"Your Boyfriend Needs an Exorcist"

New from Bloomsbury YA: Your Boyfriend Needs an Exorcist by Justine Pucella Winans.

About the book, from the publisher:

Jennifer's Body meets The Weight of Blood in this horror-comedy about an evil spirit looking for a second chance at love and life.

Just because Schuyler is a bloodthirsty evil spirit doesn't mean she can't fall in love. Ever since Wren Castillo moved into the house Schuyler haunts, Schuyler has been crushing hard. But Wren has a boyfriend, Enzo, and he's the worst. Schuyler has no choice but to watch as Enzo treats Wren terribly-until she accidentally possesses him.

With Enzo's spirit nowhere to be found, Schuyler must pretend to be him until she can set things right. But Schuyler feels more at home in Enzo's body than she ever did in her own, and as she grows closer to his family and friends-including Wren-she starts to wonder if this could all be for keeps.

Maintaining a possession is harder than Schuyler expected, though, and it might just take some spilled blood to keep her new body going strong. Worse, it turns out she's not the only one interested in stealing Enzo's body. When another evil spirit threatens everyone Schuyler now holds dear, she must decide just how far she's willing to go to secure her second chance at love-and life.

Visit Justine Pucella Winans's website.

Q&A with Justine Pucella Winans.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Romanticism and the Evolutionary Idea"

New from Stanford University Press: American Romanticism and the Evolutionary Idea by Jennifer J. Baker.

About the book, from the publisher:

Evolutionary thought transformed nineteenth-century American intellectual life. This book details how it shaped literature in the middle decades of the century and intersected with Romantic conceptions of selfhood, society, and the history of life. Jennifer J. Baker reads the era's Romanticism in relation to Darwin as well as naturalists, embryologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, and even Biblical creationists who used evolutionary frameworks to understand the past and future. The "evolutionary idea" encompassed much more than Darwinism, she argues, and even Darwinism in these decades was variously understood and not necessarily the secular, mechanistic, and deterministic thinking we now associate with the Gilded Age. Baker uncovers an earlier, Romantic evolutionism in writing about self-culture, social reform, racial uplift, prehistoric life and cultures, and the creation of art.

Baker proposes that American Romanticism was itself a way of thinking about the human condition in the terms of evolutionary process. She draws on an extensive literary archive, including works by Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Douglass, Delany, Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, to detail how writers understood change and innovation as the product of teleology, chance, social organization, environmental pressures, and, not least of all, the past.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Killing of a Chestnut Tree"

Coming soon from Tordotcom: The Killing of a Chestnut Tree (Havelock Harper Mysteries, 1) by Oliver K. Langmead.

About the book, from the publisher:

Be gay, solve crimes!

Meet Havelock Harper, gentleman detective. Dapper, delightful, and decidedly queer, he's here to solve your most magical mysteries.

Everyone in England knows Havelock Harper, the celebrated consulting detective from the papers. But if any of them read his private files, they would discover secrets that must never reach the public eye―extraordinary cases, impossible crimes, and a committed love affair with his formidable companion Major Sebastian Wright.

And their next case might be the queerest yet.

Havelock and Sebastian have been summoned to investigate the murder of the Duke of Farleigh. When they arrive at the scene of the crime ― a secluded, enchanting forest ― they discover that the victim is a tree!

The trees of Farleigh have begun to write words in their bark and branches, expressing themselves for all to read. The Duke is an ancient chestnut, cruelly chopped down, and to the villagers of Farleigh, he is a beloved friend. They want justice.

Havelock and Sebastian must use all their wits and wisdom to find the murderer who has shattered the peace of Farleigh.

Visit Oliver K. Langmead's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Writing with Fire"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life by Barbara Young Welke.

About the book, from the publisher:

A cultural and legal history intertwined with a deeply emotional meditation on the course of life, memory, and the documents that define us.

During the 1940s and 1950s, an untold number of American children suffered devastating injuries when the fur-like fabric on the chaps of their Gene Autry–branded cowboy playsuits exploded into flame. Barbara Young Welke was researching this history when her teenage daughter unexpectedly died.

The shock of Welke’s loss transformed her understanding of the children and their families. Her experience also led her to question the norms of scholarship and of writing. Historians are trained to separate the personal from the intellectual, to be suspicious of emotion. These and other norms are embedded in and reinforced by the calling card of academics, the curriculum vitae. Welke wondered how that cold document―with its literal meaning, “the course of life”―had become a form that excludes so much of what gives life meaning. What impact did that have on what we know, how we know it, and how we understand ourselves? Similarly, Welke wondered, what might we see if we looked at the history of the cowboy suit tragedy as more than a matter of lawsuits brought by grieving families? Here, Welke traces the making, marketing, and selling of the cowboy suits; the lengths the defendants went to avoid and limit liability; and the meaning of the injuries, deaths, and legal settlements in the course of these children’s and families’ lives.

Writing with Fire interweaves the histories of the cowboy suit tragedy and the curriculum vitae. Grounded in archival and legal research, oral histories, and letters Welke wrote her daughter following her death, Welke offers an inimitable examination of trauma, law, autobiography, and identity. The result is revelatory and unforgettable: a provocative historical reflection on life and death, depression and war, markets and families, law, power, and precarity in modern America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"An Uncertain Magic"

Coming October 27 from Orbit: An Uncertain Magic (Green Witch Cycle, 2) by AM Kvita.

About the book, from the publisher:

In An Uncertain Magic, the second book in AM Kvita’s award-winning Green Witch Cycle, Brooklyn's most chaotic coven has to take on ancient gods (yes, gods) to avoid a magical apocalypse and save the city―no big deal.

Joan Greenwood has been adjusting nicely to her life away from her powerful family of witches. She has an apartment full of friends, her dream job at an architecture firm, and a constant companion in the sentient magic that makes up New York City. For once, everything’s coming up Joan ... until her best friend gets possessed.

There’s a god wearing his skin, a new cult springing up around him, magic is going haywire, and things go from bad to worse when Joan’s rival-turned-crush Astoria Wardwell arrives from California with the news that her best friend is also possessed. That’s one hell of a coincidence, but the two have to work together to save their best friends before these gods corrupt them―unless their pesky feelings for each other get in the way.

Visit AM Kvita's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Bookshop"

New from Basic Books: The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century by Andrew Pettegree.

About the book, from the publisher:

The global history of the rise and transformation of bookstores, from medieval book merchants to today’s neighborhood indies.

Whether it’s a local indie bookshop, an online megaretailer, or a chain bookstore, the place we buy books is an essential part of our reading lives. Bookstores connect books to potential buyers and convert idle browsers into committed readers. Yet, as historian Andrew Pettegree reveals, it took more than five centuries after Gutenberg for bookstores as we know them to emerge.

The Bookshop tells a sweeping history of the bookstore. It celebrates the ingenuity of booksellers, from the smugglers who carried contraband books across borders, to the innovators who created the global distribution networks that define books and bookselling today. Even though few bookshops lasted more than a few years during the best of times, booksellers relentlessly sought new ways to get books to readers. Innovators like the squabbling dealers who invented the secondhand bookstore, or Victorian capitalists like W. H. Smith, who built an empire of railroad station book stalls to serve idle passengers, made bookselling what it is today.

The Bookshop is the story of how the bookstore became the indispensable meeting place for book makers and book lovers around the world.

The Page 99 Test: The Book in the Renaissance.

The Page 99 Test: The Invention of News.

The Page 99 Test: Brand Luther.

Writers Read: Andrew Pettegree (December 2015).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Claus Conspiracy"

New from Poisoned Pen Press: The Claus Conspiracy by Tamara Berry.

About the novel, from the publisher:

It's beginning to look a lot like murder in this holly-jolly mystery from award-winning author Tamara Berry!

Amber Winslow thought she'd left chaos behind when she traded bounty hunting for small-town life in Arizona. Between her job as a barista and recording a true-crime podcast with a lively group of retirees at Seven Ponds Retirement Community, life has finally settled into something resembling calm.

Until a battered, amnesiac teenager crashes into it―literally.

The girl knows only one thing for certain: Amber's voice from the podcast. Clutching a Post-it note with Amber's address, she arrives with no memory of who she is…and a dead Santa Claus in her trunk.

Determined to uncover the truth, Amber and her sharp-witted octogenarian crew begin digging―and quickly discover this is no holiday mishap. Their search uncovers a trail of rogue Mall Santas, a dangerous drug operation, and secrets someone is willing to kill to protect.

As the bodies pile up and the past closes in, Amber must untangle a mystery that's far bigger―and far more personal―than she ever imagined.

Visit Tamara Berry's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bridge to an Unseen Shore: New Age Music as Visionary Art"

New from the University of California Press: Bridge to an Unseen Shore: New Age Music as Visionary Art by Jacob Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

An audiovisual journey into the visionary heart of New Age music

Today, with Spotify “Relaxation” playlists and 24-hour YouTube ambient streams, New Age music feels ubiquitous and familiar. But its roots are stranger than is commonly known, tracing back to the spiritual exploration of the 1970s, when a cohort of musicians created cosmic soundscapes sparkling with the afterglow of ecstatic spiritual revelations, psychedelic experiences, near-death encounters, and meditative practices.

In Bridge to an Unseen Shore, Jacob Smith argues that early New Age musicians formed a distinct artistic movement, a school of visionary art expressed through recorded sound. Their music sought to dissolve boundaries between mind and body, self and cosmos, offering listeners sonic pathways to heightened awareness and holistic experience. This was a multimedia movement as well as a spiritual one, and New Age music was paired with painting, planetarium shows, laser light shows, experimental films, and television soundtracks. Drawing on extensive interviews with the genre’s pioneers, Smith delivers the first comprehensive cultural history of New Age music, from its countercultural origins in the 1970s to its 1980s cassette underground and mainstream crossover to its lasting influence today. Engaging and richly researched, this book reframes New Age music as a vital chapter in the history of spiritual and sonic culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Dancer and the Dream Thief"

New from Redhook: The Dancer and the Dream Thief by Rowenna Miller.

About the book, from the publisher:

A dancer finds herself at the center of a bootlegging scheme run by elfin creatures in this sweeping Prohibition-era historical fantasy from the author of The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill.

Working as a dancer in the Palace Ballroom, Evelyn Pulaski has become familiar with the idea of selling dreams. For a dime a dance she plays into a cheap fantasy of romance before returning to the independent life she’s made for herself. When a group of elfin bootleggers start to hang around the Palace, Evelyn and her friends grow wary. Several dancehall girls have disappeared, and the bootleggers are the prime suspects.

Raife is also in the business of selling dreams. One of the bootleggers at the Palace, he is part of an operation stealing dreams from humans and selling them in the elfinlands. Raife takes a shine to Evelyn, suspecting her to be a rare, vivid dreamer. As he investigates further, Rafe tells himself his interest is purely professional, but there is something entrancing about Evelyn.

When her best friend disappears, Evelyn forges an uneasy alliance with Raife to find her. But their rescue mission sets off a chain of events that endangers them both and reveals to Evelyn that her dreams hold more power than she could ever imagine.

Visit Rowenna Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Perilous Enchantment"

Coming October 27 from Atria Books: Perilous Enchantment: The True History of Faeries by Sarah Clegg.

About the book, from the publisher:

A compendium of fairies and fairy lore through the centuries, told through a magical year in search of the fae from the author of the “remarkable” (Literary Review) Woman’s Lore.

Fairy stories and fae lore are ancient—yet fairy stories continue to transform and enthrall our imaginations generation after generation. From Tolkien’s elves to Sarah J. Maas’s high fae, storytellers have reinterpreted the same set of traditions and texts over and over again.

Perilous Enchantment presents a definitive new cultural history of the fairy, from ancient times to now, across Europe and North America. By visiting a different fairy site each month—including fairy hills in Yorkshire, to a nymph’s cave in Delphi, to a contemporary fairy ball in Los Angeles—Cambridge PhD and folkloristSarah Clegg illuminates all the facets of the elusive, capricious figure.

Clegg shows us how shifts in culture, technology, and avenues of storytelling have shaped the image of the fairy and fairylands. Within, you’ll trace how hyper-localized nature spirits in the first century BC became otherworldly tricksters and temptresses, then scions of purgatory or the devil, to adorable Victorian children’s book characters, and ultimately, our contemporary romantasy love interests.

For fans curious for some of the inspiration behind their favorite novels to storytellers interested in adding their own twists to this rich lore, Perilous Enchantment provides a nuanced look at fairyland, from its most extraordinary tales to its darkest corners, showing us just how much faerie has always been a mirror to our own human imaginations, fears, and desires.

Visit Sarah Clegg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue