"Making Creole"

New from LSU Press: Making Creole: Women and the Creole Community in Early Jim Crow New Orleans by Natasha L. McPherson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between 1880 and 1910, as Jim Crow’s legal apparatus transformed Louisiana’s complex racial landscape into a stark binary, Creole women fought to preserve their community’s distinctive identity through the most ordinary acts of daily life. In their households, they cultivated kinship arrangements that prioritized mutual care over conventional family structures. In workshops and factories, they navigated the degradation of traditional occupations while strategically avoiding associations with Black women’s labor. In churches, they deployed Catholic sacraments to formalize social bonds and secure legal protections. In courtrooms, they exploited Louisiana’s racial ambiguities to defend their families and assert their claims to elevated status. Through these seemingly mundane spheres of daily existence, Creole women resisted the racial order that sought to collapse all people of African descent into a single category of Blackness.

Making Creole: Women and the Creole Community in Early Jim Crow New Orleans examines how Creole women took action against the systematic erosion of their privileges. As Louisiana moved from recognizing the legal status of free people of color to enforcing rigid Jim Crow segregation, Creole women became the primary architects of sociocultural preservation. Before the Civil War, Louisiana law had distinguished all free persons of African descent as legally separate from both enslaved persons and white people, granting them specific rights and privileges based on their “free” status rather than their complexion alone. The end of slavery eliminated this legal distinction. By the early twentieth century, Jim Crow legislation systematically forced all people of African descent into a single racialized category of Blackness, erasing the complex racial hierarchies that had previously structured Louisiana society. In this context, Creole women’s labor in managing complex kinship networks, preserving Franco-Catholic traditions, policing community boundaries, and strategically navigating legal institutions constituted essential political work that sustained not just families but an entire ethnic community under siege.

Using an innovative “speculative demography” methodology, Natasha L. McPherson analyzes more than nine thousand transcribed records from census data, court documents, and Catholic church registers, including materials from the Sisters of the Holy Family, to reconstruct patterns of Creole women’s resistance between 1880 and 1910. Making Creole moves beyond traditional narratives of political organizing to illuminate how women’s everyday practices became mechanisms of ethnic identity formation and cultural survival, revealing resistance from the intimate spaces where it actually occurred.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Blood Is Thicker"

New from Crooked Lane Books: Blood Is Thicker by Iris Voss.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A sinister psychological thriller where three women bound by blood must take their secrets to the grave or risk shattering the illusion of a perfect life.

Blood Is Thicker is a fast-paced and twisty novel that will appeal to fans of Liane Moriarty and Sally Hepworth.

Claire Walters has curated an enviable life. On camera, she is the face of Silverton’s morning news. Off camera, she seemingly has it all: a handsome husband, a promising teenage daughter, an adorable young son. After a trying childhood and her sister’s endless run-ins with the law, Claire’s life is finally stable.

Until one fateful night changes everything.

It was an accident! It was dark…Claire shouldn’t have taken a sedative before bed, shouldn’t have been driving with her inebriated sister, Viola, and daughter, Molly, in the car. If only she’d backed into her driveway more slowly. If only that poor person wasn’t dead, under her car…

Come daylight, the scandal would destroy them. So the trio hatches a plan to cover up the crime—literally—and bury the body deep in the woods. It’s a decision that will forever bind them in secrecy and guilt.

But all three women are hiding things from each other and must decide how far they’ll go when someone threatens to reveal what happened. Strangled in blackmail’s grip, their fragile alliance begins to splinter as a devastating revelation transforms the accident into something much darker. Will the truth bring this family closer—or ruin their lives forever?

With high stakes and clever plotting, this thriller will hook its claws into readers everywhere.

Follow Iris Voss on Facebook and Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wagner: Philosophy and Revolution"

New from Princeton University Press: Wagner: Philosophy and Revolution by Brian O'Connor.

About the book, from the publisher:

Wagner as revolutionary philosopher: a new reading of a trilogy of texts written by the composer in the aftermath of the failed Dresden Uprising

Forced into exile to avoid arrest after taking part in the failed Dresden Uprising in 1849, Richard Wagner turned to philosophical writing, producing in rapid succession three theoretical works. In this compelling study, Brian O’Connor traces Wagner’s emergence in these texts as a radical political thinker with a distinctive revolutionary vision. O’Connor describes Wagner’s transformation from publicly engaged commentator to active insurrectionist, showing how revolution’s failure redirected Wagner’s energies toward systematic philosophical reflection. For a crucial period, this theoretical work took precedence over musical composition.

At the heart of O’Connor’s account is Wagner’s philosophical imagination. He explores Wagner’s conception of aesthetic spontaneity as a model of individual freedom and his belief in collective artistic creation as the foundation of a liberated society. By situating Wagner’s philosophy within the turbulent political and intellectual context of the time, O’Connor challenges its marginalization in previous accounts, restoring it to its proper place in nineteenth-century political thought. He shows how Wagner reworked ideas drawn from the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach into an original and provocative form of aesthetic materialism, and examines the interplay between these ideas and Wagner’s dramatic works. O’Connor also offers a straightforward treatment of the unavoidable subject of Wagner’s antisemitism, as expressed in an essay from 1850 about “Jewishness” in music.

O’Connor argues that Wagner’s philosophical writing is not only significant in its own right, but it also offers unique and invaluable insights into his music dramas—particularly the composer’s most celebrated work, the Ring cycle—illuminating their themes, characters, and revolutionary affinities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Eternity's Tomb"

New from Angry Robot: Eternity's Tomb by Dan Moren.

About the book, from the publisher:

The score of a lifetime is out there, just waiting to be claimed… An irreverent sci-fi novel, perfect for fans of Guardians of the Galaxy.

“I WOULD LIKE YOU TO HELP ME RECOVER THE BIGGEST UNDISCOVERED TREASURE TROVE IN THE HISTORY OF THE GALAXY: THE TOMB OF IKANTO…”

It’s a wild offer. Especially when made by a floating brain in a jar. But Z’s an ex-con who’s short on money and options—and happens to know just the crew who could pull the job off.

Meet Graham, Z’s ursine partner in past crimes; Trix, an expert pilot and Z’s ex (it didn’t end well); and Whistler, a genetically engineered murder bird. Together with Ayex, the floating brain, they’re half dream team, half fever dream.

If they can overcome their differences and learn to trust each other, find a tomb hurtling through space towards a black hole, survive the tomb’s no doubt lethal defences, and escape, then maybe, just maybe, they can come away with riches to exceed even their wildest imagination.

Visit Dan Moren's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Generation Denied"

New from the University of Texas Press: Generation Denied: The Broken Promise of Education in Iran by Reza Khanzadeh.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of the struggles of Iran’s youth when education promises success only through loyalty to the regime, and how that loyalty manifests through ideological capital within regime-imposed parameters.

Education is highly prized in Iranian society, touted as the key to success and influence. After all, the state’s top leaders are themselves scholars and experts in Islamic thought, history, and law, and graduates of elite institutions like Sharif University enjoy better job prospects than their peers. Yet the promise of a return on investment from education is a ruse: What unlocks opportunity is not academic development but loyalty to the regime. Generation Denied shows how the education system, from middle school through university, relies on standardized tests to funnel students into politically quiescent STEM fields, limiting their potential and quashing intellectual opposition to the regime. Students then graduate into a job market dominated by regime-affiliated entities, who hire applicants on the basis not of skills but of political agendas. Those who resist discover that the future they want in Iran does not exist, resulting in compelled migration. Closely following five young men who chose to be outsiders by pursuing education while rejecting political conformity, Reza Khanzadeh situates Iran within a broader global context, offering groundbreaking insight into the roles of education and employment in non-democratic governments.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Loba"

New from Angry Robot: Loba by Valentina Cano Repetto.

About the novel, from the publisher:

The Hacienda meets The Haunting of Alejandra in this split timeline gothic horror novel set in a remote lighthouse on the edge of Uruguay, following one woman's escape from an abusive marriage... and into a haunting.

She’s not the first lighthouse keeper to lose her mind on the shores of Cabo Polonio, but she’s determined to be the first to survive it.

Delmira Torres knows fleeing to Brazil is the only way she’ll be free of her abusive husband. But to get there she’ll need money; it’s why she takes a posting at a lighthouse in Cabo Polonio, Uruguay, a small town where time doesn’t seem to move quite right.

There, she has only a month until her husband and her secrets catch up to her. But the position comes marred by the legend of La Loba, who stalks the lighthouse and the nearby fishing village, and by the spiraling visions that begin to plague Delmira.

A century earlier, Amalia arrives at the same lighthouse. Held captive and desperate to escape her dire situation, her story may hold the answers to Delmira’s torment.

Both of them, desperate for freedom and determined to survive, must find a way to outlive the horrors of Cabo Polonio.

Visit Valentina Cano Repetto's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Crime and Class in Print"

New from Syracuse University Press: Crime and Class in Print: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York by Wendy Jean Katz.

About the book, from the publisher:

As newspapers and periodicals proliferated in the United States in the nineteenth century, editors seeking to carve out a large and loyal audience hired artists to pair vivid imagery with sensational fiction ripped from the headlines. In Crime and Class in Print, Wendy Jean Katz examines the emergence of a modern visual culture in pre-Civil War New York City around these illustrated stories of crime, swashbuckling, and ordinary and extraordinary characters both rich and poor. Katz documents the life and career of Tompkins H. Matteson (1813–1884), whose drawings were printed alongside these tales, to understand the mass production, reception, and circulation of serialized illustrations. By closely analyzing the images within both their historical and fictional contexts, she interrogates how these cheap, ephemeral periodicals dramatized urban crime but also framed it within class-based concerns. The serial nature of Matteson’s illustrations, which made the coupled stories accessible to a larger swath of readers, represented an investment in industrial progress necessary to reach “mass” audiences. As Katz explores, while the images of city life conveyed nuance regarding ethnicity, temperance, police powers, privacy, sex, labor, aesthetics, reading practices, and masculinity, their paired narrative texts frequently mutated within and across different periodicals and languages to suit their audiences. In the English-language press, Matteson’s illustrations highlighted class struggle yet entwined them within the jingoist politics that advocated against immigration and upheld the white working class in opposition to ethnic diversity. As meaning shifted from one story, newspaper, or language to the next, what was a visual demonstration of progressive values championing proletariat interests became a platform to enforce a petit bourgeois and nativist perspective.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Horny"

Coming December 1 from St. Martin's Griffin: Horny: A Novel (Pan Helsing, 2) by Lucy Lehane.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Paranormal roommates discover that there's a thin line between love and hate in this steamy opposites-attract romantic comedy by Lucy Lehane.

Rachel's death is going about as well as her life. Welcoming a poltergeist to share her body had its challenges, but Rachel has mostly figured those out: She's got good friends, a room in a gorgeous apartment, and she's well on her way to regaining the career her death derailed. What she doesn't need is a strange, inhumanly beautiful new roommate―a unicorn―with a million odd questions about the human world. Especially one who can peer into Rachel's soul and see each of her dark, dirty secrets.

Isolde has been tempted by the human world for longer than she can remember. The land of the unicorns was beautiful, pristine... and as boring as watching moss grow. But taking on human form comes with more complications than she expected. Like a roommate who’s possessed, opinionated, argumentative... and distractingly alluring.

Getting into a magical grudge match with your roommate is a bad idea. Hooking up with your roommate when they're a virgin from another dimension is an even worse one. But since when did the voluntarily haunted make good choices?

Visit Lucy Lehane's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Louise de Keralio, Enlightenment Intellectual"

New from Oxford University Press: Louise de Keralio, Enlightenment Intellectual by Vicki Mistacco.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this first book-length study of prolific polymath Louise de Keralio (1756-1822), Vicki Mistacco offers a comprehensive reading of her entire body of writing and a new understanding of Keralio as an Enlightenment intellectual and a modern feminist thinker. Mistacco adopts a fresh approach to Keralio's published and unpublished writing, undertaking close textual analysis informed by feminist literary criticism and French feminist theory, and carefully reconstructing the historical and cultural context, in order to challenge the critical commonplace that Keralio is a puzzling "sexist republican." She cautions against a piecemeal approach focused almost exclusively on Keralio's writings during the French Revolution. Reading literarily rather than literally, she argues against imposing modern definitions of feminist activism on Keralio and for considering instead the anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-exclusionary paradigm at the core of her thinking, a both/and rather than either/or paradigm, which Keralio comes to envisage as a maternal one, reflected in the recurring motif of crossing boundaries. Through sustained analysis of works that have hitherto received only scant attention, Keralio's translations of John Carr's travelogues and her late novels (1808-1810), Mistacco sheds light on Keralio's use of "double-voiced discourse" to uphold her feminist ideals while ostensibly endorsing gender norms. The three parts of the book, "Women's Writing: Negotiating a Space," "Philosophizing in the Margins," and "The Missing Mother," trace the evolution in Keralio's thinking about the importance of including a matrimoine or maternal legacy in cultural patrimony, whether it be the contributions of French women writers to national identity and French genius (Collection des meilleurs ouvrages français composés par des femmes), or those of Queen Elizabeth to the history of European sovereignty (Histoire d'Élisabeth, reine d'Angleterre), or her own annotations to her translations, or in her late novels the testimony of women to arrive at historical truth. Mistacco shows how the idea of maternal legacy evolves into that of maternal Enlightenment, arguing that Keralio elevates the maternal to the level of philosophy and theorizes a new social contract based on an ethics of care. Including unpublished and archival texts, this book offers an important contribution to the history of women intellectuals of the Enlightenment.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rowan and Gemma"

New from Quill Tree Books: Rowan and Gemma by Sally J. Pla.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this new middle grade novel by Schneider Award-winning author Sally J. Pla, two neurodivergent tweens, one of whom is nonverbal, forge a friendship against the backdrop of their feuding families.

Rowan Monahan has lived in the town of Friendship Prairie forever. He knows everyone, and they know him. Some folks judge him, too, for being a slow learner. But Rowan knows in his heart that he's capable of more than people think.

Gemma Caplan is new in town. Back in the city, people understood she used her assistive device (AAC) to speak. But here in tiny Friendship Prairie, she's afraid she won't fit in.

When Rowan and Gemma meet, they form an instant, magic bond. But just as the two are growing close, their mothers start a feud: they're running terribly nasty campaigns against each other for school board.

Since their moms detest each other, Gemma and Rowan feel they must keep their connection a secret.

When they’re discovered and punished, Rowan and Gemma decide it’s time to take a stand -- and show their families what a place called Friendship Prairie is supposed to be about.

Visit Sally J. Pla's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Sally J. Pla & Leo.

The Page 69 Test: The Fire, the Water, and Maudie McGinn.

Q&A with Sally J. Pla.

--Marshal Zeringue