War has returned to Europe. Andrew Sola and Dr. Guenter Danner, our EU expert, unpack what the war means for Ukraine, Russia, and the future of the continent. Was the West delusional in believing that trade and economic relations would prevent Russian aggression? Is Putin a madman or a rational actor? How will the war end?

In our first episode 2022, Lady Fiction takes a cue from Black History
Month to ask about the legacies of black woman celebrities in the US
cultural archive. Stefanie Schäfer's guest is Dr. Samantha Pinto
(UTexas), author of Infamous Bodies. Early Black Women’s Celebrity and
the Afterlives of Rights (Duke UP 2020), whose work on transantional
feminism and black women's performance inquires into our understanding
of the "popular" in popular culture. Fans of Beyoncé will find their
Queen B all over and across this episode, as we read from Morgan
Parker's 2017 poetry collection There are More Beuatiful Things than
Beyoncé.

This episode of LadyFiction discusses Zimbabwean author NoViolet
Bulawayo’s “We Need New Names” (2013), a novel about a young girl who
leaves behind her shantytown childhood to pursue her goals in America.
The novel meditates on home, trauma, and childhood in a globalized
world—and Stefanie Schäfer’s conversation partner is Oksana Marafioti,
US-American writer of Armenian and Russian Romani descent and the author
of “American Gypsy: A Memoir” (2012).

In the final episode of 2021, Andrew Sola and our resident EU expert Dr. Guenter Danner discuss EU refugee policy, the Dublin Agreement, and Fortress Europe; the challenges facing the new German coalition government in 2022; and the likely candidates in the French presidential election coming up in April.

This episode features Stefanie Schäfer and her guest Amanda Halter discussing
their experiences in reading Louisa May Alcott's 1868/9 classic. We talk
about Jo's meanings as tomboy and archetype of white womenhood,
domesticity and nostalgia, and female authorship, touching also on Great
Gerwig's 2019 film version--and finally, we wonder why Little Women
continues to gather, as Anne Boyd Rioux and others have contended, a
predominantly female readership.

In the final episode of the first series of Novel RomAntics, host Douglas Cowie and guest Gregory Miller, a Wisconsin-based educator, discuss Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, a novel that, while telling a story of opiate addiction in the USA, contemplates matters of science, faith, race, immigration, and family.

Do women have to choose between life as an artist and being a mother? That’s what the story boils (or burns!) down to in Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel (and in the eponymous Hulu Series) Little Fires Everywhere. In this episode, Stefanie Schäfer and her guest Julia Faisst discuss the implications and repercussions of this conflict—and on the side, they connect the abyss between itinerant freedom and the comforts of white settlement to the 2008 economic crisis, to adoption and white privilege, and to the iconicity of the American home in contemporary culture.

In this episode, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, Los Angeles-based writer Ryan Gattis, discuss Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, a road novel about a family traveling from New York City to the Mexican-American border. Check out Ryan's novels at ryangattis.com.

In Oct 2021, aka the second fall after the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic, many pressing questions persist: What will be our new normal? How will we construct our stories and our identities after COVID? Is the future, as many say, indeed female?

In this episode, Stefanie Schäfer and her guests, Ina Batzke and Linda Hess, explore two novels about global pandemics that were published before the arrival of COVID-19, and the answers these works of post-apocalyptic speculative fiction offer. They touch on female authors, alternate fictional universes, and the consequences wrought on humanity by the end of oil—and of the cultural industry, respectively .

In the second of two episodes about reinterpretations of The Great Gatsby, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, Michael Coyle, discuss The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo, in which Daisy Buchanan's golf star friend Jordan Baker narrates a dark, fantastical and politically-charged version of the same events that Nick Carraway tells in Fitzgerald's 1925 novel.