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  • Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, "The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New Tellings of Half-forgotten Stories from England's 39 Historic Counties" (The History Press, 2025)

    Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, "The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New Tellings of Half-forgotten Stories from England's 39 Historic Counties" (The History Press, 2025)
    2025/09/18
    Do you know the legends of the giants who ruled England before the first human kings? What about the demon dog Black Shuck who terrorized sixteenth-century Norfolk? Or the many times the Devil has tried to get his way before being outwitted by everyday people? England’s historic counties are overflowing with folklore, and this collection of 39 stories from the hit podcast Three Ravens reimagines dozens of classic tales in surprising, spooky, and often hilarious ways. Filled with tales of ghosts, mermaids, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends and more, The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New tellings of half-forgotten stories from England's 39 Historic Counties (The History Press, 2025) by Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux spans centuries, styles, tones and narrators, making it perfect for bedtimes, reading by torchlight, or curling up on the sofa to enjoy with a mug of something hot. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    52 分
  • Spike Bucklow, "The Year: An Ecology of the Zodiac" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

    Spike Bucklow, "The Year: An Ecology of the Zodiac" (Reaktion Books, 2025)
    2025/09/15
    Spike Bucklow joins Jana Byars to talk about The Year: An Ecology of the Zodiac (Reaktion, 2025). This delightful book defies genre. It is a journey through nature’s yearly cycle, blending science, history and poetic reflection.The Year takes us on a journey exploring how nature transforms across twelve months, each chapter focusing on a specific month’s natural events, from spring’s beginning through to winter’s end. It opens with an overview of our evolving understanding of time and nature, from ancient astronomy to the present, and concludes with a chapter on the impact of climate change. Spike Bucklow draws on both modern ecological studies and historical naturalists such as Aristotle, Gilbert White, Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. Poetic reflections from Ovid, Shakespeare, John Clare and William Wordsworth enrich the narrative, giving further insights into nature’s changes. Blending modern science with traditional wisdom, The Year provides a positive perspective on ecological, global and personal change, appealing to those interested in ecology, astrology and the history of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    43 分
  • Philip Carr-Gomm, "A Brief History of Nakedness" (Reaktion, 2010)

    Philip Carr-Gomm, "A Brief History of Nakedness" (Reaktion, 2010)
    2025/08/13
    Philip Carr-Gomm joins Jana Byars to talk about A Brief History of Nakedness (Reaktion, 2010) on the occasion of its newest paperback edition. From the naked sages of India to modern-day witches and Christian nudists, from Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga, Carr-Comm writes a survey of the touching, sometimes tragic, and often bizarre story of our relationships with our naked bodies. As one common story goes, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, had no idea that there was any shame in their lack of clothes; they were perfectly confident in their birthday suits among the animals of the Garden of Eden. All was well until that day when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and went scrambling for fig leaves to cover their bodies. Since then, lucrative businesses have arisen to provide many stylish ways to cover our nakedness, for the naked human body now evokes powerful and often contradictory ideas--it thrills and revolts us, signifies innocence and sexual experience, and often marks the difference between nature and society. In A Brief History of Nakedness psychologist Philip Carr-Gomm traces our inescapable preoccupation with nudity. Rather than studying the history of the nude in art or detailing how the naked body has been denigrated in the media, A Brief History of Nakedness reveals how religious teachers, politicians, protesters, and cultural icons have used nudity to enlighten or empower themselves as well as entertain us. Among his many examples, Carr-Gomm discusses how advertisers and the media employ images of bare skin--or even simply the word "naked"--to garner our attention, how mystics have used nudity to get closer to God, and how political protesters have discovered that baring all is one of the most effective ways to gain publicity for their cause. Carr-Gomm investigates how this use of something as natural as nakedness actually gets under our skin and evokes complicated and complex emotional responses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    32 分
  • Matthew R. Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, "Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)

    Matthew R. Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, "Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)
    2025/08/12
    Matthew Sparks and Oliva Sizemore join Jana Byars for a fun, chilling, and thoughtful discussion about about Haint Country: Dark Tales from the Hills and Hollers (University Press of Kentucky, 2024). The hills of the Appalachia region hold secrets—dark, deep, varied, and mysterious. These secrets are often told in the form of eerie, thrilling, and creepy folk tales that reveal strange sightings, curious oddities, and commonly serve as cautionary tales for eager and curious ears. These spine-tingling stories have been told and retold by family members, neighbors, and "hillfolk" for generations. Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers is a collection of weird, otherworldly, and supernatural phenomenon in Eastern Kentucky—tales that have been recorded and documented for the first time. Collected and adapted by Matthew Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, the anthology explores stories of ghosts or "haints," strange creatures or "boogers," haunted locations or "stained earth," uncanny happenings or "high strangeness," and humorous Appalachian ghost stories. Contemporary yarns of black panthers, demons, and sightings of ghostly coal miners are narrated in the first person, reflecting the style and dialect of the collected oral history. Though comprised of a mixture of claimed accounts and fabricated lore, the locations and people woven throughout are very real. Complemented with evocative watercolor illustrations by Olivia Sizemore (who was inspired by the work of Stephen Gammell) and a compendium that provides additional context, Haint Country is a thrilling and bone-chilling excursion to the spooky corner of Appalachia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    42 分
  • Dom Ford, "Mytholudics: Games and Myth" (de Gruyter, 2025)

    Dom Ford, "Mytholudics: Games and Myth" (de Gruyter, 2025)
    2025/08/05
    Dom Ford joins Jana Byars to talk about Mytholudics: Game and Myth (DeGruyter Brill, 2025). Games create worlds made of many different elements, but also of rules, systems and structures for how we act in them. So how can we make sense of them? Mytholudics: Games and Myth lays out an approach to understanding games using theories from myth and folklore. Myth is taken here not as an object but as a process, a way of expressing meaning. It works to naturalise arbitrary constellations of signs, to connect things in meaning. Behind the phrase ‘just the way it is’ is a process of mythologization that has cemented it. Mytholudics lays out how this understanding of myth works for the analysis of games. In two sections each analysing five digital games, it then shows how this approach works in practice: one through the lens of heroism and one through monstrosity. These ask questions such as what heroic mythology is constructed in Call of Duty? What do the monsters in The Witcher tell us about the game’s model of the world? How does Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice weave a conflict between Norse and Pictish mythology into one between competing models of seeing mental illness? This method helps to see games and their worlds in the whole. Stories, gameplay, systems, rules, spatial configurations and art styles can all be considered together as contributing to the meaning of the game. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    56 分
  • Isabel Toral and Beatrice Gruendler, "An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions" (Brill, 2024)

    Isabel Toral and Beatrice Gruendler, "An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions" (Brill, 2024)
    2025/08/03
    The collection of wisdom fables known as Kalila and Dimna began its long literary life in Sanskrit more than two millennia ago, and was subsequently translated to numerous languages. But it is the Arabic version, adapted from Middle Persian by the eighth-century scholar Ibn al-Muqaffa, that has left the most substantial literary footprint. A foundational text of classical Arabic prose and the basis for translations into Hebrew, Syriac, Castilian, Latin, Persian, and more, versions of Kalila and Dimna exists in hundreds of manuscript copies held in libraries around the world. Kalila and Dimna is the focus of Isabel Toral and Beatrice Gruendler's new work An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions (Brill: 2024). In this collected volume, members of the Kalila and Dimna project discuss, from different perspectives, a core aspect of their work with this textual tradition: the study of variation and mutability. The aim is to shed light on Kalila and Dimna’s so-called mouvance and establish typologies of textual mobility and instability across linguistic traditions and historical periods, as well as to develop analytical tools to describe, classify, represent, and interpret these dynamics. As will be shown, the progressive digitalization of philology in the last decades has offered the unique opportunity of putting the concept of mouvance into practice. Contributors include Theodore S. Beers, Jan J. van Ginkel, Khouloud Khalfallah, Mahmoud Kozae, Rima Redwan, and Johannes Stephan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    1 時間 5 分
  • Kirstie Macleod, "The Red Dress: Conversations in Stitch" (Quickthorn, 2025)

    Kirstie Macleod, "The Red Dress: Conversations in Stitch" (Quickthorn, 2025)
    2025/07/09
    The Red Dress: Conversations in Stitch (Quickthorn, 2025), shares the deeper story of The Red Dress, its embroiderers and Kirstie Macleod's own story whilst opening up the wider issues the garment prompts for its audiences through thematic essays by individuals involved in the greater project on subjects such as empowerment, finding voice, feminism, community and healing trauma. This project offered a platform for people, mostly women, who are vulnerable and live in poverty to share their stories through embroidery. The completed Red Dress traveled for 14.5 years and was embroidered by 367 women/girls, 7 men/boys, and 2 non-binary artists from 51 countries. All 141 commissioned artisans were paid for their work and received annual donations from exhibition fees and merchandise profit. Additional small embroideries were added by participants and audiences at various events. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    31 分
  • Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, "Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests" (West Virginia UP, 2023)

    Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, "Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests" (West Virginia UP, 2023)
    2025/07/09
    2023 Weatherford Award Finalist, Nonfiction How can the craft of musical instrument making help reconnect people to place and reenchant work in Appalachia? How does the sonic search for musical tone change relationships with trees and forests? Following three craftspeople in the mountain forests of Appalachia through their processes of making instruments, Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests (West Virginia UP, 2023) considers the meanings of work, place, and creative expression in drawing music from wood. Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth explores the complexities and contradictions of instrument-making labor, which is deeply rooted in mountain forests and expressive traditions but also engaged with global processes of production and consumption. Using historical narratives and sensory ethnography, among other approaches, he finds that the craft of lutherie speaks to the past, present, and future of the region’s work and nature. From West Virginia University Press Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth PhD is Director and Curator of the Gordon Art Galleries at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He earned a PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of Kentucky and a BA in Anthropology and History from the University of Virginia. He has held research, teaching, and administrative positions in Anthropology and Folklore Studies through his work with the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Cultural History Program, the University of Kentucky Department of Anthropology and Appalachian Center, and The Ohio State University Department of Comparative Studies and Center for Folklore Studies. Rachel Hopkin PhD is a folklorist and audio producer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore
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    1 時間 8 分