"Frank Buck: Chicago Hitman"

New from Tortoise Books: Frank Buck: Chicago Hitman by Joseph G. Peterson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Frank Buck is a fat f*ck. A slob, a middle-aged loser, he’s living in Chicagoland with his mother and collecting disability checks, drinking Svedka vodka and driving aimlessly through the nighttime city in the one thing in his life that brings him joy and freedom—a 1989 Cadillac Brougham D’Elegance.

Unfortunately he also has a talent.

His great weight, his ballast, makes him a remarkable shot with all manner of weapons. And this eventually draws him into the orbit of a local gangster and psychopath, a Polaroid-toting maniac named Rodger. In short order Frank is trapped in a seemingly endless and cartoonish routine of bloodshed and gore, a criminal Sisyphus pushing a soul-wearying boulder—or perhaps a biblical figure blundering towards an improbable Golgotha.

Joseph G. Peterson has attracted a devoted readership for his unique blend of sad and funny writing—a series of remarkable books centered around lovable losers stuck in absurdly existential situations reminiscent of both Camus and the Coen Brothers. Here he’s created perhaps his most memorable book, a pulpy reverie unlike anything you’ll ever read.

Visit Joseph G. Peterson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beautiful Piece.

Writers Read: Joseph G. Peterson (May 2025).

The Page 69 Test: The Perturbation of O.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Radicals"

New from Yale University Press: Radicals: The Working Classes and the Making of Modern Britain by Geoff Andrews.

About the book, from the publisher:

An authoritative and original history of the working classes and the British Left

The political Left in Britain rose out of the Industrial Revolution, as the working classes emerged as the leading force in the call for social change. Their contributions extended widely to political representation, the birth of the Labour Party and women’s suffrage, the autodidact tradition in adult education, and Britain’s literary culture. Throughout subsequent decades, the working classes remained central to the British radical tradition.

Geoff Andrews traces the history of the Left and the Labour Party through the ideas of leading thinkers, writers, educationalists, trade unionists, and politicians. Ranging from the Workers Educational Association to the General Strike and the Women’s Liberation Movement, Andrews uncovers the voices of key figures. The first account of the Labour Party to put the working classes at the heart of its history, this fascinating book tells a wider story of their progressive contribution to British culture, politics, and the movements which have driven social change.

Visit Geoff Andrews's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"4 Janes"

Coming June 30 from Little A: 4 Janes: A Novel by Marian Yee.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Through time, space, and the transcendence of maternal love, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is reimagined in the parallel lives of one soul searching for meaning, connection, and a place to belong.

Jane Eyre is a missionary’s wife.

A bookseller in Vietnam.

A time traveler.

A hero in a modern gothic tale.

What if Jane’s story didn’t end with her marriage to Edward Rochester? What if she never married him at all?

In one lifetime, Jane travels to India and Burma as Mrs. St. John Rivers. In another, she’s Trang, a young woman selling books in Vietnam, vying for the love of the local priest. Yet another picks up where Brontë left her, now grieving the loss of her child and crossing time and space to find him. And finally, a young Vietnamese-American man searching for himself in Boston, a tutor whose relationship with a veteran feels strangely, achingly familiar…

Each thread tells Jane’s story in sweeping, heartbreaking shades of loss, vulnerability, yearning, and the fierce love of mother and child that withstands time and space. While she may long for something more out of a life she didn’t get to choose, she can still decide what to make of it.

Visit Marian Yee's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cherokee War of 1776"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: The Cherokee War of 1776: Native Destruction at the Dawn of American Independence by Kevin Kokomoor.

About the book, from the publisher:

The forgotten history of the US war against the Cherokee offers a crucial reframing of America's origin story.

Americans remember 1776 as the year liberty was declared, the moment they cast off tyranny and proclaimed the self-evident truths of equality and freedom. But that same summer, as patriots celebrated their defiant new nation, American armies launched another campaign―this one aimed at destroying the Cherokee nation.

The Cherokee War of 1776 recasts America's founding moment by tracing the importance of westward ambition and settler violence to the origins of the Revolutionary War. In this gripping and sobering book, historian Kevin Kokomoor uncovers the rarely acknowledged war waged by the emerging United States against the Cherokee people just days after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Far from a spontaneous frontier skirmish, this war was a coordinated, state-backed campaign with a clear aim: seize Indigenous land and crush Native resistance. Many of the very men who championed liberty on parchment simultaneously advocated for the wholesale destruction of a sovereign Native nation.

At the heart of this story is Cherokee resistance, which was strategic, determined, and deeply rooted in community dynamics. Figures like Dragging Canoe emerged to lead a movement that endured long after American armies had burned Cherokee towns to the ground. Kokomoor foregrounds Cherokee voices, motivations, and resilience, challenging the notion that they were merely pawns in a colonial struggle and forcing us to reckon with the real costs of independence and the long fight for Indigenous sovereignty.

Visit Kevin Kokomoor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Nantucket Second Chances"

New from Sourcebooks: Nantucket Second Chances: A Novel by Pamela Kelley.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Nantucket is the perfect place for a new beginning.

Claire Shipman never imagined she'd be the single mom of a teenager, going through a contentious divorce, and unexpectedly pregnant. On the bright side, at least she's on Nantucket, where she grew up, and where her mother and grandmother welcome her home with open arms.

For years, Claire lived an enviable Manhattan lifestyle. Until her ex had a marriage-ending affair and also lost his job and all their money. Claire's high school friends invite her to their book club and an off-hand joke that she could sell one of her Hermes bags sparks a business idea.

Her friend's brother, Cody, is a furniture builder with a spare storefront. He's initially skeptical about the prospects of a "used handbag shop".

But Claire is determined. With the support of Lily, her mother, grandmother, old friends and new, she begins to build a true second chance at a new life.

Visit Pamela Kelley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cold War Puerto Rico"

New from the University of Massachusetts Press: Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony by Steve Howell.

About the book, from the publisher:

A gripping history of FBI surveillance, political repression, and the fight for Puerto Rican independence

In the 1940s, with the construction of a naval base and a bombing range, Puerto Rico became a major geo-political military outpost for the United States. For a power claiming global leadership in a decolonizing world, however, the archipelago’s colonial condition underscored the dissonance between American democratic rhetoric and its imperial reality. The solution was a deal that, in 1952, gave Puerto Rico a degree of self-government without changing its legal status as an “unincorporated” US territory. The US then publicly claimed Puerto Rico was now more autonomous while using repressive tactics such as FBI surveillance, arrests, destabilization, and other methods developed in Washington to silence activists and political parties pushing for full independence.

In Cold War Puerto Rico, Steve Howell examines how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI targeted Puerto Rican communists as part of an offensive against pro-independence parties and activists generally. Howell’s US-born father, who fell afoul of Hoover for producing radical cartoons while working in San Juan in the 1940s, remained on the FBI’s watch list long after exiling himself in Britain. His close friends, the Puerto Rican author César Andreu Iglesias and Jane Speed de Andreu, were meanwhile arrested and imprisoned three times during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, including interviews and FBI files, Howell tells their stories along with those of other activists who battled indictment in 1954 under the Smith Act, challenged the jurisdiction of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Juan in 1959, and revived the Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1960s, despite the FBI deploying the covert tactics of COINTELPRO against them.

Puerto Rico is virtually invisible in histories of what is generally called McCarthyism, yet anti-communist repression was in many ways more intense there than in the mainland US. Now, with Puerto Rico’s future currently hanging in the balance, Howell’s compelling history demonstrates why we need to understand the long enforcement of its colonial status.

Visit Steve Howell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Jellyfish Problem"

New from Berkley: The Jellyfish Problem by Tessa Yang.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A marine biologist makes the discovery of a lifetime when called to rescue the inhabitants of a small Maine island being menaced by a giant, glowing jellyfish in this richly imagined, wholly original debut.

Dr. Jo Ness prefers jellyfish to people. Her best friend, Aldo, was the exception, but he died seven months ago. So she spends her days hidden away at an underfunded aquarium with her specimens and a draft of the jellyfish guide she and Aldo had been working on together. His voice is alive in the notes in the margins, and it’s enough. Almost.

Until she receives a call from Nadia, one of the few other humans she’s loved but whom she hasn’t heard from in years, asking for her help. Nadia tells her a grand tale of a giant jellyfish terrorizing her tiny island off the coast of Maine and sends a grainy video of the creature. Frankly, the footage looks fake, but Jo drops everything to fly across the country to see Nadia again, and to find this supposed sea beast. She couldn’t save Aldo, but perhaps she can help Nadia.

But when Jo arrives on Shattering Point, Nadia is nowhere to be found, and the islanders she meets each have something different to say about the creature they’ve dubbed Clementine ... a jellyfish who changes all who see it.

At turns an ode to classic sea monster stories and a vibrant tale of human connection, The Jellyfish Problem is an unforgettable debut that announces a new talent.

Visit Tessa Yang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri"

New from LSU Press: Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri: The Rise and Fall of Manufacturing in America’s Hometown, 1890–1970 by Gregg Andrews.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri, Gregg Andrews examines the history of factory laborers in a celebrated Mississippi River town. In the late 1890s, shoe manufacturing transformed Mark Twain’s boyhood home from a steamboat village to a factory town. By the mid-1920s, the St. Louis–based International Shoe Company, the world’s largest shoe manufacturer at the time, controlled all shoe production in Hannibal and continued to do so until it shut down production lines in the 1960s. The company kept a tight grip on the town as it battled to keep out unions and maintain labor at a low cost and in a malleable state. When Hannibal’s shoe workers claimed their right to organize under the New Deal during the Great Depression, the shoe corporation was defiant. The company’s stance sparked mob violence against outside union organizers, nurtured a company union, pitted unionists against company loyalists, and badly divided Hannibal. At the same time, the town was engaged in yearlong festivities to celebrate the centennial of Mark Twain’s birth and the opening of a museum named in his honor.

Andrews’s study of shoe manufacturing and its production workers is thick in detail and rich with the human stories of those whose lives were shaped by the rise and fall of the shoe industry in Hannibal. Andrews captures the shoe workers―white and Black, men and women―in their own words as they describe their jobs, family struggles, and battles to unionize.

Andrews examines the prevailing conditions that led the company to close its production facilities in Hannibal, leaving shoe workers and the town to confront the early shock waves of deindustrialization. His study of an industry that has virtually disappeared in the United States leaves a record for the families of thousands of American shoe workers and the citizens of Hannibal to better understand their history and the role shoe manufacturing played in it.

Visit Gregg Andrews's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Treason of Magic"

Coming June 23 from 47North: A Treason of Magic by Melissa Marr.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a world where magic, desire, and duty collide, it is beauty who is fated to kill the beast in a lush historical fantasy of secrets and star-crossed love by New York Times bestselling author Melissa Marr.

Two young women. Heirs to altogether different hereditary burdens. Yet bound by a monstrous threat to their village.

Gabrielle is the first woman in Alveus to carry the mantle of Hunter, which comes with an obligation to kill the faery beasts murdering travelers in Brimmond Wood. Wary of the power she wields as guardian of her people, Gabrielle is summoned by her first love, a seductress who shattered her heart into pieces a decade ago.

Isabeau is the rarest of nobility―a lady duke. She is also afflicted by a curse that leaves her in a deep sleep between the gloaming and daylight. How can she begin her tenure as protector when she can’t keep her village safe from whatever stalks its darkest hours? For that, she needs the help of the Hunter.

Against her will, Gabrielle is falling in love all over again. But what new threats will arise when Gabrielle and Isabeau’s star-crossed destinies collide with the beast of Brimmond Wood?

Visit Melissa Marr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In Quest of a Cure"

New from Oxford University Press: In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort by Sally Shuttleworth.

About the book, from the publisher:

People have always travelled for health, but as industrial pollution increased in nineteenth-century Britain, doctors started ordering their patients abroad in ever-growing numbers. Self-styled 'English Colonies' sprung up, not in the far-reaches of the Empire, but in health resorts in the heart of Europe. This work explores the intensity and sheer strangeness of life in these colonies, governed by illness, but where patients (before the rise of the sanatorium) could move around freely, and even indulge in winter sports. Focusing on Menton on the Riviera and Davos in the Swiss Alps, from the 1860s to the 1920s, In Quest of a Cure explores the literary and medical cultures of these resorts: the lives, conflicting emotions, and writings of the patients and their carers, and the changing patterns of medical treatment. Many of the patients ordered to winter abroad had tuberculosis, but others were cases of nervous disorders, or sufferers from 'overwork', what we would now call burnout, all hoping to be cured once placed in the right climatic environment.

Blending medical and literary history and analysis, Sally Shuttleworth looks in depth at the lives and writings of literary invalids, including John Addington Symonds, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Katherine Mansfield, leading up to an extended study of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, placed in the medical and literary context of Davos life. Other literary lives and fiction explored include Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Olive Schreiner, Vernon Lee, 'new woman' novelist Beatrice Harraden, and Llewelyn Powys. In Quest of a Cure considers the pleasures as well as the pains of medical exile, and the close bonds which often developed between doctor and patient. Medical climatology, as it was called, is a discarded science, but its prescription of fresh air, exercise, and sunshine brought about a revolution in medical practices at the time. In its understanding of the relationship between individual health and surrounding environment, it offers new perspectives for us to think about the challenges of current times.

--Marshal Zeringue