"Tree-Becoming"

New from Cornell University Press: Tree-Becoming: Gender, Race, and Trauma on Shakespeare's Stage by Shannon Kelley.

About the book, from the publisher:

Trees abound in Shakespeare's plays, and in Tree-Becoming, Shannon Kelley explores how he uses his characters' identification with cypress, balsam, bay laurel, myrrh, and pine trees as metaphors to express emotional distress. Opening new avenues for investigating knowledge of the plant world in early modern literature, Kelley traces the Ovidian conceit of arboreal transformation in A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Othello, and The Tempest.

Through the recurring motif of tree-becoming, in which characters who can no longer endure painful feelings align with or are imagined as trees, Kelley proposes a radical reading of Shakespeare's depiction of trauma's lingering impact on the body and psyche. These arboreal moments resist resolution and resist healing, offering instead a vision of survival and endurance. Bringing Shakespeare in conversation with insights from critical plant and trauma studies, Tree-Becoming honors survivors of trauma as they are, not as we would have them be: they become trees―different but not less than.

--Marshal Zeringue

"While We Were Silent"

New from Severn House: While We Were Silent by Alex Myers.

About the book, from the publisher:

Devastating secrets shroud the campus of Green Dell Academy, secrets that some think are worth killing for . . . From Lambda Literary Award finalist Alex Myers comes a provocative dark academia novel.

There are rules and then there’s reality . . .

Autumn, 2015. Green Dell Academy is a prestigious co-ed prep school tucked away in a quiet corner of Connecticut. And although it has its first female head of school, it’s still very much a boys’ club―a club with longstanding “traditions” that involve gross misconduct―and now murder.

A woman has been killed, right on campus, a woman who has been deeply involved in fighting sexual violence, a woman who had no shortage of enemies.

The murder case, coupled with an investigation into allegations of sexual assault, threatens to bring dark, deep-rooted secrets to the surface, the kind of secrets that go back decades―and some people seem to value the old ways more than human life...

For fans of Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You and Ashley Winstead’s In My Dreams I Hold a Knife. Written by the current teacher at an American school academy, Alex Myers brings to life a thought-provoking and deeply relevant story.

Visit Alex Myers's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Working Title"

New from the University of California Press: Working Title: Media Packaging and the Margins of Art by Kalani Michell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Working Title is about all the supposedly mundane things involved in creative work that you're not supposed to talk about: the prerequisites, formalities, long waits, copyright battles, packaging dilemmas, and project pitches (like the one you're reading now). This book delves into European and transatlantic audiovisual media from the 1960s and 1970s, including performances, visual art, installations, and films, which might seem well-known to us as avant-garde artworks from "the past"—but in this book, they don't remain there. Exploring the less visible media among these works—from video games, photography, television, and YouTube videos to legal texts, containers, rubbish, and paperwork—Kalani Michell unsettles the familiar motivating mythologies of art of this era and makes space for the heavy lifting these media do, carving out what and how they mean for us today and revisiting their forgotten futures.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Agnes Lives!"

New from Bloomsbury: Agnes Lives!: A Novel by Hallie Elizabeth Newton.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A day-in-the-life debut novel about a fading socialite on the hunt for someone to kill her before her next SoulCycle class.

New York City, 2014. Agnes Maurer seeks a willing murderer and wonders what she should wear. Candidates include: an icy magazine editor with a special cutlery set; an eccentric designer from her past; and Agnes's cruel novelist boyfriend. As she Ubers from Upper East Side shopping to Craigslist gun deals, Agnes' desperation becomes an exhibition, a swan song of millennial sexuality as internalized abuse and consummate style, with the knob righty-tightened all the way.

Newton's prose is disturbingly fun, relentless, shattering. A crafted study of existential despair that culminates in a worthy, intense denouement.

Follow Hallie Elizabeth Newton on Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Between Novel and Network"

New from LSU Press: Between Novel and Network: Technology and Literary Form in Fiction and Fanfiction by Suzanne R. Black.

About the book, from the publisher:

The internet has enabled new forms of literature and challenged older forms to reinvent themselves. Between Novel and Network selects texts that exemplify these digital transformations, arguing that networked communication technologies have fundamentally altered the form and content of contemporary literature. The book begins by exploring digital fanfiction as a site of literary resistance and a form of literature that can only exist in the age of networked communications. Next it examines epistolary fiction, where networked digital literature offers a different mode of subjectivity than that associated with the traditional novel. Finally, the book addresses two novels that incorporate aspects of networked literatures (fanfiction and comic books) to stake a claim for their enduring primacy as a literary form.

Between Novel and Network adds to conversations about how networked communication technologies affect literary form, content, metaphors, and reception. Readers will trace how concepts such as authorship, originality, intertextuality, and literary value play out across the digital literary sphere. As well as building upon the place of fanfiction in the literary field, Suzanne R. Black also offers a reappraisal of the place and characteristics of the novel in the twenty-first century as part of a larger literary ecosystem.

Visit Suzanne R. Black's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"All the Little Ways"

New from Gallery Books: All the Little Ways: A Novel by Laura Lekkos.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the vein of Pineapple Street and Such a Fun Age, a smart, heartfelt debut novel about two expecting mothers navigating motherhood, family life, and female friendship, whose bond is threatened by a shocking revelation.

Victoria and Liz barely breathe the same air, but they collide headfirst when they meet in a group for expectant mothers and find common ground against all odds.

Victoria, forty-three, is confident, poised, and powerful, on the fast track to major career success in finance. Having kids is not in the plan. She had avoided love for decades—and hadn’t been too keen on female friendship either—when she fell for Ace, a dashing man twenty years her senior.

Liz, thirty-two, lives a fairly unstable life, trying to make her situationship work and navigate a job on a vile reality dating show. She’s desperately wanted to experience motherhood for her entire life, but anxiety and insecurity have landed her with a laundry list of failed romances. It’s an accident—ish—when she gets pregnant with her emotionally elusive boyfriend Preston’s baby just shy of a year into dating.

When Liz and Victoria meet in a parenting class, they both feel out of place amongst these pregnant women who seem to have it all figured out. They roll their eyes at the classic sign-off peppering the new mommy group chat: TIA (thanks in advance!). Alienated from these other women and due within a week of each other, Victoria and Liz’s bond becomes a lifeline as they navigate their pregnancies and relationships. They grapple with impending motherhood together and lean on each other to navigate important decisions about family, career, and love. It’s the first successful female friendship in Victoria’s life and the first time Liz has felt so connected to an older, wiser confidante. Maybe, just maybe, it will all be okay.

But as they grow more secure in their futures with each other’s support, the friends confront a shocking turn of events that will change the course of both their lives. Victoria and Liz then must reckon with their relationships, their impending journeys of motherhood, and the strength of their own bond in this unforgettable work of women’s fiction.

Visit Laura Lekkos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Suffering for the Crown"

New from the University of Virginia Press: Suffering for the Crown: The Hudson Valley Loyalists and the Violence of Revolution by Kieran J. O'Keefe.

About the book, from the publisher:

A groundbreaking look at the chaos and carnage of the American Revolution at the local level

In many respects, the American Revolution was a civil war, pitting Americans loyal to the Crown against other Americans loyal to the vision of a new nation they sought to create. Neighbor fought against neighbor, brother against brother, father against son. One of the epicenters of this desperate struggle was New York’s Hudson Valley.

In Suffering for the Crown, Kieran O’Keefe offers an in-depth, long-term look at what many scholars consider the most fiercely contested region of the entire conflict, analyzing the effects of violence on Loyalist communities―which included white, Black, and Native peoples―in stunning detail. O’Keefe reveals the brutal reality of the war and examines its enduring psychological and social legacies, providing readers with a nuanced understanding of the Revolution’s human cost. Caught up in this crucible, he shows, suffering became central to how Loyalists came to define themselves and their ordeal, as the dark side of the nation’s birth fundamentally and permanently reshaped American civil society.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Headlights"

New from Tor Nightfire: Headlights by CJ Leede.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Every instinct tells him to run. Every memory tells him he can’t.

Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is ready for a change. Burnt out and defeated by the job, it’s his last day with the FBI. But before he can turn in his badge, he’s summoned back to Denver, the city he ran from four years ago, with a chilling message: it's happening again.

Seemingly innocent people are waking up on the side of the highway, with no memory of how they got there, wearing the skin of victims they've allegedly never met. And they each share one haunting detail: a strand of a stranger’s hair is tied around their tongue.

Now Daniel is pulled back into the gruesome cycle, and every clue leads him deeper into the shadows of his own past. He will have to confront the ghosts of his traumatic childhood and face what’s been hunting him all along― before he and the people he loves become the next victims.

Perfect for fans of The Shining and Longlegs, bestselling author CJ Leede’s Headlights is a pulse-pounding hunt across the frozen wilderness of Colorado.

Visit CJ Leede's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Word and Plan"

New from Columbia University Press: Word and Plan by John MacFarlane.

About the book, from the publisher:

We commonly believe that communication is successful when a hearer grasps what a speaker means. But Abe can assert “Sam is tall” without having any definite intention about how tall one must be to count as “tall,” and Bertha can understand his assertion without grasping such an intention. What exactly has been communicated in such a case? John MacFarlane argues that standard models of meaning and communication cannot answer this question. To answer it, he proposes, we need to see vague talk as not purely factual but in part expressive of linguistic plans. In this book, he gives a novel expressivist account of vagueness and explores its implications for semantics, pragmatics, thought, and disagreement.

Visit John MacFarlane's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Little Wonder"

New from Ballantine Books: Little Wonder: A Novel (Thousand Voices) by Sophie Chen Keller.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A musical prodigy and his mother spend years searching for each other in this beautiful novel of hope, perseverance, and love.

Song is a nobody—just a food delivery worker from a village in Northeastern China—but her son, River, is a little wonder.

At the age of four, he toddled to a piano and tapped out his favorite song. At eight, he mastered Liszt's three Liebestraume; at ten, he blazed through the complete set of Chopin's études. And at every step, through the valleys of loss, illness, and poverty, Song is there to light his way—until finally, at the age of eleven, River is invited to study with a preeminent teacher in Beijing.

But in the chaos of Beijing Railway Station on the busiest day of the year, Song faces every mother's nightmare: She loses her grip on River’s little hand and is unable to find him after a desperate, harrowing search.

Over the next days, weeks, and eventually, years, Song and River fight to forge a path back to each other as they carve out new lives that carry them farther apart. An evocative exploration of a mother’s love and a son’s yearning, Little Wonder takes us on an extraordinary journey through a modern Beijing that pulses with the music of humanity and its impossible—and impossibly brave—hopes.

As every musician knows: You start in one key. You wander to other keys, strange and distant places. But in the end, you always come back home.

Visit Sophie Chen Keller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue