"The Soviet Trickster"

New from Cornell University Press: The Soviet Trickster: Cynicism and Its Subversions by Mark Lipovetsky.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Soviet Trickster explores narratives in Soviet and post-Soviet culture featuring rogues, swindlers, and improbable adventurers who enjoyed widespread popularity across Russia. These figures simultaneously mocked and justified the pervasive culture of Soviet cynicism, facilitating subversive counter-narratives that challenged the power and incompetence of the state. Mark Lipovetsky thoroughly analyzes the most remarkable and popular Soviet tricksters in literature, film, visual art, and performance, discussing different facets of the trickster: their nihilistic revolutionary messianism, problematic ethics, role within the Soviet empire, and connections to underground culture and gender politics.

Through the combination of seemingly incompatible features thanks to its ambivalent and transgressive nature, the trickster becomes a parody and deconstruction of the Soviet "messiah"―the new Soviet man envisioned by communist propaganda. The Soviet Trickster reveals how after the collapse of the USSR, the trickster loses its critical potential and aligns with authoritarian power, serving as its populist avatar. Nonetheless, tricksters remain inexhaustible: they constantly reinvent themselves to sabotage new forms of political cynicism and authoritarianism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Doomscroller's Companion"

New from the University of Wisconsin Press: The Doomscroller's Companion by Wendy Wimmer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Jane, aka @erejane, a thirtysomething professional web influencer, lives in her aunt’s spare bedroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Her only confidant is Brian, a potter who is thrilled that the internet allows him to connect without having to leave his nearby home and studio. With limited options and a dwindling bank account, Jane lands a high-paying gig that requires her to travel to a wildlife refuge on a remote island near San Francisco to publicize a marine biologist’s shark study.

However, when a global pandemic strikes with astonishing speed, the scientists surrounding Jane succumb one by one; meanwhile, Brian grapples with neighbors living out their apocalyptic movie fantasies. When real-world events force them to set aside their online personas, Jane and Brian are forced to decide what—or whom—they care for the most.

Told through traditional narrative and imagined social media posts—which often appear, as they do in life, out of chronological order—The Doomscroller’s Companion is as engaging as it is unexpected.

Visit Wendy Wimmer's website.

-Marshal Zeringue

"The Internet Is Real Life"

New from University of Wisconsin Press: The Internet Is Real Life: Performing Folklore Online and Off by Anthony Bak Buccitelli.

About the book, from the publisher:

We often speak of a divide between online and offline cultures, despite growing recognition that the two are intertwined. Here, folklorist Anthony Bak Buccitelli challenges the idea of any divide at all in contemporary American culture. He argues that digital communications and behaviors are already deeply embedded in everyday expressive life and therefore are also already implicated in a variety of ways in the embodied performance and transmission of folklore. In other words, in contemporary American society, the internet truly is “real life.”

By treating the digital interface as a site at which embodied performance can take shape rather than just a point of contact with the online, Buccitelli argues for a critical renewal of core folkloristic concepts to meet the challenges of understanding modern networked life. The result is a folklore book for the current age.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Glacier's Guide to Dying"

New from Algonquin Books: A Glacier's Guide to Dying: A Novel by Michelle Porter.

About the book, from the publisher:

A young Métis man searching for his missing father finds himself arguing with a dying glacier in this compelling and hopeful novel about the burdens and blessings of inheritance, from the award-winning author of A Grandmother Begins the Story.

Robbie has spent most of life wondering about his real father, Mike, who long since left their family due to his struggles with visions and mistrust of the modern world. Robbie can't forget how much he felt connected to him from his few visits, and not just because they share two differently colored eyes. But now, as he rescues his mother from encroaching wildfires, he's determined to also find his father. Robbie takes off to find answers, and when his uncle confesses that he last dropped Mike off at a glacier, he and his uncle head climb up the mountain of ice to see if Mike might still be there, and whether he's still alive.

On the slopes of a huge glacier, Robbie, starts hearing the ancient voice of the glacier itself giving him guidance. Has he accessed a deep connection to the land, or is he succumbing to the same illness that had wreaked havoc on his father's life?

Michelle Porter brings her profoundly moving sensibility and disarmingly funny voice to a powerful contemporary story of identity and belonging, loss and healing, within families and with the immortal land itself.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Data Centre Entanglements"

New from Oxford University Press: Data Centre Entanglements: Geopolitics, Vulnerabilities, Sustainability, Activisms by Pradip Ninan Thomas.

About the book, from the publisher:

Data centres are involved in the sorting, sifting, storage, aggregation, and monetization of transactional data critical to data capitalism. Tucked away in high-rise buildings or peri-urban areas, data centres are largely invisible and fundamentally resource-intensive, and deploy extractive, energy-intensive technologies. In the context of artificial intelligence, data centre energy consumption has skyrocketed. Data Centre Entanglements addresses external challenges, specifically, contemporary geopolitical struggles between China and the USA to become the world's data hegemon and supply chain issues related to critical minerals and semiconductors, as well as internal issues such as data centre sustainability, which is particularly acute in countries facing significant water and power stresses. Given their essential infrastructure status in many countries, data centres are immune to public scrutiny, leading to transparency and accountability issues. The special relationship that data centres--in particular, hyperscale data centres owned by Big Tech--have with the State is reflected in the migration of public data to privately-owned data centres. Thomas focuses on this relationship in the context of data localization, data sovereignty, risk, the politics of greening and renewable energy, and incentives such as access to subsidized land, tax breaks, and unrestricted labour supply. The book concludes with a discussion on the democratization of data centres and makes a case for diversity in data centre ownership, including community-based ownership.

The Page 99 Test: Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Pearl Farmers"

New from She Writes Press: The Pearl Farmers: A Novel by Stacey Gordon.

About the novel, from the publisher:

For fans of Ann Patchett, a layered, multigenerational family novel about three sisters carrying on the legacy of their family’s pearl farm in small-town Tennessee.

Three estranged sisters—Helen, Anna, and Penn Lockshire—are bound by the shimmering but fragile legacy of their family’s freshwater pearl farm in rural Tennessee. When the business that once made them famous faces collapse, the sisters are pulled back into each other’s lives and forced to reckon with old betrayals, unspoken resentments, and the complicated truth of their inheritance. Soon, what began as a fight for survival becomes a reckoning with the myths that shaped them and the secrets buried in the family’s past.

From the discovery of a rare pearl in 1981 to the struggles of a failing farm in 2008, the Lockshire sisters must navigate love, loss, ambition, and forgiveness to decide whether their heritage is a blessing to preserve—or a burden to escape.

Rich with emotional depth and anchored by the pearl’s enduring symbolism—a thing of beauty born from irritation—this sweeping story of family, identity, and resilience will captivate readers of Celeste Ng and Claire Lombardo.

Visit Stacey Gordon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Imagined Environments"

New from the University of California Press: Imagined Environments: The Making of the Borderlands by Carlos Alonso Nugent.

About the book, from the publisher:

Casting light across the US-Mexico borderlands, Carlos Alonso Nugent reveals the region’s “imagined environments”―the frameworks through which its human groups have represented, related to, and resided in their more-than-human worlds. While these imagined environments can feel immersive and even immutable, Nugent explains how they have in fact emerged in everything from Apache pictographs to US and Mexican laws to novels, poems, paintings, and photographs. By showing how the larger imagined environments have shaped and been shaped by such cultural constituents, he revises accepted accounts of relational racialization. Advancing from 1848 to the present, he demonstrates that whiteness has coevolved with western water infrastructures, that Latinidades have developed through divergent forms of land tenure, and that Native nations have thrived not only by staying in specific places but also by migrating across vast spaces. With such stories, Nugent complicates the environmental humanities; even as he argues that media have naturalized our use and abuse of the planet, he still explores how they have helped us love places we have never been and care for creatures we have never met.

Visit Carlos Alonso Nugent's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Nightshade"

New from Poisoned Pen Press: The Nightshade: A Novel (Professor Eustacia Rose Mystery, 3) by Jill Johnson.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Secrets are the deadliest poison...

Professor Eustacia Rose is done with murder cases. After getting dragged into a series of investigations that have threatened her teaching career, her collection of rare poisonous plants, and her relationship, she's ready to settle down with her partner, Matilde, and focus on her work at the university.

But then another body is discovered, and this time, the victim was poisoned with one of her stolen plants. A specimen she'd do anything to get back.

Unable to resist investigating, Eustacia sets off on her own mission to find the murderer, and ultimately, the person responsible for stealing her most prized possession. But Eustacia isn't the only one desperate to retrieve her lost treasure: the beguiling trader of rare plants, Zsa Zsa, and rival university professor Hutchins are on the trail, too, not to mention the dangerous criminal gang determined to keep hold of the lethal plants.

The stakes are higher than ever for Eustacia. Because if she cannot save her plants in time, there will be more deaths - and this time, the blood will be on her hands...

Visit Jill Johnson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Couple with the Pitchfork"

New from Princeton University Press: The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon by Wanda M. Corn.

About the book, from the publisher:

A rich, evolving history of one of the most recognized couples in the world

In this abundantly illustrated book, award-winning art historian Wanda Corn tracks the fortunes and vicissitudes of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, his realist painting of a rural man and woman posed stiffly before a modest white house with a gothic-styled window, made in 1930. She explores Wood’s scrappy formation as a disadvantaged midwestern artist and his unexpected, overnight fame when American Gothic premiered at the Art Institute of Chicago and was purchased for the museum’s collection. After a close look at the painting’s volatile reputation over its first thirty years, Corn turns to that historic moment in the 1960s when the couple with their pitchfork left the museum and journeyed into the streets. Shedding their preciousness as art, they became a versatile, free-floating image open to reuse and reinterpretation. That moment also found Corn beginning her long career in art history, and she interweaves her story with that of the couple’s evolving appearances in pop art, cartoons, advertisements, and grassroots reenactments. She offers compelling explanations for the painting’s entry into the pantheon of cult visual images. Today, Wood’s couple stands alongside other art icons: Whistler’s mother, Rodin’s thinker, Hokusai’s wave, Munch’s screamer, and the enigmatic beauty in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

A highly readable and personalized study of a painter and the work he would forever be tied to, The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon sheds critical light on the cultural forces that transformed an image with humble roots into a global icon whose reach and charisma extends far beyond the world of art.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Tiger's Mouth"

New from Ballantine Books: Tiger's Mouth: A Novel by Lucy Tan.

About the novel, from the publisher:

When two young men meet during a tech internship, it sparks an intense friendship—and even more intense competition—in this sweeping novel of privilege, identity, and ambition from the acclaimed author of What We Were Promised.

Jack Chen, the oldest son of caterers from Queens, is an expert at studying the rich from afar. When he finagles his way into a prestigious internship at tech giant K.O. Systems, he’s prepared to fake everything: his credentials, his confidence, even his past. What he isn’t prepared for is his officemate, Jack Owens, the depressed son of the company’s billionaire founder, who’s only there for a summer reprieve from his father’s scrutiny at the family vacation house.

Their connection is immediate, built on mutual admiration. Chen sees in Owens the advantages he’s been denied; Owens sees in Chen someone free of the pain he’s been taught to hide. Owens, Chen, and Chen’s girlfriend quickly become close friends, but by summer's end the three can no longer outrun the lies they’ve told themselves and each other. As pressures build throughout the next few years, the two Jacks circle each other like opponents in their favorite board game, Go, each chasing the life the other was born into, from career to family to lovers. But the path to success and matters of the heart can test even the closest of friendships—and not all of them survive.

Nostalgic, heart-wrenching, and propulsive, Tiger’s Mouth is a nuanced portrait of complex friendship, family dynamics, and love in its most unexpected forms.

Visit Lucy Tan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue