"Aerial Archives of Race"

New from the University of California Press: Aerial Archives of Race: African American Cultural Expressions and the Black Nuclear Pacific by Etsuko Taketani.

About the book, from the publisher:

Opening new perspectives in transpacific studies, Etsuko Taketani examines the genealogy and contours of the aerial imaginary and the corollary shifting planetary imaginary that evolved in a transnational space she names the “Black nuclear Pacific.” Following the first dropping of an atom bomb on humans and the subsequent military occupation of Japan by the United States, Black-Japanese encounters happened on a scale unimaginable before World War II. Analyzing texts by a diverse range of artists, writers, and political thinkers who had formative interactions with occupied Japan—including the NAACP’s Walter White, lawyer Edith Sampson, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and Malcolm X—Taketani uncovers African American cultural expressions that include a quasi–alien abduction narrative, the literary creation of a new tribe in the image of a rainbow, a Black futuristic apocalypse, and a racial fantasy of the Mother Plane. Aerial Archives of Race tracks the Black networks and exchanges with Japan that provoked new ways of thinking about (human) races on planet Earth.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Oxford Blood"

New from Wednesday Books: Oxford Blood by Rachael Davis-Featherstone.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first in a series of compelling and skillful dark academic thrillers from a brilliant new voice in YA fiction.

Love, Lies, Legacy…

Eva has one dream: to study English at Oxford University. Not only will she receive a world-class education – getting into Oxford is a path to freedom.

But when Eva and her best friend George are invited to interview week, they find themselves in the cutthroat ultra-competitive world of elite academia, and at the center of gossip on anonymous student forum Oxford Slays. When Eva finds George dead near the steps of a statue in the college, she knows he’s been murdered – but all eyes are now on her. Can she clear her name, catch the true killer and win her place at Beecham College?

Eva has one week to prove her innocence, and Oxford Slays will be watching.

Oxford Blood is a riveting murder mystery thriller, packed with narrative twists and turns, complex and appealing characters and a captivating, authentic setting in its searing examination of the true cost of privilege.

Visit Rachael Davis-Featherstone's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Realism after the Individual"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel by Rafael Walker.

About the book, from the publisher:

A study of the transformation of the realist novel in the hands of early-twentieth-century American writers, who adapted this quintessentially nineteenth-century genre to the conditions of their age.

Realism after the Individual offers a new theoretical paradigm for understanding realist novels published in the United States between 1900 and 1920, a period that has been described wrongheadedly as a “gulf” or a “valley” in American literary history. In this generation of writers, only three have remained in favor among critics: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser. Others have disappeared from view altogether—writers such as Robert Grant, Robert Herrick, and Booth Tarkington, all of whom were critically acclaimed bestsellers in their day.

As Rafael Walker shows, this generation of writers deserves new attention for the way they revised many core facets of the nineteenth-century novel in response to the historical shifts around it. This generation of novelists not only rejected liberal individualism but also formulated alternative paradigms for conceptualizing selfhood. The result was a slew of woman-centered realist novels that broke with literary precedent: The novels punish characters not for desiring too much but for failing to desire enough, they depict subjectivity not as private and interior but as outward-facing, and they view closure not as the novel’s aim but as a convention to flout. Realism after the Individual both revises prevailing views of American realism and lays the foundation for an alternative account of the development of literary modernism, one that illuminates the continuity between realism and the modernism that followed it.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Hitch"

Coming soon from Roxane Gay Books: The Hitch by Sara Levine.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of the cult classic Treasure Island!!!, a delightfully unhinged comedy following a woman as she attempts to exorcise the spirit of a dead corgi from her nephew and renegotiate the borders of her previously rational world

Rose Cutler defines herself by her exacting standards. As an anti—racist, Jewish secular feminist eco—warrior, she is convinced she knows the right way to do everything, including parent her six—year—old nephew Nathan. When Rose offers to look after him while his parents visit Mexico for a week, her brother and sister—in—law reluctantly agree, provided she understands the rules—routine, bedtime, homework—and doesn’t overstep. But when Rose’s Newfoundland attacks and kills a corgi at the park, Nathan starts acting strangely: barking, overeating, talking to himself. Rose mistakes this behavior as repressed grief over the corgi’s death, but Nathan insists he isn’t grieving, and the dog isn’t dead. Her soul leaped into his body, and now she’s living inside him. Now Rose must banish the corgi from her nephew before the week ends and his parents return to collect their child.

With the ferocious absurdity of Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and the dark, brazen humor of Melissa Broder’s Death Valley, The Hitch is a tantalizingly bizarre novel about loneliness, bad boundaries, and the ill—fated strategy of micromanaging everything and everyone around you.

Visit Sara Levine's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Nigerian Hip-Hop"

New from Oxford University Press: Nigerian Hip-Hop: Race, Knowledge, and the Poetics of Resistance by Tosin Gbogi.

About the book, from the publisher:

Nigerian, or Naija, hip-hop has existed for close to 45 years, and throughout its rich history has been influenced by not only imperialist media flows but also enduring discourses of African anti-colonialism and pan-Africanism and the long cultural traffic between Africa and the African diaspora. In Nigerian Hip-Hop, Tosin Gbogi draws upon close readings of lyrics and other media and oral interviews with more than fifty artists to engage fully with the culture on its own terms, examining questions lying at the intersection of rap poetics, race, knowledge, and popular culture. Troubling the conventional paradigm in which hip-hop in Nigeria stands squarely for imperialist machinery, he directs attention to the culture's provocative meditations on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism. Gbogi tracks these meditations across a wide range of sources, including lyrics, music videos, cover arts, liner notes, photographs, social media, archival materials, and oral interviews. Placing these sources in conversation with one another, he examines them closely for what they reveal about the contemporary trajectories of African popular culture and youth resistance.

The first comprehensive and systematic study of Nigerian hip-hop--one of the world's oldest and most vibrant of such scenes--this book attends to the literary forms, the density of ideas, historical encounters, ideological struggles, and the lively internal debates that have animated the culture for more than four decades. In highlighting these, Gbogi engages with a broad array of topics and themes, including those having to do with race, ethnicity, class, gender, language, media and popular culture, youth cultures, and poetry.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Truth of Carcosa"

Coming soon from Union Square & Co.: The Truth of Carcosa by Jacob Rollinson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Evil books, shadowy corporations, and interdimensional monster collide in this dark, masterful tribute to Robert Chamber's cult classic, The King in Yellow.

In 1984, exiled author Salvatore Archimboldi accepts the help of a psychotherapist to write his new book. He hopes to transform his traumatic memories into literary genius. But the resulting book, The Truth of Carcosa, is pure evil. Horrified, Archimboldi suppresses the book and wills all traces of it, his correspondence, and any copies to be destroyed.

Long after Archimboldi's death, in a chaotic age of resurgent nationalism and violence, one of the only havens for his work is the ALI, the Archive for Literary Investment, where a biographer and his protégée search through Archimboldi’s correspondence for clues on the evil manuscript as they attempt to stop unscrupulous firms with their own plans for the manuscript.

Told from the perspective of a madman obsessed with The Truth of Carcosa and a ragtag group of friends, it becomes clear that this book is more than a book—and that it might be the answer to a bewildering set of questions:

Why is the Archive so desperate to preserve Archimboldi's work?

Why do so many corporations seem hellbent on seizing any scrap of this mysterious manuscript—and at whatever cost?

What are the strange, dancing monsters that appear wherever Archimboldi's work is discovered?

And who—or what—is the Yellow King?

Visit Jacob Rollinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"When Doing Good Isn't Good Enough"

New from Georgetown Press: When Doing Good Isn't Good Enough: How a Commitment to Justice and Solidarity Transformed Catholic Relief Services by Suzanne C. Toton.

About the book, from the publisher:

A powerful case study demonstrating how principled commitment and strategic vision can fundamentally redefine an organization's impact and purpose

In the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide, humanitarian organizations faced a profound moral reckoning. The devastating failure to address the systemic social, economic, and political inequalities created fertile ground for the mass atrocities and exposed critical gaps in traditional aid approaches. The very foundations of international relief work were challenged.

When Doing Good Isn't Good Enough offers an unprecedented look at the significance of Catholic Social Teaching, particularly its teaching on justice, for transforming Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in a time of institutional crisis after the Rwanda genocide. Toton traces the process by which CRS arrived at the decision to adopt justice as its operating lens and its methodical effort to integrate justice into every region and level of its operations. It provides a window into CRS's deep commitment to the people it serves; the challenges of implementing right relationships while working within diverse ethnic, cultural, and religious contexts; the lessons learned; and the institutional changes it catalyzed.

For organizational leaders, relief and development professionals, scholars, and people who belong to faith-based movements, this book provides a powerful case study of institutional transformation across cultures―demonstrating how principled commitment and a strategic vision can fundamentally redefine an organization's impact and purpose.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Bookbinder's Secret"

Coming soon from St. Martin's Press: The Bookbinder's Secret: A Novel by A. D. Bell.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Every book tells a story. This one tells a secret.

A young bookbinder begins a hunt for the truth when a confession hidden beneath the binding of a burned book reveals a story of forbidden love, lost fortune, and murder.

Lilian ("Lily") Delaney, apprentice to a master bookbinder in Oxford in 1901, chafes at the confines of her life. She is trapped between the oppressiveness of her father’s failing bookshop and still being an apprentice in a man’s profession. But when she’s given a burned book during a visit to a collector, she finds, hidden beneath the binding, a fifty-year-old letter speaking of love, fortune, and murder.

Lily is pulled into the mystery of the young lovers, a story of forbidden love, and discovers there are more books and more hidden pages telling their story. Lilian becomes obsessed with the story but she is not the only one looking for the remaining books and what began as a diverting intrigue quickly becomes a very dangerous pursuit.

Lily's search leads her from the eccentric booksellers of London to the private libraries of unscrupulous collectors and the dusty archives of society papers, deep into the heart of the mystery. But with sinister forces closing in, willing to do anything for the books, Lilian’s world begins to fall apart and she must decide if uncovering the truth is worth the risk to her own life.

Visit A.D. Bell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Entertaining Ambiguities"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Entertaining Ambiguities: Sexuality, Humanism, and Ephemeral Performances in Fifteenth-Century Italy by Ralph J. Hexter.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exploration of the intersection of male—male sexual activities and subcultures with Italian humanism and university culture

Entertaining Ambiguities explores the intersections of male—male sexual activities, subcultures, and coded language with classical reception, university culture, and Italian humanism. Through his excavation of a pair of Latin comedies—Janus the Priest and The False Hypocrite, written and performed by law students at the University of Pavia in 1427 and 1437, respectively—Ralph Hexter shows how these plays expand our understanding of the range of contemporary attitudes to male—male sexual behavior beyond previously studied registers, whether legal, ecclesiastical, or natural scientific.

The plot of the two plays, one of which is an adaptation of the other, involves the entrapment of a priest who is eager for sexual activity with men. Digging deeply into precisely how the student ringleader of the entrapment plot persuades the priest to visit him in his rooms for an assignation, Hexter uncovers the coded language that the student uses to seemingly establish himself as a member of a network of like—minded men, convincing the priest to let his guard down. Hexter reads this coded language within his examination of the context of the plays’ performance and circulation—including careful reading of a range of Italian and Latin sources, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, Apuleius’s Golden Ass, comedies by Plautus and Terence, and Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus, among others. In doing so, he demonstrates how passages throughout both plays disrupt received ideas about the period’s sexual conventions and sexual possibilities. Reading against the grain against orthodox expectations, Hexter reveals the plays’ seemingly moralizing endings to be more suggestive and more ambiguous than they appear.

Including an appendix presenting the first published English translations of both plays, Entertaining Ambiguities offers a new account of the history of sexuality, changing social mores, and intellectual exchange at the dawn of the Renaissance.

--Marshal Zeringue

"It Should Have Been You"

Coming soon from Pamela Dorman Books: It Should Have Been You: A Novel by Andrea Mara.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A gripping new thriller from Andrea Mara, the #1 international bestselling author of ALL HER FAULT, now streaming on Peacock

Your neighbors have secrets. How far would they go to keep them?

You press send and your message disappears. Full of secrets about your neighbors, it’s meant for your sister. But it doesn’t reach her – it goes to the entire local community WhatsApp group instead.

As rumor spreads like wildfire through the picture-perfect neighborhood, you convince yourself that people will move on, that this will quickly be forgotten. But then you receive the first death threat.

The next day, a woman has been murdered. And what’s even more chilling is that she had the same address as you – 26 Oakpark – but in a different part of town. Did the killer get the wrong house? It won’t be long before you find out…

Visit Andrea Mara's website.

--Marshal Zeringue