"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

"The Ancient House"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Ancient House: Constructing Community in the Seventeenth-Century New York Borderlands by Erin B. Kramer.

About the book, from the publisher:

While New Amsterdam has captured public imagination and scholarly attention for centuries, the Dutch borderland settlement that became Albany, New York, was no less vital to the development of early America. In The Ancient House, historian Erin Kramer examines how early relationships between the Dutch and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) built a foundation for the town’s oversized role in European and Indigenous diplomacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Albany (called “the ancient house” by a Haudenosaunee orator) was an essential space where Indigenous people articulated what it meant for Europeans to settle in their world. Kramer illustrates how Haudenosaunee people shaped the town, its politics, and the laws enforced there through a century of negotiations, and how they sought redress and hold colonists to their agreements. By incorporating Haudenosaunee stories into the broader narrative of New York history, The Ancient House reveals how Albany became a negotiated community, a site of dialogue, and a critical central place in early America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Perfect Hand"

New from Knopf: A Perfect Hand: A Novel by Ayelet Waldman.

About the book, from the publisher:

A richly drawn, captivating, and endlessly amusing novel of love and subterfuge between a lady’s maid and her clandestine lover, set in the country estates of nineteenth-century England.

Miss Alice Lockey, daughter of a tenant farmer, has by dint of hard work, innate intelligence, and a cunning ability to predict the moods of her betters, raised herself to the lofty status of lady’s maid at Alderwick Park. Though her mother has advised Alice to work only until marriage, Alice has thus far resisted the temptations of matrimony among the neighboring widowers and pig farmers, more content to enjoy the fruits of her labor—or at least the portion of it her father will share after it is paid to him. Alice spends her days arranging Lady Jemima Alderwick’s blond hair into the latest French styles, chignons and plaits, laundering her lady’s surprisingly malodorous petticoats and drawers, and carefully sewing all manner of fripperies, ribbons, lace, and silk flowers, to her lady’s bonnets and gowns.

But when a visiting servant, a valet named Charlie Wells, catches her eye, Alice begins to understand the constraints of her position. In a ploy to spend time with the object of her affection, Alice attempts to arrange a romance between Lady Jemima Alderwick and Charlie’s employer, one Baronet Sir Nigel Wynstowe. If only they would fall in love—then Alice and Charlie might live together as man and wife! Challenged by Lady Jemima’s love for another and Sir Wynstowe’s eccentric personality, Alice must use all of her cunning to bring about this unlikely romantic union. Will this low-born servant successfully manipulate the hearts of these lords and ladies? Will Charlie and Alice ever improve their stations? Or, as the beginning of women’s suffrage begins to percolate in the drawing rooms and salons of London, will Alice discover a different sort of path for herself?

A deliciously funny, gorgeously detailed, utter enthralling novel, A Perfect Hand is a glorious novel of class, gender, and England on the cusp of enormous change.

Visit Ayelet Waldman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Love and Treasure.

The Page 69 Test: Love and Other Impossible Pursuits.

The Page 99 Test: A Really Good Day.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Treachery and Diplomacy"

New from Columbia University Press: Treachery and Diplomacy: The Shadow Politics of US-Africa Relations by Sobukwe Odinga.

About the book, from the publisher:

The African allies of the United States are often depicted as mere pawns or clients seeking aid. Yet African leaders have deftly capitalized on security partnerships with the United States in ways that have been widely overlooked. Through skillful negotiating, hosting US military operations, and deploying their soldiers to support Washington’s strategic aims, they have advanced their own interests―sometimes at the expense of their citizens.

Treachery and Diplomacy shines a light on US-Africa security partnerships, revealing their simmering internal tensions, hidden racial politics, and consequences for peace and democracy. Sobukwe Odinga explores the contentious relations between the US and key African allies―Liberia, Ethiopia, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Uganda―from the Cold War to the War on Terror. He brings to life the diplomatic gambits of leaders such as William Tubman, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Yoweri Museveni, documenting how they prodded Washington to back them in regional conflicts, increase aid, and temper criticisms of their domestic policies. Odinga also considers the African American political elites who denounced and championed US-Africa security partnerships―in some moments undercutting the influence of African leaders, in others abetting their authoritarianism. Connecting American racial thought, Pan-Africanism, and Black transnationalism to US security policy toward Africa, Treachery and Diplomacy offers new insight into how African governments have pursued their own agendas.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Done in a Day"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon by Elisa Tamarkin.

About the book, from the publisher:

A searing reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the end of foreign reporting in the nation's daily newspapers.

Done in a Day turns on a single event: the April 30, 1975, departure of the last helicopter evacuating civilians from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon. Elisa Tamarkin's interest in that helicopter begins with the fact that her stepfather, the Saigon bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News, was on it—the last American correspondent to leave Saigon as it fell. His report was filed from a naval ship on the South China Sea at a time when no other telexes were going through.

Now, more than fifty years later, Tamarkin offers a social and cultural autopsy of that moment, based in personal history but vividly unfolding amid the vast documentation of America's obvious defeat, which never seemed to register even as it got out, in the writings of journalists and essayists, in the backchannel cables between US ambassador Graham Martin and Henry Kissinger, in congressional hearings, and in photographs of the war's end. The story is also set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in city newspapers—and of the newspapers themselves—once proud, in the words of the Chicago Daily News, of bringing readers the "literature of the day" that was "done in a day."

Done in a Day braids history, criticism, and memoir to tell the paired stories of Saigon's liberation and the demise of the news. The result is a haunting essay about all that ended in a day—and about what it means to recognize and to write about endings even as we live through them.

--Marshal Zeringue