"Bringing Wreck"

New from the University of Texas Press: Bringing Wreck: Megan Thee Stallion, Monica Roberts, and Other Houston Hurricanes by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley.

About the book, from the publisher:

A whirling exploration of how Megan Thee Stallion inspires Black women and femmes like the late Monica Roberts, framed by the storm-making work of both.

While rap megastar Megan Thee Stallion needs no introduction, fewer will be familiar with Monica Roberts, a Houston journalist, community historian, and trans activist with the popular blog TransGriot. Though the two women never met, their work has inspired Black LGBTQ+ activists to love, resist violence, speak truth to power, and dance like life depends on it. With a written energy that’s infectious, Omise’eke Tinsley highlights just how intertwined these artists are.

An incisive look at the impactful sisterhood between Black women and femmes, Bringing Wreck is a book of empowerment. From Megan’s first performance on Saturday Night Live calling to “Protect Black Women,” to Roberts’s use of Hurricane Hanna to poke fun at Donald Trump’s border wall, Tinsley digs into the world-changing power of disruption and joyful expression in the face of racial injustice, anti-trans and queer violence, mental health crises, and community disparities. Reveling in both women’s love of Houston, calling-out of gendered violence, penchant for political humor, and staunch mental health advocacy, Bringing Wreck is an ode to the Bayou City, Black music, and the difference that one woman’s voice can make when we listen carefully.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Legally Yours, Violet Lopez"

New from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers: Legally Yours, Violet Lopez by Elba Luz.

About the book, from the publisher:

A serious and studious teen reluctantly agrees to defend her elite private school’s lazy golden boy in this young adult rom-com with courtroom intrigue, an opposites attract romance, and witty banter.

Violet Lopez has planned exactly how her life will go: She’ll graduate valedictorian, attend Harvard, and become a big shot lawyer, all so that her injury-prone single dad can finally take a break.

As a member of her elite private school’s law society, Violet is proud to hold a near-perfect record of defending students against the disciplinary board. But when the popular and infuriatingly charming Theo Hudson is accused of a prank he swears he didn’t commit, Violet recuses herself from his case on the grounds of despising the school’s privileged golden boy, and not even a couple classmates’ offer of a four-figure payout to purposely tank his trial can change her mind.

Then Theo uncovers a secret Violet wants to keep under wraps and blackmails her into representing him. Sick of being pushed around by rich kids, Violet decides she can get sweet revenge on the arrogant jock and some much-needed cash at the same time. She’ll twist his alibi, lose key evidence, mislead witnesses—all while playing the perfect lawyer on the surface. Theo goes down, and Violet gets paid.

But the closer Violet gets to Theo, the more she sees beneath his devil-may-care attitude to someone caring and surprisingly sensitive…who she’s been planning to sabotage. Is it too late to change her mind? And even if she does, would Theo ever forgive her?

Violet can object to falling in love all she wants, but her heart overrules every time.

Visit Elba Luz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The God Notes"

New from HarperOne: The God Notes: How Sound Creates the World by Lynne McTaggart.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author who proved our intentions shape our reality, an awe-inspiring scientific detective story revealing the mysteries of sound—impacting everything within and around us, from our cells and brains to other living things, our relationships and even the cosmos.

Specific sounds create major effects on the human mind and body, and there are both "good" sounds (or "God notes") capable of instantly transporting human beings into an altered state, or healing all manner of illness, and "bad notes" (such as from seismic rumblings, container ships, solar flares or wind turbines), causing distress or illness.

The God Notes takes readers through a mind-expanding and paradigm-busting scientific detective story of the universe as one intergalactic sonic superorganism, revealing that

• Rhythm, vibration and sound are responsible for many molecular functions in the body, from chemical reactions and nervous system messengering to the activity of proteins and collective brain activity.

• Plants can "hear"; certain sounds help them grow and also ward off predators.

• The sun, the planets, pulsars and even black holes emit rhythmic sounds now thought to contribute to the growth of entire galaxies and to have a profound effect on life on earth.

• A hidden "musical score," based on the work of the British mathematical code-buster Alan Turing, underpins every part of our vibrating universe, a vast physical patterning across all natural phenomena.

The God Notes is first book to explain just how the sounds around us and the sounds we make affect our lives, and the tools it offers can bring peace, balance, and harmony into our lives.

Visit Lynne McTaggart's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Your Boyfriend Needs an Exorcist"

New from Bloomsbury YA: Your Boyfriend Needs an Exorcist by Justine Pucella Winans.

About the book, from the publisher:

Jennifer's Body meets The Weight of Blood in this horror-comedy about an evil spirit looking for a second chance at love and life.

Just because Schuyler is a bloodthirsty evil spirit doesn't mean she can't fall in love. Ever since Wren Castillo moved into the house Schuyler haunts, Schuyler has been crushing hard. But Wren has a boyfriend, Enzo, and he's the worst. Schuyler has no choice but to watch as Enzo treats Wren terribly-until she accidentally possesses him.

With Enzo's spirit nowhere to be found, Schuyler must pretend to be him until she can set things right. But Schuyler feels more at home in Enzo's body than she ever did in her own, and as she grows closer to his family and friends-including Wren-she starts to wonder if this could all be for keeps.

Maintaining a possession is harder than Schuyler expected, though, and it might just take some spilled blood to keep her new body going strong. Worse, it turns out she's not the only one interested in stealing Enzo's body. When another evil spirit threatens everyone Schuyler now holds dear, she must decide just how far she's willing to go to secure her second chance at love-and life.

Visit Justine Pucella Winans's website.

Q&A with Justine Pucella Winans.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Romanticism and the Evolutionary Idea"

New from Stanford University Press: American Romanticism and the Evolutionary Idea by Jennifer J. Baker.

About the book, from the publisher:

Evolutionary thought transformed nineteenth-century American intellectual life. This book details how it shaped literature in the middle decades of the century and intersected with Romantic conceptions of selfhood, society, and the history of life. Jennifer J. Baker reads the era's Romanticism in relation to Darwin as well as naturalists, embryologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, and even Biblical creationists who used evolutionary frameworks to understand the past and future. The "evolutionary idea" encompassed much more than Darwinism, she argues, and even Darwinism in these decades was variously understood and not necessarily the secular, mechanistic, and deterministic thinking we now associate with the Gilded Age. Baker uncovers an earlier, Romantic evolutionism in writing about self-culture, social reform, racial uplift, prehistoric life and cultures, and the creation of art.

Baker proposes that American Romanticism was itself a way of thinking about the human condition in the terms of evolutionary process. She draws on an extensive literary archive, including works by Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Douglass, Delany, Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, to detail how writers understood change and innovation as the product of teleology, chance, social organization, environmental pressures, and, not least of all, the past.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Killing of a Chestnut Tree"

Coming soon from Tordotcom: The Killing of a Chestnut Tree (Havelock Harper Mysteries, 1) by Oliver K. Langmead.

About the book, from the publisher:

Be gay, solve crimes!

Meet Havelock Harper, gentleman detective. Dapper, delightful, and decidedly queer, he's here to solve your most magical mysteries.

Everyone in England knows Havelock Harper, the celebrated consulting detective from the papers. But if any of them read his private files, they would discover secrets that must never reach the public eye―extraordinary cases, impossible crimes, and a committed love affair with his formidable companion Major Sebastian Wright.

And their next case might be the queerest yet.

Havelock and Sebastian have been summoned to investigate the murder of the Duke of Farleigh. When they arrive at the scene of the crime ― a secluded, enchanting forest ― they discover that the victim is a tree!

The trees of Farleigh have begun to write words in their bark and branches, expressing themselves for all to read. The Duke is an ancient chestnut, cruelly chopped down, and to the villagers of Farleigh, he is a beloved friend. They want justice.

Havelock and Sebastian must use all their wits and wisdom to find the murderer who has shattered the peace of Farleigh.

Visit Oliver K. Langmead's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Writing with Fire"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life by Barbara Young Welke.

About the book, from the publisher:

A cultural and legal history intertwined with a deeply emotional meditation on the course of life, memory, and the documents that define us.

During the 1940s and 1950s, an untold number of American children suffered devastating injuries when the fur-like fabric on the chaps of their Gene Autry–branded cowboy playsuits exploded into flame. Barbara Young Welke was researching this history when her teenage daughter unexpectedly died.

The shock of Welke’s loss transformed her understanding of the children and their families. Her experience also led her to question the norms of scholarship and of writing. Historians are trained to separate the personal from the intellectual, to be suspicious of emotion. These and other norms are embedded in and reinforced by the calling card of academics, the curriculum vitae. Welke wondered how that cold document―with its literal meaning, “the course of life”―had become a form that excludes so much of what gives life meaning. What impact did that have on what we know, how we know it, and how we understand ourselves? Similarly, Welke wondered, what might we see if we looked at the history of the cowboy suit tragedy as more than a matter of lawsuits brought by grieving families? Here, Welke traces the making, marketing, and selling of the cowboy suits; the lengths the defendants went to avoid and limit liability; and the meaning of the injuries, deaths, and legal settlements in the course of these children’s and families’ lives.

Writing with Fire interweaves the histories of the cowboy suit tragedy and the curriculum vitae. Grounded in archival and legal research, oral histories, and letters Welke wrote her daughter following her death, Welke offers an inimitable examination of trauma, law, autobiography, and identity. The result is revelatory and unforgettable: a provocative historical reflection on life and death, depression and war, markets and families, law, power, and precarity in modern America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"An Uncertain Magic"

Coming October 27 from Orbit: An Uncertain Magic (Green Witch Cycle, 2) by AM Kvita.

About the book, from the publisher:

In An Uncertain Magic, the second book in AM Kvita’s award-winning Green Witch Cycle, Brooklyn's most chaotic coven has to take on ancient gods (yes, gods) to avoid a magical apocalypse and save the city―no big deal.

Joan Greenwood has been adjusting nicely to her life away from her powerful family of witches. She has an apartment full of friends, her dream job at an architecture firm, and a constant companion in the sentient magic that makes up New York City. For once, everything’s coming up Joan ... until her best friend gets possessed.

There’s a god wearing his skin, a new cult springing up around him, magic is going haywire, and things go from bad to worse when Joan’s rival-turned-crush Astoria Wardwell arrives from California with the news that her best friend is also possessed. That’s one hell of a coincidence, but the two have to work together to save their best friends before these gods corrupt them―unless their pesky feelings for each other get in the way.

Visit AM Kvita's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Bookshop"

New from Basic Books: The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century by Andrew Pettegree.

About the book, from the publisher:

The global history of the rise and transformation of bookstores, from medieval book merchants to today’s neighborhood indies.

Whether it’s a local indie bookshop, an online megaretailer, or a chain bookstore, the place we buy books is an essential part of our reading lives. Bookstores connect books to potential buyers and convert idle browsers into committed readers. Yet, as historian Andrew Pettegree reveals, it took more than five centuries after Gutenberg for bookstores as we know them to emerge.

The Bookshop tells a sweeping history of the bookstore. It celebrates the ingenuity of booksellers, from the smugglers who carried contraband books across borders, to the innovators who created the global distribution networks that define books and bookselling today. Even though few bookshops lasted more than a few years during the best of times, booksellers relentlessly sought new ways to get books to readers. Innovators like the squabbling dealers who invented the secondhand bookstore, or Victorian capitalists like W. H. Smith, who built an empire of railroad station book stalls to serve idle passengers, made bookselling what it is today.

The Bookshop is the story of how the bookstore became the indispensable meeting place for book makers and book lovers around the world.

The Page 99 Test: The Book in the Renaissance.

The Page 99 Test: The Invention of News.

The Page 99 Test: Brand Luther.

Writers Read: Andrew Pettegree (December 2015).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Claus Conspiracy"

New from Poisoned Pen Press: The Claus Conspiracy by Tamara Berry.

About the novel, from the publisher:

It's beginning to look a lot like murder in this holly-jolly mystery from award-winning author Tamara Berry!

Amber Winslow thought she'd left chaos behind when she traded bounty hunting for small-town life in Arizona. Between her job as a barista and recording a true-crime podcast with a lively group of retirees at Seven Ponds Retirement Community, life has finally settled into something resembling calm.

Until a battered, amnesiac teenager crashes into it―literally.

The girl knows only one thing for certain: Amber's voice from the podcast. Clutching a Post-it note with Amber's address, she arrives with no memory of who she is…and a dead Santa Claus in her trunk.

Determined to uncover the truth, Amber and her sharp-witted octogenarian crew begin digging―and quickly discover this is no holiday mishap. Their search uncovers a trail of rogue Mall Santas, a dangerous drug operation, and secrets someone is willing to kill to protect.

As the bodies pile up and the past closes in, Amber must untangle a mystery that's far bigger―and far more personal―than she ever imagined.

Visit Tamara Berry's website.

--Marshal Zeringue