New Books in Language and Translation

How does an independent press survive by publishing the books the Big Five overlook? Amherst College professor and Spanglish scholar Ilan Stavans joins Sarah Russo to talk about Restless Books, the press he founded to champion immigrant writers, literature in translation, and the books that live between languages. Ilan shares the origin of Restless Books (including the investor who told him to take a finance course first), the creation of the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, and why he considers Spanglish one of the great creative forces in American English. Ilan and Sarah dig into the practical side of publishing in translation: finding the right translator, editing hybrid-language manuscripts, and navigating the politics around a single project. Ilan also offers advice for immigrant and early-career writers, and makes the case that small presses are doing some of the most important work in publishing today.
For more information on Ilan and Restless Books, please visit the website.
Books mentioned in this episode[1] :
“People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much,” by Sofi Stambo

“A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands,” edited by Ilan Stavans

“The People’s Tongue,” edited by Ilan Stavans

“Cecil the Lion Had to Die,” by Olena Stiazhkina, translated by Dominique Hoffmann

“Daniel and Ismail,” by Juan Pablo Iglesias and illustrated by Alex Peris

“Fictional Translations,” by Ilan Stavans

Also mentioned: Don Quixote, Frankenstein, and The Odyssey
Key Moments
2:02 - How a Midlife Crisis Turned Into a Publishing House 📚
Ilan's candid story of the investor who told him to take a finance course before he'd give him a dime.
5:31 - The $10,000 Bet That Became an 11-Year Literary Prize 🏆
How the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature grew from a scrappy idea into a career-launching institution.
8:16 - Editing a 100-Voice Anthology on Faith in America ✝️
The Lilly Endowment project that brought Obama, Du Bois, Sontag, Ginsberg, Dickenson, Rushdie, and many others into one book.
11:15 - Why Spanglish Isn't a "Broken" Language 🗣️
Ilan on the creative, mestizo identity behind Spanglish, and why he believes there's no single version of it.
19:52 - The Trilingual Children's Book That Took 3 Years to Publish 🌍
Finding an Arabic and a Hebrew translator willing to share a byline was "sheer torture."
24:09 - His Best Advice for Immigrant and First-Time Writers ✍️
Why Ilan refuses to call anyone's English "broken," and what he tells writers drowning in drafts.
[1]not sure if you want to mention the classics he cites at the end: Don Quixote, Frankenstein, and The Odyssey (we sort of have a lot here already)

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Featuring personal essay, manifesto, creative nonfiction, and poetry, Tsunami: Women’s Voices From Mexico (Feminist Press, 2025) gathers the multiplicity of voices being raised in Mexico today against patriarchy and its buried structures. Tackling gender violence, community building, #MeToo, Indigenous rights, and more, these writings rock the core of what we know feminism to be, dismantling its Eurocentric roots and directing its critical thrust towards current affairs in Mexico today.
Asserting plurality as a political priority, Tsunami includes trans voices, Indigenous voices, Afro-Latinx voices, voices from within and outside academic institutions, and voices spanning generations. Tsunami is the combined force and critique of the three feminist waves, the marea verde (“green wave”) of protests that have swept through Latin America in recent years, and the tides turned by insurgent feminisms at the margins of public discourse.
Guest: Gabriela Jauregui’s books include Feral, Many Fiestas, and La memoria de las cosas. She edited and coauthored Tsunami and Tsunami 2, published in Spanish in 2018 and 2021 respectively. She is a Soros New American Fellow, a Borchard Fellow, and was part of the Hay Festival's Bogotá 39 best young authors in Latin America. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from USC and teaches at the National Autonomous University in Mexico (UNAM).
Guest: Heather Cleary is an award-winning translator whose work has been recognized by English PEN, the National Book Foundation, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Mellon Foundation. A member of the Cedilla & Co. translation collective, she was a founding editor of the digital, multilingual Buenos Aires Review. She holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is a developmental editor and writing coach for scholars in the humanities. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and the show’s newsletter.
Playlist:
Thanks to Life
The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo
The Things We Didn't Know
In The Garden Behind The Moon
The Common
The Translators Daughter
We Take Our Cities With Us
A Calm and Normal Heart
The Names of All the Flowers
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 325+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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What does it mean for a modernist novel to fail?

Modernism famously celebrates rupture, difficulty, and deviance from literary norms—but that very embrace of formal experimentation creates a paradox: how can we tell the difference between daring innovation and genuinely bad writing? Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel (JHU Press, 2026) takes up this long-overlooked question and argues that modernist aesthetics have made artistic failure uniquely difficult to recognize, both in fiction and in literary criticism itself.
Through incisive close readings of D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, Mina Loy, and James Joyce, Nathan Wainstein shows how moments that appear to be mistakes—awkward repetitions, temporal glitches, excessive prose, or stylistic lapses—often hover ambiguously between error and experiment. These moments, he argues, have become privileged objects of interpretation for critics trained to find meaning precisely where form seems to break down. Wainstein situates these textual breakdowns within debates about intentionality, authorial control, and critical authority, showing how modernist fiction unsettles long-standing assumptions about craft and competence. In doing so, the book clarifies why modernist novels continue to generate intense critical attention—and why questions of value and judgment remain so difficult to resolve.
At once a work of modernist literary criticism and a searching reflection on the practice of close reading, Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel rethinks how aesthetic judgment operates in a field shaped by modernism's legacy. By confronting the possibility of genuine failure head-on, Wainstein offers a fresh account of the novelistic form and the pleasures and limits of interpretation.
Nathan Wainstein is an assistant professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Grant Us Eyes: The Art of Paradox in Bloodborne. He is also the cohost of the podcast Authors Die Twice.
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.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick chats with Professor Dr. Natalia Filatkina, Dr. Kerstin Roth and Research Associate Miriam Hinterholzer. All three work at the University of Hamburg in Germany on a long-term research project, called FSL Digital, that investigates language history, language attitudes and everyday communication in the context of multilingualism in early modern Europe.
As part of this project, today’s guests annotate and analyse multilingual foreign language textbooks from the 15th to 17th centuries.
Today’s guests discuss these textbooks, the research project, and what historical foreign language manuals can tell us about language attitudes and expectations of foreign language learning.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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With senses that often seem alien to us, bees navigate complex decisions about where to find food, when to fight or flee, and how to work together. The Language of Bees (Princeton University Press, 2026) invites readers into the hidden world of bee communication, a realm where creatures less than an inch long use scent, vibration, movement, and sound to cooperate, share information, and survive.

Drawing on decades of groundbreaking fieldwork, Dr. James Nieh sheds light on the remarkable signals that bees use and the evolutionary forces that shape them. Focusing on social species like bumble bees, honey bees, and stingless bees, he explores how colonies rely on these signals to organize all aspects of their lives, from foraging and warfare to espionage and defense. From the famous waggle dance of honey bees to the secretive trails and potentially coded sounds of stingless bees, he shows how their intricate communication systems reflect a delicate balance between cooperation and conflict and how a changing world disrupts these finely tuned systems. Along the way, Dr. Nieh shares key breakthroughs in animal behavior and offers new insights from his own research on how bees signal, eavesdrop, and adapt. Readers will learn how bees waggle dance better if they have teachers and an engaged audience, how predators and competition help shape bee language, and other astonishing findings.

The Language of Bees is also a story about how failure and unexpected turns lead to discoveries. Blending personal insights with cutting-edge science, this illuminating and informative book reveals how the study of bees continues to deepen our understanding of intelligence, resilience, and the diverse ways that life communicates.
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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