New Books in Literature

Norrin M. Ripsman (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1997) is the Monroe J. Rathbone Distinguished Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. His primary research interests include crisis prevention; democracy and national security; postwar peacemaking; the construction of regional stability; the political economy of national security; neoclassical realism; crises and pre-crises; and the impact of globalization on national security.
Norrin M. Ripsman writes in two genres: academic and literary fiction. He has published a short-story collection, Song Book, and a novel, The Oracle of Spring Garden Road. His latest novel is Bullet Holes (2026).
Bullet Holes (Next Chapter, 2026) is a novel that deals with school shootings. It is a novel that reminds us that for decades, Americans have been struggling with the urgent need to address the scourge of school shootings while protecting constitutionally enshrined freedoms. Too often, the conversation is more of an echo chamber, where people talk past each other without really listening or understanding each other's legitimate points of view.

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Describing the plot of a Tom McCarthy novel requires some caveats about the scale and the projection of the thing. One might begin with a description of a man who after suffering a head injury decides to recreate and reenact a day in his life again and again ad absurdum to the point of violence, but this would be insufficient as a depiction of the novel Remainder’s electrical currents of feeling and its intellectual conduits that flip switches on and off in literary theory and philosophy. Likewise, a gloss of Satin Island might rest on the project of its narrator, a corporate archeologist preparing an all-encompassing ethnography of our human era. But such a distillation misses the humor, intrigue, and dreamwork that make the novel an island unto itself. And these baffling plots give way to novels that as the AV club has written, “are more entertaining than [they] have any right to be”.
Such is the case with McCarthy’s latest novel, The Rhyl Poster (New York Review Books, 2026), a thriller punched through with intrigue, violence, international skullduggery, and a flawed hero weighing his personal code against the ethical nature of global law and community making. Our protagonist, Stanton, the author of legal decisions of great acclaim for The European Court of Justice, is renowned for his digressive logic and absolute professionalism, but he has got himself into some trouble. When an addiction to pain killers puts him in the crosshairs for espionage at the court, Stanton will have to consider how the ideals of the court and his own language of ethical responsibility collide with his actions in a case that has world reorganizing implications.
But this description fails mightily to describe the experience of reading The Rhyl Poster, a novel that plays in the theater of many different forms of logic and representation. Stanton will, for example, fall into the game world of Grand Theft Auto and experience himself as an infinite chameleon of the open world mode, he will process his own childhood stutter as a means of introducing doubt and reconsideration into his speech and writing, and he will explore the possibilities of other means of thinking and being as far afield from his everyday life as kite concerts and Indonesian shadow puppetry. To read The Rhyl Poster is to surrender to its thinking processes and to understand that literature need not be monolithic in its representational instincts. It is a book that challenges as it entertains, and as such, it finds good company with classical works of philosophical fiction, Dostoyevsky, Elliott, Joyce.
Tom McCarthy’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His first novel, Remainder, won the Believer Book Award. His third novel, C, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the Europese Literaturrprijs and his fourth, Satin Island, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham Campbell Literature Prize. McCarthy is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, and Jellyfish. He lives in Berlin.
Recommended Books:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
George Eliot, Middlemarch
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.

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When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara.
But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu’s farmland and begin building a missile silo, the inexplicable starts to occur: Mara can commune with the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything. When the Hsius learn that the project on their farm is an effort to make America’s nuclear deterrent invulnerable, they see firsthand the long arm of power and empire.

In the years and generations that follow, increasingly impacted by the silo and its residue, the Hsius experience strange, wondrous, and tragic events on their farm. An ambitious epic and an ode to the beauty and glory of our connection to the natural world, Babylon, South Dakota upends the idea of “strangers in a strange land” to become a classic American story. It is a daring novel about how choices reverberate across generations and asks us what we owe to one another.
Tom Lin was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Pomona College, he also holds a PhD from the University of California, Davis. His first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. He teaches English and creative writing at the University of Iowa.

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Sharma and Sushila were ahead of their time in marrying for love and across castes in early 1950s India. When their oldest daughter is nine, they leave their home and family for Sharma to take an academic position in astrophysics in America. Sushila takes care of their home, raises their girls, manages to complete a doctorate, and becomes a feminist philosopher. The three daughters grow into young women, each navigating school and community during the upheaval of the 1960s. While coming to terms with their parents’ flaws and building relationships and lives, they learn to count on each other through marriage and divorce, children and careers. Sutra Americana (U Wisconsin Press, 2026) is a sweeping and beautiful immigrant saga about identity, memory, forgiveness, and love.
Monona Wali began her professional career with an M.F.A. in film production from UCLA Film School, where she was awarded the Lynn Weston Memorial Scholarship for an outstanding female graduate student. Her thesis film, “Grey Area,” is included in the LA Rebellion, curated by the UCLA Film and Television Archives to highlight groundbreaking work done by BIPOC filmmakers in the 70s and 80s. She co-directed and edited “Maria’s Story,” a first-person account of a guerrilla leader in the Salvadoran Civil War. “Maria’s Story” received national airing on P.O.V., the award-winning PBS documentary series. The film also received the Blue Ribbon Edward R. Murrow Award at the American Film Festival, among many other awards.
In 1988, she began her second career as a fiction writer, taking classes at Santa Monica College with the legendary teacher Jim Krusoe. Sutra Americana is her second novel. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, the story of a woman who takes the god Shiva as her lover, won the 2015 Independent Book Publishers Gold Award for Multicultural Fiction. Many of her stories and essays were published in literary journals including Air/Light, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Folio Literary Journal, Juked, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Santa Monica Review. One received a Special Mention in the 2025 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She is deeply rooted in the Los Angeles literary community through several workshops, and is a former teacher of adult students, incarcerated juveniles, and veterans. She is an alum of Hedgebrook, Breadloaf, and the Community of Writers.
Monona Wali was born in Benares, India, and lives in Los Angeles, CA. Her first home in America was in Madison, Wisconsin, and she is named after the lake there, Lake Monona. Her family moved often as her father advanced in his academic career. She has a particular fondness for Hyde Park, Chicago, and many of the chapters of “Sutra Americana” are set there. She divides her time between Santa Monica and Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert. She loves the desert and is working on a book of essays viewing themes of home and belonging through the lens of an immigrant. She is passionate about the outdoors but is also a homebody who loves knitting, macrame, and having a cup of tea with a good book!

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Wednesday, Oct. 7—Over in the blink of an eye, the best flash fiction lingers long after we finish reading it. The incandescent works collected in Library of America’s American Flash Fiction: An Anthology showcase the vitality of this literary form with a rich history and dazzling present. Join celebrated flash authors Lynne Tillman, Venita Blackburn, and Ben Loory, along with volume editor David L. Ulin, for a dive into these miniature masterpieces of deceptive depth and power.
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