"Speak American"

New from the University of Hawaii Press: Speak American: The Politics of Race, Language, and Education in Territorial Hawai‘i by Christine R. Yano.

About the book, from the publisher:

Speak American explores how language tied together race, power, and citizenship in Territorial Hawai‘i from 1924 to 1960 via the public K–12 English Standard School System. In this segregated system, children were tested for spoken English fluency: those who passed were placed in elite classes or schools, while others remained in regular classrooms. Proposed by white mothers, the policy used language as a tool to implement de facto racial separation, privileging those who already spoke English rather than teaching it to those who didn’t. This dynamic was enabled by “listening regimes” (disciplinary practices that trained educators and the public to listen for and reward Standard English), while marginalizing Hawai‘i Creole English, the everyday language of plantation and urban life.

Drawing on archival records, interviews, and school alumni events, the book introduces the concept of the “panauricon”―a listening-based counterpart to Foucault’s visual panopticon―to describe how language surveillance reinforced and extended social hierarchies. A century later, debates over monolingualism and national identity persist, making this study of Hawai‘i’s historic linguistic politics both timely and urgent.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Thousand Painted Hours"

New from Lake Union: A Thousand Painted Hours: A Novel by Barbara O'Neal.

About the book, from the publisher:

An epic, emotionally charged novel about love, art, and survival spanning 1900s colonial India to Blitz-era London by the USA Today bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids.

In the shadow of the London Blitz, artist Elsie Turner clings fiercely to her canvases, refusing to let war dim the colors that define her. The bombs test her nerve, but the struggle also stirs memories of her golden youth in India and of the long-lost love of her life.

The daughter of a British civil servant in the Himalayan station of Nainital, Elsie crosses cultural divides to forge an unlikely bond with Tanveer Singh, a Sikh prince with hopes, dreams, and far-reaching ideas. What begins as shared sketchbooks and stargazing becomes first love and a secret correspondence. When Elsie’s father is summoned to England, Elsie is severed from the world she knows―and is determined to preserve it through both her art and a connection with Tanveer that endures through the most tumultuous years of their lives.

Across four decades and two continents, Elsie navigates a journey from lush colonial India to war-torn London, amid landscapes of beauty, protest, and peril. As past and present collide, the most impossible choices and sacrifices are yet to be made in the name of love, war, and survival.

Visit Barbara O'Neal's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Acts of Resistance"

New from Vanderbilt University Press: Acts of Resistance: Antibiotic Use and Prescribing Culture in the United States by Katharina Rynkiewich.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Acts of Resistance, Katharina Rynkiewich explores the fight to save the utility of antibiotic medicines amid global antimicrobial resistance. This engaging ethnography follows bacteria, patients, and practitioners as they weave in and out of North American medical institutions. Through an examination of the social dynamics and ethical challenges of everyday antibiotic use, the author expands on the limitations of good intentions in current antibiotic stewardship policy. Her ethnographic account shows the lived experience of multiple central figures as she shifts setting and tone, ultimately deepening our understanding of the global antimicrobial resistance crisis as emergency.

Due to the global scale of impact related to antimicrobial resistance, holding industries and institutions accountable is difficult but essential. With new and reemerging multidrug-resistant organisms making their homes within institutions and in the community, tracing the origins of an infection can be an insurmountable challenge. Rynkiewich demonstrates how “microbial highways” coexist along human highways, providing an apt example of how multidrug-resistant organisms spread across hospitals, communities, and entire regions.

Visit Katharina Rynkiewich's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Death at a Scottish Halloween"

Coming August 11 from Crooked Lane Books: Death at a Scottish Halloween: A Scottish Isle Mystery by Lucy Connelly.

About the novel, from the publisher:

When Dr. Emilia McRoy stumbles upon a dead body in a haunted house, she resolves to find the killer before another body can fall.

Halloween isn’t the only cause for fright in the fifth Scottish Isle mystery, perfect for fans of Paige Shelton and Connie Berry.

It’s the week of Halloween—or as they say in Scotland, All Hallows' Eve—and the town of Sea Isle is full of spooky celebrations. Dr. Emilia McRoy loves being part of her new community and is eager to help out in any way she can. But the festivities are interrupted when she and her assistant, Abigail, find a dead body in a haunted house. A real one. They’re too late to save the victim, but they’ll do whatever it takes to find his killer.

There’s just one problem: There are too many suspects.

Constable Ewan would prefer the good doctor and her friends stay out of the investigations, but that isn’t how Dr. Em rolls. As she and her gang investigate, they realize the killer is searching for something—and has no problem murdering anyone who gets in the way of finding it.

Dr. Em must stay one step ahead if she’s to survive this Halloween season alive—either that or she might just end up the next victim.

Visit Lucy Connelly's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death at a Scottish Wedding.

Q&A with Lucy Connelly.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Skirmishes with Patriotism"

New from the University Press of Kentucky: Skirmishes with Patriotism: Looking for America in the Long Shadow of Vietnam by Tad Tuleja.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War divided the country, millions of young American men faced the choice of how to respond to the draft. Some accepted conscription and went to fight. Others attended protests or fled the country. But most draft-aged men, avoiding both combat and exile, stayed home, punched the clock, watched Walter Cronkite, and mowed the lawn while history swirled around them. Decades later, members of this forgotten majority still live with the war's aftermath, questioning their response to the most polarizing conflict of their time.

Skirmishes with Patriotism is Tad Tuleja's lyrical and deeply personal memoir about this overlooked segment of his generation. Tracing his own journey from a flag-waving Boy Scout to a disillusioned humanist wrestling with the consequences of saying "no" to military service, he explores the complex pressures of family, expectations about masculine duty, and the fevered nationalism that continues to grip the United States today. This is not a tale of heroism or protest but a candid reckoning with moral ambiguity and the cost of a life-altering decision. With clarity and wit, Tuleja fills a critical gap in Vietnam War–era literature and offers a powerful reflection on what it means to be an American grappling with the legacy of patriotism and conflict.

Visit Tad Tuleja's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lunatics"

New from Forever: The Lunatics by Navessa Allen.

About the book, from the publisher:

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lights Out brings her signature high stakes, steamy romance, and suspenseful storytelling to a dark paranormal werewolf romance.

Layla Fitzpatrick lives a simple life, for a werewolf. And that's just how she likes it. Her childhood was less than ideal. She'd like to spend her adult years flying under the radar of more powerful preternatural creatures. Because she knows from experience what happens when they notice you.

Everything changes one early summer night when she attends a ritual bonding ceremony meant to join two werewolves together for life. Midway through, the spell becomes corrupted and she finds herself unexpectedly mated to the stuffiest shifter she's ever laid eyes on.

Michael Kolbeck is more man than wolf. He spends his days in a skyscraper, building his family's empire. At night, he prowls the streets of Boston, a city where shifters, witches, and vampires walk a delicate tightrope of ceasefire masquerading as peace.

Little do they know that Layla's arrival will act as the spark that ignites the fire, and that thin veneer of peace is about to vanish.

Visit Navessa Allen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Data-Driven Hollywood"

New from Princeton University Press: Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming by Violaine Roussel.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing but also in decisions about content and production. In Data-Driven Hollywood, Violaine Roussel examines the emergence of this new category of professionals at the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. Roussel shows how the rise of data and algorithm specialists has transformed organizations and rearranged power relationships within them. Drawing on extensive interviews and in situ observations, she describes the ways that technical “data work” carried out by professionals at streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ has had a significant effect on creative decisions.

Rather than fetishizing data and algorithmic models, Roussel explores the practices of the professionals who shape them, manipulate them, and give them power. She examines the relationships of these workers with traditional producers, describing legitimacy struggles and the eventual stabilization of new professional arrangements. Roussel’s account of the ways that data specialists deploy algorithmic models to reinvent their industry’s approach to content, artists, and the market—the first in-depth sociological study of the rise of this new profession—reveals the new forms of power and knowledge at play in today’s Hollywood.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Halls of the Dead"

Coming August 18 from Harper Voyager: The Halls of the Dead: A Novel – A Queer Victorian Gothic Horror Romance of Necromancy and Impossible Love by S. M. Hallow.

About the book, from the publisher:

A queer, gothic horror romance set in a necromancy-tinged London, sure to entrance fans of The Death of Jane Lawrence and Mexican Gothic.

London, December 1849

Irene Shallcross Haley has dedicated her life to necromancy, a forbidden, reviled art that is passed along through sentient grimoires bound in human skin. With her undead husband St. John—a marriage of kindred spirits and platonic convenience—she has been protecting the knowledge of generations of witches that came before her. Like any magic, it has come at a cost: her reputation, her relationship with her sister, and her soul. But when Irene’s love, Agnes, is hanged for witchcraft, Irene refuses to let Agnes be one more thing that is taken from her.

A true resurrection has not been achieved in two thousand years, but Irene is determined. With the help of St. John, Irene bangs on the doors of the Halls of the Dead, demanding the third part of their triumverate back…or did she? Because the Agnes that awakens comes with both a hunger for raw flesh and a malignant ghost tied to her soul.

Necromancy is the art of saying no—no, I won't let you go; no, I won't let you be destroyed—and Irene’s work is not yet done. She must find a way to bring Agnes back to her true self, she must navigate her feelings for her resurrected lover as well as St. John, and she must do all of this without catching the attention of Sir Silas Underhill, the man who sentenced Agnes to death.

Death is not the end of love. But Irene may realize it can actually be the beginning.

Visit S.M. Hallow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Translate and Rule"

New from Stanford University Press: Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive by Hannah Scott Deuchar.

About the book, from the publisher:

Over the decades of the nineteenth century, Egypt changed dramatically, from a minor Ottoman province to a major player in global markets and a de facto British colonial territory. Integral to this transformation was legal reform: the Islamic system was replaced by laws adapted from the French Napoleonic code, edited by international committees, rendered in several languages, and applied in multilingual secular courts. Translation made law possible for Egyptians navigating international commerce and imperial rule. But translation also enshrined hierarchies of difference and remade ideas and theories of justice. Translate and Rule argues that translation played a central role not only in colonial lawmaking, but also in anticolonial Arabic thought. Combining methods from literary and legal history, Hannah Scott Deuchar shows how translated legal codes in colonial Egypt exacerbated inequities in the courtroom and transformed relations of commerce and property ownership. These legal vocabularies and grammars also transformed Arabic itself, and Scott Deuchar analyzes how Arabophone authors, lawyers, and translators debated and challenged conceptions of language and linguistic exchange in literary and media spheres. As aspects of Egypt's legal pluralism were adopted elsewhere, seminal literary works from Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine theorized translation's role in colonial, juridical, and material violence—and offered new modes of reparation and ethical solutions premised on translingual solidarity across incalculable inequivalence.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Between Greek Balconies"

New from Lake Union: Between Greek Balconies by Francesca Catlow.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Let Francesca Catlow transport you to the Greek island of Nisyros, where sea, sun and romance offer a chance at a new beginning―perfect for fans of Karen Swan, Kate Frost and Paige Toon.

When burnt-out human rights barrister Alisha Harding is forced to take a sabbatical, she heads for the one place she’s dreamt of since childhood: a small, sun-drenched island in Greece.

In her new home by the sea, the volcanic landscape, the warmth of island life and the unhurried pace slowly begin to do what London couldn’t. She’s here to heal―not to be distracted by her brooding next-door neighbour, Helios, who seems determined to keep the world at arm’s length.

But night after night, sharing wine on their adjoining balconies, the intimacy between them grows. And Helios, it seems, is hiding his own painful past.

When duty calls Alisha back to London, the fragile peace she’s found on the island is abruptly shattered. Pulled between the life she’s always known and the one she’s only just begun to imagine, she must decide what truly matters. Can love bridge the gaps between language, loss and two very different worlds, or is the distance between them too great to overcome?

Visit Francesca Catlow's website.

Writers Read: Francesca Catlow (September 2025).

--Marshal Zeringue