Show Notes
Danny Bradigan survived brutal fighting in Afghanistan and fought as a professional boxer, but a bullet finally puts him in a coma. Part of his recovery involves heading to a small Appalachian town where he’s inherited a property and a car mechanic business. He knows nothing about repairing cars and needs to understand who gave him this chance at another life. He begins mentoring Ryan, the young man who used to help the previous owner, falls in love with Amy, the boy’s older sister, and when he’s not stuck in his memories, spends his free time searching the town records. As he gets closer to discovering the town’s violent secrets, the threats against him and his new friends start festering. A Bunch of Fives (Falling Up Publishing, 2026) is a stunning, literary crime thriller that portrays a town simmering with hate, violence, and racism while Danny Bradigan struggles to overcome violent memories of war and a life built on violence and destruction.
William Kely McClung is a novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker whose work is defined by its visceral pacing, atmospheric depth, and raw physical reality. Named as one of the “Top 100 Indie Filmmakers in the World,” McClung has written more than thirty feature screenplays and directed three award-winning feature films, cutting and mixing projects in legendary spaces from London to Berlin. McClung has spent decades learning and teaching martial arts across the United States, Southeast Asia, and Europe—a lifetime of elite combat discipline that directly infuses his prose with authentic, high-velocity stakes and action. He was twice inducted into the Martial Arts Hall of Honours for his contributions to martial arts and action cinema.
In A Bunch of Fives, as in his three previous thrillers, Loop, Super Ninja, and Black Fire, McClung strives to strip away traditional artifice to create an immersive non-linear experience where the presentation of words on the page becomes an active character. Besides spending seemingly endless time on the computer hammering out stories, McClung travels, trains, and teaches martial arts, and studies graphic design, writing, and photography.
More from New Books in Literature
Describing the plot of a Tom McCarthy novel requires some caveats about the scale and the projection of the thing. One might begin with a description of a man who after suffering a head injury decides to recreate and reenact a day in his life again and again ad absurdum to the point of violence, but this would be insufficient as a depiction of the novel Remainder’s electrical currents of feeling and its intellectual conduits that flip switches on and off in literary theory and philosophy. Likewise, a gloss of Satin Island might rest on the project of its narrator, a corporate archeologist preparing an all-encompassing ethnography of our human era. But such a distillation misses the humor, intrigue, and dreamwork that make the novel an island unto itself. And these baffling plots give way to novels that as the AV club has written, “are more entertaining than [they] have any right to be”.
When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara.
Sharma and Sushila were ahead of their time in marrying for love and across castes in early 1950s India. When their oldest daughter is nine, they leave their home and family for Sharma to take an academic position in astrophysics in America. Sushila takes care of their home, raises their girls, manages to complete a doctorate, and becomes a feminist philosopher. The three daughters grow into young women, each navigating school and community during the upheaval of the 1960s. While coming to terms with their parents’ flaws and building relationships and lives, they learn to count on each other through marriage and divorce, children and careers. Sutra Americana (U Wisconsin Press, 2026) is a sweeping and beautiful immigrant saga about identity, memory, forgiveness, and love.
Wednesday, Oct. 7—Over in the blink of an eye, the best flash fiction lingers long after we finish reading it. The incandescent works collected in Library of America’s American Flash Fiction: An Anthology showcase the vitality of this literary form with a rich history and dazzling present. Join celebrated flash authors Lynne Tillman, Venita Blackburn, and Ben Loory, along with volume editor David L. Ulin, for a dive into these miniature masterpieces of deceptive depth and power.
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Christine Fischer Guy about her novel, The Instrument Must Not Matter (Wolsak & Wynn, 2026).