"Wood You Be Mine"

New from Berkley: Wood You Be Mine (Lovewell Lumberjacks) by Daphne Elliot.

About the novel, from the publisher:

The first time I met the grumpy lumberjack next door, I almost burnt down his cabin.
The second time, I was in an argument with a moose (don’t ask).
The third time, I was naked.

Henri Gagnon is not just my neighbor and landlord, but a flannel-clad foe who helps run his family’s lumber business. His protective streak clearly does not apply to me, since he’s convinced I won’t make it through the Maine winter.

But I’m going to show Henri and the rest of this small town that they’re wrong. I have one year to prove myself as the elementary school’s principal or I’ll be getting the axe.

So I simply just don’t have time to pine away for the lumberjack next door, no matter how good he looks chopping wood in his suspenders, or the way it makes me feel when he calls me buttercup.

I definitely don’t have time to wonder what would happen if I asked him if he wood be mine...

Visit Daphne Elliot's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"All Eyes on Space"

New from the University of Pittsburgh Press: All Eyes on Space: An Architectural History of Television by Samuel Dodd.

About the book, from the publisher:

In All Eyes on Space, Sam Dodd looks at television and sees architecture: a dynamic system of spatial design, environmental planning, and bodily control operating behind and beyond the small screen. By transmitting images and sounds across vast distances, television brings faraway places into immediate view and, in the process, reshapes how space is imagined and inhabited. Yet, this seemingly effortless presentation of “distant sight” is only possible because of deliberate architectural investments made throughout the second half of the twentieth century. From the 1940s onward, American architects and planners designed stations, studios, towers, cables, and screens while also experimenting with television as a medium for public communication and engagement. Drawing on archival records, original broadcasts, and works of art and design, Dodd plots a history of television architecture in the United States to show how the medium produced a distinctly American spatial logic that tethered expansionist ambitions to the management of visibility and access. Ultimately, this book reveals how a ubiquitous medium commonly understood as immaterial―if not ephemeral―became one of the century’s most consequential built environments.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Deadlock"

Coming November 17 from Margaret K. McElderry Books: Deadlock (The StrangeLoom Trilogy) by Chloe Gong.

About the book, from the publisher:

The danger ramps up as Lia works as a double agent against NileCorp in this second book in the dystopian Strangeloom trilogy, in which humanity has moved to virtual reality to flee their deteriorating world, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Chloe Gong.

One wrong move will end the world…

The nation can’t stop talking about Eirale Ward. After a perilous mission with the enemy, she has been rescued and returned to NileCorp. Her gracious employer cleared her charges of treason and restored her status as an elite soldier.

Once, that would have been enough—but she is not that same Eirale anymore. She is a spy for the Coalition, tasked to take down NileCorp from the inside.

Meanwhile, everyone in Atahua is watching Nik Grant. Though he succeeded in his mission to retrieve Project Wit, he has put a target on his loved ones, and NileCorp will stop at nothing to bring him in. Working for the Coalition was supposed to help him destroy NileCorp, but the Coalition is pushing restraint while he wants action. He’s running out of time.

When Atahua’s charismatic vice president joins the scene at NileCorp, the company grows untouchable. Kieren is unwavering in his belief in Lia and her ability to rupture the power in virtual reality—but NileCorp sees all, and it has long set its trap. Before total and absolute control can land in NileCorp’s hands, Lia must embrace what she was built to do…

Either change the world or burn it all down.

Visit by Chloe Gong's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Culture and Containment"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Culture and Containment: Race, Geographic Mobility, and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century America by Colin Anderson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Movement—who moves, where they move, and how they move—has long been perceived as a racial threat in the United States. To better understand why, Colin Anderson examines how popular culture played a central role in shaping these perceptions during the transformative period of Greater Reconstruction (1845–1900). From sheet music and lithographs to plantation reenactments and Wild West shows, white cultural producers depicted Black and Native mobility as destabilizing. These depictions normalized fears of movement and justified the rise of systems designed to confine these communities, such as Jim Crow segregation and Native American reservations. Using a trans-regional framework spanning the North, South, and West, Anderson places these histories side by side, revealing the shared logic of racial spatial control and reframing nineteenth-century US history as a story of nation-building intertwined with segregation and capitalism.

Yet popular culture was a contested space. Black and Native performers, writers, and activists used the same platforms as white creators to assert agency, resist confinement, and challenge dominant narratives of mobility. By illuminating these dynamics, Culture and Containment reshapes our understanding of nineteenth-century race relations while offering vital insight into enduring legacies—from residential segregation to mass incarceration—that continues to define the racial landscape through the twenty-first century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"An Embodiment of Souls"

New from Union Square & Co.: An Embodiment of Souls: A Novel by Julia Laurel.

About the novel, from the publisher:

In this queer political necromantasy, a secret marriage pact for suvival might undo a kingdom...

As the daughter of a foreign ambassador, Rissa hoped living abroad would protect her from home’s puritanical customs where women are forbidden to walk at night or use magic except to support a necromancer’s dual identity.

Alek, the youngest prince of the Memric Isle, hasn’t yet taken his Second body. Fearing he’ll be accused of sin and his body claimed as a Second himself, Alek lives piously while studying abroad, even though he’s distracted by magic―and his handsome roommate, Gable.

When Alek meets Rissa by chance, his quiet life is thrown into chaos. One of Rissa’s fathers has been abducted, and Alek and Gable are witnesses. Alek and Rissa form a secret alliance to find her father and uncover the truth behind the conspiracy, risking life and freedom as they follow clues straight to the heart of the Memric Isle’s government.

Visit Julia Laurel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Settling: Women Who Sued the News"

New from the University of Massachusetts Press: Settling: Women Who Sued the News by Ashley Walter.

About the book, from the publisher:

A history of courage and collective action inside the most powerful newsrooms in America

In 1971, Susan Smith, a young researcher at Reader’s Digest, dared to imagine herself as an editor. Her ambition was swiftly dismissed by a hiring manager who told her, “Single girls just don’t do well in this job.” Crushed―and then furious―Smith sought out Harriet Rabb, the attorney who had successfully sued Newsweek for sex discrimination just a year earlier. Their meeting helped spark a class-action lawsuit that ultimately united two thousand women at the magazine and became part of a broader revolt inside American newsrooms. Smith’s experience was far from unique. For much of American history, journalism has been rigidly segregated by gender, with women confined to research, clerical work, or the “women’s pages,” while men dominated reporting, editing, and leadership. That system began to crack in the 1970s, as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the women’s liberation movement emboldened newswomen to challenge daily discrimination. Yet this development has remained largely hidden, buried by editors reluctant to document inequities within their own institutions. Settling recovers this lost story.

Tracing class-action sex discrimination lawsuits at some of the most powerful news organizations in the United States―including The Washington Post, the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Time―Ashley Walter draws on oral histories and long-forgotten documents to reconstruct legal battles at eight major outlets. She argues that meaningful change came not from institutional goodwill but from the courage of women who organized, testified, and risked their careers to demand equality. Their victories reshaped journalism itself. As women assumed reporting and editorial roles, they broadened the scope of who counted as newsworthy, covering women as workers, political leaders, and authoritative sources. With this new illumination of women’s full participation in public life, newswomen shifted social norms and helped build women’s power across American society. By recovering these accounts, Settling reveals how newsroom struggles for gender equality transformed both journalism and the nation, offering urgent lessons for our present moment.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Family Friends"

Coming November 17 from Pegasus Books: Family Friends: A Novel by Chloë Ashby.

About the book, from the publisher:

A "sultry and evocative" novel about the secrets and entanglements between a group of friends holidaying in the south of France.

Since they first met at university twenty years ago, Maggie and Will have spent the last two weeks of every summer in France with their close friends, Lydia and Roland. Both families always look forward to this annual ritual—but this summer things are different.

Will has been hiding something from his wife, and is struggling to keep his deceit from seeping into the cracks in their marriage. Maggie is worried about their withdrawn teenage son. Roland is grappling with how to grieve the death of his first wife. Lydia is trying to ignore past chemistry with an old friend while learning to play second fiddle to a ghost.

Into this already conflicted fray steps Issy, Roland’s beguiling, irrepressible daughter from his first marriage. And as the August heat beats down, and the children behave in unexpected ways, the two couples find that tensions they have been trying their best to temper have begun to bubble over…

Family Friends is a deeply atmospheric, sophisticated and compelling novel about what happens when the ties of love and loyalty are stretched to the breaking point, how relationships change (and don’t change) over time, and how we navigate the challenges thrown at us in every season of life.

Visit Chloë Ashby's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Toxic Fear"

New from the University of Georgia Press: Toxic Fear: Pollution Anxieties in the American 1980s by Michael Egan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Toxic Fear explores how fear shaped the public and private lives of those seeking to make sense of pollution in the 1980s. Driving Egan’s interest in environmental anxieties is an exploration of the social and political infrastructure that took shape during the final quarter of the twentieth century. Egan ties the uncertainties rippling through American communities and across mainstream media to the neoliberal project and its deference to self-interest as the only path to prosperity. In the 1980s, that meant less government intervention, lower taxes, more privatization, and fewer controls. Above and beyond any economic or social theory, fear unsettled established ways of American life. Just as toxic chemicals became a prominent feature of the American social and physical landscape in the 1980s, traditional forms of state oversight designed to provide security for its people were eroded. Social problems and public safety were outsourced to individuals. The onus of responsibility moved from government and government agencies to a public that had, in the previous decade, abdicated environmental oversight and the necessary scientific literacy to experts no longer equipped for the job.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Grim Reaper's Guide to Living Twice"

New from Berkley: A Grim Reaper's Guide to Living Twice (A S.C.Y.T.H.E. Mystery) by Maxie Dara.

About the novel, from the publisher:

He’s been charged with possession before, but never like this.

Jack McCoy was a thief and a liar. Then he died.

Margaret Chen transported souls for the biggest afterlife collection company in North America. Then she met Jack.

Possession isn’t really supposed to be possible, but Jack McCoy never let a little thing like reality stop him. Now he’s committing the ultimate identity theft, living a new life in Margaret’s body while his own lies six feet under. Keeping up appearances as a geriatric grim reaper for S.C.Y.T.H.E. is a full-time job, but when Jack is sent to collect the soul of an old friend, his criminal past catches up with him and suddenly he’s planning the heist of his (after)life with a gang of misfits he never thought he’d see again.

Now the only woman he’s ever loved depends on his success in stealing a priceless list of souls from S.C.Y.T.H.E., but someone keeps beating him at his own game. Time is running out. If Jack puts one bunioned foot out of line it will cost him not only the people who matter most but also his second chance at life...

Visit Maxie Dara's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Original City, Original Sin"

New from Cambridge University Press: Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida by Martin Dobrow.

About the book, from the publisher:

A Klan rally where four Black men were almost burned alive. A hotel manager pouring acid into a pool to chase out Black swimmers. Brutal assaults of peaceful demonstrators at the site of a former slave market downtown. A shooting into the cottage rented for Martin Luther King, Jr. Each form part of a rarely told and riveting story of civil rights in the nation's oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida. At the height of his fame, King found his treasured doctrine of nonviolence challenged as never before-all as the fate of the Civil Rights Act, the most consequential legislation of the twentieth century, hung in the balance. In this intimate exploration based on hundreds of interviews, Martin Dobrow introduces an extraordinary collection of idealists-Black and white, young and old, gay and straight-who were drawn into the movement, putting their lives on the line for racial justice.

Visit Martin Dobrow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue