Lisa Bhungalia, "Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2023)

The definitive illustrated book on "The Boss"-- Springsteen: Album by Album (Palazzo Editions, 2024) is now updated to celebrate Bruce Springsteen’s 75th birthday! Renowned for his passionate songwriting, galvanizing live shows, and political activism, Bruce Springsteen stands astride the rock 'n' roll stage like a colossus--and the iconic rocker shows no signs of slowing down. With in-depth reviews of 21 studio albums spanning over 6 decades of music history, Springsteen delves into every aspect of the superstar's career. Richly photographed, and featuring brilliant writing by one of America's top music critics as well as an introduction by Peter Ames Carlin (author of the bestselling biography Bruce). Ryan White has been writing cultural features for over twenty years, and is the author of Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way. Ryan on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (Duke UP, 2024), Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, nationalist religiosity and authoritarian management of social difference. As much as trans people are shaped by these processes, they also transform them in intimate ways. Transness in Turkey provides an insightful site for developing new perspectives on statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, and political life. Zengin offers the concept of violent intimacies to theorize this entangled world of the trans everyday where violence and intimacy are co-constitutive. Violent intimacies emerge from trans people’s everyday interactions with the police, religious and medical institutions, street life, family and kinship, and trans femicides and funerals. The dynamic of violent intimacies prompts new understandings of violence and intimacy and the world-making struggles of trans people in a Middle Eastern context. Aslı Zengin is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Alize Arıcan is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The City College of New York (CUNY). Her work has been featured in Environment and Planning D, Current Anthropology, and City & Society, among other journals and public-facing platforms. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode, Jenna Tang shares with us her translation of Lin Yi-Han's Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise: A Novel (HarperVia, 2024), one of the most iconic works of Taiwan's #MeToo movement. Thirteen-year-old Fang Si-Chi lives with her family in an upscale apartment complex in Taiwan, a tightknit community of strict yet doting parents and privileged children raised to be ambitious, dutiful, and virtuous. She and her neighbor Liu Yi-Ting bond over their love of learning and books, devouring classic works--Proust, Gabriel García Márquez, the very best Chinese writers. Yet, it is their lack of real-world education that makes them true kindred spirits. Si-Chi's innocence is irresistible to Lee Guo-hua, a revered cram literature teacher and serial predator who lives in her building. When he offers to tutor the academic-minded girls for free, their parents--unaware of Lee's true nature--happily accept. While Yi-Ting's studies with Lee are straightforward, Si-Chi learns about things no one teaches them in school--lessons about sex and love that will change the course of her life. Confused and uncertain, Si-Chi turns to her beloved books for guidance. But literature tells her nothing honest about rape or how to cope with the trauma of abuse. For her own salvation, the young girl begins to think of her personal hell as her "first love paradise," where the power of love, no matter how twisted, gives her the strength to survive.  One of the biggest books to come out of Taiwan in the last decade, Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise is a chilling tale of grooming and its lingering trauma, and the power structures that allow it to flourish. Insightful, unsettling, emotionally raw, it is a staggering work of literature that reverberates across cultures and forces us to confront painful truths about the vulnerability and strength of women and those who use and hurt them. Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese writer, educator, and translator who translates between Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, and English. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Her translations and essays are published in The Paris Review, Latin American Literature Today, AAWW, Catapult, Mcsweeney’s, and elsewhere. She translated Lin Yi-Han’s novel, Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise. Linshan Jiang is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also obtained a Ph.D. emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research interests include modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Emily Pacheco speaks with writer and researcher Jessica Kirkness about her memoir, The House with All the Lights on: Three Generations, One Roof, a Language of Light (Allen & Unwin, 2023). Jessica has published in Meanjin and The Conversation, as well as other outlets. Her PhD focused on the ‘hearing line’: the invisible boundary between Deaf and hearing cultures. She is also a teacher of nonfiction writing at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The House With All The Lights On explores linguistic and cultural dynamics within Deaf-hearing families. Jessica shares her experience having Deaf grandparents and navigating the cultural borderline between Deaf and hearing cultures. It is a wonderful memoir about family, the complexities of identity, and linguistic diversity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Mayada Ibrahim speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her translation of “Symphony of the South,” a short story by Tahir Annour that appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio of writing in Arabic from Chad, South Sudan, and Eritrea. Mayada talks about the process of translating this piece, including working with the author and TC Arabic Fiction Editor Hisham Bustani. She also discusses gravitating toward translation as a way to reintegrate Arabic into her life, after years of studying and learning in English. Her translation of Forgive Me, a novel set in Zanzibar and co-translated with her father, will be out in the UK this year. Mayada Ibrahim is a literary translator based in Queens, New York, with roots in Khartoum and London. She works between Arabic and English. Her translations have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published by Archipelago Books, Dolce Stil Criollo, and 128 Lit. She is managing editor at Tilted Axis Press. ­­Read “Symphony of the South” in The Common at thecommononline.org/symphony-of-the-south. To learn more about Mayada and her work, visit mayadaibrahim.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel All That Life Can Afford is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Election campaigns are becoming ever more expensive, with many parties and candidates spending large sums of money on advertising, campaign materials, and staff. But how does money affect campaign environment and electoral outcomes? Does more money mean better chances of winning? And what role do large businesses play in this? Listen to William Horncastle as he talks to Petra Alderman about his research on campaign spending, the UK and the US campaign finance rules and regulations, and the effects money has on democracy and the current state of politics. William Horncastle is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bedfordshire. Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR. *** This episode was recorded before the announcement of the UK general election date. The election is taking place on 4 July 2024.*** The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on X (Twitter) at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Polo B. Moji's book Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022) approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary France, a location which richly illustrates race in European spaces. Moji adopts a transdisciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, and music as narrative forms and engages with the sociocultural and political contexts from which they emerge. Through the figure of the black flâneuse and the analytical framework of "walking as method", the book goes beneath spectacular representations of ghettoised banlieues, televised protests, and shipwrecked migrants to analyse the spatiality of blackness in the everyday. It argues that the material-discursive framing of black flânerie, as both relational and embodied movements, renders visible a politics of place embedded in everyday micro-struggles of raced-sexed subjects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What is social mobility? In Social Mobility (Polity Press, 2023), Anthony Heath, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Yaojun Li, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, explore and explain this concept, setting out why the idea matters for both social scientists and the general reader. The book draws on a huge range of research, outlining the history of social mobility research, discussing central theories and approaches in sociology and economics, and detailing international comparisons and trends. The book highlights how social mobility is shaped by gender and ethnicity, along with the role of social class. Ultimately the book helps to explain who gets ahead in society and why; as a result the book will be essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in how society works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

On May 29, South Africans voted in the seventh election since the end of political apartheid in the early 1990s. This is the first election in which the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), is polling below 50 percent, which could force them into a coalition with one or more other parties to govern the country after the election. To learn more, we speak with Carolyn Holmes, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is an expert on South African politics and the author of The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-Building in Democratic South Africa (U Michigan Press, 2020). Find the books, links, and articles we mentioned in this episode on our website, ufahamuafrica.com. Books, Links, & Articles: The Black and White Rainbow by Carolyn E. Holmes “Family of American caught up in Congo failed coup says their son went to Africa on vacation.” by Hannah Schoenbaum and Jessica Donati “The Politics of “Non-Political” Activism in Democratic South Africa.” by Carolyn E. Holmes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

On this week's episode, Modya and David switch lenses to the trait of Zerizut, or Diligence, and use that as a lens through which to explore parshat Bechukotai, the final Torah portion in the Book of Leviticus (26:3-27:24). In this portion, God delineates the good that will come of following divine laws and commandments -- and the ills that will befall Israel if they turn away. The hosts explore how diligence in following divine will can keep our selves, our communities, and our world in balance. We hope you enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network