"Legal Moves"

New from Stanford University Press: Legal Moves: Choreographies of Race, Law, and Empireby Anna Jayne Kimmel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Legal Moves engages in a project of epistemological disobedience, boldly suturing concepts of dance studies—kinesthetic awareness, fleshly memory, and techniques of the body—to the legal humanities. What opens when we expand our disciplinary methods of law—from the lettered to the embodied? Might we locate a more complete portrait of law, its logic, and impact for construction of the human? Anna Jayne Kimmel combs the laws and law-making logics of French imperial order and its postcolonial legacy to surface the already-embedded corporeal attentions and choreographic features of legal studies. The book moves across analysis of seventeenth-century French legal codes of conduct that structured race and empire within the metropole and its overseas horizons, twentieth-century scenes of police violence during anti-colonial protest in France, twenty-first century anxieties of assembly in postcolonial Algeria, and embodied aesthetics contained within human rights discourse. By tracing disciplined histories of dance notation, Kimmel argues laws have long operated as a societal score which script movements and conscript citizens into racialized categories of (non)being. Drawing upon archival material, legal records, and performance practice, Legal Moves calls to reimagine the human within Western jurisprudence of the body.

Visit Anna Jayne Kimmel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coming September 29 from Atria Books: Trad Wife: A Novel by Sarah Langan.

About the book, from the pubisher:

A journalist descends into horror as she uncovers the sinister truth behind a trad wife influencer in this “flat-out brilliant” (Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author) blend of chilling suspense and razor-sharp commentary on modern femininity, pe

rformative domesticity, and social media—perfect for readers of Yesteryear, Mexican Gothic, and The Yellow Wallpaper.

Every day, millions watch Mia Wright, the “trad wife” queen, on her idyllic three-hundred-acre farm. With her handsome husband, seven well-behaved children, and a life of from-scratch meals and pastoral bliss, she’s an icon of modern femininity. But behind e

very perfect image is a secret. And in this case, the secret is a horror.

Desperate to save her tarnished career, journalist Jenny Kaplan arrives at Black Swan Farm to profile Mia. Jenny is ready to write a scathing exposé, determined to expose the deception behind Mia’s curated life. But soon, Jenny has more to contend with than staged videos and camera-ready poses. There’s something wrong at the farmhouse. Something slithers through Jenny’s dreams, and at night, the children sing strange nursery rhymes.

She’s losing time. She’s losing her hair. She starts to worry that she’s losing her mind.

There is a horror at the heart of Black Swan, and it’s waiting just for Jenny. Trad Wife will make you question what’s real and what’s just a perfectly curated deception…

Will you see the lie?

Visit Sarah Langan's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Keeper.

My Book, The Movie: The Missing.

The Page 69 Test: Good Neighbors.

My Book, The Movie: Good Neighbors.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles"

New from Yale University Press: Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles: How We Discover the Sacred Past by Eva Mroczek.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Zohar, this is the untold story behind our enduring fascination with lost and found religious texts

The Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest biblical manuscripts ever found, were discovered in a cave by a shepherd and his goat. This story is mostly true, and it is not the first such tale about long-lost books. Legend has it that the Zohar―the foundational text of Jewish Kabbalah―was lost for centuries before being discovered in a cave by a farmer, who sold it to spice merchants as packing material. It was only when a scholar picked through a trash heap and joined the fragments together that the world recovered its mystical secrets. These are just two of many tales recounting the discovery of ancient religious manuscripts.

Tracing a time-honored pattern of storytelling about lost and recovered sacred texts, Eva Mroczek reveals a surprising feature of Jewish and Christian thought: the idea that scripture is not complete―that it is partly lost, destroyed, or hidden―is not only the stuff of fantasy novels and conspiracy theories. Mroczek shows that modern scholarly mythmaking is more tightly bound with Jewish and Christian legends than we may think. Through the lens of discovery tales, this innovative book explores how traditions live in tension with the possibility of unknown pasts and surprising discoveries.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Deadly Entanglement"

New from Minotaur Books: A Deadly Entanglement: A Harriman & Mancini Mystery by Cathy Pegau.

About the novel, from the publisher:

In A Deadly Entanglement, two queer women in turn-of-the-century New York must work together to uncover the rotten truth.

The truth isn’t always easy…

Margot Baxter Harriman has just survived her deadliest scandal as President of B&H Foods, and now there’s nowhere to go but up. Which is why she’s organizing a fundraiser for the crowded, overworked city charity hospital, where she hopes to do good and give back–until a body falls past a second-floor window.

The nurse’s death is quickly ruled a suicide, but fellow nurse CeeCee Foxmoor, Margot’s friend and the live-in partner of investigator Rett Mancini, isn’t so sure: this isn’t the hospital's first suspicious death. CeeCee’s concerns draw both Margot and Rett into an undercover scheme to untangle the threads behind the deaths everyone else is ready to overlook.

Then another death catches their attention: Margot's old classmate checked into the Caspian, a luxury clinic catering to the New York elite, but never checked out. And the circumstances surrounding her death feel eerily familiar...

As both the secrets and bodies pile up, Rett and Margot realize that while money can buy anything, behind ward doors, everyone pays a price. This time, their search for the truth might cost the people they love.

Cathy Pegau’s A Deadly Entanglement is the captivating follow-up to A Murderous Business, where two women’s determination challenges the cost of greed–and the price of failure.

Visit Cathy Pegau's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature"

New from Oxford University Press: The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature by Peter Jaros.

About the book, from the publisher:

Through close examination of legal and literary texts, The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature tells the story of the corporation in antebellum US law, literature, and culture. It unfolds a rich and varied corporate imaginary that both illuminates the prehistory of today's corporations and captures forgotten and unrealized conceptions of personhood, politics, and collectivity. Centered on an era during which both person and corporation were contested terms, this book shows how a seemingly instrumental legal category spurred reflection on human identity, mortality and immortality, slavery and freedom, and the possibilities of social and political belonging.

In the wake of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the corporation was recognized as a flexible and powerful form for enterprises ranging from banks to mutual aid societies to utopian communities, even as its status as a legal person spurred reflection on natural and artificial personhood. Antebellum American writers took on corporate personhood and reframed it as literary personification; they explored and reimagined the tropes at the heart of the legal doctrine of the corporation, including artificiality, immortality, multiplicity, and succession; and they experimented with social and literary forms derived from the corporation.

By examining the ways writers theorized, figured, and deployed the corporate form within and beyond the law, this study both elucidates dominant conceptions of the corporation and reveals a multitude of paths not taken. It wagers that attending to the corporation as a form--or collection of forms--at the intersection of antebellum US law, literature, and culture can both inform our contemporary entanglements with the corporation and bring an unfamiliar perspective to recent debates about form.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Jenny Will Eat You Now"

Coming September 29 from Gallery Books: Jenny Will Eat You Now: A Meat Cute by Gillian Daniels.

About the book, from the publisher:

Sometimes you want to eat the ones you love…right? In this gorgeous horror-romance, river monster Jenny Greenteeth stalks a handsome academic through Boston after a chance encounter leaves her hungry and curious about the world she’s been hiding from.

Jenny Greenteeth prefers to keep her own company beneath the streets of Boston, where she’s lived for hundreds of years. With a conviction that she is far superior to humans—who are petty, dangerous, and fragile—she has no qualms about satisfying her hunger with their flesh. That is, until she comes face to face with a human man who, for the first time, she doesn’t want to eat (but also…she kind of does). Confused by these conflicting feelings, Jenny is intrigued.

So, when two city-dwelling cryptids take up residence in her station, she (begrudgingly) asks them to help her find this mystery man. Along the way, Jenny experiences the modern world for the first time—discovering catcalling, pigeons, protests, fashion, friendship, and Dunkin’ Donuts. On her quest to find the man she couldn’t eat at first sight, Jenny finds herself falling in love. And as she falls in love, two conflicting hungers grow within her—the hunger to be seen and understood and the hunger for human flesh.

Visit Gillian Daniels's blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Tempting Fate"

New from Princeton University Press: Tempting Fate: A Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life by Duncan Pritchard.

About the book, from the publisher:

A leading philosopher explains how risk-taking can help us live authentic and flourishing lives

We take risks every day—perhaps not the extreme, dangling-off-the-side-of-a-mountain kind of risks, but risks nonetheless, in decisions about careers, marriage, children, moving house, and other matters. Tempting fate is simply what we have to do from time to time in life. But how we should go about tempting fate in a reasonable way? In this illuminating book, philosopher Duncan Pritchard explains why risk-taking, even extreme risk-taking, can sometimes be both reasonable and admirable, and how it can play a crucial role in living an authentic life.

Using Alex Honnold’s famous free solo climb of El Capitan as a paradigm example of admirable risk-taking, Pritchard offers a completely new theory of risk, one that explains it in terms of fragility rather than probability. He shows how fragility can explain why skill and preparation are crucial to sensible risk-taking, even when the activity is unavoidably high risk. Fragility also makes clear that taking risks means riding one’s luck and why both risk and luck are vital to living an authentic and meaningful existence. Pritchard shows that his fragility theory of risk has practical implications for making sense of risk in law, arts, sports, and other domains. Tempting fate, in other words, is not merely thrill-seeking but essential for human flourishing.

Visit Duncan Pritchard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"We Already Dug the Grave"

New from Poisoned Pen Press: We Already Dug the Grave: A Novel by Emma C. Wells.

About the novel, from the publisher:

From the USA Today bestselling author of This Girl's a Killer, comes a southern gothic thriller with the bite of Sharp Objects and a dash of Practical Magic, following two estranged sisters who will do anything to protect each other – even murder. Again.

Milly can't divine the future anymore, and maybe that's a good thing. Lately, her life has been bleak enough, she doesn't need the now-silent tea leaves to tell her. Meanwhile, her estranged younger sister thrives miles away in a shiny new life with a shiny new marriage. Milly doesn't blame Francis for wanting nothing to do with her. Not after what happened in that Tennessee meadow a decade before.

But when Francis shows up on Milly's doorstep with a black eye and a plea for help – Milly can't say no. Especially when the tea leaves are finally crystal clear: if the sisters don't kill Francis's husband, he'll kill her.

And if they're going to plot a murder, the sisters have no choice but to return to the one place they'd left behind. A place where another body – and a multitude of secrets – were buried. Because this isn't the first time the sisters have needed to dispose of a bad man. In fact, they might be pretty good at it.

Visit Emma C. Wells's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"New World Calculation"

New from Stanford University Press: New World Calculation: The Making of Numbers in Colonial America by Molly Farrell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Molly Farrell tells the story of colonial America as a testing ground for new ways of conceptualizing numbers, uncovering overlooked forms of numerical thinking to argue that colonialism and the rise of racial capitalism incited a struggle about what exactly a number is and what it can do. When English settlers began colonizing Indigenous lands, they confronted groups of people with very different beliefs about numbers. Meanwhile, Atlantic colonialism required tremendous accounting work, especially to support the trade in enslaved Africans. Numeracy, then, seems to be deeply complicit with the colonial project. Farrell, however, follows the circulation of arithmetic primers, cipher books, and other material traces to show how everyday people repurposed numeracy to serve their own ends—ranging from making a living as a fugitive from enslavement to measuring medicine for at-home abortion. Drawing on book history and Black feminist science and technology studies, New World Calculation argues that we need to restore the math book into its social space in order to disentangle the relationship between quantification and oppression in America's cultural history.

Visit Molly Farrell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Palace Beneath the Sea"

New from Harper Voyager: The Palace Beneath the Sea: A Mermaid Fantasy by Lauren Wiesebron.

About the book, from the publisher:

The acclaimed author of House of Frost and Feathers returns with a sweeping, lyrical novel inspired by a mermaid folktale filled with exploration, love, adventure, and magic.

A GREAT LOVE. A MYSTERIOUS KINGDOM BENEATH THE WAVES. A DEVASTATING BETRAYAL.

A doomed love story created the city of Ys, it’s fitting that another one would end it...

Nolwenn is sure that her life’s purpose is to defend her beloved coastal city of Ys as a lighthouse keeper. But when a dangerous, unnatural tide threatens Ys, the queen instead tasks Nolwen with collecting enough rare seasilk to shield the city from the deadly monsters who lurk deep beneath the waves.

Determined to fulfill her task, Nolwenn recklessly puts her life in danger, only to be attacked by the very creatures she’s trying to defend her city against. She’s saved by Morvan, a member of the korrigez people, with the torso of a human and the tail of a fish. Against her will, Morvan drags her deeper into the ocean to the coral palace of Below-Ys. Although Nolwenn is terrified and homesick, Below-Ys is also strange and beautiful…as is Morvan. The more time Nolwenn spends below the surface, the less she is sure she wants to leave.

As danger draws ever nearer to her homeland and Ys remains precariously unprotected, Nolwenn must decide between her heart and her home.

Visit Lauren Wiesebron's website.

--Marshal Zeringue