"Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri"

New from LSU Press: Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri: The Rise and Fall of Manufacturing in America’s Hometown, 1890–1970 by Gregg Andrews.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri, Gregg Andrews examines the history of factory laborers in a celebrated Mississippi River town. In the late 1890s, shoe manufacturing transformed Mark Twain’s boyhood home from a steamboat village to a factory town. By the mid-1920s, the St. Louis–based International Shoe Company, the world’s largest shoe manufacturer at the time, controlled all shoe production in Hannibal and continued to do so until it shut down production lines in the 1960s. The company kept a tight grip on the town as it battled to keep out unions and maintain labor at a low cost and in a malleable state. When Hannibal’s shoe workers claimed their right to organize under the New Deal during the Great Depression, the shoe corporation was defiant. The company’s stance sparked mob violence against outside union organizers, nurtured a company union, pitted unionists against company loyalists, and badly divided Hannibal. At the same time, the town was engaged in yearlong festivities to celebrate the centennial of Mark Twain’s birth and the opening of a museum named in his honor.

Andrews’s study of shoe manufacturing and its production workers is thick in detail and rich with the human stories of those whose lives were shaped by the rise and fall of the shoe industry in Hannibal. Andrews captures the shoe workers―white and Black, men and women―in their own words as they describe their jobs, family struggles, and battles to unionize.

Andrews examines the prevailing conditions that led the company to close its production facilities in Hannibal, leaving shoe workers and the town to confront the early shock waves of deindustrialization. His study of an industry that has virtually disappeared in the United States leaves a record for the families of thousands of American shoe workers and the citizens of Hannibal to better understand their history and the role shoe manufacturing played in it.

Visit Gregg Andrews's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Treason of Magic"

Coming June 23 from 47North: A Treason of Magic by Melissa Marr.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a world where magic, desire, and duty collide, it is beauty who is fated to kill the beast in a lush historical fantasy of secrets and star-crossed love by New York Times bestselling author Melissa Marr.

Two young women. Heirs to altogether different hereditary burdens. Yet bound by a monstrous threat to their village.

Gabrielle is the first woman in Alveus to carry the mantle of Hunter, which comes with an obligation to kill the faery beasts murdering travelers in Brimmond Wood. Wary of the power she wields as guardian of her people, Gabrielle is summoned by her first love, a seductress who shattered her heart into pieces a decade ago.

Isabeau is the rarest of nobility―a lady duke. She is also afflicted by a curse that leaves her in a deep sleep between the gloaming and daylight. How can she begin her tenure as protector when she can’t keep her village safe from whatever stalks its darkest hours? For that, she needs the help of the Hunter.

Against her will, Gabrielle is falling in love all over again. But what new threats will arise when Gabrielle and Isabeau’s star-crossed destinies collide with the beast of Brimmond Wood?

Visit Melissa Marr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In Quest of a Cure"

New from Oxford University Press: In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort by Sally Shuttleworth.

About the book, from the publisher:

People have always travelled for health, but as industrial pollution increased in nineteenth-century Britain, doctors started ordering their patients abroad in ever-growing numbers. Self-styled 'English Colonies' sprung up, not in the far-reaches of the Empire, but in health resorts in the heart of Europe. This work explores the intensity and sheer strangeness of life in these colonies, governed by illness, but where patients (before the rise of the sanatorium) could move around freely, and even indulge in winter sports. Focusing on Menton on the Riviera and Davos in the Swiss Alps, from the 1860s to the 1920s, In Quest of a Cure explores the literary and medical cultures of these resorts: the lives, conflicting emotions, and writings of the patients and their carers, and the changing patterns of medical treatment. Many of the patients ordered to winter abroad had tuberculosis, but others were cases of nervous disorders, or sufferers from 'overwork', what we would now call burnout, all hoping to be cured once placed in the right climatic environment.

Blending medical and literary history and analysis, Sally Shuttleworth looks in depth at the lives and writings of literary invalids, including John Addington Symonds, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Katherine Mansfield, leading up to an extended study of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, placed in the medical and literary context of Davos life. Other literary lives and fiction explored include Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Olive Schreiner, Vernon Lee, 'new woman' novelist Beatrice Harraden, and Llewelyn Powys. In Quest of a Cure considers the pleasures as well as the pains of medical exile, and the close bonds which often developed between doctor and patient. Medical climatology, as it was called, is a discarded science, but its prescription of fresh air, exercise, and sunshine brought about a revolution in medical practices at the time. In its understanding of the relationship between individual health and surrounding environment, it offers new perspectives for us to think about the challenges of current times.

--Marshal Zeringue

"We Hexed the Moon"

New from S&S/Saga Press: We Hexed the Moon: A Novel by Mollyhall Seeley.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Bunny meets The Craft in this speculative debut about four best friends who perform a ritual on the moon in a last-ditch attempt to hold onto one another but are forced to reckon with the consequences.

It is the summer after high school graduation, and four island-grown best friends are about to be forced apart by their Plans for the Future. Rather than process the world of expectations bearing down on them or the secrets they’ve kept hidden even from one another, they perform a ritual on the moon in an impulsive fit of teen bravado.

They don’t expect it to actually work.

But suddenly the moon is gone from the sky and at their sleepover, and she’s not interested in going back where she came from. As the balmy August night unfolds, the girls scramble to find a human sacrifice to replace the moon before their world is plunged into chaos.

Equally tender and biting, We Hexed the Moon is coming-of-age at its best, cutting to the very quick of girlhood to reveal hilarious and brutally honest insights about friendship, gender, and desire.

Visit Mollyhall Seeley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Vital Ties"

New from Cornell University Press: Vital Ties: Digitally Mediated Intimacies with the Dead by Molly Hales.

About the book, from the publisher:

Vital Ties depicts an emergent form of intimacy with the dead mediated by digital technologies. In southern Australia, a game developer crafts a virtual reality experience, reuniting his best friend with an avatar of his late father. In Northern California, a woman creates a smartphone app to log moments in which her deceased mother appears. In Chicago, a high school teacher visits her late brother's Facebook page, hypnotized by the shifting content that animates and reanimates him. As digital media offer ways to bring the dead to presence, the living and the dead are haunted in new ways, affecting relationships to both media and death. Lyrical and moving, Vital Ties offers a powerful rethinking of death, memory, and mediation in the digital age.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What Could Go Wrong?"

New from Montlake: What Could Go Wrong? by Jessica Fowler.

About the novel, from the publisher:

After a disastrous one-night stand, a last-minute destination wedding seems like the perfect escape. Until she sees the sleeping arrangements…

Wedding photographer Mira Maxwell thought hooking up with Hudson Hayes―the charming bartender who’s been making her laugh for weeks―was the perfect escape from her imploding career. But when she wakes up in the morning, she discovers he isn’t quite as strings-free as he appeared…

Desperate to get away, Mira accepts a last-minute invitation to shoot a friend’s wedding in the Grand Tetons. But Hudson is one of the guests. And to make it even more awkward? She has to share a room with him…and his girlfriend.

Hudson thought dealing with his clingy ex-girlfriend would be the worst part of his stepbrother’s wedding. But after Mira turns up in his room, even disastrous boat trips, bear spray incidents, and escalating family drama can’t hold a candle to his biggest challenge: proving himself to Mira.

At a wedding where everything’s gone wrong, the question is: can anything go right?

A rollicking romcom of misunderstandings, mishaps and emotional revelations, this debut is perfect for fans of Meghan Quinn, Christina Lauren and Emily Henry.

Visit Jessica Fowler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Jane Fonda: There's a Great Deal to Say"

New from Rutgers University Press: Jane Fonda: There's a Great Deal to Say by Marilyn S. Greenwald.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the late 1960s, Jane Fonda has identified as an activist first and an actor second, using her celebrity as a vehicle to convey her views and her advocacy. Few stars of her stature have been as simultaneously acclaimed and vilified as Fonda. Even as she won two Academy Awards and was a major box office draw of the 1970s and 1980s, she received reams of hate mail for her political activism and antiwar stances. This book explores Fonda’s devotion to movement politics―sometimes at the expense of her career and her personal safety.

Digging deep into rare material from cinema archives and Fonda’s own personal papers, journalist Marilyn Greenwald tells the story of how Fonda came to view acting as a “side gig” that gives her a worldwide platform to convey her personal and political views. Charting the evolution of her activism and the merging of her acting and producing with her advocacy, Greenwald focuses on the years from 1968―when she was jarred out of complacency by the Vietnam War―to 1980, after the release of The China Syndrome and the advent of the Three Mile Island nuclear crisis, which brought to light the possible dangers of nuclear energy. Greenwald details how three of her films―Klute (1971), Coming Home (1978), and The China Syndrome (1979)―were designed to further her personal beliefs. She also considers how Fonda has weathered changes in the entertainment industry and public tastes to produce and star in decades' worth of socially conscious projects. Charting Fonda’s personal and professional growth while offering a candid account of her struggles, this book shows how Fonda viewed movies as an influential storytelling tool that can influence public opinion, change minds, and trigger social change.

Visit Marilyn S. Greenwald's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"An Artful Dodge"

New from Soho Crime: An Artful Dodge by Karen Odden.

About the book, from the publisher:

Victorian London comes to vivid life in this riveting heist novel about an all-female thieving gang and one young woman’s heroic plan to escape a life of crime, from the USA Today bestselling author of Down a Dark River.

She’s stolen gems, purses, and hearts—but can she steal her life back from the ring of thieves that’s claimed it?

London, 1879: Twenty-year-old Kit Jimeson has fingers so nimble she can nick a necklace off a lady in a crowded theater without raising alarm. Kit and her dodge partner, Mary, are the highest earners in the notorious all-women thieving ring in South London’s Elephant and Castle district.

Kit, whose mother had been a thief before her, dreams of a different life, one where she’s not constantly on the lookout for constables and plainclothes detectives, and where a mistake or pure bad luck won’t land her in the hangman’s noose. She has been saving her earnings so her younger sister, a maid for a wealthy Mayfair family, might have a shot at respectability.

Kit is very close to leaving the life entirely when the legendary former thief Maggie O’Connell brings her plans to a halt. Beautiful, charismatic Maggie has returned to reclaim leadership of the ring after twenty years in a brutal Australian penal colony. But Maggie desires more than mere wealth or power: She longs for revenge against those who sent her away. Kit, with her quick mind and dangerously clever hands, is Maggie’s best weapon. If Kit wants to walk away with her life, she must carry out a heist that will demand every skill she possesses.

Visit Karen Odden's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Karen Odden and Rosy.

The Page 69 Test: A Lady in the Smoke.

My Book, The Movie: A Lady in the Smoke.

My Book, The Movie: A Dangerous Duet.

The Page 69 Test: A Dangerous Duet.

Writers Read: Karen Odden (January 2020).

Q&A with Karen Odden.

My Book, The Movie: Down a Dark River.

The Page 69 Test: Down a Dark River.

My Book, The Movie: Under a Veiled Moon.

The Page 69 Test: Under a Veiled Moon.

Writers Read: Karen Odden (October 2022).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Minor Moves"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Minor Moves: Black Girls and Unruly Performance in Antebellum Narratives by Allison S. Curseen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Scholars and critics have long understood the writing of nineteenth-century Black women as critiquing the figure of Topsy, an enslaved girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Many interpret the works of authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Hannah Crafts as rejecting Topsy and providing their own corrective representations of Black girls. Through close readings of these works, Allison S. Curseen argues otherwise. Instead, she contends, Black girls' physical movements emerge in their narratives not as rejections but as critical reenactments of Topsy.

Minor Moves draws on performance studies, literary studies, and childhood studies to offer provocative and incisive readings of Black girls' movements in nineteenth-century US literature. Curseen challenges readers to pay attention to “minor” movements that appear fleeting, inconsequential, and easy to overlook. Attending to these movements, Curseen argues, is crucial to imagining Black girl life amid the anti-Blackness embedded in American culture. These movements reveal modes of being that work to elude dominant structures and gesture to the abundance of Black life—to growing bodies, fugitive Black female desires, queer geographies, and unruly, childish plotting.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Valet"

New from S&S/Saga Press: Valet: A Novel by J.P. Lacrampe.

About the book, from the publisher:

For fans of Kevin Wilson and Andrew Sean Greer, a helper robot and his 35—year—old ward embark on a mad—cap adventure to save the fate of the family company in this whimsically speculative ode to Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster.

Cy wants nothing more than to be useful, raise his utility score, and receive the next update for his operating system. But that’s easier said than done when he's tasked with helping his owner’s 35—year—old son “get out of his funk.” Grayson is nothing like his go—getter, CEO sister Charlotte. He didn’t inherit the family robotics company when their dad passed last year, he doesn’t have a master’s degree, and he just can’t seem to figure out the San Francisco dating scene. He’d rather eat synthesized mozzarella sticks and make pottery at his studio, Kilning Time.

When Grayson learns of Charlotte’s plan to sell the company to a tech conglomerate, he panics. It’s not just the family business at stake, it’s all the technology—like Cy—their dad invented over the years. So he does what anyone would do: he steals the flash drive with his father’s most important work stored on it and plans a corporate takeover. If only he knew what that meant.

To make matters worse, a fellow VALET deserts his owner and asks Cy to help him hightail it out of town, Grayson’s first real date—and her dog—keeping showing up at inopportune times, and the behemoth tech company wants this deal closed yesterday. Grayson, Cy, and their trusty golden retriever, Sasha III, must go on the lam until they figure out exactly what to do, and whom to trust.

A hilarious, mad—cap adventure that is as tender as it is insightful, Valet asks not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be family.

Visit J.P. Lacrampe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue