"Minutes of Empire"

New from Oxford University Press: Minutes of Empire: Dutch West India Company Politics, 1618–1648 by Alexander B. Bick.

About the book, from the publisher:

In September 1645, the directors of the West India Company gathered to discuss the most important crisis in the company's history, one that would determine the fate of a burgeoning Dutch imperial project in the New World.

In this book, Alexander Bick tells the story of this meeting, applying the tools of microhistory to the boardroom of one of early modern Europe's most enigmatic trading companies. Chartered by the States General in 1621, the West India Companyâs principal aim was to open a new front in the struggle against Habsburg Spain by attacking its colonial revenues at their source. This required close cooperation between the company and the central organs of the Dutch state responsible for military affairs. Unlike the merchant-dominated ventures of popular imagination, the company emerges as an instrument of war in which noblemen, courtiers, and magistrates played a decisive role. Through portraits of figures such as Johannes de Laet and Hendrick van der Capellen, the book reveals how the company and its leaders wrestled with questions of political authority, colonial governance, and the relationship between private enterprise and public power―questions that crystalized in the debate over the future of the lucrative but embattled Dutch sugar colony in northeastern Brazil. While this colony was ultimately lost, the West India Company's contributions to securing a favorable peace with Spain in 1648 would prove more enduring.

Minutes of Empire offers an original perspective on the cosmopolitan politics of overseas trading companies that challenges conventional accounts of how empire helped to forge the Dutch state in the Golden Age.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Foursome"

New from Mariner Books: The Foursome: A Novel by Christina Baker Kline.

About the novel, from the publisher:

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline comes a boldly original reimagining of the astonishing true story of two sisters in nineteenth-century North Carolina — Kline’s own distant relatives — who married world-famous conjoined twins from Siam.

When Eng and Chang Bunker arrive in Wilkes County in 1839, they’re not just a curiosity—they’re a sensation. Everyone is eager to learn whether the salacious rumors about them are true. Within months, the twins have opened a general store, bought land, and begun building a plantation. Now, word has it, they’re looking for wives—and in a place that thrives on gossip and legacy, their ambitions set the community on edge.

Sarah and Adelaide Yates, daughters of a once-prominent local family brought low by scandal, are drawn into their orbit. Bold, beautiful Adelaide sees in the twins’ fame a chance to reclaim her future. Sarah, quiet and observant, isn’t so sure. When the twins’ lives become entangled with theirs, they must navigate loyalty, longing, and identity in a world where everything—including race, class, and gender—is rigidly defined.

Spanning five decades and unfolding against the backdrop of a fractured nation hurtling toward war, The Foursome is both intimate and epic: a story of love and constraint, identity and reinvention. With piercing insight and emotional precision, Kline brings to life a forgotten chapter of American history and the complex, boundary-defying marriages at its center.

Visit Christina Baker Kline's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Christina Baker Kline & Lucy.

The Page 69 Test: Bird in Hand.

Writers Read: Christina Baker Kline (March 2017).

--Marshal Zeringue

"I'm Sorry You Feel That Way"

New from Stanford University Press: I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: The New Cultures of Customer Service by Diane Negra.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book is about how twenty-first century capitalism is re-making the roles of customer and customer service provider, shedding light on why consumer capitalism has come to feel so punishing for so many. In call centers, banks, airports, universities, public transport systems, hospitals, and other key sites, the intensification of profit imperatives alongside hyper-technologization has generated an "antagonistic interface" between customers and workers. Consumers widely report feeling trapped in the vise-like grip of frustrating and confounding systems that waste significant amounts of time.

Positioning the poorly served customer as the definitional figure of 21st century commercial relations, Diane Negra articulates a new corporate authoritarianism that allocates a broad range of digital tasks to customers. Essential to this apportionment are technology platforms with high failure rates, corporate devotion to byzantine bureaucratic procedures, and the conspicuous, constant valuing of high-status customers over low-status ones. Compliance with new stripped-down service protocols is enforced not only directly but through powerful norms and customs, and affective culture is notable for converting service encounters into transactions routinely characterized by frustration, impotence, and fury. In analyzing the service ecology and its media representations, I'm Sorry You Feel That Way reveals how the shift to customer work is now both totalized and thoroughly naturalized. As the book maps out, the changing nature of the service encounter in day-to-day life and in the cultural imagination reveal the emergence of corporate emotions seldom recognized as the assault on dignity they constitute.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Murder at the Hotel Orient"

New from Gallery/Scout Press: Murder at the Hotel Orient by Alessandra Ranelli.

About the book, from the publisher:

For fans of The Maid and The Grand Budapest Hotel comes this thrilling (and sexy) debut inspired by a real love hotel, which legend claims has existed forever, luring lovers inside for a night of debauchery...

In modern Vienna, American Sterling Lockwood is the loyal concierge at the infamous Hotel Orient, where cameras are banned, aliases are required, and every guest has something to hide. After the double murder of two guests, including a tech mogul building an Austrian surveillance state, Sterling must turn detective. But finding the truth will require breaking the Orient’s sacred code of secrecy, while keeping a few secrets of her own.

The police struggle when modern investigative technology proves useless at the old—fashioned hotel. Because clients use aliases, pay cash, and stay mere hours, all suspects have vanished. Sterling agrees to assist alongside her best friend and colleague, Fernando, if only to avoid arrest and the suspicion regarding her own movements that night. As enemies close in from all around, she risks everything to solve a case haunted by the past, in a city with a fetish for nostalgia.

Don’t be shy darling, ring the bell...

Visit Alessandra Ranelli's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Environmental Republic"

New from Princeton University Press: The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World by Giulio Boccaletti.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold new conception of the republic for a planet in crisis

Republicanism is arguably the most powerful political idea in history, an extraordinary feat of human imagination that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility. The Environmental Republic reclaims this idea as the path to sustaining our life together on a changing planet, reframing our relationship to the environment not as a constraint on liberty but as its republican foundation.

Giulio Boccaletti argues that we must renew our commitment to freedom and civic responsibility through popular sovereignty. He presents the environmental republic as a necessary alternative to blind faith in technocratic management, the shallow moralizing and apocalyptic rhetoric of some activists, and the disingenuous skepticism of vested interests. Our environmental challenges are not simply about “agreeing on the facts” or living within technical limitations—they reflect a deeper failure of political institutions. Drawing on the history of ideas and real-world examples, Boccaletti presents a political framework that places our relationship to our surroundings at the heart of how we exercise our voice, coordinate collective action, and define development itself.

Offering hope in an anxious age of rising authoritarianism and widespread pessimism, The Environmental Republic challenges the false choice between environmental protection and human freedom, showing how place-based institutions can deliver both sustainability and human development through true self-governance.

Visit Giulio Boccaletti's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine"

Coming soon from Shadowpaw Press: The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine by Robert J. Sawyer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Finalist, Best Novel, 2026 Aurora Awards

To see yourself as others see you

As an asteroid is about to slam into Earth, ex-convict Roscoe Koudoulian along with Captain Letitia Garvey and her starship crew re-upload their consciousnesses into cyberspace. In that digital realm, Roscoe is confronted by someone he left for dead centuries ago, and the astronauts face younger versions of themselves—ghosts in the machine—whose continued existence could destroy the last survivors of the human race.

Visit Robert J. Sawyer's website.

The Page 69 Test: WWW: Wake.

The Page 69 Test: WWW: Watch.

The Page 69 Test:: WWW: Wonder.

The Page 69 Test: Triggers.

The Page 69 Test: Red Planet Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Quantum Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Black Muslim Freedom Dreams"

New from NYU Press: Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care by Samiha Rahman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores three generations of Black American Muslims pursuing education and liberation beyond the borders of the United States

Since the 1970s, hundreds of Black American Muslims in the Tijani Sufi order have sought refuge in a new world that would nurture their racial, religious and gendered identities away from anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism in the United States. This new world is in Medina Baye, a city in Senegal that is the headquarters of a pan-African Sufi movement with tens of millions of members in Africa alone.

Drawing on a decade and a half of ethnographic engagement, Black Muslim Freedom Dreams explores the Islamic educational opportunities created for and by Black American Muslims in Medina Baye, chronicling the dreams, sacrifices, struggles, and joys of young people and parents who live, learn, and strive for liberation between the United States and Senegal. The volume traces their journeys between these two worlds, zooming in to vividly portray everyday Black American and West African religious life, and zooming out to map the sociopolitical landscapes, educational conditions and Islamic and pan-African ideologies that shape believers' perspectives.

Black Muslim Freedom Dreams argues that Black Muslims’ experiences of Islamic education and pan-African exchange are oriented towards collective care – a radical way of being and belonging through which believers journey on the path towards Allah’s love by caring for one another and addressing the material inequities that constrain their communities. This notion disrupts narratives of religion that are limited to systems of personal belief, showcasing instead how their educational experiences foster a collective responsibility and solidarity. The book offers a compelling account of how Black Muslims engage with transnational religious and racial networks to build liberatory communities beyond the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This Isn’t New"

Coming soon from Columbine York: This Isn't New: Women's Historical Stories by Cynthia Swanson.

About the book, from the publisher:

The female leads in these stories have disparate lives but share a singular trait: their sex dictates the expectations stamped onto them. Each woman, in her time, must fight for who she is against the forces working to constrain her.

Visit Cynthia Swanson's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Bookseller.

The Page 69 Test: The Glass Forest.

Writers Read: Cynthia Swanson (February 2018).

Q&A with Cynthia Swanson.

The Page 69 Test: Anyone But Her.

--Marshal Zeringue

"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