"The Language of Bees"

New from Princeton University Press: The Language of Bees by James C. Nieh.

About the book, from the pulisher:

A rich and engaging look at social bees, master communicators of the insect world

With senses that often seem alien to us, bees navigate complex decisions about where to find food, when to fight or flee, and how to work together. The Language of Bees invites readers into the hidden world of bee communication, a realm where creatures less than an inch long use scent, vibration, movement, and sound to cooperate, share information, and survive.

Drawing on decades of groundbreaking fieldwork, James Nieh sheds light on the remarkable signals that bees use and the evolutionary forces that shape them. Focusing on social species like bumble bees, honey bees, and stingless bees, he explores how colonies rely on these signals to organize all aspects of their lives, from foraging and warfare to espionage and defense. From the famous waggle dance of honey bees to the secretive trails and potentially coded sounds of stingless bees, he shows how their intricate communication systems reflect a delicate balance between cooperation and conflict and how a changing world disrupts these finely tuned systems. Along the way, Nieh shares key breakthroughs in animal behavior and offers new insights from his own research on how bees signal, eavesdrop, and adapt. Readers will learn how bees waggle dance better if they have teachers and an engaged audience, how predators and competition help shape bee language, and other astonishing findings.

The Language of Bees is also a story about how failure and unexpected turns lead to discoveries. Blending personal insights with cutting-edge science, this illuminating and informative book reveals how the study of bees continues to deepen our understanding of intelligence, resilience, and the diverse ways that life communicates.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Carrying"

Coming October 6 from G.P. Putnam's Sons: Carrying by Samantha Josephs.

About the novel, from the publisher:

She’s serving.
She’s eating.
She’s . . . Carrying.

In this electrifying horror debut that’s equal parts funny and harrowing, a stealth trans woman desperate to maintain her picture-perfect life discovers that she’s seemingly—impossibly—pregnant.

Everything Martha’s wanted, she’s made for herself.

Meet Martha: perfect wife, perfect stepmother, perfect woman. She’s got an adoring husband who wants more kids with her, a loving stepdaughter who looks up to her, and a body to die for. She’s an absolute pro: Salon-quality blowouts at home? Done. Perfectly plated meals on the table every day? Effortless. Meticulously faked miscarriages so her husband won’t suspect the truth? Just hand over the Oscar now.

Martha is trans, so stealth even her family has no idea. She carved the woman she is out of the marble of a boy, and she’ll do whatever it takes to protect what she’s built. When a mysterious chronic illness and its debilitating symptoms threaten to upend her existence, she starts experimental treatments and gives in to her surprising, unsettling cravings. She’s even more shocked to discover that she’s undeniably, impossibly pregnant.

With her body changing rapidly outside of her control and her choices dwindling, Martha struggles to maintain the life she’s fought so hard to live while preparing for the motherhood she never thought she’d have.

Visit Samantha Josephs's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Narrative Side-Stepping"

New from Cornell University Press: Narrative Side-Stepping: Disability in the Novel Beyond Normalcy by Christian Lewis.

About the book, from the publisher:

Narrative Side-Stepping offers a new feminist, queer, crip way of reading that embraces expansive narrative possibilities for disabled characters. Instead of treating disabled characters as plot devices, metaphors, stereotypes, or marginal figures enforcing able-bodiedness, Christian Lewis argues that authors utilize disabled characters to question both social and literary conventions. Disability is thus not a limiting formal feature, but a source of experimentation and critique.

Focusing on the nineteenth century, which saw the rise of normalcy and the obsession over "normal" bodies, Narrative Side-Stepping centers female characters with mobility impairments in Victorian novels. These characters side-step by challenging the plots and roles available to them, offering narrative alternatives about how things "might have been." Examining the works of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Harriet Martineau, and Charlotte Yonge, Lewis reconceptualizes the Victorian novel as a space where disabled characters can thrive.

By theorizing disabled characters and what they can do in a more reparative and capacious manner, Narrative Side-Stepping allows us to think about the novel beyond the confines of normalcy, side-stepping into a more accessible and accommodating world for those with disabilities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sisters Take All"

Coming soon from Thomas & Mercer: Sisters Take All: A Novel (Book 3 of 3: The Finch Sisters) by Amelia Diane Coombs.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a gleefully self-deprecating mystery, three estranged sisters meet in LA for the making of a documentary, learning the depth of their family dysfunction is nothing compared to social media obsession.

Another long weekend, another family reunion for the Finch sisters. This time, Venice Beach is calling, and with it, a film about Maeve’s glamorous career as an influencer. Remi and Eliana show up for moral support, but it’s not long before things start to feel wrong. Again.

For starters, documentarian Nadia Cullen bears an uncanny resemblance to Maeve―from her hairstyle down to her signature scent. Chalk it up to superfan behavior, maybe, but the weekend is far from over, and every day seems to bring something new to worry about.

Now, Remi may be prone to worry, but this is more than her anxiety disorder talking. The Finch sisters have secrets that need to stay buried between them. And with Nadia in the guesthouse and at their heels, things are starting to get too close for comfort.

If they’re not careful, this behind-the-scenes documentary could take a sharp turn into true crime.

Perhaps it already has…

Visit Amelia Diane Coombs's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mapping Medical Modernity"

New from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Mapping Medical Modernity: Urban Space and Public Health in Tokyo, 1868–1920 by Susan L. Burns.

About the book, from the publisher:

Mapping Medical Modernity explores the history of medical modernization and public health in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tokyo, a city undergoing rapid transformation from the seat of power of the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo period to the capital of a modern nation-state and its expanding empire in the Meiji period. Tracing the development of institutions and policies designed to improve medical care and public health in a dense urban environment, Susan L. Burns examines tensions between the involved parties―including doctors and policymakers, police and civil officials, residents and those who governed them―and provides case studies focused on three of the city’s major challenges in public health: syphilis, cholera, and mental illness. Drawing upon a wide range of archival materials and contemporary accounts, Burns also employs geographic information system analysis in mapping the complicated relationships interlinking aspects of the urban environment, social life, public policy, and commercialized medical culture to demonstrate visually how policy decisions and medical capitalism gradually reshaped existing spatial arrangements in the city as well as the social relations that unfolded within them.

Visit Susan L. Burns's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Evie Walters Takes the Wheel"

Coming soon from Lake Union: Evie Walters Takes the Wheel: A Novel by Kathleen Fox.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this warmhearted and witty debut, a mysterious gift spurs a widow to take a cross-country journey to find its sender―and along the way, she rediscovers herself.

Evie Walters has lived most of her seventy-one years according to others’ expectations. But on the day of her husband’s funeral, she receives an anonymous delivery: an egret orchid. The same flower a Montana ranch hand once gave her decades ago―Novel Daniels, the boy who thought she could do anything.

So now, she does.

Defying her children’s plans to move her into a retirement home, Evie buys a camper van and leaves life in North Carolina abruptly behind. Accompanied by her devoted rescue dog, she heads west to find her cowboy, befriending an unlikely cast of characters along the way. Free-spirited young vanlifers, roadside waitresses, eccentric billionaires, and kindhearted widowers all show Evie a side of life worth living.

But Evie’s drive toward the future takes her back to the past, to memories of the family ranch and childhood dreams. Now, with a second chance as open as the road before her, there’s no telling who Evie Walters will become.

Visit Kathleen Fox's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Housing in New York City"

New from NYU Press: Housing in New York City: Policy Innovations and Challenges by Katrin B. Anacker.

About the book, from the publisher:

Shows how New York has been a national pioneer in developing affordable, equitable, and comprehensive housing policy

In Housing in New York City, Katrin B. Anacker explores how New York City’s policy innovations have impacted the trajectory of a nation. Drawing on historical, policy, and data analysis, she highlights New York City's greatest successes across all five boroughs, including its early popularization of affordable housing and the birth of the modern high-rise.

From the Plan of 1811, which established Manhattan's rectangular street grids, to the 1916 Building Zone Resolution, the first comprehensive zoning ordinance in America, Anacker takes us through many of these key moments in New York City's history, and how its impact was felt beyond the city's limits. She shows us how policy innovations―like the affordable housing movement―not only improved quality of life for New Yorkers, but also made New York City a national role model to other cities, resulting in many additional national, state, and local laws, policies, and programs.

Ultimately, she emphasizes the contrast between the New York City of yesterday, and today, where exorbitant rents and gentrification threaten its historical role as a leader in housing policy. Housing in New York City provides a comprehensive discussion of this history and calls upon policymakers to continue innovating to keep the Big Apple not only affordable, but to preserve its legacy in housing.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Haunting of Lavender House"

Coming October 20 from Park Row: The Haunting of Lavender House: A Haunting, Gothic Story of Croatian Folklore by Natalie Kikić.

About the book, from the publisher:

A crumbling home surrounded by lavender fields. A decades-long curse. A nightmare from Croatian folklore with a thirst for blood. The Lost Apothecary meets The Hacienda in this multigenerational, haunting gothic saga set on the Adriatic Sea.

2026. All Petra has inherited are tales of loss. Which is why, after her mother’s passing, she is shocked to learn that her grandmother is not dead like she’s always believed, but alive and living on Tolba, a small island in Croatia. Desperate to find her last surviving family member, Petra ventures to her ancestral home, famed for its sprawling lavender fields. While she's happy to be reunited with her grandmother, rarely does a night go by that Petra doesn’t lose herself to vivid nightmares and the dizzying sense that something—or someone—is always watching in Lavender House.

1895. Whore. Sinner. Witch. No matter how many people Magdalena heals, the rumors persist. So, when she’s asked to help the matriarch of Lavender House, she seizes the opportunity to rehabilitate her reputation. As Magdalena races against time to heal the ailing woman, she finds herself unexpectedly falling for the son of her greatest enemy, the man responsible for her ostracization. But are true love and acceptance possible for a woman who has always lived on the margins?

Back in the present, Petra finds it increasingly difficult to ignore the rumors plaguing her family: that a mora, a spirit from Croatian folklore, haunts Lavender House for revenge. As the sole heir to Lavender House, Petra must discover the truth of her inheritance, or else fall prey to the same curse that claimed her family.

Through the intersecting stories of Petra and Magdalena, Natalie Kikić’s gorgeous debut asks us to consider the lengths to which we go to belong, the cost of choosing love, and what it really means to be a monster.

Visit Natalie Kikić's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reinventing Wool"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: Reinventing Wool: How a Natural Fiber Survived the Synthetic Revolution by Melissa M. Littlefield.

About the book, from the publisher:

How chemistry, culture, and industry remade a natural fiber―and reshaped our closets.

Wool once shaped daily life in the United States. The ubiquitous textile clothed soldiers and filled civilian wardrobes; sheep even grazed on the White House lawn. Today, however, wool apparel represents a sliver of the global textile market. In Reinventing Wool, Melissa M. Littlefield uncovers the surprising story behind this dramatic shift.

Rather than fading quietly as synthetics rose to prominence, wool became the focus of a sweeping mid-twentieth-century effort to "modernize" natural fibers through chemistry, industry, and politics. Littlefield reveals how, between the 1930s and 1960s, wool was recast as a material in need of technological rescue. Industrial chemists coated it with resins, laboratories experimented with moth-killing compounds, and federal agencies promoted new treatments that promised convenience to modern consumers. Detailing stories like Woolite's cold-water campaigns―complete with department-store sheep baths―the invention of washable wool, and the USDA's little-known DDT-based mothproofing agent EQ-53, Reinventing Wool traces how a once-revered fiber was repeatedly reengineered to fit the ideals and anxieties of an increasingly synthetic age.

Weaving together textile science, advertising archives, governmental reports, and her own experience as a fiber artist, Littlefield highlights the cultural forces that reshaped wool's reputation. She shows how mid-century interventions altered not only the fiber itself but also public understanding of what counts as "natural," "improved," or "modern." The consequences extend well into the present, influencing how we value materials, evaluate environmental claims, and imagine the future of textiles. Reinventing Wool offers a fresh perspective on the intertwined histories of chemistry, agriculture, fashion, and consumer culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Little Kin"

New from Blackstone Publishing: Little Kin by Katya de Becerra.

About the book, from the publisher:

Little Kin is the debut adult novel from critically-acclaimed author Katya de Becerra.

When Cass inherits a crumbling house on Rothagisht—a remote island near the Arctic Circle—she’s desperate for a new start. The land is stunning, the people are strangely healthy, and for the first time, Cass feels like she might finally belong.

But Rothagisht comes with rules: Never go out after dark, and never open the door to a knock. As Cass is drawn into the island’s mysteries—and into the secrets of her own bloodline—she discovers Rothagisht is stalked by ancient creatures that rise from the heated depths when the old covenant stirs.

With the Festival of Giving and Receiving looming, and the island’s ancient covenant unraveling in blood, Cass must choose: Embrace the community she’s longed for or confront the nightmare that could consume them all.

Perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher and Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Little Kin is a chilling, folkloric tale of survival and belonging.

Visit Katya de Becerra's website and follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Writers Read: Katya de Becerra (February 2020).

--Marshal Zeringue