"How the Cold War Broke the News"

New from Polity: How the Cold War Broke the News: The Surprising Roots of Journalism's Decline by Barbie Zelizer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Most of us would agree that American journalism has problems. Rushed reporting and thin coverage. Timidity in the face of adversity. Polarized perspectives and euphemistic language. Groupthink about complicated events.

While much blame has been levelled at big tech, Barbie Zelizer traces the decline of American journalism to the Cold War. She makes the bold claim that Cold War-era practices are to blame for the state of journalism today, undermining a once trusted media environment. This groundbreaking book shows how journalism's current problems can be traced back to customs developed over half a century ago and demonstrates how they've continued to upend journalism, journalists and the news ever since.

We all need a news environment that works. This book tells us why it doesn't and offers a plan to make it better. If our news is better, so is our democracy. And, if our democracy is better, we may be too.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Uninvited"

New from Delacorte Press: The Uninvited by Nancy Banks.

About the book, from the publisher:

A YA paranormal fantasy about vampires in the Paris underground, where a young woman's bohemian dream turns into a chilling nightmare. Now her survival hinges on bringing to light the city's darkest and deepest secrets.

When 17-year-old Tosh Reeves moves from Portland, Oregon to Paris, it’s a dream come to life. The city embraces her with its street-life, iconic architecture, and infinite gustatory delights. There’s even a charming expat boy, Nick, who introduces her to sights tourists never see.

From medieval catacombs to the viciously competitive street art scene, Tosh’s immersion in Paris makes her feel wholly alive in a way she’s never before experienced. She belongs.

But when a series of brutal vampiric attacks creeps closer to her new circle of bohemian friends, Tosh will confront the darker side of her beloved Paris, and learn how deeply monsters can strike at a young woman’s power and heart.

Visit Nancy Banks's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Finding Mr. Perfect"

New from Rutgers University Press: Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race by Min Joo Lee.

About the book, from the publisher:

Finding Mr. Perfect explores the romantic relationships between Korean men and women who were inspired by romantic Korean televisual depictions of Korean masculinity to travel to Korea as tourists. Author Min Joo Lee argues that disparate racialized erotic desires of Korean pop culture fans, foreign tourists to Korea, Korean men, and the Korean nation converge to configure the interracial and transnational relationships between these tourists and Korean men. Lee observes how racial prejudices are developed and manifested through interracial and transnational intimate desires and encounters. This book is the first to examine the interracial relationships between Hallyu tourists and Korean men. Furthermore, it is the first to analyze Korea as a popular romance tourist destination for heterosexual women. Finding Mr. Perfect illuminates South Korean popular culture’s transnational fandom and tourism as a global phenomenon where fantasies and realities converge to have a tangible impact on individual lives.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Whispers of Ink and Starlight"

Coming March 10 from Lake Union: Whispers of Ink and Starlight: A Novel by Garrett Curbow.

About the book, from the publisher:

A spellbinding tale of forbidden love and the power of words, where a girl must choose between the life written for her and the future she dares to imagine.

In a small Georgia town, Nelle’s life has been carefully scripted by her creator and captor, the reclusive author Wallace Quill. Born from ink and imagination, every breath she takes is dictated by his pen. But on a star-studded Fourth of July night, she meets James—a young man with dreams as vivid as the fireworks above them—and suddenly, the unwritten becomes possible.

As Nelle and James fall deeply in love, they embark on a breathtaking journey across Europe, each new experience a defiant stroke against the words that bind her. But freedom has a price. With every mile they travel, the ink in Nelle’s veins threatens to rewrite their story. In a world where every moment could be her last, Nelle and James must fight to write their own happily ever after—before the final page turns.

Visit Garrett Curbow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Trust Fall"

New from the University of California Press: Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us by Sarah Mosseri.

About the book, from the publisher:

How do millions of Americans navigate today’s demanding and unpredictable work terrain without the protection of strong labor laws, unions, or a reliable social safety net? They turn to trusted colleagues and supervisors to help find a way through the chaos. But is interpersonal trust truly a solution, or just another source of vulnerability?

In Trust Fall, Sarah Mosseri delves into the intricate web of workplace trust. Drawing on years of immersive research across diverse industries—from bustling restaurants and tech startups to marketing agencies and ride-hail circuits—she uncovers how the very bonds workers rely on to manage instability and insecurity often deepen their exposure to risk and exploitation.

Blending vivid storytelling with sharp sociological insight, Trust Fall reveals the seduction and costs of workplace trust. It gives readers the language to recognize and challenge the unspoken bargains workers make to belong, thrive, and survive in today’s precarious labor landscape.

Visit Sarah Mosseri's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Love & Other Monsters"

Coming April 7 from Godine: Love & Other Monsters: A Novel by Emily Franklin.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the stormy, scandalous summer of 1816, daring eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont changed the course of literature forever. But then—unlike her stepsister Mary Shelley—she was forgotten, until now.

During the dangerous storms of The Year Without Summer, a group of famous young writers gathered at a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her fiery fiancé Percy Shelley, the famously promiscuous Lord Byron, and John Polidori, his sexually tormented personal physician. At the group’s center was Claire Clairmont, Mary’s impressionable, clever, and dangerously loyal stepsister.

Those months of desire, betrayal, and creative passion gave the world the works of Frankenstein, the modern vampire, and the mythic image of these Romantic literary giants. In this intense and propulsive story of love, lust, art and betrayal Claire tells her story, trying to solve the mystery of why she was all but erased from history.

Claire—herself a writer—is desperate to free herself from the uncomfortable role she plays in her sister’s marriage in London. Fueled by Jane Austin’s romantic novels, and believing love offers freedom, Claire begins an affair with celebrity Lord Byron and convinces Mary and Shelley to follow him to Switzerland.

With the threat of paparazzi lurking nearby, Claire’s intimate connection to each member of the celebrity group grows more complex. Her journey of self-discovery leads her to document everyone’s secrets in her journal, and when climate disaster causes food shortages, Claire learns to forage, determined to prove her worth in a world built by and created for men.

The real Claire Clairmont poured her love, life, and razor-sharp wit into her pages, yet her journal from 1816 is curiously missing and each member of the group had a reason to take it.

With searing relevance to our here and now—of celebrity worship, climate disaster, of complicated femininity, Love & Other Monsters is the untold origin story of Frankenstein, a feminist reckoning of sisters, survival, and the creation of monsters—both those on the page and those who walk among us.

Visit Emily Franklin's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Lioness of Boston.

Q&A with Emily Franklin.

My Book, The Movie: The Lioness of Boston.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mixed-Blood Histories"

New from the University of Minnesota Press: Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest by Jameson R. Sweet.

About the book, from the publisher:

An unprecedented study that puts mixed-ancestry Native Americans back into the heart of Indigenous history

Historical accounts tend to neglect mixed-ancestry Native Americans: racially and legally differentiated from nonmixed Indigenous people by U.S. government policy, their lives have continually been treated as peripheral to Indigenous societies. Mixed-Blood Histories intervenes in this erasure. Using legal, linguistic, and family-historical methods, Jameson R. Sweet writes mixed-ancestry Dakota individuals back into tribal histories, illuminating the importance of mixed ancestry in shaping and understanding Native and non-Native America from the nineteenth century through today.

When the U.S. government designated mixed-ancestry Indians as a group separate from both Indians and white Americans—a distinction born out of the perception that they were uniquely assimilable as well as manipulable intermediate figures—they were afforded rights under U.S. law unavailable to other Indigenous people, albeit inconsistently, which included citizenship and the rights to vote, serve in public office, testify in court, and buy and sell land. Focusing on key figures and pivotal “mixed-blood histories” for the Dakota nation, Sweet argues that in most cases, they importantly remained Indians and full participants in Indigenous culture and society. In some cases, they were influential actors in establishing reservations and negotiating sovereign treaties with the U.S. government.

Culminating in a pivotal reexamination of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, Mixed-Blood Histories brings greater diversity and complexity to existing understandings of Dakota kinship, culture, and language while offering insights into the solidification of racial categories and hierarchies in the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions"

Coming March 3 from Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books: Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions by Ahmad Saber.

About the book, from the publisher:

An intensely brave, beautifully honest, and wryly funny story about a gay Muslim teen who has to choose between being true to himself or his faith—and his realization that maybe they aren’t as separate as he thought.

Ramin Abbas has spent his whole life obeying his parents, his Imam, and, of course, Allah—no questions asked. But when he starts crushing on the ridiculously handsome captain of the soccer team, so many things he’d always been so sure about are becoming questions:

1. Music is haram. But what if the Wicked soundtrack is the only thing keeping you sane because you’re being forced to play on the soccer team? With Captain Handsome?!

2. A boy crush is double haram, and Ramin’s parents will never accept it. But can he really be the only Muslim on Earth who feels this way?

3. Allah is merciful and makes no mistakes. Then isn’t Ramin just the way Allah intended him to be?

And so why should living your truth but losing everything—or living a lie and losing yourself—have to be a choice?!

Visit Ahmad Saber's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"We Are Internationalists"

New from the University of California Press: We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation by Martha Biondi.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores forgotten solidarity with African liberation struggles through the life of Black Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt.

For many civil rights activists, the Vietnam War brought the dangers of US imperialism and the global nature of antiracist struggle into sharp relief. Martha Biondi tells the story of one such group of activists who built an internationalist movement in Chicago committed to liberation everywhere but especially to ending colonialism and apartheid in Africa.

Among their leaders was Prexy Nesbitt. Steeped from an early age in stories of Garveyism and labor militancy, Nesbitt was powerfully influenced by his encounters with the exiled African radicals he met in Dar es Salaam, London, and across the United States. Operating domestically and abroad, Nesbitt's cohort worked closely with opponents of Portuguese and white minority rule in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. Rather than promoting a US conception of Black self-determination, they took ideas from African anticolonial leaders and injected them into US foreign policy debates.

The biography of a man but even more so of a movement, We Are Internationalists reveals the underappreciated influence of a transformative Black solidarity project.

--Marshal Zeringue

"As Far as She Knew"

Coming April 7 from Mindy's Book Studio: As Far as She Knew by Diana Awad.

About the book, from the publisher:

“A masterful exploration of marriage, secrets, and identity that will leave you questioning how well you really know those closest to you. Diana Awad crafts a thriller that is both heart-stopping and heartbreaking.”―Mindy Kaling

A devoted wife and mother unravels her late husband’s secret life in an emotional and suspenseful novel about betrayal, lies, love, and loss.

For twenty-three years, Amira Abadi believed she had a strong, loving marriage. But when her husband, Ali, dies suddenly, that certainty shatters with the discovery of a house she never knew existed. As whispers of betrayal spread through their tight-knit Arab American community, Amira refuses to let others define her husband’s legacy―or her path forward.

Diving into an investigation of Ali’s final days, Amira uncovers decades-old secrets that challenge everything she thought she knew. With her children struggling to process their father’s death, Amira must balance protecting her family with pursuing the truth, even as each revelation brings her closer to danger.

As Amira peels back layers of lies, she discovers that the greatest mystery isn’t what her husband was hiding―it’s how far she’ll go to uncover the truth.

Visit Diana Awad's website.

--Marshal Zeringue