Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form (Cambridge UP, 2026) by Dr. Emmy Waldman is the first book to place the autobiographical projects of canonical comics authors Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other, focusing on new and neglected works (and with an epilogue on the Pulitzer Prize-winning tour-de-force debut of Tessa Hulls). The book offers a lively cast of five formal tropes-boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs-through which to model fundamental elements of the comics grammar and its material processes. Built around rich close readings, it shows what makes the comics form particularly suited to negotiate complex familial and creative inheritances and manage layered, relational identities.

Interweaving accounts of Jewish identity, female embodiment, legacies of modernism, and feminist practice, the book traces how contemporary graphic memoirists visually work and rework their filiations and affiliations through form, situating the medium as a privileged site and staging ground for arguments about the enabling possibilities of form now.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Merilyn Simonds about her bestselling memoir, Walking with Beth: Conversations with My 100-Year-Old Friend (Penguin Random House Canada, 2025).

Merilyn Simonds's Walking with Beth allows us to eavesdrop on two women, one already a centenarian, talking frankly about what scares us all: growing old. It's a book with a unique take on longevity, full of wisdom, tenderness, joy and the passions that sustain a very long life. In the spring of 2021, Merilyn Simonds asked her friend Beth Robinson if she’d like to go for a walk. Simonds had just turned 70, still active, still writing, but entering what struck her as a mysterious, even frightening stage of life. Beth, a smart, vibrant woman who’d held a job until she was 99, lived on her own and was as awake to the world as a person half her age. Who better to ask what might come next? During three years of weekly walks, the conversation between the two women only deepened, as they opened up about their heart-felt passions, the lingering influence of their pasts, and their hopes and fears for the future. In Walking with Beth, Simonds shares these intimate exchanges, delving into corners of older women’s lives that are rarely seen or spoken about so openly. As Simonds looks forward into a future that seems unknowable, Beth looks back, offering her experience in surviving the later-life blows that batter us all, and more importantly, her wisdom about how to enrich every passing day.

MERILYN SIMONDS is author of twenty books, most recently Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay, an innovative memoir/biography of Lawrence, an extraordinary self-trained ornithologist who became one of Canada’s greatest naturalists. Born in Winnipeg, Merilyn grew up in small-town Ontario and Brazil. She published her first book in 1979 at the age of 29, and since then her work has been anthologized and published internationally in eight countries. She writes in a wide variety of genres—personal essay, memoir, travel, literary fiction (such as the novel The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice) and creative nonfiction, including The Convict Lover, which was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction. In 2017, Project Bookmark Canada installed a plaque on the site of the former Kingston Penitentiary rock quarry to honour the place of The Convict Lover in Canada’s literary landscape.

Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024 and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, was released with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and is a 2026 Giller Prize finalist. Her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Founder of River Street, and the co-chair of the League of Canadian Poets BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. She is also a member of The National Book Critics Circle, The Creative Nonfiction Collective, and The Writers Union of Canada. Hollay was also featured on the cover of issue 10 of The Ampersand Review. Learn more about Hollay here.

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David N. Gellman interviews Jesse Wegman on The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon Books, 2026).

Jesse Wegman tells the story of James Wilson, a Founding Father whose bold vision shaped American democracy but whose legacy was lost to scandal.

As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He went on to write the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation.

Wilson believed that in a democracy, the people were the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency and unsuccessfully for a president elected by popular vote and a Senate apportioned by population. He was recognized for his ideas and leadership. But only a decade after the Constitution was ratified, he died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.

Instead of going down as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and relevance of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.

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