"Vengefully Matched"

New from Atria Books: Vengefully Matched: A Novel (Book 2 of 2: Hallowcross) by Audrey Goldberg Ruoff.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of the “colorful, sweet, and swoony” (Mallory Marlowe, USA TODAY bestselling author) Hopelessly Teavoted comes a witchy, sapphic rom-com about a mischievous runaway bride and her prim-and-proper Witchery Council rival who must fake-date in order to catch a would-be murderer—and accidentally fall in love.

Priscilla Hart does not do regret—except maybe for the spectacularly disastrous choice of fleeing her own wedding in a cloud of magical fireworks. Now the town’s most infamous runaway witch, she’s determined to rebuild her reputation on the Witchery Council and prove she’s more than a scandal in designer heels.

Agatha Vanderbilt Voisin, the newly elected council president, is everything Priscilla can’t stand: composed, proper, and infuriatingly perfect. But when a string of dangerous magical explosions points to Priscilla as the culprit, Agatha makes an impulsive move—announcing that they’re dating—to save her from exile.

Faking a relationship in public should be simple even for such opposites…until late-night arguments turn into slow-burn attraction, and the two discover that something wicked is brewing in Hallowcross. To survive the magic—and their feelings—they’ll have to stop pretending and risk falling for real.

Can they outwit a magic powerful enough to destroy them, or will trust be the most dangerous risk of all?

Visit Audrey Goldberg Ruoff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America"

New from the University of Illinois Press: Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America by Nick Mathews.

About the book, from the publisher:

The crisis of rural news consumers abandoned by corporate owners

The devastation of local news organizations has left rural areas of the US marooned in information deserts. Nick Mathews offers a boots-on-the-ground examination of the human toll of local news’s erosion by the winds of de-localization and corporate indifference.

It is no secret that ownership transfers, corporate mergers, and hedge fund takeovers have relentlessly consolidated and closed local news organizations. Mathews exposes the impact of that process on journalism, journalists, and news consumers hungry for outlets that tell their stories. A fundamental breakdown within journalism itself, the abandonment of community news has left disgruntled and disconnected locals to piece together news and information themselves. Mathews draws on the personal experiences of news gatherers and consumers to illuminate why local news cannot be scaled. Mass-produced content inevitably severs ties to communities while distant ownership is indifferent to local concerns.

Nuanced and sympathetic, Deserted provides a vivid portrait of the people and places forsaken by journalism’s corporate owners.

Visit Nick Mathews's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Holmes Away From Home"

Coming October 6 from Severn House: Holmes Away From Home (An Althea Adler Mystery) by Samantha Larsen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Introducing Althea Adler, accomplished thief and daring heroine with a mysterious link to Sherlock Holmes.

A heart-racing game of wits, murder and romance is about to commence...

London, 1911. Althea Adler receives a mysterious postcard with just four words, ‘Holmes away from home.’ Surely her mother, notorious thief and opera star Irene Adler, is instructing her to break into Sherlock Holmes’s safe? But when she does, Althea makes a shocking discovery...

Still reeling from events at 221b Baker Street, Althea accepts an invitation to a party at Twickenham Towers, the ancestral home of Lord Slough, where a murder throws her into further turmoil―as does handsome fellow guest William, the Marquess of Sheffield, who has been tasked with staking out Slough by the British Government.

Althea and William form an unlikely alliance as they set about catching a killer. But can they trust each other when they both have something to hide?

Visit Samantha Larsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom"

New from Oxford University Press: Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom by Stephen Spiess.

About the book, from the publisher:

How does one know a whore is a whore? Upon what terms, standards, interpretive logics, and material practices does such knowledge depend? In Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom, Stephen Spiess pursues these questions and, in so doing, discovers the extraordinary cultural labor necessary to produce and sustain the fiction of the “whore” as a fixed, coherent, and readily apprehensible category of sexual knowledge. This work, he shows, unfolds across a variety of historically situated social, textual, and linguistic processes, from the writing of dictionary entries, character sketches, and lyric poems to public proclamations, conversion rituals, and dramatic representations. It also extends into the present era, where scholars continue to shore up whoredom's incoherences and to reproduce moralized distinctions between “real” prostitutes and “discursive” whores.

Charting a different approach in this book, Spiess argues that the ambiguities, incoherences, and impasses that attend the meanings and makings of English whoredom are essential to understanding how that category operates, both in that historical culture and our own. Establishing whoredom as a knowledge relation and a material process, he reveals the analytical benefits of lingering in sites where sexual knowledge breaks down, and of tarrying with the complexities and consequences of the material practices, cultural logics, and social affects that emerge to mediate these impasses. Applying the methods and insights of queer epistemology to a topic of vital feminist concern, Spiess locates new sites for discursive contestation while resisting the identitarian or ontological logics that disciplinary categories seek to install in the first place. Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom thus delivers a new analytical framework for understanding the social, textual, and representational histories of illicit sexual figures in early modern England.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dear Future Occupants"

New from the University of Wisconsin Press: Dear Future Occupants by Keith Stahl.

About the book, from the publisher:

It is 1979 and patriarch Bud relocates his family to his conservative hometown of Greenhill, Connecticut. Despite dubious restaurant experience, he uses his wife’s inheritance to purchase a diner in hopes of proving himself. Things begin to fall apart when police find an all-too-literal skeleton in the family’s basement. A series of misfortunes, accidents, and comedic events follow, including the creation of a vending-machine-sandwich/drug-dealing business and a protest-turned-siege at the local hospital.

Charting one family’s rise to subversive glory in a genteel New England town, this colonial gothic novel is told through found documents and multiple perspectives, including those of Bud; Victor, the middle son; and Herman, the ahead-of-their time, nonbinary, eldest child whose journal entries serve as a kind of Greek chorus throughout. In this breathless, exuberant work, Keith Stahl brilliantly captures the foundational dichotomies at the heart of the American experience: a puritanical distrust of anything fun and a nearly anarchic love of pleasure and freedom. Moving and bitterly humorous, Dear Future Occupants is a paean to the working class and the diversity that holds a family together.

Visit Keith Stahl's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Crimes Against Feeling"

New from University of Massachusetts Press: Crimes Against Feeling: Piracy, Sympathy, and Ocean Politics in Antebellum American Legal Culture by Mark B. Kelley.

About the book, from the publisher:

Demonstrating how emotion became central to the legal and literary meanings of piracy in nineteenth-century America

Pirates have long occupied a central yet unstable place in American law and national identity. In the decades leading up to and including the U.S. Civil War, the charge of piracy was leveled against an unusually wide range of figures: foreign heads of state, imperial filibusters, transoceanic enslavers, enslaved mutineers, radical abolitionists, and others who challenged established forms of authority. Early American literature reflects this instability, portraying pirates who vary dramatically in politics, race, gender, and allegiance. As Mark B. Kelley shows, these characters are united less by ideology than by their challenge to landed social norms and fixed national belonging. The pirate, in both law and literature, emerges as an individual defined by multiplicity rather than political coherence.

Crimes Against Feeling examines how Americans made sense of this ambiguous figure by turning to emotion. Drawing on legal materials including treaties, trial transcripts, congressional debates, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, as well as popular sentimental fiction (often written by women), Kelley argues that piracy was codified as an offense against moral feeling rather than being a singular political position. Legal thinkers and writers such as John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Maria S. Cummins relied on shared affective frameworks―sympathy, sentiment, and domestic vulnerability―to render piracy legible and punishable. American pirate law, Kelley demonstrates, was shaped by the same emotional logics that structured the era’s popular fiction.

By tracing piracy across debates over domestic sovereignty, global enslavement and abolition, imperial expansion, postbellum reparations, and international copyright, Crimes Against Feeling reveals the pirate as a key figure for understanding gender, home, family, and nation in early America. Reading law and literature together, the book shows how emotional judgment―not political consensus―became a foundational tool for managing oceanic violence and transnational disorder in the nineteenth-century United States.

Visit Mark B. Kelley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Falling Like Snow"

Coming October 6 from Margaret K. McElderry Books: Falling Like Snow (Part of Bramble Falls) by Misty Wilson.

About the book, from the publisher:

A girl juggles planning her town’s first-ever winter festival and untangling her complicated feelings for both her best friend and the star hockey player in this charming book in the swoony Bramble Falls series that started with the New York Times bestselling Falling Like Leaves.

After Bramble Falls’s wildly successful Falling Leaves Festival, Sloane Sullivan is looking forward to some downtime—especially kicking back and marathoning Nora Ephron movies with her best friend, Asher. But they barely make it through Sleepless in Seattle before Sloane’s mom calls an emergency tourism department meeting; it’s all hands on deck—Bramble Falls is having its first ever Falling Snow Festival!

Sloane may still be recovering from the last seasonal event, but she’s also excited. After all, Christmas is the best time of year! And she’ll have her whole crew by her side, including her cousin Ellis and, of course, Asher. But when irresistible, hockey-playing Micah catches Sloane’s attention, she finds herself a bit distracted. The emotions her unexpected flirtation brings up make Sloane feel confused about Micah…and Asher.

She’s never thought of Asher as more than her best friend, but even if Sloane is seeing Asher in a new light, what does that mean for her and Micah? Uncertain and more than a little overwhelmed, Sloane throws herself into festival preparations, hoping to get a little Christmas magic in return that will help her figure out where her heart lies.

Visit Misty Wilson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Whiteness Between Us"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Whiteness Between Us: Early Modern Playbooks of Racial Triangulation by Noémie Ndiaye.

About the book, from the publisher:

A theorization of the representational juxtapositions, frictions, and connections between Black people and other non-white people in early modern European theatre.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, European drama was an important tool for whiteness to imagine itself at the top of an aspirational structure of power relations. Indeed, that structure could only be aspirational at a time when Europeans were profoundly divided along easily racializable religious and ethnic lines, and when their sovereignty was threatened by the Ottoman empire. It was to strengthen this emerging consciousness of racial whiteness, Noémie Ndiaye argues, that European drama engaged in a form of racial triangulation, fitting Muslim, Jewish, Indigenous, Romani, and Asian characters into a spurious black/white racial binary.

Focusing on English, Spanish, and French drama from 1580 to 1715, The Whiteness Between Us shows how plays became a crucial tool to position not only black people but any non-white community in the new racial architecture that white supremacy sought to build. Ndiaye reveals the stage of this era as a space for wish fulfillment, enabling participants to imagine and work towards a whiter future.

The early modern playbooks of racial triangulation that Ndiaye brings to light can and have been reactivated for white supremacist purposes in our own day and age. Partly in response to the contemporary threat of white nationalism, scholars and students have sought to unearth the early modern roots of racial whiteness and white supremacy. Ndiaye’s book participates in this wave of interest, offering several innovations, including its capacious transnational claims.

Visit Noémie Ndiaye's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hanging and Burning"

Coming October 20 from Little, Brown and Company: Hanging and Burning: A King Oliver by Walter Mosley.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A dying gangster’s plea sends Joe King Oliver on a quest for a missing woman across America’s coasts—unraveling a dark and violent family history along the way—in this engrossing new novel from one of the most celebrated and acclaimed crime writers at work today.

Joe King Oliver is the big man you call to solve the most delicate and dangerous of problems. Fresh off unraveling the mystery of his own parents’ fates, King finds himself accepting (again at his grandmother’s request) a case from Arman Babylon, a powerful Los Angeles gangster now dying from cancer.

Babylon’s granddaughter, Twyla Mann, has been missing for years, and he’s desperate to find her before he passes. The search pulls King into the Babylons’ stained past and the cold case of Dalia Shorts, a torch singer who vanished without a trace and whom Arman was once suspected of killing.

As King follows her trail from L.A. to New York and back, he’ll realize nothing is what it seems as he uncovers a pattern of violence that has targeted the women around Babylon for decades. How much will King be willing to risk to finally set things right?

Visit Walter Mosley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Claiming the Nation"

New from the University of California Press: Claiming the Nation: The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Brazil by Andre Pagliarini.

About the book, from the publisher:

Time and again, in heated debates over Brazil's political economy and democracy, one disputed concept emerges: nationalism. Claiming the Nation traces the contested history of the nationalist label in twentieth-century Brazil, examining how both progressive and conservative forces invoked national interest to advance divergent political agendas. Focusing on the period from the 1920s through the end of military rule in 1985, Andre Pagliarini demonstrates how progressive reformers linked nationalism to social justice, economic sovereignty, and mass participation, while right-wing elites often used it to justify hierarchy and technocratic governance. Through detailed analysis of political debates, media, and activism, the book shows how competing attempts to define and claim nationalism in the public square shaped Brazil’s civic identity, development, and political trajectory during the past one hundred years. Ultimately, Pagliarini unveils the enduring ways in which control over nationalist discourse became a proxy for determining who legitimately represented the nation and its future.

--Marshal Zeringue