Fiction’s Lost Ambition with Writer Sam Kahn

Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof join Jana Byars to talk about their new book, The Burgeoning European Print Trade: The Distribution of Prints Via the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp (Harvey Miller, 2025). The European print trade is an evocative topic. Not only art historians, but social, cultural, and economic historians all agree that it was of vital importance in the Early Modern Period, as the conveyer of established icons, as well as the most recent imagery and news. Yet, thus far it is often discussed solely on the basis of tantalizing, isolated case studies. Bowen and Imhof's ground-breaking publication will address this significant lacuna by demonstrating in unprecedented detail how booksellers were routinely engaged in the extensive international distribution and sale of hundreds of thousands of prints annually between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Based upon the exceptionally well-preserved archives of the renowned Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp, this book presents the often-overlooked interwoven worlds of booksellers and print sellers, while documenting Antwerp's continued fame for the production and distribution of prints. Together with a remarkable array of clients, ranging from the cultivated and influential elite to ordinary laymen, these figures provide palpable examples of suppliers, buyers, and middlemen that reveal how they interacted with one another. Simultaneously, this work illuminates numerous critical related topics, ranging from how prints were priced and the relative quantities in which they were sold, to the importance of national and professional networks in these transactions. The result is an essential, novel study that clarifies how the print trade worked in practice during a burgeoning period in its evolution. 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 his new book, The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Brill, 2026) historian Dr. Michael W. Tuck examines life on James Island, now Kunta Kinteh Island, where enslaved Africans worked for European trading companies in the eighteenth century. These individuals were not plantation workers. They served as carpenters, sailors, soldiers, canoe workers, healers, cooks, mothers, and interpreters. They built forts, repaired boats, buried the dead, and maintained trading posts. Dr Tuck’s research demonstrates that, despite harsh conditions, Castle Slaves formed families, preserved African names, practised healing, held funerals, and resisted captivity through escape and daily acts of survival. Women played key roles as caregivers, cultural anchors, and healers, despite facing significant vulnerability and exploitation. The book also highlights the high number of escape attempts from James Island, challenging the idea that resistance in West Africa was uncommon. Drawing on company ledgers, punishment logs, and death records, Dr. Tuck reconstructs a world often overlooked in Atlantic history. His work emphasises that each archival entry represents a person with relationships, memories, fears, and hopes. The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River provides both a history of slavery and a testament to resilience, community, and humanity. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands and Europe. 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

When maps come up short and the path ahead is uncertain, how do we find our way? Visionary climate leader Katharine K. Wilkinson offers a compassionate and empowering guide to navigating from ache to action, doubt to possibility. Through transformational programs and books, including the national bestseller All We Can Save, Wilkinson has inspired hundreds of thousands of climate journeys. In Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home (Amber Lotus, 2026) she shares a proven process for looking inward with care, outward with curiosity, and forward with courage. Ultimately, readers chart a course toward playing their unique part in our collective healing. With her singular blend of warmth and rigor, Wilkinson lights the way through stirring personal essays, interwoven with the wisdom of other climate leaders and the beauty of poetry, art, and song. A book to sit with and savor, Climate Wayfinding also invites engagement with journaling prompts, practical exercises, and guides for conversation. Whether steeped in climate or newly curious, readers will discover something grounding and generative in these pages. The terrain ahead is calling—and we have everything we need to find our way. (Source: here) Dr. Katharine Wilkinson is a climate leader named by Time magazine as one of 15 “women who will save the world.” Her publications include the New York Times bestseller, Project Drawdown, and the co-edited, All We Can Save, which is an anthology of writings on climate change named among the 10 best science books of 2020 by Smithsonian magazine. Dr. Wilkinson is the co-founder and executive director of the All We Can Save Project and Co-host of the podcast, A Matter of Degrees. In this interview with Dr. Patricia Houser, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson discusses the unique organization of the Climate Wayfinding book--with its strategic juxtaposition of inspirational essays, poetry, music and reflective passages. This “quilt of components” says Wilkinson, was honed in a series of workshops designed to help people find meaningful and impactful roles as climate leaders/workers. Selected subtopics and excerpts of the conversation can be found at the following timestamps: 0:04 mins. The podcast opens with the author explaining that people today are confronting a world where the earth’s features no longer resembles what is on a map—we are literally “map-less.” [Background instrumental music: folk_acoustic from Pixabay] 3:04 “Most books talk to you. These pages hope to walk with you.” 4:18 The Author explains, when she is asked “What can I do?” about the climate crisis, she feels that the answer is really, “something of a Russian doll:” Wilkinson: We ask, what can I do? But sitting within that question are often other bigger wonderings about what it means to be alive at this time, what it means to contribute, where we belong, how are we going to cope? 5:12 Wilkinson: This is an unusual book in the sense that it grew out of this experiential learning and leadership development program and then found its way onto the page. 6:41 Explaining who the book is written for and who is it designed to help 10:41 How the reflective passages and invitations to meditate in this book help people prepare for climate work 15:08 The power of community building as part of a preparation for climate work, has its parallels in history. 17:15 The challenge of better engaging the 89% of people around the world who would like to see more climate action. 24:40 The website climatewayfinding.earth offers audio versions of specially designed meditations printed in the book. 26:45 Features of the website linked to the book. 30:00 Wilkinson: What I hope is that readers, that reading groups, that people who come through the program, they feel at the end of it more equipped for the ongoing work of orientation and navigation and finding our next steps. 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 three short years, the Milwaukee Bucks went from merely an idea to NBA champions. What started as a quest by Marvin Fishman and eventually Wesley Pavalon to get Milwaukee back in the big leagues became something bigger than they could have imagined. They attracted a hard-working coach in Larry Costello, a pioneer in Wayne Embry and some of the biggest talents in the game of basketball with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson. The pieces fell into place for a franchise that asserted themselves as a force to be reckoned with in the NBA. Building the Milwaukee Bucks: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson, and the Rapid Rise of an NBA Franchise, 1968-1975 (McFarland, 2025) covers the unique formation of the NBA franchise that helped restore the image of the city of Milwaukee amid civil unrest and the departure of Major League Baseball as well as why Abdul-Jabbar never found comfort being the face of the Bucks while living in Milwaukee. Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. 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 fifth episode of Season 5, I interview Professor Thomas C. Schmidt, a historian who focuses on the New Testament, Patristics, and Eastern Christianity. An Associate Professor at Fairfield University, he is currently a 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Drawing on his new book, Josephus and Jesus (OUP, 2025), we discuss in this Part II of a two-part series the writings of the ancient historian Josephus and what they reveal about the historical identity of Jesus of Nazareth as well as the events surrounding the rise of early Christianity. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.” 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

Fiction has “lost its ambition,” and not only that, “its centrality to the culture,” Sam Kahn says in a recent piece on “Castalia,” his popular Substack newsletter. We explore that proposition in our wide-ranging conversation about contemporary fiction and its ailments. What’s especially sad about the diminished role that fiction plays in the culture is that, in our Age of Upheaval, circumstances beg for the sort of wide-angled treatment that novelists like Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer supplied in their day. What happened? Kahn is also an editor at the digital-magazine Persuasion and he edits “The Republic of Letters” on Substack. 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

Sustaining Peace After Civil War: Insights from 48 Recent Cases (Springer, 2026) examines one of the most important questions in peace research: What leads to enduring peace after civil wars, and what leads to the resurgence of violence? For decades, intrastate conflicts have been the predominant form of armed conflict, and most recent civil wars were conflicts that recurred. The research presented in this book focuses on influenceable factors, first and foremost on the type of civil war termination and on the post-civil war order that is shaped by the distribution of military power between the former warring parties and the scale of political compromise. Moreover, it shows that the peacekeeping environment has a major influence on whether peace endures.The insights provided in this book are relevant for the academic community, and for decision-makers and practitioners involved in civilian or military efforts to establish and preserve peace. Thorsten Gromes is a Project Leader and Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt's (PRIF) Research Department Intra­state Conflicts. His research focuses on post-civil war societies and so-called humani­tarian military inter­ventions. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Book Recommendations: Sixteen Million One: Understanding Civil War by Patrick M. Regan How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them by Barbara Walter Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace by Christopher Blattman 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

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black female writer—and her work is highly complex.” In On Morrison (Hogarth, 2026), Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and a professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form. This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry—with contextual guidance and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence. Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was selected as one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Caine Prize for African Writing, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Harvard University. Derek Adams is Associate Professor of African American literature at Ithaca College and is currently teaching an upper-level seminar on Toni Morrison titled Across the Decades that challenges the origins of an assumed mythic status generally applied to her. Recommended Books: Maya Binyam, Hangmen Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. 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

A compelling insight into how our imagination works, based on the latest scientific research. People often think of imagination as something used only in creative endeavours. In fact, we use imagination constantly as we reminisce, anticipate, plan, daydream, read, create imagined worlds. The truth is we live in the here and now much less than we tend to think. Imagination isn't the exception in our daily lives; it's our default setting. Yet only now are we beginning to understand exactly how it works.From hallucination to sleepwalking, from REM sleep to delusions, neurologist Adam Zeman brilliantly guides us through the latest scientific studies in the world of the imagination. In The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2025), he draws on research in neuroscience, the study of human origins and child development to show how the human brain is above all else a creative, imaginative organ – and that we have evolved to share what we imagine.Our brains behave in strikingly similar ways when we observe, remember, imagine or act. Imagine looking at a cube and your eye will trace the contours of the cube as if you were actually seeing it. Yet it turns out that people differ hugely in their imaginative experience. Some people lack sensory imagery altogether – they would be unable to picture their family if asked to – but still lead fulfilling, even highly creative, lives.From how we visualise to how we understand the minds of others, from the benefits of play to mental disorders, The Shape of Things Unseen dazzles and delights. It is an essential guide to the latest discoveries about the workings of the human mind. 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

Who makes a living from the music industry? In Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy: From Taping to Napster to TikTok (Anthem Press, 2026) David Arditi, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington, looks at the history of technology in the music industry. This history illustrates the way the industry continues to profit even as artists struggle to make money. The book charts the development and evolution of listeners’ uses of formats and technologies, from cassette tapes and CDs through sharing to streaming, demonstrating how the record industry has initiated moral panics to stop threats to their profits. This is in a context where listeners and independent labels have found new ways to engage with music because of these same formats and technologies. An engaging and accessible overview of issues central to creative industries, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary culture. 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