"Mirrors of Empire"

Coming February 1 from State University of New York Press: Mirrors of Empire: Courtiers, Diplomats, and Intellectuals in Mughal India by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

About the book, from the publisher:

Approaches the history of the Mughal Empire at the level of human experience, through a diverse group of autobiographical narratives.

Starting from 1526, the Mughals ruled over much of India for three centuries, perhaps the most important Islamic empire in the early modern world. This period saw the production of a fascinating variety of memoirs and autobiographies in which residents of the empire reflected on their own lives, on Islam in a Hindu context, and on the relationship of individual subjects to their new rulers. Those written by Mughal royalty--especially Babur and Jahangir--are well known. This book considers the less well-known writings of diverse others, from the poet laureate Faizi to those who were not part of elite society but a few notches below it, such as the lowly envoy Asad Beg and characters like Mirza Nathan and Abdul Latif, who lived dangerously on the Bengal frontier. Also considered are prolific Hindu writers, such as Bhimsen Saksena and the witty Anand Ram Mukhlis, who lived in Delhi through the turbulent 1730s and 1740s. Together, they offer an original and differently critical perspective on the empire--its religious, social, and political tensions, as well as its strategies for overcoming them.

Covering over two centuries of such materials, Mirrors of Empire is a work of cultural history that is also firmly rooted in social history. It incorporates extensive translations from Persian, including materials that are little-known even to historians and specialists, and shows the transformation of the empire from its difficult emergence, to its expansive height, to its phase of disintegration in the middle of the eighteenth century. Gracefully written, the book approaches the Mughal Empire at the level of human experience, rendering it accessible and not a mere abstraction.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum"

New from Kensington: The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum (A Harriet Stone Mystery) by Valerie Wilson Wesley.

About the book, from the publisher:

At the darkly glamorous height of the Roaring 20s, an independent Black intellectual and her bi-racial foster child are immersed in the vibrant world of the Harlem Renaissance – and a shocking murder on Striver’s Row – in this thrilling Jazz Age mystery for reader of Nekesia Afia, Jacqueline Winspear, Avery Cunningham’s The Mayor of Maxwell Street.

1926: Harriet Stone, a liberated, educated Black woman, and Lovey, the orphaned, biracial 12-year-old she is bound to protect, are Harlem-bound, embarking on a new, hopefully less traumatic chapter in their lives. They have been invited to move from Connecticut by Harriet’s cousin, Junetta Plum, who runs a boardinghouse for independent-minded single women.

It’s a bold move, since Harriet has never met Junetta, but the fatalities of the Spanish flu and other tragedies have already forced her and Lovey to face their worst fears. Alone but for each other, they have little left to lose—or so it seems as they arrive at sophisticated Junetta’s impressive brownstone.

Her cousin has a sharp edge, which makes Harriett slightly uncomfortable. Still, after retiring to her room for the night, she finally falls asleep—only to awaken to Junetta arguing with someone downstairs. In the morning, she makes a shocking discovery at the foot of the stairs.

What ensues will lead Harriet to question Junetta’s very identity—and to wonder if she and Lovey are in danger, as well. It will also tie Harriet to five strangers. Among them, Harriet is sure someone knows something. What she doesn’t yet know is that one will play a crucial role in helping her investigate her cousin’s murder . . . that she will be tied to the others in ways she could never imagine . . . and that her life will take off in a startling new direction....

Visit Valerie Wilson Wesley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"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