"The Environmental Republic"

New from Princeton University Press: The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World by Giulio Boccaletti.

About the book, from the publisher:

A bold new conception of the republic for a planet in crisis

Republicanism is arguably the most powerful political idea in history, an extraordinary feat of human imagination that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility. The Environmental Republic reclaims this idea as the path to sustaining our life together on a changing planet, reframing our relationship to the environment not as a constraint on liberty but as its republican foundation.

Giulio Boccaletti argues that we must renew our commitment to freedom and civic responsibility through popular sovereignty. He presents the environmental republic as a necessary alternative to blind faith in technocratic management, the shallow moralizing and apocalyptic rhetoric of some activists, and the disingenuous skepticism of vested interests. Our environmental challenges are not simply about “agreeing on the facts” or living within technical limitations—they reflect a deeper failure of political institutions. Drawing on the history of ideas and real-world examples, Boccaletti presents a political framework that places our relationship to our surroundings at the heart of how we exercise our voice, coordinate collective action, and define development itself.

Offering hope in an anxious age of rising authoritarianism and widespread pessimism, The Environmental Republic challenges the false choice between environmental protection and human freedom, showing how place-based institutions can deliver both sustainability and human development through true self-governance.

Visit Giulio Boccaletti's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine"

Coming soon from Shadowpaw Press: The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine by Robert J. Sawyer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Finalist, Best Novel, 2026 Aurora Awards

To see yourself as others see you

As an asteroid is about to slam into Earth, ex-convict Roscoe Koudoulian along with Captain Letitia Garvey and her starship crew re-upload their consciousnesses into cyberspace. In that digital realm, Roscoe is confronted by someone he left for dead centuries ago, and the astronauts face younger versions of themselves—ghosts in the machine—whose continued existence could destroy the last survivors of the human race.

Visit Robert J. Sawyer's website.

The Page 69 Test: WWW: Wake.

The Page 69 Test: WWW: Watch.

The Page 69 Test:: WWW: Wonder.

The Page 69 Test: Triggers.

The Page 69 Test: Red Planet Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Quantum Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Black Muslim Freedom Dreams"

New from NYU Press: Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care by Samiha Rahman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores three generations of Black American Muslims pursuing education and liberation beyond the borders of the United States

Since the 1970s, hundreds of Black American Muslims in the Tijani Sufi order have sought refuge in a new world that would nurture their racial, religious and gendered identities away from anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism in the United States. This new world is in Medina Baye, a city in Senegal that is the headquarters of a pan-African Sufi movement with tens of millions of members in Africa alone.

Drawing on a decade and a half of ethnographic engagement, Black Muslim Freedom Dreams explores the Islamic educational opportunities created for and by Black American Muslims in Medina Baye, chronicling the dreams, sacrifices, struggles, and joys of young people and parents who live, learn, and strive for liberation between the United States and Senegal. The volume traces their journeys between these two worlds, zooming in to vividly portray everyday Black American and West African religious life, and zooming out to map the sociopolitical landscapes, educational conditions and Islamic and pan-African ideologies that shape believers' perspectives.

Black Muslim Freedom Dreams argues that Black Muslims’ experiences of Islamic education and pan-African exchange are oriented towards collective care – a radical way of being and belonging through which believers journey on the path towards Allah’s love by caring for one another and addressing the material inequities that constrain their communities. This notion disrupts narratives of religion that are limited to systems of personal belief, showcasing instead how their educational experiences foster a collective responsibility and solidarity. The book offers a compelling account of how Black Muslims engage with transnational religious and racial networks to build liberatory communities beyond the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This Isn’t New"

Coming soon from Columbine York: This Isn't New: Women's Historical Stories by Cynthia Swanson.

About the book, from the publisher:

The female leads in these stories have disparate lives but share a singular trait: their sex dictates the expectations stamped onto them. Each woman, in her time, must fight for who she is against the forces working to constrain her.

Visit Cynthia Swanson's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Bookseller.

The Page 69 Test: The Glass Forest.

Writers Read: Cynthia Swanson (February 2018).

Q&A with Cynthia Swanson.

The Page 69 Test: Anyone But Her.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dogs Save"

New from Columbia University Press: Dogs Save: Stories of Canine Redemption in US Culture by Katharine Mershon.

About the book, from the publisher:

Stories about people and dogs saving one another are everywhere in US culture—on TV, in Hollywood movies, on social media, and even on bumper stickers. Yet these seemingly heartwarming stories of mutual rescue revolve around redemption through suffering, a narrative profoundly interwoven with Christian beliefs, white racial anxieties, and US national myths.

Katharine Mershon examines the unacknowledged religious underpinnings of stories about dogs, revealing deeply rooted cultural assumptions about who can be saved and how redemption ought to occur. She identifies the “canine redemption narrative” as the defining cultural script for the stories people in the United States tell about dogs and, in turn, the nation. Exposing unexamined assumptions about the relationships between people and dogs, Mershon sheds light on the central place of animals and religion in defining racial boundaries.

Dogs Save considers examples including the Michael Vick dogfighting case; Samuel Fuller’s controversial B-movie White Dog; the TV show The Dog Whisperer, from the celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan; Laurie Anderson’s film Heart of a Dog; and Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir). Bringing together religious studies and animal studies, this book shows that redemption narratives shape who is allowed to survive and thrive in US society.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dear Missing Friend"

New from Sea Crow Press: Dear Missing Friend by Susan McGuirk.

About the book, from the publisher:

Three hearts. Countless letters. One impossible choice.

Through letters exchanged across oceans and Manhattan streets, Irish immigrant Catherine McGuirk navigates love, ambition, and heartbreak. Torn between her seafaring husband, the suitor she once refused, and her own dreams, Catherine’s fate unfolds in an intimate, epistolary saga of passion, resilience, and 19th-century life.

Visit Susan McGuirk's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Right-Wing Idea Factory"

Ndew from Oxford University Press: The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism by Donald F. Kettl.

About the book, from the publisher:

An incisive analysis of one of the most disruptive forces in modern American politics, The Right-Wing Idea Factory is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the fundamental transformation of conservatism in the Trump era and beyond.

While Donald Trump's 2024 re-election was hailed by many as a personal triumph, political scientist Donald F. Kettl argues it marked the apex of a movement that began long before Trump entered politics--and one that will continue to shape the American landscape long after he's gone.

In The Right-Wing Idea Factory, Kettl traces the rise of a revolutionary political force that has redefined the American right. Fueled by soft money and amplified by social media, a network of determined activists and organizations worked to dismantle traditional free-market conservatism and replace it with a populist agenda rooted in cultural and social issues. From abortion and gender to critical race theory, book bans, immigration, and the "deep state," this movement built a powerful new political base--one designed not just to win elections, but to reshape the rules of governance for generations.

Kettl reveals how this idea factory has profoundly influenced policy at every level of government, driving polarization and upending long-standing political norms. With sharp insight and deep research, he offers a vital account of how the American right has evolved--and what that means for the future of democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mist and Malice"

New from Thomas & Mercer: Mist and Malice (Haven Thrillers) by Rachel Howzell Hall.

About the book, from the publisher:

A small-town PI is drawn into a killer conspiracy in a breathtaking novel of suspense by the New York Times bestselling author of the Anthony Award–nominated These Toxic Things.

Private investigator Sonny Rush, the newest resident of Haven, California, knows that this fogbound coastal hamlet is every bit as dangerous as her hometown of Los Angeles. And when teenager and repeat runaway Honor Butler shows up at Sonny’s door with terror in her eyes, Sonny is immediately pulled into a new case that lands close to home.

Desperate, hungry, and in need of someone she can trust, Honor tells Sonny a horrifying story about where she’s been―and what she’s been forced to do. Then, hours later, the forest near Sonny’s cottage yields the remains of a missing day laborer, a man whose wife has been searching for answers for months. Soon, coincidence sharpens into conspiracy.

As Sonny digs deeper, the threads of these cases twist together into something horrifying: a ruthless network preying on the vulnerable, protected by the very people meant to uphold the law. With every step closer to revealing Haven’s corruption, Sonny risks pulling the lives of her loved ones into the cross fire―and exposing the shadows of her own past. Because in this town, loyalty can be fatal, and survival means deciding who you’re willing to betray.

Visit Rachel Howzell Hall's website.

The Page 69 Test: They All Fall Down.

The Page 69 Test: What Fire Brings.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Forms of Time, Newton to Austen"

New from Stanford University Press: Forms of Time, Newton to Austen by Jesse Molesworth.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between 1700 and 1800, the English-speaking world came to terms with one of modernity's most fundamental ideas: the separation of time from its measure, or what Newton described as the distinction between "absolute" and "relative" time. Jesse Molesworth argues that most experienced this encounter not firsthand, through direct exposure to Newton's writings, but secondhand, through a variety of smaller encounters in art, science, culture, and literature. Enriching our understanding of the connection between science and literature, Forms of Time, Newton to Austen offers the rise of the novel as a case study to examine the relationship between transformations in culture and transformations in literary forms. Through incisive readings of works by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and others, Molesworth reveals that the novel arose by making visible what culture does not or cannot see itself. The emergent "realist" novel did not adopt Newtonian claims wholesale. While the novel accommodated the new physicalist sense of "absolute time" in theme, its formal techniques offered something else: an escape, however temporary, from the claims made by Newtonian time.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Westerly"

New from Little A: Westerly: A Novel by Susan Donovan Bernhard.

About the book, from the publisher:

In an unforgettable saga of survival, motherhood, sisterhood, and the secrets that haunt us, one desperate decision creates a fault line that spans decades and threatens to break a family wide open.

In 1946, two German sisters, child refugees in a program dubbed Operation Shamrock, arrive in Ireland to live in foster care while Europe recovers from war. Nearly fifty years later, on a fateful day in a bustling Maine farmhouse, an Irish newspaper clipping threatens to unravel Faye Sullivan’s carefully constructed life with husband William and daughters Maeve and Molly, a life already on the brink of collapse.

When tragedy strikes and the Sullivans grapple with a cascade of buried secrets, Faye must confront the truth of a childhood summer in West Cork marked by adventure, heartbreak, and a life-altering decision that now jeopardizes everything she holds dear. And while their bonds may not be what they seemed, those bonds might be the one thing strong enough to help the broken Sullivan family navigate the truth and find their way forward together.

From Germany to Ireland to coastal Maine, this tender family saga explores identity, reconciliation, and the true meaning of home.

Visit Susan Donovan Bernhard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue