"The Precarious Past in Premodern Java"

New from the University of California Press: The Precarious Past in Premodern Java by Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan.

About the book, from the publisher:

The practice of history in premodern Java was profoundly influenced by precarious conditions of textual production and preservation: fragile manuscripts perished in the tropical environment, archival records were scattered far afield, and historical memories faded over many generations. In this book, Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan examines how Javanese societies between the fifth and fifteenth centuries CE responded with distinctive strategies to record and transmit knowledge of the past.

Drawing on sources in Javanese, Sanskrit, Malay, and related languages from the Indonesian archipelago, Sastrawan provides a detailed account of diverse forms of history making in premodern Java, reconstructing a dynamic culture in which written and nonwritten modes of transmission coexisted and intersected. By situating these practices within broader discussions of global historiography, this book challenges modern assumptions about what counts as “history” and illuminates how societies have developed different ways of preserving and remembering the past.

Visit Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Breathing Under Water"

New from Harper Muse: Breathing Under Water by Jacqueline Friedland.

About the book, from the publisher:

The current is threatening to pull them under.

Berry thought she had it figured out—juggling her vice principal role while raising her sixteen-year-old autistic son, Leo. But when a promotion opportunity collides with her family's deepest needs, she must confront whether she's been fighting the wrong battles all along.

McKenna is drowning. Between caring for her grandmother with dementia, losing her swimming scholarship, and facing homelessness, the college student's carefully constructed world is crumbling. Her only lifeline? Teaching swim lessons to children with autism—including Leo.

As these two women's paths converge in the most unexpected way, they discover that sometimes the people who need saving the most are the ones who end up saving you.

Visit Jacqueline Friedland's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Rise and Fall of Original OxyContin"

New from Oxford University Press: The Rise and Fall of Original OxyContin: A Rhetorical Study of Blame, Scapegoating, and Our Unrelieved Pain by Michael J. Madson.

About the book, from the publisher:

The United States opioid crisis has wrought devastation on a massive scale. With closure elusive, much of the blame has fallen on a single pill, a long-acting oxycodone tablet called OxyContin. Perhaps one of the most notorious prescription painkillers on the market, OxyContin may be the best documented opioid in the country due to extensive litigation, regulation, and news coverage. Analyses of these documents can provide deeper insights into the drug's lifecycle as well as the shaping of public understandings of the crisis. Blame pervades our lived experiences, affecting how we norm and punish, explain and evade, reconcile and heal. This phenomenon has rarely been discussed by scholars, leaving gaps in our collective knowledge.

Drawing on extensive documentation--from media coverage and court records to internal company emails--Madson examines who was blamed, how, and why. To do this, he has adapted for a new critical contextualized methodology to identify key players, map time-space axes, and pinpoint tipping points. Rather than pointing to a single cause, The Rise and Fall of Original OxyContin traces how blame shifted among drug makers, regulators, doctors, patients, and others over time, leaving some as scapegoats. Using clear, accessible language, it offers insight into how blame can influence public health, policy, and trust.

The outcome is a preliminary model of blame discourse in pharmaceutical contexts, which aims to inform future research. Applications can be drawn to three critical areas of practice: pharmaceutical risk communication, organizational health literacy, and interprofessional education. The work provides valuable insights into the origins of miscommunication about risk, addiction, and corporate responsibility, and offers practical takeaways for future crisis communication and risk regulation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fields of Asphodel"

New from 47North: Fields of Asphodel (Underworld Myths) by Callie Rowland.

About the novel, from the publisher:

In this lush reimagining of Greek mythology, the daughter of Hades and Persephone defies the gods of the underworld to forge her own life amid war, curses, and unexpected romance.

For Asphodel, the free-spirited daughter of Hades and Persephone, being cursed to never fall in love with a god is a blessing.

Determined not to be trapped in a union like her mother, Del spends her life blissfully on the Isle of Flowers, far from her family in the underworld. But when Del’s parents ordain her marriage to Thanatos, the god of death, the freedom she’s long since guarded is at risk of being stolen for eternity. So Del takes fate into her own hands: She kidnaps her groom-to-be and traps him on her Isle.

But defying the gods comes with a price. Without Thanatos to send mortals off to peaceful rest in the underworld, death will devolve into brutality and violence. The realms will be consumed by chaos. With time running out and her freedom on the line, Del must restore the balance she upended―even as she finds herself irrevocably drawn to the ever-charming and bashful Thanatos, who offers another way of saving the worlds by breaking her curse. Only then can Del choose to marry him.

Visit Callie Rowland's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Time on the Brink of Impasse"

New from Fordham University Press: Time on the Brink of Impasse: Historicity, Postmodernity, and the French Seventies by Brittany Murray.

About the book, from the publisher:

Time on the Brink of Impasse explores a pivotal decade in French cultural history through the lenses of literature, film, and critical theory. The 1970s in France are often dismissed as a period of blocked historical imagination. This book argues that the period’s literature and cinema reflect not disorientation or despair but a decade animated by artistic responses to new experiences of time.

Returning to influential theorists of postmodernity, including Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, Time on the Brink of Impasse investigates how artists represented new experiences of time. Through close readings of writers and filmmakers including by Agnès Varda, Rachid Boudjedra, Chantal Akerman, Georges Perec, Sarah Maldoror, and Carole Roussopoulos, the book examines how aesthetic form registered new temporal imaginaries.

By situating culture within the broader context of work, housing, migration, and gender activism, Murray’s book offers a fresh perspective on how historicity was rethought after the end of the postwar period. Historically grounded and theoretically lucid, Time on the Brink of Impasse reveals a period alive with possibility.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Killing in the Countryside"

Coming soon from Crooked Lane Books: Killing in the Countryside: A Wren & Wilson Mystery by Maria Malone.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Sergeant Ali Wren and her police dog, Wilson, are back in this charming sequel, perfect for fans of Ann Cleeves and Margaret Mizushima.

It’s just another day in the small town of Heft when Ali follows up on reports of an escaped pride of peacocks stirring up trouble in a once quiet cul-de-sac. A routine call, a case of fuss and feathers, Ali suspects. But what she discovers inside the house the birds have invaded is far from routine. The couple who live there have been receiving anonymous hate letters.

Letters that are at once threatening and suspiciously personal.

As Ali and Wilson investigate, they dig up long-buried secrets at the heart of the community. Every detail they uncover brings them closer to the truth, that someone in Heft will stop at nothing to keep their past hidden…

Visit Maria Malone's website.

Writers Read: Maria Malone (August 2025).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Divination Engines"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture by Xiaochang Li.

About the book, from the publisher:

A revealing and surprising origin story, showing how attempts to render human speech and language computable led from the era of big data to today’s AI.

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In this eye-opening book, technology expert Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI. With original research and clear explanations, Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human speech, she demonstrates how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting instead for work-arounds that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Li reveals, transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access, circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and ever-growing amounts of new data.

At its core, Divination Engines illuminates how the artifacts of human communication―speech, text, and images―have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Séance Garden"

New from Berkley: The Séance Garden by Juliet Blackwell.

About the novel, from the publisher:

After a cheesy ghost tour in one of California’s oldest towns stumbles upon an actual haunting, a skeptical historian of the occult becomes entangled in solving a murder case.

When Professor Harper Grae loses a bet with a friend, she finds herself on a local nighttime tour of “haunted” locations in Monterey. Harper’s a lifelong non-believer in the occult, though her academic career is devoted to the historical and societal significance of witchcraft, ghosts, and medicinal poisons of all sorts. But her skepticism immediately gets tested when the tour stumbles on the body of local artist Delilah Mason—who’s found murdered on the grounds of a nearly two-hundred-year-old mansion, once home to the infamous Perles family.

On the night Mason’s body is found, Harper catches sight of something in the house that she can’t shake, something that’s impossible to explain, at least not rationally. Soon the murder investigation reveals that this is the second time a woman has been found murdered beneath a sprawling cypress tree in the gardens of the Perles Mansion. And when Harper’s closest friend is questioned by the police, Harper fears the authorities will fail to uncover the real killer.

As Harper asks questions around town and digs deeper into the supernatural speculation and rumors surrounding the murders—two women killed in similar circumstances, separated by nearly two centuries —she sees evidence she can’t ignore that the notorious mansion truly is haunted by the ghost of Isabel Perles.

What will it cost Harper to rethink everything she’s always believed to admit that the veil between the living and the dead might actually be crossed?

Visit Juliet Blackwell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Embattled Belief"

New from Cambridge University Press: Embattled Belief: Religion and the British Army from Korea to Afghanistan by Michael Snape.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book examines the neglected role of religion in the British Army in an era of rapid and far-reaching change. Covering the Cold War, the end of empire, seismic shifts in Britain's cultural and religious landscape, and the dramatic shrinkage of the armed forces, Michael Snape reveals religion's abiding importance at an institutional, individual and operational level. He explores the religious contexts of the Army's warfighting, counterinsurgency and peacekeeping operations, including the Korean, Falklands and Gulf Wars; the 'Emergencies' in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus; the Northern Ireland conflict; UN and NATO operations in the Balkans; and Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. He also charts the religious responses of British soldiers to allies, adversaries and civilian populations. This is a unique and significant contribution to our understanding of the secularisation of British society, the social and cultural history of the British Army, and religion and war in the contemporary world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Killing Sadie"

Coming August 4 from Simon Pulse: Killing Sadie by Rachel Peterson.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Perfect for fans of How to Survive Your Murder and Dead Girls Can’t Tell Secrets, this young adult thriller unspools the truth behind a tragic murder through multiple unreliable narrators who all have secrets to keep.

Here’s what we do know: there was another infamous barn party at the McClain family farm last night, and things went horribly wrong. By the end of the night, there were two dead bodies in the old barn: seventeen-year-old Sadie Cooper and her killer, Mason Vreeland. The murder was heartbreakingly witnessed by Sadie’s twin sister, Jayne, and Sadie died in her arms. Mason was killed by Sadie’s boyfriend, Ben, in an attempt to save Sadie.

Aside from figuring out Mason’s motive, it should be an open and shut case.

But it’s not.

The story unfolds just after the murders, and Jayne, Ben, and Sadie’s best friend, Liz, are telling the cops what transpired at the party and the events leading up to it. But little details don’t match. And those little details start to add up to big discrepancies. But who’s lying, and why?

The shocking truth is revealed in the third act, when the POV shifts to victim Sadie herself, in the days leading up to the party. Witness exactly what happened—and see if you can piece it all together. Because poor Sadie totally missed what was right in front of her.

Visit Rachel Peterson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue