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  • Robyn Hitchcock, "Stranded in the Future" (Akashic Books, 2026)

    Robyn Hitchcock, "Stranded in the Future" (Akashic Books, 2026)
    2026/08/26
    Robyn Hitchcock's second memoir, Stranded in the Future (Akashic Books, 2026), explores the formation of his seminal 1970s band the Soft Boys, and the obsessions that fueled his early creative output. Stranded in the Future is a kind of dystopian self-portrait. It's about obsession, and obsessive behavior. Spanning from 1968 to 1978, it takes in the mythology surrounding Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett (though it doesn't name him) and hinges on Robyn Hitchcock's teenage girlfriend (she isn't named either). The book explores the way that Hitchcock, in his own head, linked these two figures to each other, although they never actually met. On the way, the story mines the incremental hangover of the 1970s as Hitchcock begins to play live, teaches himself to write songs, and eventually forms the Soft Boys. There's a side order of trolleybuses too! Hitchcock's beautiful prose will resonate far beyond the fans of his music, and build on the literary following he established with his first book, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    42 分
  • Brian Jay Jones, "George Lucas: A Life" (Little, Brown and Company, 2016)

    Brian Jay Jones, "George Lucas: A Life" (Little, Brown and Company, 2016)
    2026/08/26
    The essential biography of the influential and beloved filmmaker George Lucas. On May 25, 1977, a problem-plagued, budget-straining independent science-fiction film opened in a mere thirty-two American movie theaters. Conceived, written, and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, the movie originally called The Star Wars quickly drew blocks-long lines, bursting box-office records and ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. It is now one of the most adored–and successful–movie franchises of all time. Now, the author of the bestselling biography Jim Henson delivers a revelatory look into the life and times of the man who created Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Indiana Jones in George Lucas: A Life (Little, Brown and Company, 2016) If Star Wars wasn't game-changing enough, Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with Indiana Jones, and he completely transformed the world of special effects and the way movies sound. His innovation and ambition forged Pixar and Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX sound. Lucas's colleagues and competitors offer tantalizing glimpses into his life. His entire career has been stimulated by innovators including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, actors such as Harrison Ford, and the very technologies that enabled the creation of his films-and allowed him to keep tinkering with them long after their original releases. Like his unforgettable characters and stories, his influence is unmatched. Brian Jay Jones is the author of the New York Times bestseller Jim Henson: The Biography, as well as Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of An American Imagination and Washington Irving: An American Original. His most recent book is The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building. He continues to believe that Han shot first. Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 時間 16 分
  • Patricia A. Billingsley, "Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover" (High Road Books, 2026)

    Patricia A. Billingsley, "Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover" (High Road Books, 2026)
    2026/08/24
    A groundbreaking reassessment of the relationship between Federico García Lorca and American poet Philip Cummings and its impact on the poems in Lorca's landmark collection, Poet in New York.In August 1929, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca left New York City to spend ten days with his friend and lover Philip Cummings at a lakeside cottage in northern Vermont. Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover (High Road Books, 2026) tells the story of two young men with mismatched goals and expectations: Lorca, already well established in his career, who sought a sustained romantic relationship with another man, and Cummings, a new college graduate eight years his junior, who had no interest in long-term commitment or in challenging social conventions. Based on over a decade of research, Lorca in Vermont explores the full course of Lorca’s relationship with Cummings, an affair that spanned three years and two continents. Combining unique access to primary sources, extensive original research, and a fresh analysis of published sources, the book describes not only the pair’s history as a couple but also the suppression of their relationship by Lorca scholars after the poet’s tragic death in 1936. Perhaps most importantly, it reveals previously unrecognized links between the disappointment and loss Lorca experienced in his relationship with Cummings and at least eight of the poems in his landmark collection Poet in New York, a work that has long intrigued and inspired other writers. The book brilliantly blends compelling new findings and an engaging narrative style in a page-turning tale that is a must read for anyone interested in Lorca and his legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    59 分
  • Jessica Riskin, "The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck" (Penguin, 2026)

    Jessica Riskin, "The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck" (Penguin, 2026)
    2026/08/22
    In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck’s life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? New findings suggest Lamarck’s basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, ⁠The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck⁠ (Penguin, 2026) shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science. ⁠Jessica Riskin⁠ is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California. ⁠Anna Olteanu⁠ is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 時間 10 分
  • Jane Draycott, "Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome" (Yale UP, 2025)

    Jane Draycott, "Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome" (Yale UP, 2025)
    2026/08/22
    Fulvia was born into wealth, privilege, and prestige around the year 80 BCE, yet there was nothing inherently special about her—she was not a saint, an empress, or a queen. But during the years leading up to the fall of the Roman Republic, Fulvia was moving in the most powerful social circles, and by her death in 40 BCE she had amassed a degree of political and military power unprecedented for a woman. Fulvia’s success came at considerable cost, however. None of her three marriages to politically powerful men—most famously to Marc Antony—lasted, and three of her five children died violently. She was repeatedly ridiculed for daring to step outside the confines of the domestic sphere. The deliberate and systematic destruction of her reputation shaped her legacy for two millennia.Ample literary, documentary, and archaeological sources for Fulvia exist, yet most contemporary depictions of her were extremely negative. In Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome (Yale UP, 2025) historian Jane Draycott, reading between the lines of the ancient evidence, proposes a more nuanced interpretation. Using Fulvia as a guide, she invites readers to visit an unfamiliar Rome, one in which women played a crucial role during Rome’s violent transition from a republic to the dictatorship of the Roman Empire. Jane Draycott is a historian and archaeologist, and the author of Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the university’s Games and Gaming Lab. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 時間 4 分
  • Ed Park, "Three Tenses" (Random House, 2026)

    Ed Park, "Three Tenses" (Random House, 2026)
    2026/08/22
    Three Tenses (Random House, 2026) by Ed Park is not quite a memoir, not quite fiction, not quite poetry and not quite prose—and yet it transcends the sum of all its not-quite parts as a resonant portrait of its young artist. Written when he was 28, Park’s “transmission from the nineties” displays his more earnest, more vulnerable version: a writer toiling away in upstart obscurity, working thankless New York jobs, who has yet to reach the triumph of publishing his first book. Three Tenses would not be that book. Instead, Park stashed it away in a manilla folder. Fast forward to the dog days of the pandemic, 2020, when Park rediscovered his old manuscript, tinkering with it while he worked on other projects, including his novel Same Bed, Different Dreams, which went on to be a Pulitzer Prize finalist after its 2023 publication. Fascinated and charmed by its lack of convention, I knew that I wanted to speak to Park about Three Tenses, and he was kind enough to join me for a chat about the process of confronting—and publishing—his younger self. Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed, Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and his writing appears in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic, and other publications. In 2025, he received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Deborah Pease Prize from A Public Space Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 時間 14 分
  • Emile Chabal, "The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Emile Chabal, "The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian" (Harvard UP, 2026)
    2026/08/21
    Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown. Yet Hobsbawm was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende. In The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed, The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates globally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 時間 34 分
  • Andrew Fisher, "Nathan Straus: From Macy's Magnate to International Humanitarian" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

    Andrew Fisher, "Nathan Straus: From Macy's Magnate to International Humanitarian" (Rutgers UP, 2026)
    2026/08/21
    In New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centauries, Nathan Straus was famous as a co-owner of the Macy’s and Abraham and Straus department stores. He was also a leading Zionist and briefly, in 1894, a Democratic nominee for mayor of New York. Yet his greatest achievement, Andrew Fisher argues in Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian, was his work in public heath—particularly for the pasteurization of milk. Straus, as Fisher shows, worked with serious scientists and used the knack for promotion that he acquired in his business life to promote research and educate the public. Nathan Straus, published by Rutgers University Press, restores to history a man who was prominent in his time but is almost forgotten today. The book illuminates philanthropy, public health, German Jewry in New York, Zionism, and the history of department stores and retailing. Fisher is a historian and the retired founding executive of the Lavelle Fund for the Blind. For thirty-five years he worked for charitable foundations in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    43 分