Monday, March 18, 2024

"The Sicilian Inheritance"

New from Dutton: The Sicilian Inheritance: A Novel by Jo Piazza.

About the book, from the publisher:

From bestselling author and award-winning journalist Jo Piazza, comes a transporting novel rooted in the author’s own family history about a long-awaited trip to Sicily, a disputed inheritance, and a family secret that some will kill to protect...

Sara Marsala barely knows who she is anymore after the failure of her business and marriage. On top of that, her beloved great-aunt Rosie passes away, leaving Sara bereft with grief. But Aunt Rosie’s death also opens an escape from her life and a window into the past by way of a plane ticket to Sicily, a deed to a possibly valuable plot of land, and a bombshell family secret. Rosie believes Sara’s great-grandmother Serafina, the family matriarch who was left behind while her husband worked in America, didn’t die of illness as family lore has it . . . she was murdered.

Thus begins a twist-filled adventure that takes Sara all over the picturesque Italian countryside as she races to solve a mystery and learn the story of Serafina—a feisty and headstrong young woman in the early 1900s thrust into motherhood in her teens, who fought for a better life not just for herself but for all the women of her small village. Unsurprisingly the more she challenges the status quo, the more she finds herself in danger.

As Sara discovers more about Serafina, she also realizes she is coming head-to-head with the same menacing forces that took down her great-grandmother. At once an immersive multigenerational mystery and an ode to the undaunted heroism of everyday women, The Sicilian Inheritance is an atmospheric, page-turning delight.
Visit Jo Piazza's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Materializing the Middle Passage"

New from Oxford University Press: Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping, 1680-1807 by Jane Webster.

About the book, from the publisher:

An estimated 2.7 million Africans made an enforced crossing of the Atlantic on British slave ships between c.1680 and 1807--a journey that has become known as the 'Middle Passage'. This book focuses on the slave ship itself. The slave ship is the largest artefact of the Transatlantic slave trade, but because so few examples of wrecked slaving vessels have been located at sea, it is rarely studied by archaeologists. Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping,1680-1807 argues that there are other ways for archaeologists to materialize the slave ship. It employs a pioneering interdisciplinary methodology combining primary documentary sources, maritime and terrestrial archaeology, paintings, maritime and ethnographic museum collections, and many other sources to 'rebuild' British slaving vessels and to identify changes to them over time.

The book then goes on to consider the reception of the slave ship and its trade goods in coastal West Africa, and details the range, and uses, of the many African resources (including ivory, gold, and live animals) entering Britain on returning slave ships. The third section of the book focuses on the Middle Passage experiences of both captives and crews and argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the coping mechanisms through which Africans survived, yet also challenged, their captive passage.

Finally, Jane Webster asks why the African Middle Passage experience remains so elusive, even after decades of scholarship dedicated to uncovering it. She considers when, how, and why the crossing was remembered by 'saltwater' captives in the Caribbean and North America. The marriage of words and things attempted in this richly illustrated book is underpinned throughout by a theoretical perspective combining creolization and postcolonial theory, and by a central focus on the materiality of the slave ship and its regimes.
--Marshal Zeringue

"The Monstrous Misses Mai"

New from 47North: The Monstrous Misses Mai: A Novel by Van Hoang.

About the book, from the publisher:

A determined young woman in 1950s Los Angeles walks a darker city than she ever imagined in a spellbinding novel about the power to make dreams come true―whatever the sacrifice.

Los Angeles brims with opportunity in 1959―though not for aspiring fashion designer Cordelia Mai Yin, the first-generation child of Vietnamese immigrants, who finds the city unkind to outsiders and as dispirited as her own family. When Cordi rents a cheap loft in an old apartment building, she quickly warms to kindred souls Tessa, Audrey, and Silly. They also want better things and have pasts they’d rather forget. That they all share the same middle name makes their friendship seem like destiny.

As supportive as they are of each other, it’s a struggle just to eke out a living, let alone hope to see their wishes for success come true. Until an ever-present and uncannily charming acquaintance of the landlord’s offers a solution to their problems. He promises to fulfill their every dream. All it takes is a little magic. And a small sacrifice.

As one surprisingly effective spell leads to another, their wishes get bigger. But so does the price they must pay. Amid the damaged seams of her life so far, Cordi must realize her own power in order to rip free, without losing everything she’s worked so hard to achieve.
Visit Van Hoang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Apathy of Empire"

New from the University of Minnesota Press: The Apathy of Empire: Cambodia in American Geopolitics by James A. Tyner.

About the book, from the publisher:

What America’s intervention in Cambodia during the Vietnam War reveals about Cold War–era U.S. national security strategy

The Apathy of Empire
reveals just how significant Cambodia was to U.S. policy in Indochina during the Vietnam War, broadening the lens to include more than the often-cited incursion in 1970 or the illegal bombing after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. This theoretically informed and thoroughly documented case study argues that U.S. military intervention in Cambodia revealed America’s efforts to construct a hegemonic spatial world order.

James Tyner documents the shift of America’s post-1945 focus from national defense to national security. He demonstrates that America’s expansionist policies abroad, often bolstered by military power, were not so much about occupying territory but instead constituted the construction of a new normal for the exercise of state power. During the Cold War, Vietnam became the geopolitical lodestar of this unfolding spatial order. And yet America’s grand strategy was one of contradiction: to build a sovereign state (South Vietnam) based on democratic liberalism, it was necessary to protect its boundaries—in effect, to isolate it—through both covert and overt operations in violation of Cambodia’s sovereignty. The latter was deemed necessary for the former.

Questioning reductionist geopolitical understandings of states as central or peripheral, Tyner explores this paradox to rethink the formulation of the Cambodian war as sideshow, revealing it instead as a crucial site for the formation of this new normal.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, March 17, 2024

"All We Were Promised"

New from Ballantine Books: All We Were Promised: A Novel by Ashton Lattimore.

About the book, from the publisher:

A housemaid with a dangerous family secret conspires with a wealthy young abolitionist to help an enslaved girl escape, in volatile pre-Civil War Philadelphia.

The rebel . . . the socialite . . . and the fugitive. Together, they will risk everything for one another in this “beguiling story of friendship, deception, and women crossing boundaries in the name of freedom” (Lisa Wingate, #1
New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends).

Philadelphia, 1837
. After Charlotte escaped from the crumbling White Oaks plantation down South, she’d expected freedom to feel different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. After all, Philadelphia is supposed to be the birthplace of American liberty. Instead, she’s locked away playing servant to her white-passing father, as they both attempt to hide their identities from slavecatchers who would destroy their new lives.

Longing to break away, Charlotte befriends Nell, a budding abolitionist from one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest Black families. Just as Charlotte starts to envision a future, a familiar face from her past reappears: Evie, her friend from White Oaks, has been brought to the city by the plantation mistress, and she’s desperate to escape. But as Charlotte and Nell conspire to rescue her, in a city engulfed by race riots and attacks on abolitionists, they soon discover that fighting for Evie’s freedom may cost them their own.
Visit Ashton Lattimore's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Exurbia Now"

New from Melville House: Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy by David Masciotra.

About the book, from the publisher:

The suburbs have become too liberal and diverse for many white American conservatives, so “exurbia”—areas outside the cities and their suburbs—are becoming the staging ground for the radical right extremist insurgency...

Beyond a fanatical devotion to former president Donald Trump, one of the curious things that united the rank and file of the January 6 insurrectionist mob was that many of them were residents of one of America’s fastest growing residential areas: Exurbia.

Home to the likes of Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ohio’s Jim Jordan, big box retailers, chain restaurants, monster trucks, and megachurches, exurbia is becoming America’s greatest political battleground, more important to American politics than urban or rural America.

In this brilliant work of political and cultural inquiry, veteran political journalist David Masciotra provides a definitive account of what exurbia is, how it came to be, and how it's transforming American life. Zooming in outside the greater metropolitan area of Chicago—where Masciotra grew up—he shows how exurbia has become a safe space to fly the MAGA flag and romanticize the mores of the pre-civil rights, pre-feminist, pre-gay rights 1950s.

But, as Masciotra also shows, reactionary white flight is not the whole story of small-town America. The story often lost is the power and persistence of small-town liberals—people who believe in equality, celebrate diversity, and enroll in movements for justice. Exurbia, as it turns out, is ground zero for the fight over a democracy mightily beleaguered, yet still full of promise, and still worth fighting for.

Combining interviews, research, and anecdote—and anchored in personal experience—Exurbia Now delivers a powerful ballad on the state of small-town America, and provides a sense of the fight for democracy, on the ground, in the heartland.
Visit David Masciotra's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Habitations"

New from Simon & Schuster: Habitations: A Novel by Sheila Sundar.

About the book, from the publisher:

A young academic moves from India to the United States, where she navigates first love, a green card marriage, single motherhood, and more in this “delightful novel, written with immediacy, warmth, and wry humor” (Ha Jin, National Book Award-winning author of Waiting).

Vega Gopalan is adrift. Still reeling from the death of her sister years earlier, she leaves South India to attend graduate school at Columbia University. In New York, Vega straddles many different worlds, eventually moving in and out of a series of relationships that take her through the striving world of academia, the intellectual isolation of the immigrant suburbs, and, ultimately, the loneliness of single motherhood. But it is the birth of Vega’s daughter that forces the novel’s central question: What does it mean to make a home?

Written with dry humor and searing insight, Habitations is an intimate story of identity, immigration, expectation and desire, and of love lost and found. But it is also a universal story of womanhood, and the ways in which women are forced to navigate multiple loyalties: to family, to community, and to themselves.

A profound meditation on the many meanings of home and on the ways love and kinship can be found, even in the most unfamiliar of places, Habitations introduces Sheila Sundar as an electrifying new voice in literary fiction.
Visit Sheila Sundar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Nation Fermented"

New from Oxford University Press: A Nation Fermented: Beer, Bavaria, and the Making of Modern Germany by Robert Shea Terrell.

About the book, from the publisher:

How did beer become one of the central commodities associated with the German nation? How did a little-known provincial production standard – the Reinheitsgebot, or Beer Purity Law – become a pillar of national consumer sentiments? How did the jovial, beer-drinking German become a fixture in the global imagination?

While the connection between beer and Germany seems self-evident, A Nation Fermented reveals how it was produced through a strange brew of regional commercial and political pressures. Spanning from the late nineteenth century to the last decades of the twentieth, A Nation Fermented argues that the economic, regulatory, and cultural weight of Bavaria shaped the German nation in profound ways. Drawing on sources from over a dozen archives and repositories, Terrell weaves together subjects ranging from tax law to advertising, public health to European integration, and agriculture to global stereotypes.

Offering a history of the Germany that Bavaria made over the twentieth century, A Nation Fermented eschews both sharp temporal divisions and a conventional focus on northern and industrial Germany. In so doing, Terrell offers a fresh take on the importance of provincial influences and the role of commodities and commerce in shaping the nation.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Dear Edna Sloane"

Coming April 30 from Red Hen Press: Dear Edna Sloane by Amy Shearn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dear Edna Sloane is a funny, fast-paced epistolary novel about fame, writers, ambition, and the ups and downs of a creative life.

Edna Sloane was a promising author at the top of her game. Her debut novel was an instant classic and commercial success, vaulting her into the heady echelons of the 1980s New York City lit scene. Then she disappeared and was largely forgotten. Decades later, Seth Edwards is an aspiring writer and editor who feels he’s done all the right things to achieve literary success, but despairs that his dream will be forever out of reach. He becomes obsessed with the idea that if he can rediscover Sloane, it will make his career. His search for her leads to unexpected places and connections, and the epistolary correspondence that ensues makes up this book, a novel infused with insights and meditations about what our cultural obsession with the "next big thing" does to literature, and what it means to be a creative person in the world.
Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (Marxh 2013).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Urban Refugees and Digital Technology"

New from McGill-Queens University Press: Urban Refugees and Digital Technology: Reshaping Social, Political, and Economic Networks by Charles Martin-Shields.

About the book, from the publisher:

Refugees and displaced people are increasingly moving to cities around the world, seeking out the social, economic, and political opportunity that urban areas provide. Against this backdrop digital technologies are fundamentally changing how refugees and displaced people engage with urban landscapes and economies where they settle. Urban Refugees and Digital Technology draws on contemporary data gathered from refugee communities in Bogotá, Nairobi, and Kuala Lumpur to build a new theoretical understanding of how technological change influences the ways urban refugees contribute to the social, economic, and political networks in their cities of arrival. This data is presented against the broader history of technological change in urban areas since the start of industrialization, showing how displaced people across time have used technologized urban spaces to shape the societies where they settle. The case studies and history demonstrate how refugees’ interactions with environments that are often hostile to their presence spur novel adaptations to idiosyncratic features of a city’s technological landscape. A wide-ranging study across histories and geographies of urban displacement, Urban Refugees and Digital Technology introduces readers to the myriad ways technological change creates spaces for urban refugees to build rich political, social, and economic lives in cities.
Visit Charles Martin-Shields's website.

--Marshal Zeringue