"The Roommate Subtext"

New from Severn House: The Roommate Subtext by Elia Winters.

About the novel, from the publisher:

RITA Award-winning author Elia Winters is back: The Roommate Subtextis a seriously spicy roommates-to-lovers romance with a unique, kinky twist!

Scarlet Pimpernel: Are you propositioning me?
Curious Rose: What if I am?

Freelance journalist Maggie St. Claire likes her hot, nerdy roommate Blake and his absurd collection of houseplants. But when she's hired to write an exposé about an enigmatic online kinkster known as The Scarlet Pimpernel, she can't exactly sit next to wholesome Blake while researching her current topic!

Botanist Blake Peabody isn’t the type of guy people expect to be kinky. His double life writing erotica online allows him to satisfy his Dom impulses while protecting his public image. Until the mysterious 'Rose' texts him to explore some new desires. As their chats grow more intimate, his feelings develop for the Sub, even as he grows closer to Maggie.

By day, they navigate their evolving friendship; by night, their alter-egos come out to play. Will the surprise of who they truly are be a welcome one―or more shocking than their darkest fantasy?

Visit Elia Winters's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Revolutionary Ink"

New from Cambridge University Press: Revolutionary Ink: New York Printers and the Promise of Democracy, 1693–1804 by Mark J. Noonan.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Revolutionary Ink, Mark J. Noonan explores the careers of New York printers whose presses disseminated Enlightenment ideals that fueled the American Revolution and framed the political debates of the early republic. Long overshadowed by the celebrated authors whose works they produced, printers William Bradford, John Peter Zenger, James Parker, Thomas Greenleaf and others helmed presses that provoked civic engagement, cultivated an appreciation for the arts and sciences, and defended press liberty. The book also examines the equally revolutionary work of their wives, who assisted with and sometimes ran their husband's presses. Throughout the narrative, Noonan addresses the discrepancy between revolutionary rhetoric and practice, and argues that to grasp New York's early print history is to confront the paradox of the Anglo-American Enlightenment: its profound advancements alongside the denial of universal human rights.

Visit Mark J. Noonan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Girl in Green"

Coming September 15 from Harper Collins: The Girl in Green by Laura Creedle.

About the book, from the publisher:

A school’s storied legacy cannot stop student's whispers of mysterious disappearances and a legendary monster, in this terrifying new novel that will entrance fans of Madeline Roux and Claire Legrand.

Jess has always been a runner—always looking for an escape, no matter how many detention centers or “special schools” she’s been sent to. So when she receives a scholarship to the illustrious Danvers-Cutteridge in the mountains of West Virginia, her first plan of action is to find the fastest exit.

But Jess soon learns that this new school has secrets hidden beyond the grand staircases and storied past. A student has gone missing, and Jess’s new friends suspect that they haven’t been told the truth about the disappearance.

As Jess helps search for answers (and a way out), she discovers more of Danvers-Cutteridge’s unsettling history. The abuses and mutilations inflicted on past residents. The strange authority in the headmaster’s celebrated family tree. And the fearsome legend that has haunted the valley for decades—a mysterious girl, dressed in green.

Soon, Jess’s search will take her down into the heart of the school, through the closed-off parts of its history left forgotten in the dark. But wa

Visit Laura Creedle's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily.

My Book, The Movie: The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily.

Writers Read: Laura Creedle (January 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Final Solution to the Jewish Question"

New from Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living by Dara Horn.

About the book, from the publisher:

From three-time National Jewish Book Award winner Dara Horn, a masterful new work of nonfiction that boldly confronts and dismantles the myths and lies that have spread antisemitism from ancient times until today—and then offers an audacious but achievable vision for the future.

After publishing the “extremely engaging” (The Washington Post) and award-winning essay collection People Love Dead Jews about the insidious nature of contemporary antisemitism, Dara Horn heard from thousands of people, online and in person, demanding solutions. Then, in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel and the subsequent attacks on Jewish communities worldwide, the calls started coming not just from average readers but from university presidents and the United States government. From her front-row seat to this nightmare—including serving on Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group, meeting with the White House and Congress, and speaking with communities of all backgrounds across North America—she was surprised to discover that there was far more ignorance than malice, and saw an opportunity for change.

Combining deep historical research, investigative reporting, and storytelling bravado, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question is both diagnosis and prescription. She explores and exposes the failures of Holocaust education, the long history of the antizionist movement, the compromises of the American Jewish “Golden Age,” and the organized plot to poison artificial intelligence with anti-Jewish propaganda, and weaves it all into an erudite, audacious, and convincing series of arguments that invites readers of every background and inclination to become curious about their blind spots and to absorb new and uncomfortable truths. From there, she proposes a dramatic solution rooted in a new understanding of freedom and responsibility, and clears a path toward a shared future.

The Final Solution to the Jewish Question is a worldview-shifting book by one of our most incisive thinkers and writers—a lamentation, a manifesto, a call to action, and, ultimately, a love story for the living.

Visit Dara Horn's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 99 Test: The World to Come.

The Page 99 Test: All Other Nights.

The Page 69 Test: A Guide for the Perplexed.

The Page 69 Test: Eternal Life.

Writers Read: Dara Horn (January 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beyond Honor"

New from Emily Bestler Books/Simon & Schuster: Beyond Honor: A Novel by K.B. Brodsky.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A paramilitary operative confronting his grief on a path of retribution. A CIA analyst hunting a conspiracy that leads to the Oval Office. A Russian agent hiding in plain sight. Jason Matthews’s Red Sparrow meets Jack Carr’s The Terminal List in Beyond Honor, a debut political thriller that plunges readers into a world of international espionage, where loyalty and duty are tested.

A man forged by war, paramilitary operative Kevin Rhoads is recruited for a solo extraction mission deep inside Siberia. CIA analyst Whitney Skyler’s investigation into a Russian-backed bank on American soil leads to the President of the United States.

Director Cynthia King plays an audacious gambit, leveraging a thirty-year debt of honor to save a captured American agent. But in this world of shifting alliances, even the most careful plans can unravel. Skyler faces an impossible choice: expose her mentor’s dangerous game to protect national security or reveal the truth to Rhoads. Already shattered by loss, Rhoads discovers the devastating betrayal that will transform him into a force of vengeance, leaving death in his wake.

From the war-torn streets of Damascus to the merciless Siberian tundra, from the rugged Kenai Peninsula to the polished corridors of Langley, Virginia, Beyond Honor is a white-knuckled thriller about duty, betrayal, and the impossible choices made by those who serve in the shadows.

Visit K.B. Brodsky's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Our Lives"

New from the University of California Press: Our Lives: What Abortion Attitudes Reveal About Who We Are as Americans by Tricia Colleen Bruce.

About the book, from the publisher:

Amid a volatile abortion landscape in the United States, Our Lives goes beyond polling and politics to uncover the raw messiness of everyday Americans' abortion attitudes. Drawing on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with a randomly selected, closely representative set of US residents in the lead-up to and aftermath of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, sociologist Tricia Colleen Bruce uncovers the ambivalence, loyalties, doubts, contradictions, personal ties, and quiet stories undergirding moral and legal views on abortion.

Listening to everyday Americans complicates straightforward pro-choice and pro-life talking points and reveals something more about contemporary judgments as to what makes a good life, a good person, a good government, and a good society. How Americans think about abortion, Bruce shows, turns out to say a lot about how Americans think about themselves, each other, and the society they imagine, create, and live in―together.

Visit Tricia Colleen Bruce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last Harbinger"

New from 47North: The Last Harbinger by Jeff Wheeler.

About the book, from the publisher:

A princess and her entrusted protector must save a world on the brink of revolution in a thrilling historical fantasy by Wall Street Journal bestselling author Jeff Wheeler.

Hastings Creigh is a rake, gambler, and spendthrift. He’s also the best dragoon in the Muirwood military, and with mounting tensions between kingdoms, he’s appointed as bodyguard to a princess on an off-world journey.

Princess Maia Fitzempress’s duty has always been to her people and maintaining peace between the worlds. Now, she must venture to Kingfountain, where her aunt reigns as queen and her cursed cousins have fallen ill. If Maia can reestablish the royal line, she can secure its longevity.

Yet in the devastating aftermath of war between two empires and with rebellion forces on the rise, Kingfountain holds danger for a princess and a bodyguard on a mission. Hastings and Maia must forge ahead on a quest to save themselves and a kingdom at the brink of civil war before cunning magical entities determine their destinies―even as an ancient force threatens to destroy both worlds.

Visit Jeff Wheeler's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Queen's Poisoner.

My Book, The Movie: The Queen's Poisoner.

My Book, The Movie: Storm Glass.

The Page 69 Test: Storm Glass.

Writers Read: Jeff Wheeler (2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Land of Happiness"

New from The MIT Press: The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life by Nozomi Naoi.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fascinating look at how Japanese department stores of the twentieth century influenced modern life, identity, and the concept of a dreamworld—and why they continue to loom so large in our imagination.

The Land of Happiness explores the far-reaching influence of the Japanese department store on modern life and our imaginations. In this gorgeously illustrated volume, Nozomi Naoi explains how Japanese department stores modeled “the new modern Japanese life and identity” through print media and design, physical and imagined space, and the new experiences that these spaces offered. The stores created the notion of a modern subject enjoying a “land of happiness”—and this, in turn, shaped the wider sociological context, including emerging roles for women and perceptions of coloniality.

The book focuses on three areas: the mediascape of proliferating department store posters, advertisements, commercial design, promotional magazines, and merchandise; the physical space, such as the Western-style architecture that characterized many of these early department stores, and the imagined “modern space” created within their walls; and, finally, the production of a novel “dreamworld,” which included dining spaces with children’s menus, elevators, escalators, and more.

While the research on department stores and their role in the quotidian experience is vast, there is nothing like this study, which is uniquely grounded in an art historical approach that draws upon the visual media environment of early twentieth-century Japan and its impact on the everyday.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Appraisals"

New from W.W. Norton: Appraisals: A Novel by Claire Boyles.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Financial and ecological realities tear at the heart of a multigenerational farm family in this debut novel from a “deft and daring” (Los Angeles Times) Whiting Award winner.

Maggie Brandt, a third-generation farmer, is cultivating a few acres of organic vegetables in rural Colorado―a place where industrial farming reigns supreme―when the Great Recession hits. After months of unemployment, her husband, Fish, takes a job with an oil and gas company, a decision that threatens their once happy marriage and alienates their teenage daughter, Ozzie, a budding environmental crusader. As the wider community organizes against a billionaire outsider who is buying farmland and, more worryingly, water rights in the moisture-starved county, Maggie’s grandmother Flora grapples with the painful echoes of her own past. Flora and Ozzie’s already close bond deepens as they join a local activist group, but Fish and Maggie’s conflicting approaches to surviving circumstances that are out of their control drive them further apart. Faced with intolerable layers of loss, each member of the family is forced to consider what they are willing to compromise and what they are, or are not, able to forgive.

At once tender and urgent, Appraisals is a moving portrayal of ecological and financial catastrophe, the powerful generational bonds between women, and the fierce impulse to protect the places we love.

Visit Claire Boyles's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Becoming Orthodox"

New from Fordham University Press: Becoming Orthodox: Women, Religion, and Ethnicity in the American South by Elena V. Kravchenko.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exploration of an embodied, practice-centered, and continuous process through which Orthodox Christian women in the American South cultivate a compelling religious womanhood

Becoming Orthodox is a multi-lingual, ethnographic study of two Orthodox Christian communities in the US. Utilizing interview material, participant observation, and participant participation, Kravchenko argues that Russian women who immigrate to the United States and American women who convert to Orthodox Christianity engage with the materiality and visuality of the Orthodox Church to embrace conservative gender roles of a patriarchal tradition in a way that propels them to actively advocate for the equality, freedom, and empowerment of women.

Becoming Orthodox adds a new angle to the literature on the conservative religious women because of its attention to the intersection of religion, gender, and ethnicity. By attending to how Russian immigrant and American convert women―in the midst of their simultaneously sympathetic and antagonistic relationships―made choices about what icons to venerate, what prayers to use, how to dress, what food to cook, and how to raise their children, the book demonstrates that the project of becoming a good Orthodox woman was entangled in the project of defining what it means to be authentically “Russian” and “American.” Through performative ethnographic writing, the book illuminates how, in the social context of immigration and conversion, Russian and American women commonly sought to create a place of belonging by constructing meaningful ethno-religious homes and producing their respective Russian Orthodox and (Un)Russo-American Orthodox identities.

--Marshal Zeringue