"The Final Solution to the Jewish Question"

New from Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living by Dara Horn.

About the book, from the publisher:

From three-time National Jewish Book Award winner Dara Horn, a masterful new work of nonfiction that boldly confronts and dismantles the myths and lies that have spread antisemitism from ancient times until today—and then offers an audacious but achievable vision for the future.

After publishing the “extremely engaging” (The Washington Post) and award-winning essay collection People Love Dead Jews about the insidious nature of contemporary antisemitism, Dara Horn heard from thousands of people, online and in person, demanding solutions. Then, in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel and the subsequent attacks on Jewish communities worldwide, the calls started coming not just from average readers but from university presidents and the United States government. From her front-row seat to this nightmare—including serving on Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group, meeting with the White House and Congress, and speaking with communities of all backgrounds across North America—she was surprised to discover that there was far more ignorance than malice, and saw an opportunity for change.

Combining deep historical research, investigative reporting, and storytelling bravado, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question is both diagnosis and prescription. She explores and exposes the failures of Holocaust education, the long history of the antizionist movement, the compromises of the American Jewish “Golden Age,” and the organized plot to poison artificial intelligence with anti-Jewish propaganda, and weaves it all into an erudite, audacious, and convincing series of arguments that invites readers of every background and inclination to become curious about their blind spots and to absorb new and uncomfortable truths. From there, she proposes a dramatic solution rooted in a new understanding of freedom and responsibility, and clears a path toward a shared future.

The Final Solution to the Jewish Question is a worldview-shifting book by one of our most incisive thinkers and writers—a lamentation, a manifesto, a call to action, and, ultimately, a love story for the living.

Visit Dara Horn's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 99 Test: The World to Come.

The Page 99 Test: All Other Nights.

The Page 69 Test: A Guide for the Perplexed.

The Page 69 Test: Eternal Life.

Writers Read: Dara Horn (January 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beyond Honor"

New from Emily Bestler Books/Simon & Schuster: Beyond Honor: A Novel by K.B. Brodsky.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A paramilitary operative confronting his grief on a path of retribution. A CIA analyst hunting a conspiracy that leads to the Oval Office. A Russian agent hiding in plain sight. Jason Matthews’s Red Sparrow meets Jack Carr’s The Terminal List in Beyond Honor, a debut political thriller that plunges readers into a world of international espionage, where loyalty and duty are tested.

A man forged by war, paramilitary operative Kevin Rhoads is recruited for a solo extraction mission deep inside Siberia. CIA analyst Whitney Skyler’s investigation into a Russian-backed bank on American soil leads to the President of the United States.

Director Cynthia King plays an audacious gambit, leveraging a thirty-year debt of honor to save a captured American agent. But in this world of shifting alliances, even the most careful plans can unravel. Skyler faces an impossible choice: expose her mentor’s dangerous game to protect national security or reveal the truth to Rhoads. Already shattered by loss, Rhoads discovers the devastating betrayal that will transform him into a force of vengeance, leaving death in his wake.

From the war-torn streets of Damascus to the merciless Siberian tundra, from the rugged Kenai Peninsula to the polished corridors of Langley, Virginia, Beyond Honor is a white-knuckled thriller about duty, betrayal, and the impossible choices made by those who serve in the shadows.

Visit K.B. Brodsky's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Our Lives"

New from the University of California Press: Our Lives: What Abortion Attitudes Reveal About Who We Are as Americans by Tricia Colleen Bruce.

About the book, from the publisher:

Amid a volatile abortion landscape in the United States, Our Lives goes beyond polling and politics to uncover the raw messiness of everyday Americans' abortion attitudes. Drawing on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with a randomly selected, closely representative set of US residents in the lead-up to and aftermath of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, sociologist Tricia Colleen Bruce uncovers the ambivalence, loyalties, doubts, contradictions, personal ties, and quiet stories undergirding moral and legal views on abortion.

Listening to everyday Americans complicates straightforward pro-choice and pro-life talking points and reveals something more about contemporary judgments as to what makes a good life, a good person, a good government, and a good society. How Americans think about abortion, Bruce shows, turns out to say a lot about how Americans think about themselves, each other, and the society they imagine, create, and live in―together.

Visit Tricia Colleen Bruce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last Harbinger"

New from 47North: The Last Harbinger by Jeff Wheeler.

About the book, from the publisher:

A princess and her entrusted protector must save a world on the brink of revolution in a thrilling historical fantasy by Wall Street Journal bestselling author Jeff Wheeler.

Hastings Creigh is a rake, gambler, and spendthrift. He’s also the best dragoon in the Muirwood military, and with mounting tensions between kingdoms, he’s appointed as bodyguard to a princess on an off-world journey.

Princess Maia Fitzempress’s duty has always been to her people and maintaining peace between the worlds. Now, she must venture to Kingfountain, where her aunt reigns as queen and her cursed cousins have fallen ill. If Maia can reestablish the royal line, she can secure its longevity.

Yet in the devastating aftermath of war between two empires and with rebellion forces on the rise, Kingfountain holds danger for a princess and a bodyguard on a mission. Hastings and Maia must forge ahead on a quest to save themselves and a kingdom at the brink of civil war before cunning magical entities determine their destinies―even as an ancient force threatens to destroy both worlds.

Visit Jeff Wheeler's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Queen's Poisoner.

My Book, The Movie: The Queen's Poisoner.

My Book, The Movie: Storm Glass.

The Page 69 Test: Storm Glass.

Writers Read: Jeff Wheeler (2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Land of Happiness"

New from The MIT Press: The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life by Nozomi Naoi.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fascinating look at how Japanese department stores of the twentieth century influenced modern life, identity, and the concept of a dreamworld—and why they continue to loom so large in our imagination.

The Land of Happiness explores the far-reaching influence of the Japanese department store on modern life and our imaginations. In this gorgeously illustrated volume, Nozomi Naoi explains how Japanese department stores modeled “the new modern Japanese life and identity” through print media and design, physical and imagined space, and the new experiences that these spaces offered. The stores created the notion of a modern subject enjoying a “land of happiness”—and this, in turn, shaped the wider sociological context, including emerging roles for women and perceptions of coloniality.

The book focuses on three areas: the mediascape of proliferating department store posters, advertisements, commercial design, promotional magazines, and merchandise; the physical space, such as the Western-style architecture that characterized many of these early department stores, and the imagined “modern space” created within their walls; and, finally, the production of a novel “dreamworld,” which included dining spaces with children’s menus, elevators, escalators, and more.

While the research on department stores and their role in the quotidian experience is vast, there is nothing like this study, which is uniquely grounded in an art historical approach that draws upon the visual media environment of early twentieth-century Japan and its impact on the everyday.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Appraisals"

New from W.W. Norton: Appraisals: A Novel by Claire Boyles.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Financial and ecological realities tear at the heart of a multigenerational farm family in this debut novel from a “deft and daring” (Los Angeles Times) Whiting Award winner.

Maggie Brandt, a third-generation farmer, is cultivating a few acres of organic vegetables in rural Colorado―a place where industrial farming reigns supreme―when the Great Recession hits. After months of unemployment, her husband, Fish, takes a job with an oil and gas company, a decision that threatens their once happy marriage and alienates their teenage daughter, Ozzie, a budding environmental crusader. As the wider community organizes against a billionaire outsider who is buying farmland and, more worryingly, water rights in the moisture-starved county, Maggie’s grandmother Flora grapples with the painful echoes of her own past. Flora and Ozzie’s already close bond deepens as they join a local activist group, but Fish and Maggie’s conflicting approaches to surviving circumstances that are out of their control drive them further apart. Faced with intolerable layers of loss, each member of the family is forced to consider what they are willing to compromise and what they are, or are not, able to forgive.

At once tender and urgent, Appraisals is a moving portrayal of ecological and financial catastrophe, the powerful generational bonds between women, and the fierce impulse to protect the places we love.

Visit Claire Boyles's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Becoming Orthodox"

New from Fordham University Press: Becoming Orthodox: Women, Religion, and Ethnicity in the American South by Elena V. Kravchenko.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exploration of an embodied, practice-centered, and continuous process through which Orthodox Christian women in the American South cultivate a compelling religious womanhood

Becoming Orthodox is a multi-lingual, ethnographic study of two Orthodox Christian communities in the US. Utilizing interview material, participant observation, and participant participation, Kravchenko argues that Russian women who immigrate to the United States and American women who convert to Orthodox Christianity engage with the materiality and visuality of the Orthodox Church to embrace conservative gender roles of a patriarchal tradition in a way that propels them to actively advocate for the equality, freedom, and empowerment of women.

Becoming Orthodox adds a new angle to the literature on the conservative religious women because of its attention to the intersection of religion, gender, and ethnicity. By attending to how Russian immigrant and American convert women―in the midst of their simultaneously sympathetic and antagonistic relationships―made choices about what icons to venerate, what prayers to use, how to dress, what food to cook, and how to raise their children, the book demonstrates that the project of becoming a good Orthodox woman was entangled in the project of defining what it means to be authentically “Russian” and “American.” Through performative ethnographic writing, the book illuminates how, in the social context of immigration and conversion, Russian and American women commonly sought to create a place of belonging by constructing meaningful ethno-religious homes and producing their respective Russian Orthodox and (Un)Russo-American Orthodox identities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Strange Is the Light"

Coming September 8 from Tor Books: Strange Is the Light by Sarah Maria Griffin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Strange Is the Light follows a passionately entangled group of childhood friends, fractured by the betrayals and secrets kept as they grew into adulthood.

Now, after twenty years, Daphne, Ronan, Leonie and Finn will finally have to face the consequences of cutting their last adventure short--having accidentally opened a rift into a dangerous alternate dimension while playing a mysterious RPG version of their childhood game.

Daphne never took her final turn... And there is a debt that must be paid.

Visit Sarah Maria Griffin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"For the Love of Labor"

New from the University of Illinois Press: For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman by Cathryn J. Prince.

About the book, from the publisher:

From her start as one of the youngest activists in US history, Pauline Newman helped shape the International Ladies' Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) into a dominant force in industrial America. Cathryn J. Prince tells the story of a self-educated Jewish immigrant who dedicated herself to a legion of causes and lifelong battles against sexism and classism.

Prince follows Newman’s life from a youth split between Lithuania and New York City sweatshops to her work as an advisor to New Deal–era labor secretary Frances Perkins. Newman’s long hours at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory informed her entrée into labor activism. In the following years, she tirelessly advocated for workers, ran for New York Secretary of State as a socialist, and became the first woman to serve as the ILGWU general organizer. Her interest in the health of workers led to service on the Joint Board of Sanitary Control and a decades-long term as education director of the ILGWU health center. Membership in Eleanor Roosevelt’s circle opened doors to government positions and advisory roles that continued into the postwar era. Prince also weaves in the details of Newman’s fifty-year relationship with a woman, her struggles with her sexual identity, and her final years.

Engaging and panoramic, For the Love of Labor is the first major biography of an important figure in labor and women’s history.

Visit Cathryn J. Prince's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Cathryn J. Prince & Hershey and Juno.

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The Page 99 Test: Queen of the Mountaineers.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Inventing Mr. Darcy"

New from Severn House: Inventing Mr. Darcy by Susanna Craig.

About the book, from the publisher:

Award-winning author Susanna Craig is bringing the charm and sass of her historical romances into the 21st century with her first contemporary romance, Inventing Mr. Darcy, an enemies-to-lovers, alternate timeline romance with a Jane Austen twist!

A truth universally acknowledged: enemies attract!

Grad student Elle Bradshaw is on the cusp of completing her literature PhD. And while life beyond college is terrifying, spending her evening fixing a database malfunction with gorgeous yet grumpy tech geek Fisher Davis is worse. He infuriates her while making her heart race―it’s a distraction she doesn't need!

When a fluke geomagnetic storm leaves them trapped together during a blackout, the fiery kiss that follows is unexpected―and explosive. But catastrophically, the storm also wiped Jane Austen from existence! Now, Elle’s the only person to remember Pride and Prejudice and, it seems, romance itself.

As Elle navigates a world so familiar, yet not her own, she realizes she might just need to put her pride to one side and ask Fisher for help. Could the guy who was once her enemy turn out to be her very own Mr. Darcy . . . ?

Visit Susanna Craig's website.

--Marshal Zeringue