The Summer's Best Book Festival
In this week’s newsletter
Brooklyn Book Fest Sept 14-22
New Books in Late Antiquity
Meet a Host: Sullivan Summer
Brooklyn Book Fest Sept 14-22
Stop by the Brooklyn Book Festival from Sept 14-22, and celebrate 20 years of New York City’s largest free literary festival. Since its founding in 2006, the event has grown from a one-day event to 8 days of city-wide events including 300 authors, a Literary Marketplace with 250 independent and major publishers, and the BKBF Children’s Day. Learn more here and check out the Festival Day schedule here.
New Books in Late Antiquity
For the past year, Michael Motia, Lydia Bremer-McCollum, and other excellent hosts have dedicated themselves to covering a historical period that hasn’t received nearly enough attention on the NBN. Late antiquity covers the temporal bridge between the ancient world and the medieval world. The topics covered by scholars of late antiquity paint a picture of the diverse societies birthing many of the foundational ideas and structures of our current age. In particular, late antiquity saw the development of early Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and the origins of Islam.
Read our brief interview with Michael Motia about New Books in Late Antiquity:
Q: What do you cover on New Books in Late Antiquity?
A: The short answer is history from about 200-800 CE.
A longer answer might break that time period down by geography: We mainly cover the Roman Empire and its breakup, but we also venture into Persia, China, and more. Or by language: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic, with some others (e.g., Armenian, Ge'ez, Middle Persian) that also pop up. Another answer is that Lydia Bremer-McCollum and I both got into late antiquity through religious studies, so a lot of the books we gravitate toward orbit around Judaism, Christianity, Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, and the many other religions of late antiquity. We don't often call it "patristics" or "rabbinics," but if that language is more familiar, we do that too.
Q: What's your favorite interview you've done in the past year?
A: Really hard to say. I think some representative ones are: Cam Grey, Living with Risk in Late Antiquity, and Krista Dalton, How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donner Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity.
Q: How has the podcast changed how you do research?
A: It’s given me a much broader sense of the time period. My first book focused on one very small part of the Roman world in the 4th century CE, but when I started to work on some bigger-scope projects, I started reading much more widely in the field. The podcast grew out of how exciting it was to wander into subfields and to see how much great work was being done.
Q: What advice would you give to academics interested in hosting on the New Books Network?
A: Choose books you like.
Q: What's your favorite book to assign to students?
A: In my writing courses, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.
In my course on the Fall of Rome, Mike Chin, Life: The Natural History of a Christian Universe.
Subscribe to our new channel, New Books in Late Antiquity to hear more of Michael’s interviews, along with our other wonderful hosts.
Meet A Host: Sullivan Summer
Sullivan Summer is an independent scholar, critic, and author. She holds a JD, a BA in Journalism, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Q: Can you briefly introduce yourself including your areas of academic interest?
A: I spent the first two decades of my career in legal and in corporate management roles for some of the world’s most recognizable brands. Those experiences shaped me in a lot of ways but, through the pandemic, I found myself questioning all my life choices! I spent the last couple of years reconnecting to the things that brought me joy when I was younger— reading and writing. I’m currently agent-shopping a novel, and am working on a nonfiction book proposal. Both grapple with America’s past and present, and with memory. And I am applying to PhD programs in History.
Q: What channel(s) do you contribute to?
A: Predominantly American Studies, African American Studies, and general History, but my episodes have appeared across 32 channels.
Q: How did you first hear about the New Books Network?
A: I was conducting research for my nonfiction book project, and I was trying to figure out if I needed to read a particular book I found in a bibliography. I thought, it would be really helpful if I could just find a podcast with this author. And I found one: at the NBN.
Q: What made you want to be a host for NBN?
A: A couple of reasons. One was selfish: I was reading all these books anyway, and was like—I can get them for free and talk to the authors?!
The other reason was much bigger. My area of interest is generally in US history from the Revolution through the Civil War. Most books published about this time frame, including books that center the Black experience, are by white authors. We are indebted to the work of many of these authors; and also, the lack of representation in all areas of publishing is an issue. I’m encouraged that we are seeing more stories about historically marginalized people, but now I feel like we have a bit of a Jurassic Park problem: some authors spend too much time thinking about whether they can tell a story, and not enough time thinking about whether they should. I get hot when I visit a history museum bookstore and there is an “African American” section with few or no books by Black historians. I thought, well, I can keep getting mad about this, or I can be part of the solution. Returning to school, publishing, and interviewing Black historians and promoting their books is all part of that for me.
I describe my NBN catalogue as “Black authors writing Black ‘small h’ history.” I’ve interviewed authors of academic texts, but also poets, literary and cultural critics, biographers, satirists. In this time of misinformation and disinformation, I think they all have something important to say about the interplay of present and past, and how our history has been, and continues to be shaped.
Q: What do you enjoy most about being an NBN host?
A: There is a lamentation about the decline of book reading in the US right now, and that obviously goes hand-in-hand with concerns about misinformation and disinformation. I share these concerns. And also— book reading requires time, money, access, and capacity that is not available to everyone. It’s a privilege. Being in a position to bring a book’s ideas to someone that might not otherwise be able to consume it is what I enjoy the most about being a host. It’s a self-imposed responsibility, but I take it seriously.
Q: What episode has been your favorite to record?
A: This is such a hard question, because I feel like whatever episode I recorded last is my “favorite,” and also because I now consider many of the authors “friends” after having interviewed them. But I had the chance to record with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers about her essay collection, Misbehaving at the Crossroads (Harper, 2025). She’s an award-winning novelist and poet. This is her seventh book and her first essay collection, and it touches on all the things that excite me—American history, cultural criticism, politics. Jeffers and I are close in age and share some similar experiences, and she’s gotten to the point in her life where she’s unwilling to be dishonest in service of other people’s comfort. I am a huge fan of her work, so I was thrilled, and intimidated, to be speaking with her. When that episode came out I was like: Who let me talk to this woman? And who let me publish on the American Politics channel? I was really proud of it.
Q: Other than your own, what has been your favorite episode or channel to listen to?
A: I really like the Pop Culture channel. The books there tend to be an interesting mashup of history and memory, future and nostalgia; all things I wrestle with in my own work. I feel like it’s the Cool Kids’ Table of the NBN.
Q: If you could record an NBN interview with anyone, who would it be?
A: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Saidiya Hartman, Nell Irvin Painter—I will keep going! There are a bunch of people who, like Jeffers, are published in multiple genres while writing in the history/politics/criticism space. They are aspirational for me.
Q: What advice would you give to anyone interested in becoming a host at NBN?
A: The best hosts are the ones who are not simply subject matter experts, but who are genuinely excited about the books they are discussing. I’m thinking about hosts Adam McNeil and Hollay Ghadery, for example. You can hear in their voices how excited they are; how much the books mean to them. I would say to let your excitement, and your personality, come through.
Q: Is there anywhere else our readers can find you? Or anything you want to promote?
A: Readers can find me on my website and on Instagram. I also have a free Substack, where I speak with authors, historians, and thinkers interrogating the intersections of race, identity, US history, politics, and popular culture.
Check out Sullivan’s host page on the NBN to easily listen to all of her great interviews!