"The Pearl Farmers"

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

About the novel, from the publisher:

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

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

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

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

Visit Stacey Gordon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Imagined Environments"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

Visit Carlos Alonso Nugent's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Nightshade"

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

About the novel, from the publisher:

Secrets are the deadliest poison...

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

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

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

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

Visit Jill Johnson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Couple with the Pitchfork"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Tiger's Mouth"

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

About the novel, from the publisher:

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

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

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

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

Visit Lucy Tan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Kennedy’s Only Hero"

New from PublicAffairs: Kennedy’s Only Hero: How JFK’s Obsession with Winston Churchill Defined His Presidency by Joel Nelson.

About the book, from the publisher:

The surprising story of how John F. Kennedy’s obsession with Winston Churchill defined his life, transformed his politics, and helped elevate him to the nation’s highest office.

Winston Churchill remains one of the modern age’s most revered leaders. His life has been the subject of decades of mythmaking and scrutiny, and yet few know the powerful sway he had over another twentieth-century political icon―John F. Kennedy. Drawing on deep wells of unpublished archival material, Kennedy's Only Hero uncovers Kennedy’s obsession with Churchill, whose career, policies, writings, and even daily habits profoundly shaped the future president.

Kennedy discovered Churchill’s books as a teenager and by his early twenties had become an unswerving believer in his brilliance. Under Churchill’s influence, Kennedy rejected his own youthful isolationism and adopted the approach to national and international politics that propelled him to the presidency. Although they would not meet until late in their lives, Churchill’s influence on Kennedy’s campaign tactics, speeches, and worldview was overwhelming. Kennedy’s conviction in the power of peace through strength, his faith in summits, his understanding of the importance of rhetoric, and his deep commitment to service and global engagement―all came from Churchill.

Kennedy's Only Hero is an enlightening and deeply human story of an admiration and aspiration that changed the course of history.

Visit Joel Nelson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"O Now!"

New from Bloomsbury: O Now! by Niall Williams.

About the novella, from the publisher:

From novelist Niall Williams, bestselling author of Time of the Child and This Is Happiness, a new story set in the small Irish town of Faha, exploring love, loss, and the "why" of life

Mossie Crowe, known as "Ganga," is that rare man who is beloved by everyone who knows him and is particularly cherished by his best friend, Bat. On one ordinary October day, Bat interrupts their usual evening tea to ask Ganga why God created the earth. But when Ganga passes away that night, Bat finds himself at a loss, without his friend and without an answer to his question. Over the next days, as all of Faha comes to care for and honor the body of the man they loved, Bat begins a new journey towards understanding life, death, and love.

A tender exploration of life's many meanings, O Now! is a perfect gift for readers who loved Niall Williams' previous Faha novels and features an all-new essay from Niall exploring Faha's creation and legacy.

Visit Niall Williams's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Forms of Utopia"

New from Princeton University Press: The Forms of Utopia: Paradox, Labyrinth, and Recursion in the Renaissance by Jenny C. Mann.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new analysis of utopia as a literary form, with recursive patterns that draw from early modern logic and mathematics

In this ingenious and provocative book, Jenny Mann asks us to shift our understanding of utopia from its politics to its form. Beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), one of the most influential books of all time, Mann shows that utopia’s recursive patterns—its frames, folds, knots, meanders, and turns—enable the perpetual invention of limitless artificial worlds.

Mann demonstrates how paradox, labyrinth, and recursion, in the hands of More, William Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish, become techniques of utopian invention. Drawing on concepts from logic and mathematics, including the Liar’s Paradox and the conundrum of squaring the circle, to make sense of utopia’s impossible geometries, she offers fresh and illuminating considerations of More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Cavendish’s The Blazing World, each representing a different form of utopia. These sections are framed by interludes that feature an artwork or artifact—an intarsia-paneled door, a turf maze, a silver coin—that materially expresses an element of utopia’s puzzling structure. To study utopia, she argues, we must enter its structure and follow the disorienting paths. Utopia works by transforming enclosed spaces—a book, a play—into sites of infinite possibility.

Visit Jenny C. Mann's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Trials of Orpheus.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What We Promised"

Coming November 24 from Montlake: What We Promised by Q.B. Tyler.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Twelve years of silence shattered by one truth: The best man has always loved the bride. Now she must choose between her vows and her heart.

Minutes before I walk down the aisle, I discover my fiancé, Elijah, cheated on me.

He slept with someone else at his bachelor party three months ago.

When his brother, Julian―my best friend since college―learns I know the truth, he confesses a secret of his own, something that changes everything: He’s been in love with me for twelve years.

I’ve always felt the same, but I buried those feelings, convinced he’d never love me back.

What happens next in the bridal suite is reckless. Impulsive. Forbidden. Everything I’ve wanted since the day we met. One moment of passion that makes an impossible situation even more complicated.

Now I’m facing an unthinkable choice: the man I made promises to, or the one I’ve wanted all along. Walking away from either brother means destroying more than just a marriage―it means tearing a family apart.

But Elijah’s betrayal runs deeper than I know.

And nothing can prepare me for what he’ll do to keep me.

Visit Q.B. Tyler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Experience: A History"

New from the University of California Press: Experience: A History by Lawrence Kramer.

About the book, from the publisher:

A lyrical, provocative journey into the art, memory, and meaning of experience.

What does it mean to have an experience? When did we begin to believe we could “have" one at all? In Experience: A History, Lawrence Kramer traces the cultural birth of experience as a singular, life-defining event. Moving lyrically between criticism and memoir, he guides readers from Petrarch and Nietzsche to Virginia Woolf and Anne Carson; from Haydn’s luminous Creation to Billie Holiday's searing “Strange Fruit.” Along the way we encounter Niagara Falls and the Galápagos, Parisian department stores and Manhattan nightclubs, and luminaries such as Franz Schubert, Henry and William James, and Benjamin Britten.

As early as the fourteenth century and accelerating after the eighteenth, records of concentrated, unforgettable moments begin to proliferate―until the possibility of having an experience becomes a demand for one. Experience turns into something to seek, curate, even consume. Yet its power lies in its particulars: the convergence of history, art, memory, and self. At once personal and tender, challenging and vulnerable, Experience fuses philosophical argument with intimate recollection. The result is both a sweeping intellectual history and a deeply human reckoning with the experiences that shape and unsettle modern life.

Visit Lawrence Kramer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue