"Our Ex's Wedding"

Coming soon from Berkley: Our Ex's Wedding by Taleen Voskuni.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Two people who can’t stand each other must come together to plan their mutual ex’s wedding in this new romantic comedy by Taleen Voskuni, author of Lavash at First Sight.

Ani Avakian was supposed to be the Bay Area’s premier Armenian wedding planner by now. But after a huge blow to her business, she’s determined to redeem herself by taking on the biggest job of her career: a wedding for an indie movie star. The wedding is set at a stunning Armenian-owned winery, and Ani is eager to connect with the owner, who she’ll be working closely with. But then she actually meets him. Sure, Raffi is ridiculously hot and charming, but he’s also insufferably smug. Though the real gut punch comes when Ani meets the happy couple—because the actress’s fiancée is none other than the woman who shattered her heart two years ago: her ex-girlfriend, Kami.

All Raffi Garabedian has ever wanted is to make his father proud. Taking over the family winery should be his dream come true—but its first major event is off to a rocky start, thanks to one irritating(-ly beautiful) wedding planner who challenges him at every turn. He’s shocked to find that they have one thing in common, however: their mutual ex, Kami. Despite the record level of awkwardness, they’ll have to work together to make sure this wedding goes perfectly. But first, they’ll have to deal with the tension sizzling between them—before it turns their ex’s nuptials into a full-blown disaster…or something much more scandalous.

Visit Taleen Voskuni's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dressing for England"

New from the State University of New York Press: Dressing for England: Fashion and Nationalism in Victorian Novels by Amy L. Montz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture.

Dressing for England argues that women's interest in fashionable clothing-in dress that appealed to a sophisticated, cultured, and continental society-was viewed in two ways in nineteenth-century England: as a superficial feminine habit, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a dangerous tool women used to control how they were perceived. Dress could be a means of not only conveying extravagance or beauty but also influencing society at home and expressing Englishness aboard. Victorian women turned the world of fashion into an arena of feminine power. Reading well-known novels by Gaskell, Thackeray, and Eliot alongside clothing and cultural ephemera, Dressing for England shows how evolving fashions-shawls, crinolines, turbans, corsets, hats-reflected shifting notions of class, gender, and Empire and enabled women to shape both their own identities and national consciousness.

Visit Amy L. Montz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Just Watch Me"

New from Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: Just Watch Me: A Novel by Lior Torenberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister—a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.

Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.

Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on earth: the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.

Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this misguided striver with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.

Visit Lior Torenberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Into the Loop"

New from Duke University Press: Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition by Samuele Collu.

About the book, from the publisher:

Into the Loop asks how, and under what conditions, we can interrupt the repetitions that define us. Drawing from more than 200 hours of ethnographic observations of Systemic couples therapy in Buenos Aires, alongside auto-ethnographic recordings of Samuele Collu’s own hypnotherapy sessions, this study traces the psychic forces that compel people to repeat, interrupt, or drift aside from relational loops. Grounding his analysis in affect theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, Collu examines how identification, affective transmission, compulsive repetition, and hypnosis play out within therapeutic encounters observed by teams of psychotherapists through one-way mirrors and closed-circuit television systems. This focus on visual mediation reveals how screens and observational devices both capture and distort the therapeutic process itself—a dynamic that connects to broader questions about digital media and user-screen relations in contemporary society. Written in an experimental and literary style that moves fluidly between the academic, the personal, and their uncanny in-betweens, Into the Loop offers a unique window into the repetitive cycles that shape our most intimate relationships and the possibilities for transformation within them.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Darkrooms"

New from William Morrow: Darkrooms: A Novel by Rebecca Hannigan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Two unforgettable women investigate the disappearance of a missing girl in a small Irish town brimming with secrets—in this haunting debut from a new crime writing talent, perfect for fans of Tana French and Flynn Berry.

What secrets lurk in the Hanging Woods?

On the night of the Summer Solstice in 1999, nine-year-old Roisin O’Halloran marched into the Hanging Woods, the mysterious copse that had inspired fear in decades of children in the small Irish town of Bannakilduf. She was never seen again.

Twenty years later, two women are drawn together to discover the truth of what happened to Roisin: Roisin’s older sister Deedee, a rookie cop who’s barely hanging on to the appearance of keeping it all together, and Roisin’s childhood best friend Caitlin, a petty criminal who was the last person to see the young girl before she disappeared, now returned to her hometown after her mother’s death.

Reluctantly brought together after decades of mistrust, Caitlin and Deedee must reckon with their shadowy pasts, the monsters that still haunt them, and the role they each may have played in Roisin’s disappearance.

With old wounds made fresh, the unresolved events of that summer years ago rise to the surface, and the truth threatens to reshape the small town that would prefer the past remain buried.

The siren of the Hanging Woods rings out once more. After all, nothing can stay hidden forever.

Visit Rebecca Hannigan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The White Pedestal"

New from Yale University Press: The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate by Curtis Dozier.

About the book, from the publisher:

How white nationalist thought leaders use ancient Greece and Rome to claim historical precedent for their violent and oppressive politics

It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website incorporates an image of the Parthenon into its logo, and rioters wore Spartan helmets in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. These juxtapositions may appear incongruous to people who associate the ancient world with enlightened political ideals and sophisticated philosophical inquiry. But, as Curtis Dozier points out in this thought-provoking book, it’s hard to imagine a historical period better suited to rhetorical use by white nationalists. Indeed, some of the most widely admired voices from ancient literature and philosophy endorsed ideas that modern white supremacists promote, and the social and political realities of the ancient world provide models for political systems that white supremacists would like to establish today.

Part introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past, this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this knowledge with disturbing success.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rage of Swords"

New from Bloomsbury USA: Rage of Swords by David Gilman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this thrilling historical adventure, Master of War Sir Thomas Blackstone must travel into enemy lands with a price on his head as he seeks gold and alliances for King Edward's war with France.

THE MASTER OF WAR RIDES AGAIN.

1368, Northern Italy. As the Hundred Years' War smoulders, the Duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III, sets out from Paris to wed the Lord of Milan's daughter. The union could forge an alliance as vital as any victory on the battlefield.

But the road to Milan is a road to betrayal.

Riding ahead is Sir Thomas Blackstone, the legendary Master of War. Blackstone is tasked with securing the gold that, together with the marriage alliance, will fuel the House of Plantagenets' fight against France. But with a bounty on his head, Blackstone will have to outthink and outfight foes deadlier than any he has faced before.

Yet the gravest threat may lie closer to home. Blackstone's son, Henry, has inherited his father's unerring fate to walk where peril waits...

Visit David Gilman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life by Aleksandr Prigozhin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores how modernist fiction interrogated the many promises of ubiquitous media connectivity as key to collective life.

In Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life, Aleksandr Prigozhin explores how modernist fiction responded to its changing media environment in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers used diverse forms of media, broadly conceived—from print, architecture, and radio to soil and infrastructure—as metaphors for the contradictions of common life, while highlighting both the promises and failures of media modernity.

Media's complex relationship to affect and sociality allowed modernists to imagine how disparate lives might be linked together through modes of impersonal intimacy. Through close readings of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Andrei Platonov, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among others, Prigozhin reveals how their works leverage media's ability to connect and divide. These texts grapple with the challenges of mass democracy, imperial decline, and the growing ubiquity of media communication, offering a nuanced vision of the difficulties of mediated human connection.

This interdisciplinary study bridges literature, media theory, and cultural history, showing how modernist novels illuminate the entangled relationship among materiality, affect, and social structures. Tracking their engagement with media and matter, Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life reveals a politics of the common at the heart of modernist fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

"You'll Never Forget Me"

New from Bantam: You'll Never Forget Me: A Novel by Isha Raya.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this captivating cat-and-mouse thriller, a struggling actress is only just beginning to enjoy the life sheʼs always wanted after inadvertently killing her rival—but now she must contend with the woman who threatens to take it all away.

Struggling actress Dimple Kapoor wouldn’t call herself a murderer, per se—she’d prefer the term “opportunist.” Years ago, she did what had to be done to get herself out of a bad situation. And now, after accidentally killing her Hollywood rival, Irene Singh, at a party, she’s simply seizing the chance to nab her dream leading role and resuscitate her career in the process. Thereʼs only one problem: Someone else at the event witnessed the crime . . . and caught it all on camera.

With everything she’s ever wanted within reach, Dimple will stop at nothing to keep stardom in her grasp. But Irene’s parents have hired Saffi Mirai Iyer, one of the best private investigators in the business. Living up to her reputation, Saffi immediately zeroes in on Dimple, who feels she has no choice but to raise the stakes. Playing along with Dimple’s facade, Saffi invites her on to the case, suggesting she act as bait to draw out the killer—and as the two women’s cat-and-mouse game intensifies, Saffi starts to wonder if she may have finally met her match.

With their careers at risk, both women must fight the potent chemistry drawing them closer together. Dimple needs Saffi dead and for her theories to die with her. And Saffi needs Dimple behind bars, but catching her elusive prey won’t be so easy—especially as emotions begin to cloud her judgment. When ambition and desire collide, only the most cunning will survive.

Visit Isha Raya's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Stolen Representation"

New from Cambridge University Press: Stolen Representation: Black Disfranchisement and State Legislative Politics in the American South by Michael P. Olson.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the decades after Reconstruction, African Americans were systematically removed from the electorate in the American South using tools such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Stolen Representation draws on significant amounts of new historical data to explore how these tools of Black disfranchisement shaped state legislative politics in the American South. The book draws on contemporary scholarship to develop theoretical arguments for how disfranchisement plausibly affected roll-call voting, committee assignments, and policymaking activity in southern state legislatures, and uses rich data on each of these areas to demonstrate disfranchisement's profound effects. By analyzing state legislative data and drawing on historical sources to help characterize the nature of politics in each state in the period around disfranchisement, Olson offers a nuanced, context-driven exploration of disfranchisement's effects, making a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between racial discrimination at the ballot box and public policymaking in the United States.

Visit Michael Olson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue