"Illegality in the Heartland"

New from the University of California Press: Illegality in the Heartland: Latinidad, Indigeneity, and Immigration Policies during Times of Hate by Andrea Gómez Cervantes.

About the book, from the publisher:

Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic participant observation, Illegality in the Heartland interrogates existing understandings of illegality and Latinidad by centering the voices and experiences of Indigenous and mestizo Latino immigrants in the American heartland during the first Trump administration, a distinct era of political uncertainty. Immigration policies and political narratives have long tied those suspected of being "illegal" to perceptions of Mexican origin and stereotypes associated with Hispanics more broadly. Likewise, Latin American immigrants in the United States have been positioned as a single group, thereby collapsing ethnoracial distinctions under the umbrella identities of Hispanic, Latina/o, or Latinx/e. Andrea Gómez Cervantes examines these ethnoracial divides among Latino immigrants as they seek to navigate life and make Kansas their home while undocumented. This work shines a crucial light on how immigration laws, racialization, and gender mechanisms intersect in spaces where immigrants are not yet an established part of the public imaginary—even as they make essential contributions to their communities and mobilize as increasingly influential constituents in their own right.

Visit Andrea Gómez Cervantes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ways to Find Yourself"

Coming May 1 from Little A: Ways to Find Yourself by Angela Brown.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A woman adrift finds a unique path forward in a charming and heartfelt novel about memories, identity, and the wonderful mysteries of life by the author of Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time.

Grace Whittaker's life is coming apart.

In the wake of her mother's death, a stalled writing career, and a slow-motion separation from her husband, Grace is more directionless than ever. But when she returns to Sea Drift, the beach town where she and her mother summered for years, Grace's life comes together in the most unexpected ways.

Soon after arriving on the picturesque coastline that meant so much to her, Grace discovers more than she remembers, and for reasons she can't possibly fathom. Amid the weathered surf shops, pastel motels, and sloping beaches, Grace begins to encounter younger versions of herself. Each one is vivid, alive, and breathtakingly real.

As she navigates this most surreal week--reconnecting with old friends, trying to solve a quiet mystery about her mother, and revisiting a love she left behind--Grace is forced to remember who she used to be. It's the only way she can figure out who she can still become.

Visit Angela Brown's website.

The Page 69 Test: Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time.

Q&A with Angela Brown.

The Page 69 Test: Some Other Time.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Tower and the Ruin"

New from W.W. Norton: The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation by Michael D.C. Drout.

About the book, from the publisher:

A leading scholar draws on fifty years of reading and studying J.R.R. Tolkien to explain how he created an entire world.

No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his world of Middle-earth—a world that has felt so real to so many readers that it is almost impossible to imagine that anyone could have created it, seemingly out of thin air. In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael D. C. Drout explores Tolkien’s genius, allowing us to glimpse the making of every work from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion to lesser-known books such as The Fall of Gondolin as well as his poetry. We see how Tolkien invented myths, legends, cultures, languages, histories, and an intricate, multivocal narrative. We come to understand how, early on, Tolkien drew upon and modified material he found in Beowulf, the Kalevala, and other medieval literature from Northern Europe, and how he later developed the complex form of sorrow that is the primary theme of his mature works. Sweeping and hugely perceptive—and enhanced throughout by Drout’s personal reflections as a dedicated reader of Tolkien since childhood—The Tower and the Ruin illuminates Tolkien anew.

Visit Michael Drout's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"You Can Tell Me"

Coming May 12 from Montlake: You Can Tell Me (Olivia Cruz) by Melinda Leigh.

About the book, from the publisher:

Crime writer Olivia Cruz is drawn into the dark secrets of a missing friend in a terrifying novel of suspense by #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author Melinda Leigh.

On the three-year anniversary of true crime writer Olivia Cruz’s horrific kidnapping, she’s scheduled to walk her podcaster friend Zoe March through the crime scene, but Zoe fails to show. Olivia knows Zoe would never stand her up―not today.

Zoe’s husband, who claims she never came home the night before, has reported her missing. But marital conflicts make the police suspect she has left him. Olivia thinks otherwise. The police aren’t looking for Zoe, so Olivia begins her own investigation. Retracing her friend’s last steps, she finds Zoe’s phone and a text with one chilling word: Run.

It soon becomes apparent that Zoe has been keeping secrets, and with her true crime podcast, there’s no telling what she has unearthed. To find her, Olivia must dig into her friend’s past. Did Zoe vanish to escape a killer, and is Olivia walking into a deadly trap?

Visit Melinda Leigh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fictions of God"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Fictions of God: English Renaissance Literature and the Invention of the Biblical Narrator by Raphael Magarik.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new history of literary narration rooted in the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation.

We often identify secularization's characteristic literary form as the modern novel: out with divine scripture, in with human fictions. In Fictions of God, Raphael Magarik argues that this story overlooks the cultural upheavals of the Protestant Reformation. Early reformers imagined a Bible that was neither infallible nor inerrant but fictional, composed by a divine counterfactual: God crafted the text, they said, as if it had been written by the prophets. Early modern Protestants now found in their Bibles not a source of foundational truths but a model for unreliable narration, even fiction.

Fictions of God traces how this approach to literature passed from biblical commentators to poets like Abraham Cowley, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson amid the violent emergence of a new religious and political order—long before the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel. The result is a transformative account of the Reformation’s effect on imaginative literature and the secularization of the Bible itself.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wreck Your Heart"

Coming soon from Minotaur Books: Wreck Your Heart: A Mystery by Lori Rader-Day.

About the novel, from the publisher:

From award-winning author Lori Rader-Day, Wreck Your Heart is an engaging, “wisecracking and wonderful” crime novel with a big heart, about a country and midwestern singer out to catch her big break before family―or murder―wrecks everything. Dahlia “Doll” Devine had the kind of hardscrabble beginning that could launch a thousand broken-hearted country songs, but now she’s the star of her own stage at McPhee’s Tavern. As part of Chicago’s―yes, Chicago’s―country music scene, Dahlia is an up-and-coming singer in spangles and boots of classic country tunes. Up and coming, that is, until her boyfriend Joey up and went, taking the rent money with him.

So Dahlia is back to square one, relying on Alex McPhee―again. Alex helped her out of a bad situation when she was a kid living rough with her mother. Now he’s part landlord, part band booster, all-around rescuer. It’s just that Dahlia wishes she didn’t keep giving him reasons to have to do it.

Just as Dahlia suspects she’s scraped rock bottom, the mother she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years shows up with something to say. The next morning, a distraught young woman arrives at the bar, asking after her missing mother―Dahlia's mother, too, even if the missing suburban PTA mom the girl describes sounds pretty different from the one who let Dahlia down all those years ago.

Though no one is using the word sister any time soon, Dahlia lets herself be drawn into reuniting the family that might have been hers. But when a body is discovered outside McPhee’s Tavern, the crime threatens not just the place Dahlia has made into a home, but everything she’s believed about her past, her dreams for the future, and the people she was just, maybe, beginning to let into her heart.

Visit Lori Rader-Day's website.

Q&A with Lori Rader-Day.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Fantastic"

New from the University of Wisconsin Press: American Fantastic: Myths of Violence and Redemption by Derek J. Thiess.

About the book, from the publisher:

American Fantastic challenges readers to recognize an organizing myth in America’s perception of its imperialist past, “the myth of redemptive violence.” Derek J. Thiess persuasively argues that this myth serves to obscure the deep thread of Christian supremacy that underwrites America’s colonial and imperial impulses, from the early colonial period to westward expansion to the contemporary global order. This American imaginary, which enmeshes religion with violence, is constructed in multiple contentious and productive contact zones: between genres, between cultures, and between past and present.

Thiess’s interdisciplinary study examines America’s past and present imperial projects, from the Hawaiian Islands to the Eastern Seaboard, as they proliferate in popular story forms. By interrogating American myths, legends, and fantastic narratives across an impressive array of genres, including folk narratives, science fiction, movies, and more, Thiess exposes how the “myth of redemptive violence” manifests in contemporary constructions of America’s fantastic imaginaries.

Visit Derek J. Thiess's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Field Guide to Murder"

Coming January 27 from Crooked Lane Books: A Field Guide to Murder: A Novel by Michelle L. Cullen.

About the book, from the publisher:

A cranky widower and his spirited caregiver team up to solve his neighbor’s murder in this charming and original mystery, perfect for fans of Richard Osman and Benjamin Stevenson.

Once a globe-trotting anthropologist, Harry Lancaster is now certain that all his grand adventures are behind him. Recently widowed and suffering from a fractured hip, Harry spends his days and nights behind a pair of binoculars, nose-deep in his neighbors’ affairs. His millennial caregiver, Emma, is determined to get him out of his armchair and back into the world.

Fate intervenes when Harry’s mysterious neighbor, Sue, phones, pleading for help. But instead of rescuing her, Harry and Emma find Sue dead: poisoned, days after a break-in at Sue’s house. Harry resolves to find out what happened, and Emma insists on going along for the ride. Together, they discover motives and suspects abound in Harry’s quaint condominium community—putting them both in the crosshairs of a cold-blooded killer.

Readers of Kristen Perrin and Deanna Raybourn will be charmed by this quirky, cross-generational murder mystery.

Visit Michelle L. Cullen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Range of the River"

New from Stanford University Press: The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia by Iftekhar Iqbal.

About the book, from the publisher:

Spanning nearly 4 million square kilometers, the Tibetan river system—including the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Red, and Yangzi—forms the largest contiguous network of rivers on the planet, stretching across eastern South Asia, mainland Southeast Asia, and southern China. The Range of the River uncovers the entwined histories of these vast waterways and the empires, human actors, and other—than—human forces that have shaped Asia since the 1850s. Both ethnodiverse and biodiverse, these rivers were more than contested imperial spaces—they were also channels of communal and material exchange, linking near and distant contact zones. They fostered connections across Asia, driving commerce, mobility, and cultural encounters that transformed them into shared, living commons bridging societies, political powers, and economic interests.

Tracing six major rivers across eight countries, Iftekhar Iqbal argues that these river systems formed the core of a discursive space where empires, regional political forces, ethnic groups, boaters, peddlers, explorers, merchants, and mules encountered each other in layered meanings and movements. This groundbreaking book reimagines the river not as merely a tool of empire but as a dynamic force in itself, shaping a truly transregional Asia. By weaving together diverse riverine life—worlds, The Range of the River invites us to rethink Asia's spatial history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This Brutal Moon"

New from Orbit: This Brutal Moon (The Kindom Trilogy, 3) by Bethany Jacobs.

About the book, from the publisher:

Bethany Jacobs returns with the thrilling conclusion to The Kindom Trilogy that began with the Philip K. Dick Award–winning These Burning Stars, the debut epic space opera trilogy about revenge, power, and the price of legacy.

Violence has erupted across the Treble. The colony that Jun Ironway and Masar Hawks have fought to protect is now woefully compromised, and its people, unwilling to submit to tyranny once more, face a brutal fight for their lives and freedom.

In the midst of upheaval and rebellion, new enemies arise at every corner, including a familiar player who won't let power slip through his fingers again. Not when he has every Kindom Hand under his heel. And whether he will be as bloody-minded as his predecessors remains to be seen.

As the quiet ones launch their attack and all hope seems lost, Cleric Chono looks to unlikely allies to fight a final battle for peace. But one crucial question remains: where is Six?

Visit Bethany Jacobs's website.

--Marshal Zeringue