.
September 24, 2024
Down Here We Come Up
Sara Johnson Allen
In Sara Johnson Allen's novel Down Here We Come Up (Black Lawrence Press 2023), Kate Jessup’s mother lures her back home to North Carolina.
September 17, 2024
Trust Me
Scott Nadelson
Set mostly in a remote cabin in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, Trust Me is about a divorced dad who drives forty-five minutes to work and back each day.
September 10, 2024
Songs for the Brokenhearted
Ayelet Tsabari
A beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself.
August 20, 2024
This Room is Made of Noise
Stephen Schottenfeld
Don Lank is a newly divorced handyman who spots an imitation Tiffany lamp in the front window of a house and offers the elderly owner $800 for it. He’s shocked to get a check for fifteen thousand and returns to the house to give 95-year-old Millie most of the money.
July 30, 2024
In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist
Ruchama Feuerman
Mustafa was born with a twisted neck and treated with disdain throughout his life. He works long hours as a janitor on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Isaac is a religiously observant new immigrant from New York who stumbles into a position as assistant to a famous rabbi known for curing the uncurable.
June 25, 2024
Life Span
Molly Giles
Molly Giles looks back at moments of her childhood, her mistakes and missteps, getting pregnant at eighteen, marrying her boyfriend and having a second child, divorcing, marrying a second time but failing to find the happiness she knows she deserves. As the decades passed, she edited many well-known novels and popped out four story collections, two novels, and this brutally honest memoir.
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.
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