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NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb
Immigrant Fiction
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).
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.
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.
December 19, 2023
American Ending
Mary Kay Zuravleff
It’s the early 1900s in an Appalachian town filled with immigrants, and Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents. She can cook, clean, and take care of her baby siblings by age nine, but she loves school and wants something different that all the other girls, who get married by 13 or 14, and start having more babies than they can feed.
December 5, 2023
The Shining Mountains
Alix Christie
Angus McDonald had to escape from Scotland or risk arrest. In 1838, he contracted with the Hudson Bay Company to trade in the Pacific Northwest. There he discovers majestic mountains, raging rivers, and buffalo.
August 1, 2023
Kantika
Elizabeth Graver
Rebecca Cohen and her family live in Istanbul, until they lose all their wealth and are forced to leave. It’s also no longer safe for Jews, and many are trying to find a place to go. Rebecca’s father, once a successful businessman, now cleans a synagogue in Barcelona.
July 4, 2023
Shadows We Carry
Meryl Ain
Meryl Ain's Shadows We Carry (Sparkspress, 2023) is a follow-up to the author’s 2020 novel, The Takeaway Men, focuses on fraternal twins Bronka and JoJo Lubinski, now in college and figuring out what to do with their lives.
May 16, 2023
Hotel Cuba
Aaron Hamburger
Two sisters fleeing the horror of the Soviet Revolution and aftermath of WW1 are disappointed when American policy prevents them from joining their older sister in New York.
April 18, 2023
Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions
Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi
Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi’s novel Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stories (Amistad 2022), is a moving and unforgettable collection of stories that span a lifetime.
January 14, 2019
Lucky Boy
Shanthi Sekaran
An optimistic young Mexican woman gets pregnant while trying to cross the border into the states. An Indian-American woman struggles with infertility. When undocumented Solimar is detained by the state, Kavya and her husband foster and then fall in love with her little boy.
October 6, 2020
A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son
Sergio Troncoso
Troncoso fills these 13 linked stories with the struggles and triumphs of Mexican/American immigrants or their children who’ve settled in the United States. In a nod to philosophical perspectivism, the view that perception changes according o the viewer’s interpretation...
November 13, 2018
A Terrible Country
Keith Gessen
The only job Andrei Kaplan has been able to find since completing his doctorate, is teaching an online, poorly-paid course. So, he agrees to fly to Moscow when his brother promises him a round-trip ticket, hockey games, and his old bedroom with free WiFi in exchange for taking care of their aging grandmother.
March 2, 2021
Purple Lotus
Veena Rao
Already in her late twenties, Tara is relieved when her parents arrange a marriage with a man who lives across the world in Atlanta. But she understands quickly that her husband doesn’t love her or even want her.
November 30, 2021
Nermina's Chance
Dina Greenberg
Nermina is a medical student in Sarajevo. She’s been raised in an educated family of Westernized, secular Muslims, but it’s 1992 and the Serbian Chetniks have started to destroy the city.
February 8, 2022
In the Shadow of Dora
Patrick Hicks
In the Shadow of Dora by Patrick Hicks explores the space program’s path from the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp in 1940’s Nazi Germany, to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
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