"Dogs Save"

New from Columbia University Press: Dogs Save: Stories of Canine Redemption in US Culture by Katharine Mershon.

About the book, from the publisher:

Stories about people and dogs saving one another are everywhere in US culture—on TV, in Hollywood movies, on social media, and even on bumper stickers. Yet these seemingly heartwarming stories of mutual rescue revolve around redemption through suffering, a narrative profoundly interwoven with Christian beliefs, white racial anxieties, and US national myths.

Katharine Mershon examines the unacknowledged religious underpinnings of stories about dogs, revealing deeply rooted cultural assumptions about who can be saved and how redemption ought to occur. She identifies the “canine redemption narrative” as the defining cultural script for the stories people in the United States tell about dogs and, in turn, the nation. Exposing unexamined assumptions about the relationships between people and dogs, Mershon sheds light on the central place of animals and religion in defining racial boundaries.

Dogs Save considers examples including the Michael Vick dogfighting case; Samuel Fuller’s controversial B-movie White Dog; the TV show The Dog Whisperer, from the celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan; Laurie Anderson’s film Heart of a Dog; and Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir). Bringing together religious studies and animal studies, this book shows that redemption narratives shape who is allowed to survive and thrive in US society.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dear Missing Friend"

New from Sea Crow Press: Dear Missing Friend by Susan McGuirk.

About the book, from the publisher:

Three hearts. Countless letters. One impossible choice.

Through letters exchanged across oceans and Manhattan streets, Irish immigrant Catherine McGuirk navigates love, ambition, and heartbreak. Torn between her seafaring husband, the suitor she once refused, and her own dreams, Catherine’s fate unfolds in an intimate, epistolary saga of passion, resilience, and 19th-century life.

Visit Susan McGuirk's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Right-Wing Idea Factory"

Ndew from Oxford University Press: The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism by Donald F. Kettl.

About the book, from the publisher:

An incisive analysis of one of the most disruptive forces in modern American politics, The Right-Wing Idea Factory is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the fundamental transformation of conservatism in the Trump era and beyond.

While Donald Trump's 2024 re-election was hailed by many as a personal triumph, political scientist Donald F. Kettl argues it marked the apex of a movement that began long before Trump entered politics--and one that will continue to shape the American landscape long after he's gone.

In The Right-Wing Idea Factory, Kettl traces the rise of a revolutionary political force that has redefined the American right. Fueled by soft money and amplified by social media, a network of determined activists and organizations worked to dismantle traditional free-market conservatism and replace it with a populist agenda rooted in cultural and social issues. From abortion and gender to critical race theory, book bans, immigration, and the "deep state," this movement built a powerful new political base--one designed not just to win elections, but to reshape the rules of governance for generations.

Kettl reveals how this idea factory has profoundly influenced policy at every level of government, driving polarization and upending long-standing political norms. With sharp insight and deep research, he offers a vital account of how the American right has evolved--and what that means for the future of democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mist and Malice"

New from Thomas & Mercer: Mist and Malice (Haven Thrillers) by Rachel Howzell Hall.

About the book, from the publisher:

A small-town PI is drawn into a killer conspiracy in a breathtaking novel of suspense by the New York Times bestselling author of the Anthony Award–nominated These Toxic Things.

Private investigator Sonny Rush, the newest resident of Haven, California, knows that this fogbound coastal hamlet is every bit as dangerous as her hometown of Los Angeles. And when teenager and repeat runaway Honor Butler shows up at Sonny’s door with terror in her eyes, Sonny is immediately pulled into a new case that lands close to home.

Desperate, hungry, and in need of someone she can trust, Honor tells Sonny a horrifying story about where she’s been―and what she’s been forced to do. Then, hours later, the forest near Sonny’s cottage yields the remains of a missing day laborer, a man whose wife has been searching for answers for months. Soon, coincidence sharpens into conspiracy.

As Sonny digs deeper, the threads of these cases twist together into something horrifying: a ruthless network preying on the vulnerable, protected by the very people meant to uphold the law. With every step closer to revealing Haven’s corruption, Sonny risks pulling the lives of her loved ones into the cross fire―and exposing the shadows of her own past. Because in this town, loyalty can be fatal, and survival means deciding who you’re willing to betray.

Visit Rachel Howzell Hall's website.

The Page 69 Test: They All Fall Down.

The Page 69 Test: What Fire Brings.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Forms of Time, Newton to Austen"

New from Stanford University Press: Forms of Time, Newton to Austen by Jesse Molesworth.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between 1700 and 1800, the English-speaking world came to terms with one of modernity's most fundamental ideas: the separation of time from its measure, or what Newton described as the distinction between "absolute" and "relative" time. Jesse Molesworth argues that most experienced this encounter not firsthand, through direct exposure to Newton's writings, but secondhand, through a variety of smaller encounters in art, science, culture, and literature. Enriching our understanding of the connection between science and literature, Forms of Time, Newton to Austen offers the rise of the novel as a case study to examine the relationship between transformations in culture and transformations in literary forms. Through incisive readings of works by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and others, Molesworth reveals that the novel arose by making visible what culture does not or cannot see itself. The emergent "realist" novel did not adopt Newtonian claims wholesale. While the novel accommodated the new physicalist sense of "absolute time" in theme, its formal techniques offered something else: an escape, however temporary, from the claims made by Newtonian time.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Westerly"

New from Little A: Westerly: A Novel by Susan Donovan Bernhard.

About the book, from the publisher:

In an unforgettable saga of survival, motherhood, sisterhood, and the secrets that haunt us, one desperate decision creates a fault line that spans decades and threatens to break a family wide open.

In 1946, two German sisters, child refugees in a program dubbed Operation Shamrock, arrive in Ireland to live in foster care while Europe recovers from war. Nearly fifty years later, on a fateful day in a bustling Maine farmhouse, an Irish newspaper clipping threatens to unravel Faye Sullivan’s carefully constructed life with husband William and daughters Maeve and Molly, a life already on the brink of collapse.

When tragedy strikes and the Sullivans grapple with a cascade of buried secrets, Faye must confront the truth of a childhood summer in West Cork marked by adventure, heartbreak, and a life-altering decision that now jeopardizes everything she holds dear. And while their bonds may not be what they seemed, those bonds might be the one thing strong enough to help the broken Sullivan family navigate the truth and find their way forward together.

From Germany to Ireland to coastal Maine, this tender family saga explores identity, reconciliation, and the true meaning of home.

Visit Susan Donovan Bernhard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rhythm Nation"

New from Oxford University Press: Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora by Jasmine E. Johnson.

About the book, from the publisher:

At the intersection of diaspora theory, dance studies, performance studies, and critical ethnography, Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora explores the relationship between West African dance, race, gender, and sexuality in the United States and Guinea. In this book, Jasmine E. Johnson reveals the power of dance in shaping participants' individual and collective identities through the premise of African connectedness. By considering the relationship between movement, diaspora, and belonging, Johnson offers a study of multiple West African dance and drum contexts, including dance classes in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, dance and drum workshops in Guinea, and the North American Broadway stage.

Johnson explores the ways people with various lengths of experience with West African dance make use of movement to confer self, community, and diasporic membership. Revealing the ways practices of pleasure are enmeshed in the operations of power, intimacy, and difference, Rhythm Nation shows how dance links the symbolic and physical dimensions of diaspora: the imaginative work that fosters diasporic connectedness and the physical motion through and across space that has, and continues to, yield variegated African diasporic communities. Rhythm Nation asserts that West African dance both widens the circle of African diasporic "we" and interrogates its ever-shifting boundaries of belonging.

Visit Jasmine E. Johnson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Babylon, South Dakota"

New from Little, Brown and Company: Babylon, South Dakota: A Novel by Tom Lin.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of the Carnegie Medal in Fiction winner The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu comes a tantalizing, American West saga about a Chinese American family trying to survive on their Dakota farm as a powerful, mysterious, and morally dubious military secret shapes their lives.

When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara.

But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu’s farmland and begin building a missile silo, the inexplicable starts to occur: Mara can commune with the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything. When the Hsius learn that the project on their farm is an effort to make America’s nuclear deterrent invulnerable, they see firsthand the long arm of power and empire.

In the years and generations that follow, increasingly impacted by the silo and its residue, the Hsius experience strange, wondrous, and tragic events on their farm. An ambitious epic and an ode to the beauty and glory of our connection to the natural world, Babylon, South Dakota upends the idea of "strangers in a strange land" to become a classic American story. It is a daring novel about how choices reverberate across generations and asks us what we owe to one another.

Visit Tom Lin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Smart as a City"

New from the University of California Press: Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism by Burcu Baykurt.

About the book, from the publisher:

Smart as a City provides a rich ethnographic investigation into how smartness is received and negotiated in a midsize US city. Burcu Baykurt follows the work of civic entrepreneurs, local residents, and city officials in Kansas City, Missouri, where Google tested a citywide gigabit service and the local government launched a series of smart city pilot projects in transportation, public housing, and municipal services. Baykurt redefines smartness as a collective effort to spotlight a city’s enduring local problems and align solutions with the often buggy, partially developed systems offered by tech companies. She shows that success in matching civic concerns with flawed tech systems is hard-won and ambiguous, and that the techniques of data capitalism extract value from urban inequalities rather than solve them.

Visit Burcu Baykurt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Girl on the Beach"

Coming soon from Crooked Lane Books: The Girl on the Beach: A Thriller by Carol Snow.

About the book, from the publisher:

A missing child tears a family apart in this switchback roller coaster of a psychological thriller that builds to a final, jaw-dropping twist, perfect for fans of Jennifer Hillier and Lisa Lutz.

On the surface, Sonia and Graham Starr were a glamorous couple: She, the sleek entrepreneur; he, the boyishly handsome painter with an irrepressible zest for life. They had everything money can buy and the one thing it can’t—a precious, precocious four-year-old named Roxie. But when Roxie disappears into the Pacific Ocean on a perfect August afternoon, their world crumbles around them.

Months later, Roxie’s twenty-one-year-old former nanny, plagued by guilt and confusion, returns to the Starrs’ beach house on the “American Riviera,” the rarefied stretch of land around Santa Barbara where the mountains meet the sea. Her first night back, she gazes out at the sand, only to see a child who bears a striking resemblance to Roxie. When she calls out, the child runs away.

Colleen never believed that Roxie, who was afraid of the surf, would run into the ocean on her own. Now, she is determined to get to the truth, even if it means facing her greatest fears.

The Girl on the Beach asks us who we trust when we can’t trust ourselves.

Visit Carol Snow's website.

My Book, The Movie: Just Like Me, Only Better.

My Book, The Movie: What Came First.

The Page 69 Test: Bubble World.

--Marshal Zeringue