"Night of the Mallrats"

New from Harper Perennial: Night of the Mallrats: A Novel by Nicolina Torres.

About the book, from the publisher:

Five friends travel back to the 1990s to solve the brutal murder and disappearance of two of their high school peers in this thrilling debut novel from a promising new voice in horror—a murderous, nightmarish romp that is nostalgic, terrifying, and impossible to put down.

Shop ’til you drop . . . dead

Colleen’s life feels as hollow as the abandoned Beechnut Mall—the 90s hangout where neon lights and endless laughter defined her teens thirty years before. When her old high school clique reassembles for one last night of rebellion inside the now condemned building, she joins them, never expecting the mall to give something back. The reunited friends do not know that inside its darkened halls, the past is waiting, and it’s not all Glamour Shots, Beanie Babies, and Lisa Frank.

Faced with their lost youth, they are drawn back into the mystery of Beth Packard—a schoolmate who vanished in 1994—and without warning, they find themselves transported to the mall in its heyday on the very night Beth disappeared. Thrust back three decades, the former mallrats must unravel the secrets hidden beneath memories, lies, and betrayals before time snaps shut around them. But each step closer to the truth of Beth’s disappearance brings them within reach of exposing ugly, fatal truths about each other.

Haunting, wistful, pulse-pounding fun, Night of the Mallrats is a time-travel thriller that asks a question with an unforgettable answer: What really happened to Beth Packard?

Visit Nicolina Torres's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Recognizing Reality"

New from Northwestern University Press: Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Presence by Jessica C. Resvick.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reveals how literary scenes of recognition stage the process of coming to know reality

In this deeply researched and thought-provoking study, Jessica C. Resvick traces nineteenth-century German realist writing’s paradoxical investment in mediated accounts of the world and the direct, unfiltered experience of reality. Focusing on the motif and operation of recognition in its Aristotelean sense, Resvick examines self-reflexive narratives in which the authors struggle to resolve this tension between the media they choose and the immediacy they hope to create.

Through close readings of key works by canonical authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, and Wilhelm Raabe, Resvick demonstrates the medially influenced and historically contingent ways in which they represent reality. Each chapter focuses on a different form of recognition, reconstructing the techniques that allow these authors to generate an effect of presence. Exploring the history and poetics of knowledge exchange, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Presence expands on recent media histories of realism, examining the material bases for realist aesthetics while also investigating media’s epistemological accomplishments, and astutely elaborates the role of recognition as a medium-specific tool.

Visit Jessica C. Resvick's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beneath the Edelweiss"

Coming October 20 from Little A: Beneath the Edelweiss: A Novel by Elizabeth Noel.

About the book, from the publisher:

From a poetic new voice in historical fiction comes a story of resistance, community, and survival set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Austrian Alps and the heartbreaking onset of World War II.

Growing up on a farm, high among the flowering slopes of Carinthia, Mitzi Hausler has never fit in―not even with her own family. At thirteen, she’s no taller than a six-year-old, and her peers’ taunts of “Witchy Mitzi” follow her everywhere. Thankfully, she has her loyal pup for comfort. And Oma, the grandmother who raised her.

But Oma, a gifted herbalist, won’t be around forever. She vows to pass on her knowledge before it’s too late, sharing her mysterious alpine remedies with Mitzi. With no marriage prospects, herbs may be Mitzi's only path forward. Indeed, when resources grow tight, her resentful older sister sends Mitzi away to Talend to care for a grieving widower and his sickly young child.

In the town, against all odds, Mitzi’s life gradually blooms into something unexpected and she discovers she belongs. But when political violence and Nazi eugenic policies come to town, she’s forced to make a life-altering choice.

Visit Elizabeth Noel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Walden Experiments"

New from Princeton University Press: The Walden Experiments: The Science of Henry David Thoreau by Robert Thorson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reading Thoreau as a scientist for modern times

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden stands as the foundational text for the environmental movement and as a model for the practice of nature writing. In The Walden Experiments, Robert Thorson tells the story of how, after several discarded drafts of social critique, Thoreau resuscitated Walden with a sharp swerve toward science. Thorson invites us to read—or reread—Walden to discover the observations, empirical thinking, and scientific explanations supporting this canonical work of literature. Chapter by chapter, he guides us through Walden’s relevance for such contemporary scientific concerns as climate change, ecological collapse, water supply, agriculture, artificial intelligence, and technology.

Thoreau's first “experiment” of living deliberately took place in a one-room house at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847. This was followed from 1851 to 1852 by a little-known second experiment of trying to live deliberately in the midst of society as a sojourning scientist. Thorson’s account of a science-revitalized version of Walden helps us appreciate Thoreau's masterpiece not only for its prophetic, lyrical, uplifting, witty, and timeless advice on living sustainably, but also as a historic benchmark for anchoring our modern solutions. Exploring the science that underlies Walden enhances our understanding of the deeper meanings Thoreau draws from nature.

Visit Robert Thorson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Vengefully Matched"

New from Atria Books: Vengefully Matched: A Novel (Book 2 of 2: Hallowcross) by Audrey Goldberg Ruoff.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of the “colorful, sweet, and swoony” (Mallory Marlowe, USA TODAY bestselling author) Hopelessly Teavoted comes a witchy, sapphic rom-com about a mischievous runaway bride and her prim-and-proper Witchery Council rival who must fake-date in order to catch a would-be murderer—and accidentally fall in love.

Priscilla Hart does not do regret—except maybe for the spectacularly disastrous choice of fleeing her own wedding in a cloud of magical fireworks. Now the town’s most infamous runaway witch, she’s determined to rebuild her reputation on the Witchery Council and prove she’s more than a scandal in designer heels.

Agatha Vanderbilt Voisin, the newly elected council president, is everything Priscilla can’t stand: composed, proper, and infuriatingly perfect. But when a string of dangerous magical explosions points to Priscilla as the culprit, Agatha makes an impulsive move—announcing that they’re dating—to save her from exile.

Faking a relationship in public should be simple even for such opposites…until late-night arguments turn into slow-burn attraction, and the two discover that something wicked is brewing in Hallowcross. To survive the magic—and their feelings—they’ll have to stop pretending and risk falling for real.

Can they outwit a magic powerful enough to destroy them, or will trust be the most dangerous risk of all?

Visit Audrey Goldberg Ruoff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America"

New from the University of Illinois Press: Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America by Nick Mathews.

About the book, from the publisher:

The crisis of rural news consumers abandoned by corporate owners

The devastation of local news organizations has left rural areas of the US marooned in information deserts. Nick Mathews offers a boots-on-the-ground examination of the human toll of local news’s erosion by the winds of de-localization and corporate indifference.

It is no secret that ownership transfers, corporate mergers, and hedge fund takeovers have relentlessly consolidated and closed local news organizations. Mathews exposes the impact of that process on journalism, journalists, and news consumers hungry for outlets that tell their stories. A fundamental breakdown within journalism itself, the abandonment of community news has left disgruntled and disconnected locals to piece together news and information themselves. Mathews draws on the personal experiences of news gatherers and consumers to illuminate why local news cannot be scaled. Mass-produced content inevitably severs ties to communities while distant ownership is indifferent to local concerns.

Nuanced and sympathetic, Deserted provides a vivid portrait of the people and places forsaken by journalism’s corporate owners.

Visit Nick Mathews's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Holmes Away From Home"

Coming October 6 from Severn House: Holmes Away From Home (An Althea Adler Mystery) by Samantha Larsen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Introducing Althea Adler, accomplished thief and daring heroine with a mysterious link to Sherlock Holmes.

A heart-racing game of wits, murder and romance is about to commence...

London, 1911. Althea Adler receives a mysterious postcard with just four words, ‘Holmes away from home.’ Surely her mother, notorious thief and opera star Irene Adler, is instructing her to break into Sherlock Holmes’s safe? But when she does, Althea makes a shocking discovery...

Still reeling from events at 221b Baker Street, Althea accepts an invitation to a party at Twickenham Towers, the ancestral home of Lord Slough, where a murder throws her into further turmoil―as does handsome fellow guest William, the Marquess of Sheffield, who has been tasked with staking out Slough by the British Government.

Althea and William form an unlikely alliance as they set about catching a killer. But can they trust each other when they both have something to hide?

Visit Samantha Larsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom"

New from Oxford University Press: Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom by Stephen Spiess.

About the book, from the publisher:

How does one know a whore is a whore? Upon what terms, standards, interpretive logics, and material practices does such knowledge depend? In Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom, Stephen Spiess pursues these questions and, in so doing, discovers the extraordinary cultural labor necessary to produce and sustain the fiction of the “whore” as a fixed, coherent, and readily apprehensible category of sexual knowledge. This work, he shows, unfolds across a variety of historically situated social, textual, and linguistic processes, from the writing of dictionary entries, character sketches, and lyric poems to public proclamations, conversion rituals, and dramatic representations. It also extends into the present era, where scholars continue to shore up whoredom's incoherences and to reproduce moralized distinctions between “real” prostitutes and “discursive” whores.

Charting a different approach in this book, Spiess argues that the ambiguities, incoherences, and impasses that attend the meanings and makings of English whoredom are essential to understanding how that category operates, both in that historical culture and our own. Establishing whoredom as a knowledge relation and a material process, he reveals the analytical benefits of lingering in sites where sexual knowledge breaks down, and of tarrying with the complexities and consequences of the material practices, cultural logics, and social affects that emerge to mediate these impasses. Applying the methods and insights of queer epistemology to a topic of vital feminist concern, Spiess locates new sites for discursive contestation while resisting the identitarian or ontological logics that disciplinary categories seek to install in the first place. Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom thus delivers a new analytical framework for understanding the social, textual, and representational histories of illicit sexual figures in early modern England.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dear Future Occupants"

New from the University of Wisconsin Press: Dear Future Occupants by Keith Stahl.

About the book, from the publisher:

It is 1979 and patriarch Bud relocates his family to his conservative hometown of Greenhill, Connecticut. Despite dubious restaurant experience, he uses his wife’s inheritance to purchase a diner in hopes of proving himself. Things begin to fall apart when police find an all-too-literal skeleton in the family’s basement. A series of misfortunes, accidents, and comedic events follow, including the creation of a vending-machine-sandwich/drug-dealing business and a protest-turned-siege at the local hospital.

Charting one family’s rise to subversive glory in a genteel New England town, this colonial gothic novel is told through found documents and multiple perspectives, including those of Bud; Victor, the middle son; and Herman, the ahead-of-their time, nonbinary, eldest child whose journal entries serve as a kind of Greek chorus throughout. In this breathless, exuberant work, Keith Stahl brilliantly captures the foundational dichotomies at the heart of the American experience: a puritanical distrust of anything fun and a nearly anarchic love of pleasure and freedom. Moving and bitterly humorous, Dear Future Occupants is a paean to the working class and the diversity that holds a family together.

Visit Keith Stahl's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Crimes Against Feeling"

New from University of Massachusetts Press: Crimes Against Feeling: Piracy, Sympathy, and Ocean Politics in Antebellum American Legal Culture by Mark B. Kelley.

About the book, from the publisher:

Demonstrating how emotion became central to the legal and literary meanings of piracy in nineteenth-century America

Pirates have long occupied a central yet unstable place in American law and national identity. In the decades leading up to and including the U.S. Civil War, the charge of piracy was leveled against an unusually wide range of figures: foreign heads of state, imperial filibusters, transoceanic enslavers, enslaved mutineers, radical abolitionists, and others who challenged established forms of authority. Early American literature reflects this instability, portraying pirates who vary dramatically in politics, race, gender, and allegiance. As Mark B. Kelley shows, these characters are united less by ideology than by their challenge to landed social norms and fixed national belonging. The pirate, in both law and literature, emerges as an individual defined by multiplicity rather than political coherence.

Crimes Against Feeling examines how Americans made sense of this ambiguous figure by turning to emotion. Drawing on legal materials including treaties, trial transcripts, congressional debates, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, as well as popular sentimental fiction (often written by women), Kelley argues that piracy was codified as an offense against moral feeling rather than being a singular political position. Legal thinkers and writers such as John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Maria S. Cummins relied on shared affective frameworks―sympathy, sentiment, and domestic vulnerability―to render piracy legible and punishable. American pirate law, Kelley demonstrates, was shaped by the same emotional logics that structured the era’s popular fiction.

By tracing piracy across debates over domestic sovereignty, global enslavement and abolition, imperial expansion, postbellum reparations, and international copyright, Crimes Against Feeling reveals the pirate as a key figure for understanding gender, home, family, and nation in early America. Reading law and literature together, the book shows how emotional judgment―not political consensus―became a foundational tool for managing oceanic violence and transnational disorder in the nineteenth-century United States.

Visit Mark B. Kelley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue