New Books Network

Woody Allen has called A Streetcar Named Desire the most well-directed film ever made and its influence on Blue Jasmine (2013) is unmistakable. Both concern a woman whose fantasy life and self-deception break down and both feature incredible performances by the lead actress: in Streetcar, it’s Vivien Leigh and here it’s Cate Blanchett. And if Streetcar is a high point of Eliza Kazan’s filmography, Blue Jasmine is surely one of Allen’s and perhaps the best of the subgenre Woody Allen Movies Without The Woody Allen Character.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Blue Jasmine is Allen’s 44th film; his memoir, Apropos of Nothing, details how he became a writer and director of fifty films.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day.
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Colin Flahive
is an American entrepreneur and writer who has spent more than two
decades living and running social enterprises in southwestern China. He
is best known as one of the founders of Salvador's Coffee House, which
is a hub of international exchange in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan
province.

In this New Books Network episode, we talk with Colin about his latest book, The Galaxy's Last Ride: Shifting Gears in Rural China (Earnshaw Books, 2026).

The Galaxy's Last Ride is a rich combination of
memoir, travelogue, and oral history that explores China's sweeping
development through a deeply personal lens. The book weaves together
several strands—a 2,500-kilometer solo motorcycle journey that Colin
took across rural China during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the
personal stories of Salvador’s employees, and recollections from Colin’s
past travels—to paint a part-insider-part-outsider portrait of China’s
evolutions over the last two decades.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a
publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and
television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera,
The Diplomat, and Eater.
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Exploring the work of established and emerging artists in Indonesia’s vibrant art world, Artists and the People: Ideologies of Art in Indonesia (NUS Press, 2022) examines why so many artists in the world’s largest archipelagic nation choose to work directly with people and in the studio. While the social dimension of Indonesian art makes it distinctive in the globalised world of contemporary art, Elly Kent is the first to explore this engagement in Indonesian terms. What are the historical, political and social conditions that lie beneath these polyvalent practices? How do formal and informal institutions, communities and artist-run-initiatives contribute to the practices and discourses behind socially-engaged art in Indonesia? What do artists do when they locate their practice in a broader social milieu, and what tensions arise when artists integrate communities, governments, politics, history and people into their practice?

Drawing on interviews with artists, translations of archival material, visual analyses and participation in artists’ projects, this book presents a unique, interdisciplinary examination of ideologies of art in Indonesia. It portrays the ways art practice and theory are understood within Indonesia and inside Indonesian-language discourse. Indonesia's artists have continued to explore, resist and draw on the methodologies and discourses of social responsibility and artistic autonomy generated by Indonesian arts practitioners through their early 20th-century encounters with modernity and the founding of the nation state. This book brings contemporary practice into conversation with art history in Indonesia.

Dr Elly Kent is a visual artist, translator, researcher and educator with 20 years of experience working in academia and the arts in Indonesia and Australia. Elly is Deputy Director of the ANU Indonesia Institute and Sub-dean of Languages in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She convenes the Year in Asia program and is Treasurer of the Indonesia Council, Australia’s peak body for Indonesian studies.
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Ever since conquistadores claimed Taino land in the name of their Catholic God and New England Puritans formed their strictly Protestant “city on a hill,” religion has been central to American life. Even as some found religious freedom—Rhode Island welcomed the Quakers, Jews, and Baptists that Massachusetts expelled as dissenters—indigenous people and Africans forced into slavery struggled to protect their religious practices. With the constitutional separation of church and state, it fell to the American people to decide: would they sharpen religion’s formidable powers of division, or reimagine its creative possibilities?

In A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2026) Brook Wilensky-Lanford follows this essential American tension from first contact through the 2024 election. This is an expansive history of extraordinary religious questions, told through the ordinary people who grappled with them. It is a story of defiance: Anne Hutchinson, preaching against Puritan clergy; Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise serving soft-shell crab to his kosher guests at an 1883 banquet; and Wovoka, a Paiute man who envisioned the Ghost Dance movement, which persisted in the face of violent government repression at Wounded Knee. It is also a story of community: Millerites waiting together in vain for Jesus’s return on a rainy October night in 1844; Chinese immigrants bringing Daoist and Buddhist gods to their California temples; Mormons pushing westward to build their “new Zion” in Utah. And in the last fifty years, it has been a story of muscular political power, as the religious right has sought to shape the present and paint the past in its own image.

At a moment when religion penetrates even the most secular aspects of American life, understanding its history is more essential than ever before. “It is in history that the very human work of religion happens,” Wilensky-Lanford shows us, “and in ordinary time that even the most carved-in-stone tenets can and do change.”

Brook Wilensky-Lanford is a religion writer, editor, and teacher. The author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and former managing editor of Killing the Buddha, her work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Currently the Associate Director of Sacred Writes Public Scholarship, she holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University and a PhD in Religion in the Americas from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she lives.

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com
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What
does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit
cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the
question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only
to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but
to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered
radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism
itself.

These
ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking
internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city
from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists
to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country’s
Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a
science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to
rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical
South, The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (Routledge, 2026)
explores the material and immaterial legacies of
socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To
this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban
sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing
visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using
varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the
book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity,
polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the
social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political
center
in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and
linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness
within the regional dynamics of the Global South.

David Leupold is a sociologist, scholar of memory wars and research fellow in the ERC-funded research project REVENANT: Revivals of Empire. He is the author of the prize-winning book Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish Memory (2021), the former principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021–2025), and a current resource scholar for the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies (Middlebury Institute of International Studies). He lives in Berlin. 

This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee,
PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of
postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and
environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia. 
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