"The New Believers"

New from Cambridge University Press: The New Believers: Religion and the Contemporary Novel by Jack Dudley.

About the book, from the publisher:

The New Believers identifies a group of today's most important novelists, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Junot Díaz, and George Saunders, who have challenged the trend of depressing and defeatist novelistic endings by turning to spiritual beliefs, powers, and presences. Through spiritual belief, these writers use the novel to imagine more hopeful and caring ways of being in the world, ones that can challenge Christian Nationalism and neoliberal capitalism and empower leftist and liberal causes, such as women's rights, migrant rights, animal rights, and care for the environment. Through a survey of the current state of novel studies, close readings of key works by each writer, and new archival research on Margaret Atwood and J. M. Coetzee, The New Believers shows how these writers transform novelistic realism through spiritual realism and reshape the current debate about religion, secularization, and literature.

Visit Jack Dudley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Something of a Calling"

Coming soon from Blackstone Publishing: Something of a Calling by Zoje Stage.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the brilliant Zoje Stage, Bram Stoker Award finalist and author of Baby Teeth, Something of a Calling is an unsettling look at a woman—and a world—on the brink of change.

Detective Andy Cooper is about to retire. She isn’t sure what’s next … perhaps traveling in the RV she has yet to buy, with a dog she doesn’t currently own. Perhaps gardening near the ever-shrinking patch of woods behind her house—once the cable company’s backhoe is removed.

She’ll need to do something, if only to distract herself from how empty her life has become. After the murder of her young daughter by a drunk driver. After the divorce. After the realization that all she has is her job and that she’s about to lose that, too.

Everything changes when bodies begin to turn up. Murdered, but how? Not by knife, gun, or any obvious weapon. Instead: teethmarks. Chunks missing. Like they’d been chewed on. And not by humans.

As she’s struggling to solve her final case, an unexpected new friendship seems like just what Andy needs. Where she is detached from life, Fiona embraces it. Where she is a homebody, Fiona roams. Yet the women are drawn together by a shared love of nature and wildlife. Until Andy learns the dark truth behind Fiona’s smile. A secret that threatens to unravel the world as she knows it.

Visit Zoje Stage's website.

Writers Read: Zoje Stage (July 2018).

Q&A with Zoje Stage.

Writers Read: Zoje Stage (August 2024).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Chinese Media Improvisations"

New from Stanford University Press: Chinese Media Improvisations: Thriving on Deficits by Xuenan Cao.

About the book, from the publisher:

Xuenan Cao offers an unexpected angle on China's technological rise, spotlighting the role of deficit-driven improvisation. As Cao demonstrates, where printing paper, computers, and microchips have been in shortage, media improvisations and AI gadgetry have filled the gap and become the unlikeliest accelerants of tech imaginaries. Equal parts media-historical and literary analysis, the book connects several moments in Chinese history: Mao's Great Leap Forward that demanded the country produce mountains of books, notwithstanding the shortage of papers and printers; the compressed development that pushed key industries—such as China Railway—to informatize amidst hazards; the information-theoretical explosion in which scientists impersonated computing devices when there were none for them to access; and the ironic present, when municipals have scrambled to update their smart-cities with low-budget AI gadget theatrics, such as facial recognition toilet paper dispensers. These are scenarios in which media practitioners—from print to information technologies and to AI—have had to improvise in response to political pressure and thrive on a deficiency of funding and materials. Drawing on Chinese communist party archival records, China Railway local archives, newspapers, ersatz college reference books, science journals, and AI-related technical documents, each book section combines archival research and literary readings, narrated through personal history with media-theoretical extrapolation. Ultimately, Cao persuades that the critique and deconstruction of the canonicity of Western media theory requires an understanding of media improvisations in China.

Visit Xuenan Cao's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Country House Murders"

Coming soon from Thomas & Mercer: The Country House Murders (Polly Hope Mysteries) by Friday Turner.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Meet Polly Hope: art expert, reluctant dog lover and… amateur detective?

London, 1941. Polly Hope is bravely working as an air raid warden during the Blitz when she saves the life of the charming Freddie Fairbank. Over a thank-you breakfast at the Ritz, he asks Polly to help requisition a sprawling English country house for the war effort.

Petherbridge Hall has grand rooms, lovely views and will be a perfect nursing home for injured troops, if they can only persuade the family to give up their house. But then they find the lord of the manor dead behind the gardener’s shed. With the local police too busy to investigate, Polly and Freddie realise they need to find the culprit, and fast. At least Toby the terrier seems happy to help.

With more suspects than you can shake a ration book at, our intrepid duo are on the hunt for the killer. But when Polly follows a clue down to the cellars, a secret door opens with a bang and her torch goes out… Really, in wartime Britain, couldn’t murderers at least wait until after tea?

Perfect for fans of cosy mysteries and anyone who likes their sleuths witty, their houses stately, and their wartimes adventures served with a dash of danger!

Visit Friday Turner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Enlightenment in Concert"

New fom Yale University Press: The Enlightenment in Concert: Music, Markets, and Secularization by Andrei Pesic.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new interpretation of the Age of Enlightenment through the lens of music, institutions, and markets

The birth of public concerts changed Europe’s cultural landscape by introducing sacred music to secular spaces. The Concert spirituel in Paris is a landmark in this Enlightenment transition: the first long-lasting concert series, it began in 1725 with performances that mostly featured sacred music composed for the royal chapel in Versailles. By the time the Concert ended, in 1790, it was presenting a variety of musical genres, and its sacred repertoire had declined precipitously. The Concert had evolved from an institution dependent on the church calendar and the court into a business in a competitive market.

Andrei Pesic explores the dynamics of secularization during the Enlightenment, including the unintended consequences of linking music to commerce, social hierarchy, and religious practices. He reveals the role of public concerts in a burgeoning marketplace for entertainment—and the expansion of secular customs and diminishment of religious constraints—in places as varied as Paris, Berlin, and Haiti.

Visit Andrei Pesic's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Siren Says"

New from G.P. Putnam's Sons: Siren Says by Jennifer Michelle Herrera.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A lush, spellbinding tale about a tenacious young woman who must harness her family’s dangerous magic to put a stop to the sacrifices they’ve been making for more than a century

Twenty-five-year-old Raven Wynn knows that the ancient plant magic running through her veins brings nothing but destruction. It doomed her Welsh ancestors. It killed her mother. It’s the reason she’s now bound by a painful curse—one that will destroy her if she can’t find a way to break its hold.

When her estranged Aunt Delilah bursts into her life promising a cure, Raven seizes the chance. However, her freedom comes at a steep price: Once her magic is fully unleashed, she is more powerful—and more dangerous—than anyone thought possible.

Desperate to tame powers she never wanted, Raven makes a pact with Delilah: In exchange for learning to control her magic, Raven will capture one of the spirits that roam Delilah’s hometown on May’s Eve so that it may grant Delilah’s secret wish. With the help of an enigmatic new friend, Cherry, as well as an infuriatingly handsome stoneworker, Idris, Raven learns that her task is even more perilous than she imagined—one false move and the spirits could trap her soul—forever.

A sumptuous escape into a world of Celtic spirits and botanical magic, Siren Says is a bewitching story of the unbreakable bonds between women, the interplay between goodness and power, and the capacity of love to mend our very souls.

Visit Jennifer Herrera's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Pastoral’s End"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Pastoral’s End: Art, Ecology, and Catastrophe in Renaissance Italy by James Pilgrim.

About the book, from the publisher:

How early modern Italian painting addressed the ways humans shape and are shaped by their environments.

In the sixteenth century, Italian artist Jacopo Bassano painted pictures of herdsmen and animals moving through dark and muddy landscapes. But he also participated in the agricultural development of the region in which he lived, producing topographical maps of local mountains and forests, inventing new methods of drainage and irrigation, and studying the latest techniques of crop rotation and fertilization. The relationship between Bassano’s rustic art and his participation in environmental transformation has, however, never been explored.

One of the first studies of Italian Renaissance art to grapple with the connections between visual culture and the environment, Pastoral’s End explores this crucial, formative relationship. James Pilgrim looks at Bassano’s career holistically, demonstrating how his involvement in a world marked by agricultural expansion, industrialization, resource extraction, environmental degradation, social transformation, and radical philosophical development informed his paintings of country life. Introducing new archival and visual evidence of Bassano’s knowledge of hydrology, agronomy, husbandry, and architecture, Pastoral’s End argues that he transformed the more placid rustic imagery of previous Renaissance artists into visions of dangerous ecological instability.

Visit James Pilgrim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Untamed Coast"

Coming soon from Ballantine Books: Untamed Coast: A Novel by Kevin C. Morris.

About the book, from the publisher:

A late-night mayday call drives a grieving man to embark on an unexpected journey along the wild Alaskan coast, unraveling a decades-old mystery of stolen gold, missing women, and murder in this atmospheric and propulsive debut novel, perfect for fans of William Kent Krueger and Peter Heller.

After the loss of his wife, Marconi Franco is content drifting alone on his boat through the isolated waters of Southeast Alaska with no real destination in mind. But when a mysterious distress signal cuts through the static on his radio one sleepless night, Marco feels an overwhelming pull to help the woman whose plea he heard—a pull he can't explain or ignore.

His search for the missing woman draws him to Radioville, an abandoned 1930s communication outpost now decaying on an uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska. There, Marco begins uncovering fragments of a story long forgotten: a Depression-era theft, a shattered marriage, and a disturbing pattern of disappearances. As he sifts through the past, his own grief starts to mirror the tragedies that echo across decades, and his search draws the attention of someone determined to keep the truth buried.

Told across three evocative timelines—a radio operator in 1938 collecting more than just telegrams, a young woman in the 1980s fighting to survive her abusive husband, and Marco in the present day searching for a voice in the static—Untamed Coast is a story of fierce determination, missed signals, loneliness and connection, and the unseen ripples that reverberate across generations, standing the test of time and the tides.

Visit Kevin C. Morris's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Town of Dollars"

New from the University of Washington Press: Town of Dollars: Ambient Violence and Everyday Dispossession in the Philippines by Dada Docot.

About the book, from the publisher:

Colonial aftermaths linger quietly, revealing violence woven into the fabric of daily life

What does violence look like when it is not spectacular but quiet and routine? In this intimate ethnography, anthropologist Dada Docot introduces readers to her hometown of Nabua, located in the Bicol region of the Philippines. The site of her study is a rural locale nicknamed the “Town of Dollars” thanks to the Nabueño men who served in the lowest ranks of the US Navy. Performing tasks considered beneath white sailors, these men introduced American dollars into the local economy and transformed perceptions of the good life. Docot explores this and other manifestations of the Philippines’ four centuries of colonization through stories of ritual, family, migration, and labor. She reveals how everyday struggles―from flooding rice fields and precarious wage work to political patronage and overseas migration―are shaped by the layered histories of Spanish, US, and Japanese colonization and contemporary dispossession. These forms of “ambient violence,” she theorizes, are neither extraordinary nor rare but harmful realities sedimented into the ordinary, becoming the atmosphere in which life unfolds.

Blending hometown ethnography, historical research, and autoethnographic reflection, Town of Dollars introduces a new lens for understanding colonial aftermaths and the quiet endurance of inequality in the rural Global South. Both intimate and rigorously analytical, the book challenges romanticized notions of Filipino resilience, instead illuminating the unviable conditions that contour everyday aspirations. Essential for scholars of anthropology, postcolonial studies, and Asian and diaspora studies, as well as readers seeking a deeper understanding of Philippine life, Town of Dollars exposes how violence lingers not in moments of crisis but in the ordinary persistence of survival.

Visit Dada Docot's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"My Sister Is Going to Kill Me"

New from William Morrow: My Sister Is Going to Kill Me: A Novel by Nina Simon.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the New York Times bestselling author of the runaway hit Mother-Daughter Murder Night, a Reese’s Book Club pick, comes another fun, family-centered whodunnit about two sisters who work together to find a killer as they raft down the rapids of the Grand Canyon.

What's a family vacation without a little murder?

Liv and Mandy Chisholm’s yearly sister trip is a sacred tradition, an attempt to bond as their lives increasingly diverge. Liv, the ever-practical older sister, packs the color-coded itineraries. Mandy, a bedazzled human tumbleweed, brings the spontaneity.

This year, the sisters take off for a rafting adventure through the breathtaking depths of the Grand Canyon with a group of strangers. But beyond the terrors of whitewater rapids, sibling squabbles, and rogue reptiles, the ferocious beauty of the river carries a darker undercurrent, and an unexpected guest: a murderer in their midst.

When a fellow traveler is found dead and another corpse hits the water, the rafting trip flips from idyllic sister vacation to high-stakes murder investigation. Every suspect has a secret, every clue is drenched in mystery, and Liv and Mandy can hardly trust each other, let alone their own instincts. With the river raging and danger around every bend, the Chisholm sisters must work together to catch a killer—and keep their relationship from capsizing—before it’s too late.

Visit Nina Simon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue