"Skirmishes with Patriotism"

New from the University Press of Kentucky: Skirmishes with Patriotism: Looking for America in the Long Shadow of Vietnam by Tad Tuleja.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War divided the country, millions of young American men faced the choice of how to respond to the draft. Some accepted conscription and went to fight. Others attended protests or fled the country. But most draft-aged men, avoiding both combat and exile, stayed home, punched the clock, watched Walter Cronkite, and mowed the lawn while history swirled around them. Decades later, members of this forgotten majority still live with the war's aftermath, questioning their response to the most polarizing conflict of their time.

Skirmishes with Patriotism is Tad Tuleja's lyrical and deeply personal memoir about this overlooked segment of his generation. Tracing his own journey from a flag-waving Boy Scout to a disillusioned humanist wrestling with the consequences of saying "no" to military service, he explores the complex pressures of family, expectations about masculine duty, and the fevered nationalism that continues to grip the United States today. This is not a tale of heroism or protest but a candid reckoning with moral ambiguity and the cost of a life-altering decision. With clarity and wit, Tuleja fills a critical gap in Vietnam War–era literature and offers a powerful reflection on what it means to be an American grappling with the legacy of patriotism and conflict.

Visit Tad Tuleja's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lunatics"

New from Forever: The Lunatics by Navessa Allen.

About the book, from the publisher:

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lights Out brings her signature high stakes, steamy romance, and suspenseful storytelling to a dark paranormal werewolf romance.

Layla Fitzpatrick lives a simple life, for a werewolf. And that's just how she likes it. Her childhood was less than ideal. She'd like to spend her adult years flying under the radar of more powerful preternatural creatures. Because she knows from experience what happens when they notice you.

Everything changes one early summer night when she attends a ritual bonding ceremony meant to join two werewolves together for life. Midway through, the spell becomes corrupted and she finds herself unexpectedly mated to the stuffiest shifter she's ever laid eyes on.

Michael Kolbeck is more man than wolf. He spends his days in a skyscraper, building his family's empire. At night, he prowls the streets of Boston, a city where shifters, witches, and vampires walk a delicate tightrope of ceasefire masquerading as peace.

Little do they know that Layla's arrival will act as the spark that ignites the fire, and that thin veneer of peace is about to vanish.

Visit Navessa Allen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Data-Driven Hollywood"

New from Princeton University Press: Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming by Violaine Roussel.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing but also in decisions about content and production. In Data-Driven Hollywood, Violaine Roussel examines the emergence of this new category of professionals at the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. Roussel shows how the rise of data and algorithm specialists has transformed organizations and rearranged power relationships within them. Drawing on extensive interviews and in situ observations, she describes the ways that technical “data work” carried out by professionals at streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ has had a significant effect on creative decisions.

Rather than fetishizing data and algorithmic models, Roussel explores the practices of the professionals who shape them, manipulate them, and give them power. She examines the relationships of these workers with traditional producers, describing legitimacy struggles and the eventual stabilization of new professional arrangements. Roussel’s account of the ways that data specialists deploy algorithmic models to reinvent their industry’s approach to content, artists, and the market—the first in-depth sociological study of the rise of this new profession—reveals the new forms of power and knowledge at play in today’s Hollywood.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Halls of the Dead"

Coming August 18 from Harper Voyager: The Halls of the Dead: A Novel – A Queer Victorian Gothic Horror Romance of Necromancy and Impossible Love by S. M. Hallow.

About the book, from the publisher:

A queer, gothic horror romance set in a necromancy-tinged London, sure to entrance fans of The Death of Jane Lawrence and Mexican Gothic.

London, December 1849

Irene Shallcross Haley has dedicated her life to necromancy, a forbidden, reviled art that is passed along through sentient grimoires bound in human skin. With her undead husband St. John—a marriage of kindred spirits and platonic convenience—she has been protecting the knowledge of generations of witches that came before her. Like any magic, it has come at a cost: her reputation, her relationship with her sister, and her soul. But when Irene’s love, Agnes, is hanged for witchcraft, Irene refuses to let Agnes be one more thing that is taken from her.

A true resurrection has not been achieved in two thousand years, but Irene is determined. With the help of St. John, Irene bangs on the doors of the Halls of the Dead, demanding the third part of their triumverate back…or did she? Because the Agnes that awakens comes with both a hunger for raw flesh and a malignant ghost tied to her soul.

Necromancy is the art of saying no—no, I won't let you go; no, I won't let you be destroyed—and Irene’s work is not yet done. She must find a way to bring Agnes back to her true self, she must navigate her feelings for her resurrected lover as well as St. John, and she must do all of this without catching the attention of Sir Silas Underhill, the man who sentenced Agnes to death.

Death is not the end of love. But Irene may realize it can actually be the beginning.

Visit S.M. Hallow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Translate and Rule"

New from Stanford University Press: Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive by Hannah Scott Deuchar.

About the book, from the publisher:

Over the decades of the nineteenth century, Egypt changed dramatically, from a minor Ottoman province to a major player in global markets and a de facto British colonial territory. Integral to this transformation was legal reform: the Islamic system was replaced by laws adapted from the French Napoleonic code, edited by international committees, rendered in several languages, and applied in multilingual secular courts. Translation made law possible for Egyptians navigating international commerce and imperial rule. But translation also enshrined hierarchies of difference and remade ideas and theories of justice. Translate and Rule argues that translation played a central role not only in colonial lawmaking, but also in anticolonial Arabic thought. Combining methods from literary and legal history, Hannah Scott Deuchar shows how translated legal codes in colonial Egypt exacerbated inequities in the courtroom and transformed relations of commerce and property ownership. These legal vocabularies and grammars also transformed Arabic itself, and Scott Deuchar analyzes how Arabophone authors, lawyers, and translators debated and challenged conceptions of language and linguistic exchange in literary and media spheres. As aspects of Egypt's legal pluralism were adopted elsewhere, seminal literary works from Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine theorized translation's role in colonial, juridical, and material violence—and offered new modes of reparation and ethical solutions premised on translingual solidarity across incalculable inequivalence.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Between Greek Balconies"

New from Lake Union: Between Greek Balconies by Francesca Catlow.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Let Francesca Catlow transport you to the Greek island of Nisyros, where sea, sun and romance offer a chance at a new beginning―perfect for fans of Karen Swan, Kate Frost and Paige Toon.

When burnt-out human rights barrister Alisha Harding is forced to take a sabbatical, she heads for the one place she’s dreamt of since childhood: a small, sun-drenched island in Greece.

In her new home by the sea, the volcanic landscape, the warmth of island life and the unhurried pace slowly begin to do what London couldn’t. She’s here to heal―not to be distracted by her brooding next-door neighbour, Helios, who seems determined to keep the world at arm’s length.

But night after night, sharing wine on their adjoining balconies, the intimacy between them grows. And Helios, it seems, is hiding his own painful past.

When duty calls Alisha back to London, the fragile peace she’s found on the island is abruptly shattered. Pulled between the life she’s always known and the one she’s only just begun to imagine, she must decide what truly matters. Can love bridge the gaps between language, loss and two very different worlds, or is the distance between them too great to overcome?

Visit Francesca Catlow's website.

Writers Read: Francesca Catlow (September 2025).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Paper Tombs"

New from NYU Press: Paper Tombs: Post-Holocaust Memorial Books and Prewar Jewish Life by Jennifer Rich.

About the book, from the publisher:

Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this volume explores how post-Holocaust memorial books help to reshape our understanding of Jewish life and death in Eastern Europe

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Eastern European survivors created yizker bikher―Yiddish for “memorial books”―to honor their towns destroyed and loved ones murdered during the Second World War. Devoted to their fellow community members, these collaboratively-written volumes were one way for survivors to reclaim their lives and memories.

In Paper Tombs, Jennifer Rich argues that yizker bikher demand renewed attention. Often dismissed as nothing more than nostalgic, amateur histories, Rich showcases how these vibrant sources are exceptional accomplishments that reanimate prewar Jewish life, condemn the Germans and their local collaborators, and memorialize the people, places, and ways of life destroyed during the Holocaust.

Paper Tombs makes the case for the importance of post-Holocaust memorial books as a resource for understanding Eastern European Jewish life, reshaping our understanding of Jewish experiences following the Holocaust. Deeply researched and engagingly written, Paper Tombs recovers these largely forgotten volumes and repositions them as critically important sources that reveal the rich diversity of prewar Jewish life, the relentless cruelty wrought by the Nazi occupation of the small towns and large cities of Eastern Europe, and the ways that survivors wanted them to be remembered.

--Marshal Zeringue

"When the World Was Happy"

Coming September 29 from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers: When the World Was Happy by Benjamin Alire Sáenz.

About the book, from the publisher:

A “heartrending yet beautiful” (School Library Journal, starred review) tale of twins and their group of friends who are forced to navigate life, relationships, and grief after their world is turned upside down from New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Benjamin Alire Sáenz.

CheChe knows that he and his twin sister Emma lead an unusual life. They enjoy spending time with their parents and grandparents, love to read, and don’t have a huge circle of friends—and they’re happy. Then, just a few months after they turn seventeen, three gunmen show up one morning at their El Paso, Texas, high school, and everything changes.

CheChe loses a leg, and both he and Emma have friends who die. Suddenly, the world feels like a very different place. But what they find hasn’t changed—or has only gotten deeper—is their love for their family, their close friends, and one another, and as they begin to heal, they create their own little community, one that wields the power of humor, kindness, and hope.

CheChe finds himself doing all kinds of things he never expected from his junior year: relearning to walk, falling in love with the boy he’s nursed a longtime crush on, making friends with a kid he always found intimidating. By the end of this life-changing school year, none of them will be the same, and many of them will have found their voices in ways they never imagined.

Visit Benjamin Alire Sáenz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Carousel: An Essay on Seeing"

New from Yale University Press: Carousel: An Essay on Seeing by Sarah Minor.

About the book, from the publisher:

From an award-winning writer, a critical reflection on the human desire to see and be seen

Carousel opens as a professor begins delivering a lecture to a hot room. Her students have the internet in their pockets, screens on their wrists, seeing in more directions than students ever could before. But what, in fact, are they looking at?

In the spirit of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Sarah Minor’s Carousel explores how the pursuit of panoramic vision frames power, distorts reality, and implicates both viewer and subject. Across short, loping sections that weave history with memoir, close looking with confession, Minor masterfully fuses the slide lecture with the lyric essay, tying medieval tapestries to surrealism and Instagram reels to predator drones. In language that captures the disorientation of that other carousel, the whirling carnival ride, Minor shows how the more we strive to see, the more we ultimately reveal ourselves.

Visit Sarah Minor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Great Game"

New from Thomas & Mercer: The Great Game: A Thriller by Arvind Ethan David.

About the novel, from the publisher:

An outsider in London investigates a series of brutal murders targeting English aristocrats in a timely and provocative historical novel brimming with intrigue, wit, and rage.

London, 1905: Law student and military veteran Balvinder dev Singh has found an extralegal way to fund his studies. As friend and accomplice to the infamous gentleman thief AJ Raffles, he rubs shoulders with the upper crust―and steals their valuables. That is, until their next mark, an imperialist general, is grotesquely murdered in the library of his Mayfair mansion. Bal and Raffles find themselves implicated in a series of killings that soon attracts the attention of Scotland Yard―and the aging Sherlock Holmes himself.

As Bal works to clear his name, he must hide his checkered past from a new acquaintance, the beautiful Irish violinist Maud Adler. Her fiery views lead Bal to question his own place in the world. But when he comes face-to-face with a plot to strike at the very heart of the British government, he must decide how much he’s willing to risk for his adopted city.

Visit Arvind Ethan David's website.

--Marshal Zeringue