"Looks Perfect"

Coming October 6 from Little A: Looks Perfect: A Novel by Jessica Siskin.

About the book, from the publisher:

What comes between a fashion icon’s perfect image and her genuine self? The perfect stranger―in a sharp and witty novel about identity, performance, and what it takes to make a true connection.

One million people follow Stella Lerner’s every move. And now the buzzy fashion designer is fulfilling her lifelong dream and taking her indie clothing brand global with the help of the industry’s biggest investor. Sounds perfect. Except offline, the optics aren’t so great.

Her relationship with her boyfriend, Alex, is crumbling just as the pressure to curate her image online only builds. Feeling trapped between the picture-perfect life she’s promised her followers and the messy reality she’s facing, Stella anonymously joins a new dating app. Blindr promises deep, private conversations, free from the burden of anyone’s expectations, especially her own. That’s when Stella connects with a stranger called Pineapple who’s intuitive, honest, and empathetic. Stella may be watched by millions, but this man, who’s never even laid eyes on her, makes her feel seen.

What starts as a diversion becomes a journey of radical transformation. As Stella’s search for authenticity intensifies, every chat with Pineapple takes her further down a path she never could’ve imagined.

Visit Jessica Siskin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby"

Coming soon from PublicAffairs: The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family's Quest to Craft a Christian Nation by Michael Blanding.

About the book, from the publisher:

A revelatory account of how the family behind Hobby Lobby rose to political prominence and used their influence—and fortune—to push a radical religious agenda

Hobby Lobby is a multibillion-dollar craft store chain with more than a thousand US locations, founded and owned by the Greens—an evangelical Christian family committed to establishing the Bible as the ultimate authority behind our laws and society.

In The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby, Michael Blanding reveals how the Greens have quietly yet effectively used their vast wealth to spread their beliefs throughout the US and beyond. They have run expensive, wide-reaching ad campaigns to inculcate biblical values and have propped up evangelical education through donations of money and land. They successfully fought a Supreme Court case to deny their employees insurance coverage for contraception and funneled millions of dollars to organizations working to overturn Roe v. Wade and to undermine LGBTQ rights. And, for their multimillion-dollar Museum of the Bible just blocks from the US Capitol building, they’ve acquired looted, stolen, and forged biblical antiquities from the Middle East. In a riveting exposé, Blanding traces the Greens’ efforts to sell their evangelical mission.

Captivating and disturbing, The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby exposes the pivotal role the Green family has played in funding and empowering America’s dangerous, ascendant Christian nationalist movement.

Visit Michael Blanding's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Map Thief.

The Page 99 Test: North by Shakespeare.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Her Sharp Embrace"

New from Wednesday Books: Her Sharp Embrace (The Nightshades, 1) by Kate Koenig.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first in a sweeping queer fantasy duology set in a shimmering, New Orleans-inspired world.

In the glittering city of New Soleil, beauty masks danger at every turn. The Nightshades, a crew of magical outlaws, are no different. Their glamorous facades conceal the terror they strike into the hearts of the rich and powerful as they steal from the corrupt and fight for the forgotten.

Noa Toussaint fled her cossetted life as a Saint to join the Nightshades. Infatuated with their ferocious leader, Lennon, Noa aims to capture her heart and keep it. Her talent for alchemy is valuable, but her connection to her family puts all of the Shades in danger.

Now enemies are closer than Lennon knows and Noa must uncover the threat and keep them both alive. Because in a city where lies are lethal and magic is fading, secrets aren’t just costly―they’re deadly.

Visit Kate Koenig's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"White Woman's Burden"

New from State University of New York Press: White Woman's Burden: Race, Empire, and Influence in Writing by US Women's Rights Activists, 1867–1936 by Kathryn Wichelns.

About the book, from the publisher:

Counters universalist narratives of mainstream feminism by examining the power exerted by four white women writer-activists to shape American society from the 1860s to 1930s.

White Woman's Burden focuses on four American writer-activists who were significant if secondary actors in the historical push for two rights that disproportionately served elite women: suffrage and equal higher education. Reflecting regional ideas about whiteness and womanhood from Massachusetts to New Mexico, Elizabeth Agassiz, Annie Fields, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Nina Otero-Warren embodied and helped nationalize the domestically defined versions of their era's mainstream feminism. Through their participation in advances in science, literary culture, higher education, state government, and language rights, these four women advocated for the interrelated objectives of (white) women's rights, US imperialism, and white nationalism. In challenging the assumption that white women's political involvement supported and supports universal goals that serve other marginalized groups, White Woman's Burden revisits mainstream feminist responses to the nineteenth-century "theory of influence," arguing that elite women's practices of social power developed during that period continue to shape our ideas about womanhood and activism into the present―from the contemporary belief in (white) women's innate civic-mindedness to white women's voting patterns in recent US presidential elections.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Three Hitmen and a Baby"

New from G.P. Putnam's Sons: Three Hitmen and a Baby (An Assassins Anonymous Novel) by Rob Hart.

About the book, from the publisher:

Welcome back to Assassins Anonymous, where family is everything and danger lurks around every corner.

Assassins Anonymous isn't just a weekly recovery meeting for reformed killers—it's also a family.

When Valencia receives troubling news that her brother has gone missing, she wants rush off to LA to find him. But she can’t bring her baby girl, Lucia. Enter the other members of Assassins Anonymous—Mark, Astrid, and Booker, who offer to watch the toddler while she's gone. After all, they're three of the deadliest, most highly skilled people on the planet; what could go wrong?

Turns out, a lot. Shortly after Valencia leaves, Mark is summoned to the lair of Zmeya, a Russian mob boss calling in a deadly favor—she wants him to kill Astrid, his protege and friend. Mark refuses, but Zmeya reveals that she knows the identity of Mark’s ex-girlfriend . . . and his son. Either Astrid goes, or they do.

Meanwhile, Lucia spikes a dangerously high fever, and when Booker and Astrid take her to urgent care, they realize too late, that their fabricated identities are a real liability. Also, they don't know Valencia’s last name, let alone Lucia's. They can hardly blame the staff for calling the NYPD.

Suddenly the splintered group is on the run from both the Russian mob and the police, dodging bad guys and do-gooders while trying to find refuge in a city full of surveillance cameras—all without killing anyone. That is, until Zmeya captures Sara and Bennett, and Mark is ready to throw his sobriety out the window.

Visit Rob Hart's website.

My Book, The Movie: Potter's Field.

The Page 69 Test: Potter's Field.

The Page 69 Test: The Warehouse.

Writers Read: Rob Hart (January 2021).

The Page 69 Test: The Paradox Hotel.

Q&A with Rob Hart.

The Page 69 Test: Assassins Anonymous.

--Marshal Zeringue

"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