Winter Reads
This will be our last regular newsletter of 2025. Next week, we’ll share a playlist of our hosts’ favorite episodes from this year that you can tune in to over our holiday break.
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In this week’s newsletter
Winter Reading List
Meet the Press: University College London Press
Meet a Host: Shobhana Xavier
Winter Reading List
Looking for a good book to read this winter? Listen to interviews with a few wonderful novelists who have been featured on the NBN this year!
Tune in to our conversation with author Stephanie Wambugu about her recently published book, Lonely Crowds. At the center of the novel are Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, and Maria, a beautiful orphan, who attend the same Catholic school. Their decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time.
Check out Dennard Dayle’s interview about How to Dodge a Cannonball, a satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War. The protagonist is Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future―as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus.
Listen to Ori Gersht speak about his novel Ham’s Heaven (Warbler Press, 2025). Inspired by the true story of the first great ape in space, it explores the friendship of an ape and his trainer to examine what we do with animals in the name of progress.
Jonas Hassen Khemiri discusses his latest book, The Sisters (FSG, 2025), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, and the New York Times editors choice. Narrated in six parts, each spanning a period ranging from a year to a day to a single minute, this is a big, vivid family saga of the highest order—an addictively entertaining tour de force.
Tune in to our interview with Robert de la Chevrotiere about his novel, Tall is Her Body. Recently orphaned Fidel returns to his mother’s native Dominica and whirls from one relative and reality to another, learning pieces of his own story. His heritage is one of layered secrets and sharp divisions.
Meet the Press: UCL Press Podcast
We are excited to share that University College London Press is a new academic partner of the NBN!
UCL Press turned 10 years old in June! Since its founding in 2015, the press has been committed to open research and scholarship. It was the United Kingdom’s first fully open access university press. The press has built a strong Diamond OA journals program featuring journals in the fields of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Law, and a pioneering multidisciplinary journal on environment studies, UCL Open Environment, that operates an open peer review model. More recently, UCL Press has also established an open access textbooks program to provide free, digital high-quality textbooks for students. In total, UCL Press has published over 400 scholarly monographs, 11 textbooks, and has built a portfolio of 15 scholarly journals.
Listen to Anna Shadrina’s interview about her book, The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia. She examines the social production of ageing in post-Soviet Russia. She highlights the role of grandmothers as primary caregivers due to men’s traditional estrangement from family life and reveals that this expectation makes them unpaid family carers reliant on the state and their children.
Tune in to John Nott’s discussion of Between Feast and Famine: Food, Health, and the History of Ghana’s Long Twentieth-Century. In this comparative history of nutrition in Ghana since the end of the 19th century, he analyzes how an uneven capitalist transformation affected the lives of women and children.
Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. Alastair Gornall shows thow this era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region.
Subscribe to the UCL Press podcast to hear more great interviews with authors of UCL Press books!
Meet a Host: Shobhana Xavier
Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her most recent book is Dervishes of the North: Rumi, Whirling and the Making of Sufism in Canada.
Q: Can you briefly introduce yourself including your areas of academic interest?
A: I am a religious studies professor who is an ethnographer, with wide-ranging interests, but I write and think mostly on contemporary Sufism and Islam, namely practices of mysticism, spirituality, and esotericism and popular spiritual practices. I work on Canada, the United States and Sri Lanka. I teach courses on Islam, religion and popular culture, race and religion at the undergraduate level and research methods in religious studies at the graduate level.
Q: What channel do you contribute to?
A: I am a co-host of the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast channel.
Listen to a few of Shobhana’s interviews here:
Q: How did you first hear about the New Books Network?
A: I learned about the New Books Network in 2017, which is fascinating to think about now that the network has expanded and grown so much since then!
Q: What made you want to be a host for NBN?
A: In 2017, the New books in Islamic Studies team consisting of Kristian Petersen, Elliott Bazzano, and SherAli Tareen invited me to join them as a co-host on the NBIS. It is because of them that I agreed to join the podcast and I have been hosting ever since (I am at about 70+ interviews now!).
Q: What do you enjoy most about being an NBN host?
A: My favorite thing about being a co-host is really just the wonderful opportunity to chat and connect meaningfully with the author. What a treat it is to read a book so closely and be able to process the book with an author and learn more about the before and after lives of a book. Of course, being a host means that I need to read! Hosting has really forced me to keep up with the literature on Islamic Studies (which I think of capaciously), read closely, and prepare questions. I often tell folks that being a host has felt like completing a second PhD. It has been rewarding and I really am appreciative of the generosity of so many authors who have been willing to have a conversation with me since 2017!
Q: What episode has been your favorite to record?
A: I have so many memorable episodes and conversations, so this is definitely a very difficult question to answer. But, the graduate student in me who nerds out about Sufism and all its facets was nervous and excited to connect with Dr. Michael Sells about his translation of Ibn Arabi’s poems in the book The Translator of Desires. He is such an important scholar in my field. The entire interview felt like I was taking a masterclass on Sufi poetry. I still remember when Dr. Sells asked me what I thought about a verse we were discussing and walked me through it. I felt like I was in class with him, and I forgot we were recording a podcast! I’ve had so many similar moments with many and most colleagues and authors, deep in conversation about methods or theories, and forgetting that we are recording.
Q: Other than your own, what has been your favorite episode or channel to listen to?
A: I listen widely, from the Religion channel to African Studies, South Asian Studies and more. I assign NBN podcasts regularly in my classes, so that also informs what channels I am listening to at any particular time (depending on what I am teaching at the moment!).
Q: If you could record an NBN interview with anyone, who would it be?
A: Oh this is a hard question, do they have to be alive?! If not, I would have loved to interview Annemarie Schimmel, she is one of the pioneering scholars of Islam and Sufism, and her scholarship has inspired much of my work. I would have loved to chat with her about any or all her books.
Q: What advice would you give to anyone interested in becoming a host at NBN?
A: It is a lot of work, in the sense of reading and preparing. Luckily hosts have production support from the NBN, but I think what motivates me at the end of the day is that it has been really rewarding for me. So if this resonates as an outlook, it will definitely keep you motivated to record episodes and connect with colleagues thoughtfully and be willing to grow intellectually yourself. I think beyond the time commitment, for me the podcast has helped me foster my intellectual curiosity in a structured way. So it really depends on where you are at and what you are looking for!
To listen to Shobhana’s great interviews, subscribe to our New Books in Religion and New Books in Islamic Studies channels!