"The Politics of the Table"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: The Politics of the Table: Nutrition and the Body in Modern Germany by Kristen Ann Ehrenberger.

About the book, from the publisher:

How nutrition and the body became matters of national importance in modern Germany.

What does it mean to eat well, and why should it matter to the nation? In The Politics of the Table, historian Kristen Ann Ehrenberger uncovers how food became a matter of political concern in modern Germany, tracing the evolution of nutritional science from the laboratory bench to the family dinner table between 1890 and 1935.

This compelling study reveals how everyday meals became sites of public policy, scientific authority, and cultural identity. Germans were encouraged to see their bodies not only as private entities but also as integral parts of a larger social organism in matters ranging from calories and vitamins to ration cards and state-sponsored hygiene exhibitions. Ehrenberger introduces the concept of the "scalar body" to explain how individuals were imagined as connected to one another through the acts of eating, drinking, and digesting. Using a wide array of sources including cookbooks, popular magazines, medical texts, trade journals, and government archives, the book charts how nutrition was promoted as a means to build healthier citizens and a stronger nation. Whether in kitchens or clinics, during wartime shortages or peacetime reforms, food was imbued with moral, medical, and economic significance. The dining table emerged as a focal point where gender roles, social expectations, and state interests converged.

The Politics of the Table illuminates the intimate links between bodily health and national politics in an era of profound social transformation. It challenges readers to reconsider how private habits like eating have long been shaped by public values, and how the politics of food and nutrition continue to resonate today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Like This, But Funnier"

New from Simon & Schuster: Like This, But Funnier: A Novel by Hallie Cantor.

About the book, from the publisher:

For fans of Dolly Alderton and HBO’s Hacks, a whip-smart, laugh-out-loud funny debut novel about faking it (and “making it”) as a writer in Hollywood.

TV writer Caroline Neumann is thirty-four and mired in professional envy and self-hatred. Even Harry, her usually supportive therapist husband, thinks it’s time for her to press pause on her career ambitions and focus on getting pregnant, despite Caroline’s serious ambivalence about having children.

When Caroline accidentally stumbles on Harry’s patient session notes and offhandedly mentions what she finds in a meeting with a producer, the momentum of Hollywood takes over. Before she knows it—and unbeknownst to Harry—Caroline finds herself pitching a TV show about the deepest, darkest secrets of her husband’s favorite patient, a woman known to Caroline only as the Teacher.

Amid the indignities of the Hollywood development process, Caroline must balance her burning desire for professional validation against her own morality and the health of her marriage. And when Caroline forms a real-life relationship with Teacher herself, the lines between art and life begin to blur further, shaking up Caroline’s understanding of what it means to be the “likeable female protagonist” of her own life.

Visit Hallie Cantor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Order, Authority, Nation"

New from Cambridge University Press: Order, Authority, Nation: Neo-Socialism, Fascism, and Political Conversion in Interwar France by Mathieu Hikaru Desan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Order, Authority, Nation develops a sociological account of political conversion from left to right through an examination of the historical case of Marcel Déat and the French neo-socialists. Déat and the neo-socialists began their careers in the 1920s as democratic socialists but became fascists and Nazi collaborators by the end of World War II. While existing accounts of this shift emphasize the ideological continuity underlying neo-socialism and fascism, this book centers the fundamentally discontinuous and relational character of political conversion in its analysis. Highlighting the active part played by Déat and the neo-socialists in their own reinvention at different moments of their trajectory, it argues that political conversion is a phenomenon defined not just by a change in belief, but at its core, by how political actors respond to changing political circumstances. This sociological account of a phenomenon often treated polemically offers a unique contribution to the sociology and history of socialism and fascism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Honey in the Wound"

New from Avid Reader Press: Honey in the Wound: A Novel by Jiyoung Han.

About the book, from the publisher:

A lyrical and suspenseful debut novel about a mysteriously gifted Korean family confronting the brutality of the Japanese empire, Honey in the Wound is an epic tale of survival and the reclamation of power.

A sister disappears and returns as a tiger. A mother’s voice compels the truth from any tongue. A granddaughter divines secrets in others’ dreams. These women are all of one lineage—a Korean family split across decades and borders by Japanese imperialism.

At this saga’s heart is Young-Ja, a girl who infuses food with her emotions. She revels in her gift for cooking, nourishing the people she loves with her cheerfulness. But her sunny childhood comes to an end in 1931 when Japanese soldiers crush her family’s defiance against the Empire. Young-Ja is cast adrift, her food turning increasingly bitter with grief. When a Korean rebel fighter notices her talents, however, she is whisked off to Manchuria to join a secretive sisterhood of beautiful teahouse spies. There, Young-Ja finds a new sense of belonging and starts using her abilities for the resistance. But the Imperial Army is not yet finished with her…

Decades later, Young-Ja lives alone in Seoul, withdrawn from the world until her Tokyo-born granddaughter Rinako bursts into her life with the ability to see into dreams. In cultivating a tentative bond, they confront the long-buried past in a stunning emotional climax.

As an unforgettable family perseveres in the long shadow of colonialism, Honey in the Wound transports readers to mountain forests where tiger-girls stalk, to Manchurian teahouses and opium dens where charming smiles veil secrets, and to the modern metropolises of Tokyo and Seoul where restless ghosts stir. This debut novel is a tender yet powerful multi-generational drama that shines light onto the twentieth century’s darkest corners and gives voice to those who bore witness.

Visit Jiyoung Han's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unsettling Territory"

New from Yale University Press: Unsettling Territory: The Resurgence of the Oneida Nation in the Face of Settler Backlash by Douglas Metoxen Kiel.

About the book, from the publisher:

A history of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, from Revolutionary War allies to modern resurgence

How did the Oneida Nation of northeastern Wisconsin―stripped of nearly all its reservation lands by the early twentieth century―rise to become a powerful political and economic force in Native America and the present-day Midwest? Doug Kiel traces the journey of resurgence, adaptation, and nation rebuilding of the Oneida people, who navigated federal policies and socioeconomic shifts to chart their own future, transforming adversity into opportunity.

Kiel shows how Oneidas harnessed New Deal programs to advance their goals of self-determination; how urban migration, often seen as a marker of Indigenous displacement, became a tool of community empowerment; and how the Nation has reclaimed land and authority despite predictable backlash from neighboring towns. Drawing on extensive archival records, family photographs, and oral histories―including stories from his grandmother―Kiel highlights the everyday acts that have sustained the Oneida Nation across generations and offers vital insights into the broader fight for Indigenous nationhood in twenty-first-century America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Silver Fish"

New from The Mysterious Press: The Silver Fish by Connor Martin.

About the novel, from the publisher:

In this thrilling espionage fiction debut, an American journalist in Ghana is pulled into a dangerous struggle for control of the world’s fiber optic cables.

Journalist Danielle “Dani” Moreau has spent a lifetime trying to outrun the privilege she was born into. Fresh off a personal tragedy, she lands in Ghana to uncover corruption in the local oil industry. But when she crosses paths with James Aidoo, an idealistic young Ghanaian whose father is a local populist politician, Dani remembers what drew her to journalism in the first place: you go looking for a story, but when the real story appears, it’s never the one you expected.

Dani soon finds herself chasing a scoop that involves an American operative with a violent past, a Ghanaian double agent, and a fight between the United States and China over one of the world’s most dangerous and least-known technologies: fiber optic cables. Underwater tubes as thick as a garden hose, the cables snake along the seafloor carrying the world’s information at the speed of light from one continent to another, and the fight to control them is increasingly visible on the world’s front pages. Amidst this world-changing struggle, Dani and her new associates will be forced to make deadly choices that impact each other and their own lives in ways nobody expects.

A twisty double-cross narrative, The Silver Fish opens with a spy operation going horrifically off course and takes the reader sprinting through crowded markets, darkened bars, bustling ports, and steaming jungle on the way to a startling conclusion. It will leave the reader shocked, moved, better-informed—and eagerly awaiting the next chapter in the story.

Visit Connor Martin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Connection"

New from Columbia University Press: Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans by Dan Turello.

About the book, from the publisher:

Technology gets a bad rap. It is accused of being a dehumanizing force, a chief culprit in everything from mass commercialization to environmental crisis through the potential collapse of civilization. In Connection, Dan Turello reflects on the origins and limitations of such views. He offers a philosophical and literary meditation on what technology is and can be, arguing that it provides surprising ways to strengthen and deepen what makes us human.

Putting medieval Italian poets and Renaissance artists in conversation with contemporary philosophers and pop culture, this book traces the roots of our fascination with―and aversion to―technology. Turello shows how the moments that shaped Western views of technology offer perspective on our current predicaments, as figures such as St. Francis of Assisi and Dante grappled with problems that are strikingly reminiscent of the ones we face today. Challenging nostalgia for preindustrial innocence, he demonstrates that historically technology has enabled us to develop art, philosophy, religion, and culture. Today, technology can safeguard human creativity―if we choose self-awareness and community over consumption and exploitation. Wide-ranging and inviting, Connection makes a timely case for embodied experience in the age of AI.

Visit Dan Turello's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Men Like Ours"

Coming May 12 from Bloomsbury: Men Like Ours: A Novel by Bindu Bansinath.

About the novel, from the publisher:

From brilliant new voice in fiction Bindu Bansinath, a darkly funny and moving story about death, life, and community in a South Asian suburban enclave of New Jersey.

When Matthew Pillai is found dead, slumped over the wheel of his BMW, the women of Willow Road are roped into the investigation of their friend's death.

At the center of the case are the Sharmas--Anita, a widow whose husband introduced Matthew to the neighborhood, and her boundary-pushing daughter, Leila, who called him Uncle. To Anita, who has been in freefall since her arrival in America as a young woman, Matthew's presence offered hope, including a promise of betterment for Leila. The truth, however, is far stranger.

In this darkly funny debut, the women of Willow Road find that despite their internecine quarrels, casual backstabbing, and generational feuds, in the end, there is no one to turn to but each other.

Visit Bindu Basinath's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Can We Laugh at That?"

New from the University of California Press: Can We Laugh at That?: Comedy in a Conflicted Age by Jacques Berlinerblau.

About the book, from the publisher:

Did you hear the one about the comedian who was canceled?

Comedians are no strangers to controversy or crossing the line. But some things do change. Humorists the world over are no longer simply denounced in grouchy op-eds. Now comedians are being hounded by criminal investigations and civil suits, or forced off the airwaves. They are menaced by vigilantes and religious fundamentalists. Some have been forced into exile, imprisoned, or even murdered. In the age of social media and global digital distribution, the audience is everyone, ensuring that criticism can be as vicious as it is unavoidable.

With a flair for storytelling, Jacques Berlinerblau explores the high stakes of the low blow in this darkly witty examination of American comedians such as Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Shane Gillis, and Sarah Silverman as well as humorists in France, Denmark, Zimbabwe, and Egypt.

Visit Jacques Berlinerblau's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mom Brain"

Coming April 21 from Harper Muse: Mom Brain: A Novel by Nicole Hackett.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Can a luxury resort transform her life by giving her back control? Georgia Evans thinks it sounds too good to be true. Turns out her motherly intuition isn't wrong . . . In the vein of Liane Moriarty's Nine Perfect Strangers, Mom Brain turns a discerning eye toward society's view on modern motherhood and reframes "mom brain" as a superpower.

Welcome to The Program, an immersive week-long experience set to the backdrop of the breathtaking island of O'ahu, where mothers in all stages of crisis can come to take control of their lives. It's not exactly the type of thing Georgia Evans--a busy working mother of two--would usually consider. However, still spiraling from a debacle that crowned her "internet's worst mom," she is desperate enough to try anything.

Once on the island, Georgia is quickly won over by the elegant (and somewhat enigmatic) founder of The Program, Cecilia Clements. Cecilia shows The Program's attendees how the biology of motherhood has imprisoned them. More importantly, she promises them freedom from that prison. Captivated by this possibility and the compelling science behind it, Georgia grows deeply involved with Cecilia's mission, ignoring any doubt that starts to creep in. That's the whole point of The Program, after all: you can't really trust a mom brain.

Visit Nicole Hackett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Detroit Never Left"

New from NYU Press: Detroit Never Left: Black Space, White Borders, Latino Crossings by Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagán.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new perspective on the relationship between race and space in Detroit

Detroit seemed to experience an explosive rebirth following its bankruptcy, the largest in US municipal history. It was as if the slate had been wiped clean and the color line erased in the nation’s largest Black city. Detroit Never Left explains the relation between racism and space by analyzing the ways opportunities changed in the years leading up to and following bankruptcy.

Based on a variety of data, including in-depth interviews with people who identify as “Latina/o/x” in their early 20s, ethnographic observation, and media coverage, Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagán shows how a dialectic between empty and concrete abstractions created new opportunities for outside investment, often at the expense of residents' fortunes. She reveals space is much more than a neutral backdrop; It is continually produced through abstractions that act like bordering and crossing practices to control resources and opportunities. With broad implications for analyses of space and opportunity, Detroit Never Left tackles important contradictions in the post-bankruptcy city. For example, urban youth do not want to be moved out or isolated in their barrio. Similarly, many Detroiters feel spatial changes happen “to,” instead of “for” them. Ultimately, residents’ concerns underscored broader tensions between democratic inclusion and racialized capitalism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Yesteryear"

New from Knopf: Yesteryear: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

Visit Caro Claire Burke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Selves in Doubt"

New from Oxford University Press: Selves in Doubt by Eli Hirsch.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Selves in Doubt, Eli Hirsch focuses on the importance of the first-person perspective to a normal human level of rational thought and behavior. Hirsch argues that an "I-blind" being—one who lacks the capacity to employ the first-person pronoun—could not be fully rational; nor could they acquire normal knowledge of physical reality.

The meaning of the first-person pronoun is shown to have a particular bearing on the anomalous context of split-brain patients and generalizations of that context. Hirsch critiques Parfit's suggestion that a better language might eliminate or revise the concept of personal identity and the use of the first-person pronoun, on the grounds that the first-person perspective must remain as it is because the capacity to employ the first-person pronoun is a necessary condition for a language to be suitable for rational beings. Hirsch also contends that, contrary to Lewis and Sider, it may be difficult to find any other necessary condition for a language to be suitable for rational beings.

A bold claim defended later in the book is that it is metaphysically impossible to be sane while doubting the reality of other selves. This claim leads to a discussion of skepticism, and the final chapter consists in reflections on how facing skepticism relates to facing death.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Consequences of Normal"

Coming April 28 from Lake Union: Consequences of Normal: A Novel by Elle Baade.

About the book, from the publisher:

A devoted mother fights to change hearts and minds while protecting her transgender child in a hopeful and poignant novel about family, finding your voice, and the illusion of normalcy.

Jane Zander has moved with her husband, Matt, back to his hometown of Atwood, Wisconsin, where he is the new headmaster of the prestigious Atwood Prep School. Jane hopes it will be a good fit for herself, her husband, and their children. Especially Charles, their six-year-old son, who aspires to be the next Julia Child, rejects the norms of boyhood, and insists he is a girl.

Jane only wants Charles to be happy. Matt, fearing for his own reputation in a town small enough for everyone to know everything, is in denial. And Charles is facing increasing pressure to conform. When Jane befriends Libby, an Atwood outcast, her advocacy for Charles grows even stronger. Then an unforeseen crisis changes everything, forcing a husband and wife, a family, and a community to confront their beliefs about gender, identity, and unconditional love.

Compassionate and illuminating, The Consequences of Normal explores the journey of a mother and child navigating a different but true path of their own.

Visit Elle Baade's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Feminist Freedom"

New from Cornell University Press: Feminist Freedom: An African Vision by Minna Salami.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Feminist Freedom, Minna Salami asks: What happens when we consider Africa through a feminist lens—and feminism through an African one?

Salami explores these questions through an unflinching and clear-sighted African feminist vision. From African knowledge systems to feminist thought and through postcolonial history, she reveals the matrix of power, identity, patriarchy, and imagination that animates everyday life. She tackles the hardest challenges to the African feminist movement—why feminism matters in Africa, how it relates to Black liberation and global feminism, whether "African feminist" is itself a contradiction—and confronts the backlash that both sparked and stalled its progress. Patriarchy and culture, she shows, can smother feminist fire—but language, history, and soul can reignite it.

Braiding social criticism with personal storytelling, Feminist Freedom invites readers to see our past, present, and future from the continent outward and to imagine new horizons of liberation.

Follow Minna Salami on Instagram and Threads.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last Woman of Warsaw"

New from Dutton: The Last Woman of Warsaw: A Novel by Judy Batalion.

About the book, from the publisher:

A debut novel by the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Light of Days, following two very different Jewish women in Warsaw in the late 1930s as they unexpectedly come together in their search for love, meaning, and a sense of home, and as they grapple with the storm clouds gathering around them

1938: Fanny Zelshinsky is a sophisticated, modern daughter of the city’s Jewish elite who wants nothing more than to be recognized as a legitimate artist by her family, her radical professor whom she idolizes, and the world at large. And all while she wonders if she is really going to go through with her wedding.

Meanwhile, Zosia Dror has left behind her small northeastern shtetl and religious family in the wake of violence. Part of a budding youth movement that believes in social equality and creating a Jewish homeland, all she wants is to not get distracted by the glitz and hubbub of the city—or by the keen eyes of a certain tall, handsome comrade.

When legendary artist Wanda Petrovsky—both a member of Zosia’s movement leadership and Fanny’s beloved photography professor—goes missing, the two young women are thrown together in the pursuit of the elusive firebrand. Is Wanda simply hiding, or is her disappearance connected to the rise in antisemitic laws and university practices? Fanny and Zosia may be the most unlikely of allies, but they must bridge their differences to help someone they both care for—and dodge the danger mounting around them in the process.

Visit Judy Batalion's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Legislating Against Liberties"

New from the University Press of Kansas: Legislating Against Liberties: How Congress Suppresses Constitutional Rights After Wars by Harry Blain.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sobering and eyeopening indictment that Congress has consistently been the most dangerous branch of government when it comes to protecting, and undermining, civil liberties—particularly in the wake of military conflict.

Why do wartime restrictions on civil liberties outlive their original justifications? Scholars have long argued that the blame lies with the executive branch of government. Their logic is straightforward: during war, lawmakers require (in Alexander Hamilton’s words) “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch,” so they choose to enable executive leadership. Executives promise to wield extraordinary powers temporarily, only to entrench them indefinitely. This book tests how these claims hold up in four pivotal moments in US history: the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. Ultimately, it finds them wanting.

Harry Blain argues that national legislators are decisive in sustaining postwar restrictions on civil liberties. These elected officials have formidable tools at their disposal, including powers over the rules and membership of their own institution, the funding and personnel of the executive branch, the jurisdiction of federal courts, and the priorities of state and local governments. These tools make Congress, not the executive, the primary institutional threat to civil liberties in the aftermath of war. For example, the House used its exclusion power to refuse to seat the socialist Victor Berger, disenfranchising voters in the process; Congress used its power to compel testimony during the Red Scares in an effort to discredit and humiliate their political enemies; and legislators have removed, or threatened to remove, Supreme Court jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions throughout US history.

In a time where the president and the Supreme Court are seen as the most dangerous branches of government, Legislating Against Liberties is a sober reminder that Congress has historically been at the vanguard of undermining democracy and liberty.

--Marshal Zeringue

"An Impossibility of Crows"

New from the University of Massachusetts Press: An Impossibility of Crows: A Novel by Kirsten Kaschock.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A story of mothers, monsters, and the science of longing

In this daring and evocative tale, Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone's throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations—bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land.

Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal—experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential—manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein’s monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family’s past.

A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm and self-preservation, as well as memory and myth, in a narrative as visceral and uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.

Visit Kirsten Kaschock's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Torture and American Terrorism"

New from Oxford University Press: American Torture and American Terrorism: The Myth of American Decency by Jessica Wolfendale.

About the book, from the publisher:

For most Americans the terms 'torture' and 'terrorism' evoke barbaric regimes and savage enemies, not liberal democracies dedicated to human rights and freedom, as the United States claims to be. American Torture and American Terrorism demonstrates the falsity of the claim that America is a nation fundamentally opposed to torture and terrorism. Drawing on and developing victim-centred definitions of torture and terrorism, Wolfendale reveals how these forms of violence have been embedded within American institutions since the country's founding. From the earliest days of colonization to today's prison conditions, high rates of police violence, and drone warfare, torture and terrorism have been used to dominate, attack, threaten, and control groups and individuals-primarily people of color-viewed as dangerous to white political and social domination. But this reality has been ignored and distorted, if not completely forgotten. By recognizing and naming the violence inflicted on victims of American torture and terrorism, Wolfendale provides a crucial corrective against this national amnesia.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Soldier's House"

Coming April 21 from Red Hen Press: The Soldier's House: A Novel by Helen Benedict.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A bold and compassionate novel about war’s aftermath, The Soldier’s House confronts the uneasy truths of rescue, redemption, and what it means to share a home and future with a former enemy.

In The Soldier’s House, Helen Benedict tells the story of an Iraq War veteran who saves the lives of his assassinated Iraqi interpreter’s widow, child, and mother by bringing them to his upstate New York home. For the soldier, this is a way of making amends, but the widow finds being rescued by the enemy both humiliating and compromising. This is a compassionate tale that examines whether redemption and forgiveness are even possible in the wake of war. In light of the increasing displacement of people all over the world, The Soldier’s House is particularly timely and poignant.

Visit Helen Benedict's website.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

Q&A with Helen Benedict.

The Page 69 Test: The Good Deed.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Soviet Rock on Screen"

New from the University of Washington Press: Soviet Rock on Screen: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of a Film Genre by Rita Safariants.

About the book, from the publisher:

As the Iron Curtain fell and Cold War suspicions thickened in the second half of the twentieth century, the quintessentially American genre of rock and roll, seen as a potent symbol and product of an enemy ideology, quickly became a clandestine import in the USSR. The Soviet underground embraced the forbidden sounds, despite official propaganda that called rock stars social parasites and corrupting sluggards. Contrary to the regime’s desires, the genre grew in popularity until it could no longer be ignored. In the Soviet Union’s last decade, a flailing film industry, controlled by and dependent on an increasingly unstable central government, seized on the rock star as a central figure—and the Soviet rock film was born.

In Soviet Rock on Screen, Rita Safariants chronicles the birth, life, death, and resurrection of a genre that rapidly became one of the most readily recognized cultural signifiers of the perestroika era and which continues to reflect and codify Russian culture. During their initial heyday in the 1980s, rock films were influenced by and encouraged the cultural shifts of perestroika and the incipient political storm. Today, Safariants argues, the reemergence and reconfiguration of the genre indicates the extent to which Soviet-era cultural emblems inform Russian national identity and obliquely support the current political repression under Putin.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last Labyrinth"

New from 47North: The Last Labyrinth by Gwendolyn Womack.

About the novel, from the publisher:

From USA Today bestselling author Gwendolyn Womack comes a thrilling and romantic science fiction adventure about a musician who travels back to the 1800s on the currents of sound and falls for an earl as the two must decode the secrets of time and music to save both of their futures.

Magellan Brighton may be a musical prodigy with limitless talent, but her soul yearns for something more than playing in concert halls or at weddings. As the world is on the brink of a catastrophic polar shift, she mysteriously vanishes while playing an ancient organ and awakens in 1829. The answers to why lie in a lost diary belonging to Gwynedd, Merlin’s forgotten twin sister.

Rhys Sherwood, the dashing and brooding Earl of Liron, is still haunted by the memory of his father, a scientist and historian who was killed in an experiment gone wrong. When Rhys stumbles upon a strange woman at the center of his estate’s labyrinth, her arrival couldn’t have come at a worse time, interrupting an important house party he’d planned to select his future wife.

Yet the two find themselves inexplicably drawn to each other, and when they discover that Magellan’s musical gifts and the diary are connected, they must uncover its secrets and connection to the key to saving the world. From candlelit medieval abbeys to opulent Renaissance courts in a perilous journey through the past to find the key, Magellan must risk everything and face the sinister forces who want the key for themselves.

Visit Gwendolyn Womack's website.

Writers Read: Gwendolyn Womack (May 2015).

My Book, The Movie: The Memory Painter.

The Page 69 Test: The Memory Painter.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Saving Apartheid"

New from Columbia University Press: Saving Apartheid: White Internationalism at the End of the Cold War by Augusta Dell'Omo.

About the book, from the publisher:

During the 1980s, as global antiapartheid sentiment grew, an international coalition of far-right activists arose to preserve racial hierarchy in South Africa and beyond. This groundbreaking book tells the story of how a transatlantic pro-apartheid movement attempted to defend white rule in South Africa―and forged enduring links between global conservatism and white power.

By mapping an international network of white supremacist organizations, Augusta Dell’Omo reveals a fundamental shift in far-right organizing in response to changing geopolitical realities. The pro-apartheid movement brought together a range of figures who sought to influence the conservative Western governments they saw as allies. As antiapartheid activism grew, the South African regime crumbled, and the post–Cold War order took shape, apartheid’s defenders adapted their ideology for a colorblind, human rights–centric, and neoliberal world. Their successes and failures shaped the antistatist trajectory of white supremacist organizing in the 1990s and beyond, planting the seeds for a global resurgence of the far right.

Saving Apartheid ranges from Reagan’s Oval Office to South Africa’s bantustans and from white women’s grassroots organizing to evangelical broadcasting, illuminating how an unlikely coalition reimagined white supremacy. Uncovering the surprising influence of apartheid’s defenders, this book offers a prehistory of the present.

Visit Augusta Dell'Omo's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"While You Were Seething"

Coming soon from St. Martin's Griffin: While You Were Seething: A Novel by Charlotte Stein.

About the novel, from the publisher:

The road to love is bumpy in Charlotte Stein’s While You Were Seething― a sexy and heartwarming contemporary romance filled with fake dating hijinks, delicious forced proximity, and top tier banter.

Daisy Emmett has been enemies with famous romance author Caleb Miller since they were in college together, and time hasn’t lessened their mutual loathing. So when she agrees to manoeuvre him through a PR disaster of his own making, she knows it’s not going to be easy. She just doesn’t realise how not easy until they somehow end up trapped in the same truck, on an endless road trip from one book tour stop to another, bantering and butting heads along the way.

Then, even more horrifying: people appear to be mistaking her for the woman he dedicates all his books to. The love of his life, his adored beloved―the one who doesn’t actually exist. Now they’re trapped into pretending she does and that Daisy is her, each fake kiss and phoney embrace ratcheting up the tension to the point where enemies suddenly seems a lot closer to lovers than either of them would like.

Or so they’re telling themselves.

But sometimes it’s hard to be sure, when seething turns into something so much more…

Visit Charlotte Stein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Asianism and the Fall of Empire"

New from the University of California Press: Asianism and the Fall of Empire: India's Road to Freedom by Mithi Mukherjee.

About the book, from the publisher:

Offering a new global perspective on modern Indian history, Asianism and the Fall of Empire identifies the rise of Asianism in the early twentieth century as the origin and primary driving force of resistance movements that brought down the British Empire. Mithi Mukherjee ties together into a single sweeping narrative two contrasting, conflicting forms of anticolonialism: the emergence of nonviolent resistance movement under Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa and the militant movement culminating in the war on British India by the Indian National Army under Bose in alliance with the Japanese army. Asia emerges in this breakthrough retelling not as an inert geographical category, but instead as a singular agent of change in modern world history.

Visit Mithi Mukherjee's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In the Great Quiet"

New from Lake Union: In the Great Quiet: A Novel by Laura Vogt.

About the book, from the publisher:

A pioneer unwaveringly endures the Oklahoma frontier in an epic adventure about a woman haunted by secrets and searching for home.

A cannon booms at high noon, and the race begins in the Oklahoma land rush of 1893.

Amid the crowd is Minnie Hoopes. Tenacious and fiercely independent, she is determined to endure the brutal frontier and create a life of her own. Guarding her solitude, she distances herself from bordering homesteaders and finds peace under the starry nights of the vast frontier. But this is outlaw country, and Minnie soon has the blood of two gunfighters on her hands. After a renegade outlaw named Stot discovers her secrets, she forms an unlikely friendship with him. With each passing season, Minnie’s past grows more haunting and threatens the future she has risked everything to build. Minnie raced into the Wild West alone, but her grandest journey in the frontier wilderness is one she never saw coming.

Based on the true story of the author’s great-great-grandparents, this sweeping and transportive survival story explores a woman’s connection with the land, her reconciliation with the past, and her elemental search for home against all odds.

Settle in, I’ve stories to tell.

Visit Laura Vogt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism by Rachel Silveri.

About the book, from the publisher:

How artists of interwar Paris created an “art of living,” treating their daily lives as an aesthetic, ethical, and creative practice.

With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris, Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life, an ambition long regarded as foundational to the European historical avant-gardes. She reveals how many early twentieth-century artists saw their own everyday lives—their bodies, identities, and relationships—as a type of creative material and a central component to their avant-garde practice. These artists abandoned traditional forms of artmaking and venues of art viewing, instead aspiring to integrate art with everyday life, creating an “art of living.”

Considering Tristan Tzara’s performances of Dadaist identity, Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, Silveri offers a new narrative about how the artists of interwar Paris developed experiential life practices that resisted dominant forms of “lifestyle” and normative discourses surrounding gender, ethnicity, and office work. This book argues that ethical questions of “How should I live?” and “How should I relate to others?” were as important to the avant-garde as politics, and that aspirations to change the world played out in daily practices of self-making.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Radiant Dark"

Coming April 28 from SJP Lit: The Radiant Dark: A Novel by Alexandra Oliva.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Arrival meets Wild Dark Shore in this captivating novel that follows a family over fifty years—a bold and compassionate exploration of the universe around us and what it truly means to be human.

“The Radiant Dark is incandescent.” —Sarah Jessica Parker

It’s March 1980, and Carol Girard and her husband are living an ordinary life in a small town in the Adirondacks. They have just had their first child, and though Carol is struggling with the challenges of new motherhood, her future seems clear. Until something extraordinary happens: an inexplicable flickering of light in the sky, which is ultimately determined to be communication from intelligent life on another planet. But these beings are eleven light-years away, and nothing is known about them other than the fact that they seem to know we exist too. And so begins a decades-long exchange of messages with this mysterious, faraway civilization.

As humanity reels from a shifting understanding of its place in the universe, we follow the stories of the Girard family: Carol, whose fascination with this other life sparks a desperate search for spiritual meaning; Michael, her loyal son, who finds solace not in the stars above his head but in the ground beneath his feet; and Ro, Carol’s bright and ambitious daughter, whose childhood goal to work in interstellar communication will evolve into something far grander.

Tracing five decades of love, loss, ambition, and self-discovery, The Radiant Dark is a stunning examination of a family navigating their lives with the knowledge that we are not alone.

Visit Alexandra Oliva's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Last One.

Coffee with a Canine: Alexandra Oliva & Codex.

The Page 69 Test: Forget Me Not.

Q&A with Alexandra Oliva.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie"

New from The Ohio State University Press: Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric by Atilla Hallsby.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie, Atilla Hallsby argues that secrets play a pivotal role in organizing political discourse in the United States. Hallsby takes up contemporary case studies—ranging from the Valerie Plame scandal during the George W. Bush presidency, to the use of Saul Alinsky’s name as a partisan codeword for politicizing Obama’s Blackness, to Chelsea Manning’s public naming and outing—to show how dramatic revelations increasingly fail to produce meaningful change and instead reproduce entrenched racial, gendered, and colonial hierarchies.

The core feature of these interlinked moments of crisis is the secret: a rhetorical patterning of political life organized by specific forms, each one lending a familiar shape to the shadows of American empire. These forms, theorized here as tropes, connect decades of secrets, linking the George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror to the Trump-era reemergence of “deep state” conspiracy theories. As an extension of secrecy and surveillance studies, and with the aim of attaining a more accountable and just form of US governmentality, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie explains how still-unfolding political realities in the United States emerged, transformed, and regenerate.

Visit Atilla Hallsby's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Two Truths and a Lie"

Coming April 7 from Thomas & Mercer: Two Truths and a Lie: A Thriller by Mark Stevens.

About the novel, from the publisher:

In a taut, haunting follow-up to No Lie Lasts Forever, reporter Flynn Martin gets ensnared in a copycat killer’s game where winning means solving a crime―and losing could cost her everything.

Lambasted for a tragedy caught live on camera, then lauded for her help capturing the elusive PDQ, a serial killer, Flynn Martin’s career has reached new heights. But now, the TV journalist and mother has much further to fall. And someone wants to push her over the edge.

PDQ is behind bars, for life and then some, but someone on the outside has picked up the killer’s mantle. Flynn is neck-deep in an investigation when the copycat emerges, targeting her sources and delivering cryptic messages. It’s clear that Flynn’s stories are getting deadlier. This one proves no exception.

A family of four has gone missing, leaving behind ties to New Hope Church more tangled than they appear. The dangerous web rivals the threat in Flynn’s personal life. And it’s up to her to unravel each knot.

Scandal. Conspiracy. Murder. Flynn hardly knows where to begin―and if her stalker has their way, she might not live to see the end.

Visit Mark Stevens's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Fireballer.

Q&A with Mark Stevens.

My Book, The Movie: The Fireballer.

Writers Read: Mark Stevens (June 2025).

The Page 69 Test: No Lie Lasts Forever.

My Book, The Movie: No Lie Lasts Forever.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Vital Moments"

New from Oxford University Press: Vital Moments: Life, Matter, and Time in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Thomas Allen.

About the book, from the publisher:

The environmental and political crises humanity faces today have given rise to influential new theories of life, matter, and time. Vitalism, a controversial term describing the ideas of philosophers from Lucretius to Bergson, provides a common intellectual foundation linking many of the contemporary efforts to reconstruct our understanding of nonhuman agency and the place of humanity in the world.

Vital Moments argues that it is time to critically assess neovitalism's potential as a discourse of hope in light of the specific ways in which this potential has been shaped by the genealogy of vitalist perspectives. The emergence of modern vitalist representational forms in the nineteenth century was closely tied to colonialist projects of resource extraction and bioprospecting. Literary narratives linked political liberalism to a temporal structure in which life could be defined and controlled for the benefit of a privileged class. Romances of nonhuman agency idealized the democratic promise of life's plenitude even as chattel slavery and industrialization consigned many human beings to the status of things. Meanwhile, more subversive forms of vitalist narrative unsettled the hierarchy of animate and inanimate being.

These errant vitalisms envision other modes of human being--or being human--that lend themselves to more just and equitable possibilities of existence within the world's matrix of matter and time. By tracing the transformations of vitalist representational forms from the early nineteenth century to the present, Vital Moments seeks to recuperate the potential of thi

--Marshal Zeringue

"Everything Has Happened"

Coming April 28 from Crooked Lane Books: Everything Has Happened: A Novel by T. Greenwood.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A disappearance from the past echoes in the future in this ambitious and wrenching mystery, perfect for readers of The God of the Woods.

In 1986, a child disappeared. Nearly forty years later, a tip line rings.

It’s been almost four decades since Edie Marshall’s little brother, Charlie, vanished on his walk home from day camp. After the case went cold, Edie—who had once dreamed of pursuing a life beyond the confines of her small Vermont town—never left, her dreams disappearing right along with Charlie. In her fifties now, she teaches at her old high school and has returned to her childhood home to care for her ailing mother.

When the long-dormant tip line set up for Charlie rings for the first time in years, Edie assumes it’s a wrong number—but on the other end is Jericho Jenkins, the only person of interest ever identified in the investigation. Jericho believes he’s found something of Charlie’s on his property, and with this news, all the pain and uncertainty of that summer rushes back to Edie, including vivid memories of her best friend, Trill: their shared secrets and the devastating lie Edie told that could have changed everything.

Now Jericho is under suspicion again, Trill is coming home, and her mother’s hope is renewed. Edie’s in the same place with the same people as when Charlie first vanished, but somehow everything is different now, and maybe this time they can discover the truth.

Everything Has Happened is not only a compelling mystery of a missing child but a story of forbidden young love, a deeply moving novel for readers of Rebecca Makkai and Angie Kim.

Visit Tammy Greenwood's website.

My Book, The Movie: Rust and Stardust.

The Page 69 Test: Rust and Stardust.

Writers Read: T. Greenwood (August 2019).

The Page 69 Test: Keeping Lucy.

My Book, The Movie: Keeping Lucy.

Q&A with T. Greenwood.

The Page 69 Test: Such a Pretty Girl.

My Book, The Movie: The Still Point.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Moys of New York and Shanghai"

New from the University of California Press: The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution by Charlotte Brooks.

About the book, from the publisher:

The most extraordinary family you’ve never heard of.

Born to Chinese immigrant parents, the Moy siblings grew up in an America that questioned their citizenship and denied their equality. Sophisticated and self-consciously modern, they challenged limitations and stereotypes in the United States and sought new opportunities in China’s tumultuous republic. Sometimes the risks they took paid off, but their occasional recklessness also led to infidelity, divorce, bankruptcy, and worse. Those in China faced pressure to collaborate with Japanese occupiers, making choices that had serious consequences for their siblings in the United States.

Charlotte Brooks’s gripping tale follows the family back and forth across the Pacific and through two world wars, China’s Nationalist and Communist revolutions, and the Cold War—events that the siblings and their spouses helped shape. The Moys’ incredible story offers a kaleidoscopic view of an entire generation’s struggle for acceptance and belonging.

Follow Charlotte Brooks on Instagram.

The Page 99 Test: Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Love Is an Algorithm"

New from Park Row Books: Love Is an Algorithm: A Novel by Laura Brooke Robson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Take the uncertainty out of love with Pattern, it's more than just a dating app!

Eve wants to make music that's fueled by love, passion, and rage (feelings!). She trusts her gut and her friends and in no way wants to rely on technology, let alone AI, to tell her how she feels. Danny is anxious—about his dad, his dating life, his coffee order (why is it twelve dollars?), and about the dating app he helped create, which seems determined to serve him terrible matches.

When Eve and Danny start dating, it feels like the solution to all of Danny’s worries—except when it doesn’t. Is she happy? Should he be doing more? Or less? This becomes the catalyst for a revolutionary new version of Danny’s app that promises to quantify relationship health and potential, helping users understand what's really going on. Problem solved!

As Pattern and Bug, the ever—so—friendly AI assistant, catch fire, users everywhere begin outsourcing major life decisions to Danny’s algorithms. But as Danny reckons with his newfound success, Eve—whose career relies on her ability to write her emotions into song—grows increasingly skeptical of the app’s impact on genuine connection. Their relationship becomes the ultimate modern experiment: How do you fall and stay in love in the digital age?

Visit Laura Brooke Robson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reluctant Abolitionists"

New from Cambridge University Press: Reluctant Abolitionists: Britain and the End of the Colonial Death Penalty by James M. Campbell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Britain abolished the death penalty for murder in 1965, but many of Britain's last colonies retained capital murder laws until the 1990s. In this book, James M. Campbell presents the first history of the death sentences imposed under British colonial rule in the late twentieth century; the decision-making processes that determined if condemned prisoners lived or died; and the diverse paths to death penalty abolition across the empire. Based on a rich archive of recently released government records, as well as legislative debates, court papers, newspapers and autobiographies, Reluctant Abolitionists examines connections between the death penalty, British politics, decolonisation and the rise of international abolitionist movements. Through analysis of murder trials, clemency appeals, executions and legal reforms across more than 30 British colonies, it reveals the limits of British opposition to the death penalty and the enduring connections between capital punishment and empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Quarter Queen"

New from Ballantine Books: The Quarter Queen: A Novel by Kayla Hardy.

About the book, from the publisher:

A Voodoo witch must navigate a magically and racially divided nineteenth-century New Orleans to save her mother—and the soul of the city itself—in this lush debut novel inspired by the life of Marie Laveau.

In 1843 New Orleans, the reigning Voodoo queen is Marie Laveau, feared by her enemies and followers alike. Her daughter, Marie "Ree" Laveau the Second, is everything her cutthroat and principled mother is not—spoiled and entitled, with a wickedly rebellious streak—and defies her mother at every turn. But Ree’s world is turned upside down when she finds Marie comatose in the bayou, cursed by exiled Voodoo king Jon the Conjurer—Marie’s former teacher, lover, and greatest enemy.

As Marie hovers on the brink of death, Ree races to uncover the secrets of her mother’s life in search of a cure and gradually uncovers a web of alliances, dangers, and deception. What’s worse, Henryk Broussard, Ree’s long-missing childhood best friend, returns as a witch hunter of the Church, tasked with investigating her. With so many enemies circling, including a puritanical-minded Brotherhood of alchemists and the slave-holding mayor of the city, Ree must confront the past and face her mother’s demons that have now become her own—or die trying.

Told in alternating timelines between Ree in the present and Marie’s rise to power twenty-five years earlier, The Quarter Queen is an intimate yet epic portrait of a mother and daughter who have struggled all their lives to understand one another, and a captivating exploration of racism, family, and womanhood.

Visit Kayla Hardy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Instrumental Indians"

New from University of Pennsylvania Press: Instrumental Indians: John Dewey and Indigenous Schools by Matthew Villeneuve.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of how settler colonialism shaped the thinking of America’s leading philosopher of democracy and education, John Dewey

John Dewey is regarded as a towering figure in the history of American philosophy, widely remembered by educators as an advocate for experiential and child-centered pedagogy, as evidenced by the mantra “learning by doing.” At first blush, such ideas appear to a share strong resonance with Indigenous ways of teaching and learning. After all, Native educators have long emphasized the importance of hands-on learning drawn from close relationships to place. This resemblance begs the question: What might Dewey have learned from Indigenous people?

Instrumental Indians shows that, despite such affinities, Dewey wrote a great deal about Indians as he imagined them rather than as they are. He did so through the lens of the frontier discourse, a pervasive cultural mythology that represented Indigenous people as savage foils and background actors in the settlement of a frontier across North America. Consequently, Dewey’s imagined Indians became both instrumental and instrumentalized in his philosophy, a paradox that reduced Indigenous people to mere evidence for his pragmatism rather than as a contemporary constituency who might have benefited from its application. By instrumentalizing Indians, Dewey’s contributions to American philosophy were made under the shadow of US settler colonialism.

As Matthew Villeneuve demonstrates, Dewey’s disregard for his Indigenous contemporaries was far from harmless. His career coincided with the height of the federal Indian boarding school system, an era when Native families were subjected to the violence of imposed schooling. Where Dewey failed to offer a critique of such antidemocratic schools, a contemporary of his, Oneida philosopher of education Laura Cornelius, succeeded. In 1920, Cornelius offered an Indigenous theory of democracy and education, an alternative the US government failed to pursue. In Instrumental Indians, Villeneuve provides the first comprehensive account of Dewey’s relationship to Indigenous people―one that challenges the philosopher’s place in the canon of democratic education.

Visit Matt Villeneuve's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wilderness Hacks"

New from Knopf Books for Young Readers: Wilderness Hacks by Joslin Brorsen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hatchet meets Survivor in this high-action, humor-filled middle grade adventure about two kids stranded in the wilderness, whose annoyance with each other rivals the roaring rapids and ferocious predators they must face.

12-year-old Sadie Hahn didn’t plan to eat grubs on camera to win a contest. And she definitely didn’t plan to win first prize—a guest appearance on a Youtube show hosted by America’s favorite 13-year-old survivalist Radley Shaw. But she’ll do anything to cheer up her little brother Silas, who’s too young to qualify.

Rad has millions of followers and exactly zero real-life friends, so the contest is a great chance for him to hang out with kids his own age. But it’s hate-at-first-sight when Silas throws a wrench in his plan and Sadie decides Rad is just a clueless poser who doesn’t know the first thing about survival.

Disaster strikes when their scripted rafting trip turns into a real fight for survival. Lost in the mountains, Rad and Sadie must find shelter, build a fire, forage for food and try not to become food for a hungry predator. But can they stop bickering long enough to hack it in the wilderness? And will that be enough to keep them alive?

Visit Joslin Brorsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Economy of Anonymity"

New from Stanford University Press: The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification by Hector Amaya.

About the book, from the publisher:

We use avatars to play videogames. We use pseudonyms on social media. We use VPNs to mask our identities and activities. In the digital realm, anonymity is everywhere, a persistent option for those who wish to hide, experiment, and deceive. But we are anonymous in more contexts than the digital. In urban settings, we routinely experience the anonymity of the crowd, and routinely use anonymity to participate in political life and social protests. Anonymity matters. This book is a wager that we can learn much about society, humanity, and power by analyzing the structural tensions and possibilities of anonymity, and by analyzing how the economy of anonymity is changing in a modernity defined by computation. While many have explored the connections between surveillance, datafication, and privacy, relatively little has been done to theorize anonymity and its critical role in our lives. This book rebalances our intellectual investments by expanding our understandings of anonymity. Putting the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Bernhard Siegert into conversation, Hector Amaya examines the contours of anonymity in different social domains—in relationship to individuals, institutions, and contexts; to epistemology and ontology; and to history and society. As the book shows, anonymity entails paradoxical possibilities—sometimes anonymity is experienced as freedom and other times as powerlessness, or subjugation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Han"

New from Algonquin Books: American Han: A Novel by Lisa Lee.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, Jane Kim and her brother, Kevin, dutifully embodied the model minority myth as their parents demanded: both stellar tennis players and academically gifted, they worked hard to make their parents proud. Jane went on to law school. Kevin came close to becoming a professional tennis player. But where they started is nowhere near where they have ended up: Jane has stopped going to her law school classes, and Kevin, now a policeman, has become increasingly distant. Their parents, each on their own path toward the elusive American Dream (their mother hell-bent on having the perfect house and the perfect family, their father obsessed with working his way up from one successful business to the next), don’t want to see the family unraveling. When Kevin goes missing, no one recognizes his absence as the warning sign it is until it erupts, forcing them all to come to terms with their past and present selves in a country that isn’t all it promised it would be.

Both deeply serious and wickedly funny, American Han is a profound story about striving and assimilation, difficult love, and family fidelity. A searing portrait that challenges assumptions about the immigrant experience, Lisa Lee’s debut introduces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.

Visit Lisa Lee's website.

--Marshal Zeringue