"A Gift Before Dying"

New from Crown Publishing: A Gift Before Dying: A Novel by Malcolm Kempt.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a hauntingly atmospheric novel set against the unforgiving landscape of the Arctic Circle, a disgraced police investigator discovers that his path to redemption is paved with ice—and blood.

After a botched high-profile murder investigation, Corporal Elderick Cole is exiled to the remote, rugged landscape of Nunavut, a vast territory in the Arctic Circle known for its untamed beauty, frigid temperatures, and endless winter nights. With his family having severed all ties, Cole waits out the result of a civil lawsuit alone—the wrong verdict could end what’s left of his flailing career.

His bleak existence takes a sinister turn when he discovers the hanging body of Pitseolala, a troubled Inuit girl whom he had sworn to protect. Her death dredges up demons he thought he’d buried along with the scars of a fractured marriage and the aching divide between him and his estranged daughter.

As Cole’s life unravels—and with it, the fragile thread of his investigation, he turns to Pitseolala’s younger brother, Maliktu, a fellow outsider. It’s then that Cole uncovers what binds them—a singular mission to find her killer.

Against fierce backlash, Cole’s overriding desire to redeem just one aspect of his otherwise failed life becomes an obsession—and he’s willing to break every rule in his unyielding pursuit of justice and the smallest shred of redemption.

Visit Malcolm Kempt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What Animals Teach Us About Families"

New from the University of California Press: What Animals Teach Us About Families: Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature by Beth A. Berkowitz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reading the Bible and rabbinic literature to reimagine the bonds between animals.

Moving beyond debates about the ethics of animal consumption to focus on animals' intimate lives, Beth A. Berkowitz examines the contribution of religious traditions and sacred texts to contemporary conversations about animals. Reading the four "animal family" laws of the Bible alongside their rabbinic interpretations from ancient times to today, she examines the bonds that animals form with each other and reimagines family to include new forms of life and alternative modes of kinship.

Humanitarian politics—and biblical law—tend to take for granted that human interests supersede animal interests and that our moral obligation extends only to avoiding unnecessary suffering, but necessity is determined by humans. What Animals Teach Us About Families looks at animal emotions, animal agency, family diversity, and human response to reconsider the obligations and opportunities the animal family presents.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Discipline"

New from Random House: Discipline: A Novel by Larissa Pham.

About the book, from the publisher:

I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. Yet I don’t know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow. Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she’s seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends.

But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her that he’s read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she’s imagined it.

A pristine and provocative high-wire act toggling the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive and the possibilities that lie beyond them, Discipline launches a spellbinding inquiry into the nature of art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

Visit Larissa Pham's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"All Work Is Cultural Work"

New from Rutgers University Press: All Work Is Cultural Work: Diasporic Haitian Women, Paid Labor, and Cultural Citizenship by Nikita Carney.

About the book, from the publisher:

What does it mean to belong in a nation? All Work Is Cultural Work examines how Haitian women living in diaspora find and create status through their work outside the home. Nikita Carney draws on ethnographic data gathered over several years in Boston, Montreal, and Paris with women who left Haiti in search of other things: safety, financial security, and opportunity. Ranging from administrative assistants to dancers to preschool teachers, the women in this study share their rich experiences, teaching us how they found a place in their new host nations through paid labor. Focusing on small, daily interactions in the workplace, these women’s narratives highlight the ways in which often invisible daily cultural practices build and re-build both the nation and the home. Taking into account the overlapping and interlocking systems of oppression her participants face both nationally and globally, Carney uses an intersectional analysis to illuminate how the workplace serves as a central site in which Haitian women become raced, gendered, and classed within the nation. Ultimately, the lives and experiences of these women point to one conclusion: culture is indivisible from labor and labor from culture, with paid labor providing a vital method for national culture to be created and recreated each and every day.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fruit of the Flesh"

New from Montlake: Fruit of the Flesh by I.V. Ophelia.

About the book, from the publisher:

Behind the glamour of Gilded Age New York, a marriage of convenience between an artisan and a ballerina masks their shared appetite for revenge in this darkly seductive gothic romance.

In early 1900s New York, former ballerina Petronille De Villier makes an unconventional choice: Marry struggling sculptor Arkady Kamenev. For her, it’s an escape from her family’s unsavory legacy. For him, the De Villier name promises the patronage his art desperately needs. It should be a simple arrangement.

But beneath their marriage of convenience lurks a darker recognition. In each other, they see a reflection of their own dangerous appetites. As buried secrets surface and bodies begin disappearing, Petronille and Arkady discover their union runs deeper than social advantage. Their shared obsessions draw them into an intoxicating dance of predator and prey, though it’s never quite clear who is which.

Bound by law, God, and blood, they must decide if their monstrous natures will tear them apart or forge them into something terribly wonderful together. In a world where nothing is quite what it seems, two creatures of shadow learn that true love requires a taste for the macabre.

Visit I.V. Ophelia's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Will for the Machine"

New from the University of Chicago Press: A Will for the Machine: Computerization, Automation, and the Arts in South Africa by Mark Sanders.

This study takes up the relations among computerization, labor, and the arts in South Africa.

There are many books about the history and discourses of computerization in the United States but relatively little about these phenomena anywhere in the Global South. In A Will for the Machine, Mark Sanders outlines South Africa’s entry into the computer age in the 1960s and ’70s and explains how it coincided with the high point of apartheid. South Africa’s government viewed automation and computerization as one way of barring Black Africans from skilled work and reserving it for whites. Sanders unpacks this peculiar history, relates it to early twentieth-century struggles around mechanization in mining and telephony in South Africa, and analyzes responses to it by the writers Miriam Tlali and J. M. Coetzee, the artist William Kentridge, and Handspring Puppet Company. Showing how the arts realize ideas about the ethics and politics of automation, Sanders contributes to debates about locally divergent understandings of computer technology and human-computer interaction.

The Page 99 Test: Learning Zulu.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Godfall"

New from Grand Central Publishing: Godfall by Van Jensen.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this riveting small town thriller, Sheriff David Blunt is faced with a string of murders following the arrival of an alien life form—perfect for fans of Blake Crouch and Jeff Vandermeer, and soon to be a television series from Ron Howard!

When a massive asteroid hurtles toward Earth, humanity braces for annihilation—but the end doesn’t come. In fact, it isn’t an asteroid but a three-mile-tall alien that drops down, seemingly dead, outside Little Springs, Nebraska.

Dubbed “the giant,” its arrival transforms the red-state farm town into a top-secret government research site and major metropolitan area, flooded with soldiers, scientists, bureaucrats, spies, criminals, conspiracy theorists—and a murderer.

As the sheriff of Little Springs, David Blunt thought he’d be keeping the peace among the same people he’d known all his life, not breaking up chanting crowds of cultists or battling an influx of drug dealers. As a series of brutal, bizarre murders strikes close to home, Blunt throws himself into the hunt for a killer who seems connected to the Giant.

With bodies piling up and tensions in Little Springs mounting, he realizes that to find the answers he needs, he must reconcile his old worldview with the town he now lives in—before it’s too late.

Visit Van Jensen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Geometry of Christian Contemplation"

New from Oxford University Press: The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure by David Albertson.

About the book, from the publisher:

The writings of ancient and medieval Christian mystics were rediscovered in the twentieth century, and today they are read more widely than ever before. But do modern assumptions about religious experience influence how we hear those premodern voices? Do we do them justice by thinking of mysticism as interior and ineffable? Or can mystical experience intersect with the natural environment, and indeed the cosmos, which science calculates with precise quantities? David Albertson's The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure suggests a fresh approach to the history of mystical theology that is oriented toward exteriority more than interiority, and toward the measurable world outside more than the invisible world within.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus had taught contemplatives to close their eyes and withdraw into the soul. Most Christians followed his directions, but others dissented. In three critical episodes, an alternative model of Christian contemplation began to emerge: from Dionysius the Areopagite, to the Byzantine monks John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite, to eccentric humanists in medieval Paris. Together these episodes add up to a very different theological aesthetics, one that can enliven the modern study of mysticism and correct some of its imbalances. For in the centuries before the scientific revolution and the secularization of nature, Christians still saw God in the exterior world, not only the interior soul. God was not an ineffable and formless Absolute, immeasurable as the soul, but an infinite Measure who leaves behind geometrical traces in the figures of the world. The God who became a human body in the Incarnation not only entered time and matter, but also spatial extension, and with it the conditions of measure: points, lines, curves, shapes, planes, dimensions, and magnitudes.

Today the wisdom of this counter-tradition can strengthen the study of mysticism, not only by supplementing our contemporary fascination with negative theology by redefining what it means to name God positively, but by suggesting a new connection between Christian mysticism and the hyper-measured, hyper-technologized world that surrounds us.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Our Ex's Wedding"

Coming soon from Berkley: Our Ex's Wedding by Taleen Voskuni.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Two people who can’t stand each other must come together to plan their mutual ex’s wedding in this new romantic comedy by Taleen Voskuni, author of Lavash at First Sight.

Ani Avakian was supposed to be the Bay Area’s premier Armenian wedding planner by now. But after a huge blow to her business, she’s determined to redeem herself by taking on the biggest job of her career: a wedding for an indie movie star. The wedding is set at a stunning Armenian-owned winery, and Ani is eager to connect with the owner, who she’ll be working closely with. But then she actually meets him. Sure, Raffi is ridiculously hot and charming, but he’s also insufferably smug. Though the real gut punch comes when Ani meets the happy couple—because the actress’s fiancée is none other than the woman who shattered her heart two years ago: her ex-girlfriend, Kami.

All Raffi Garabedian has ever wanted is to make his father proud. Taking over the family winery should be his dream come true—but its first major event is off to a rocky start, thanks to one irritating(-ly beautiful) wedding planner who challenges him at every turn. He’s shocked to find that they have one thing in common, however: their mutual ex, Kami. Despite the record level of awkwardness, they’ll have to work together to make sure this wedding goes perfectly. But first, they’ll have to deal with the tension sizzling between them—before it turns their ex’s nuptials into a full-blown disaster…or something much more scandalous.

Visit Taleen Voskuni's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dressing for England"

New from the State University of New York Press: Dressing for England: Fashion and Nationalism in Victorian Novels by Amy L. Montz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture.

Dressing for England argues that women's interest in fashionable clothing-in dress that appealed to a sophisticated, cultured, and continental society-was viewed in two ways in nineteenth-century England: as a superficial feminine habit, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a dangerous tool women used to control how they were perceived. Dress could be a means of not only conveying extravagance or beauty but also influencing society at home and expressing Englishness aboard. Victorian women turned the world of fashion into an arena of feminine power. Reading well-known novels by Gaskell, Thackeray, and Eliot alongside clothing and cultural ephemera, Dressing for England shows how evolving fashions-shawls, crinolines, turbans, corsets, hats-reflected shifting notions of class, gender, and Empire and enabled women to shape both their own identities and national consciousness.

Visit Amy L. Montz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Just Watch Me"

New from Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: Just Watch Me: A Novel by Lior Torenberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister—a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.

Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.

Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on earth: the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.

Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this misguided striver with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.

Visit Lior Torenberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Into the Loop"

New from Duke University Press: Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition by Samuele Collu.

About the book, from the publisher:

Into the Loop asks how, and under what conditions, we can interrupt the repetitions that define us. Drawing from more than 200 hours of ethnographic observations of Systemic couples therapy in Buenos Aires, alongside auto-ethnographic recordings of Samuele Collu’s own hypnotherapy sessions, this study traces the psychic forces that compel people to repeat, interrupt, or drift aside from relational loops. Grounding his analysis in affect theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, Collu examines how identification, affective transmission, compulsive repetition, and hypnosis play out within therapeutic encounters observed by teams of psychotherapists through one-way mirrors and closed-circuit television systems. This focus on visual mediation reveals how screens and observational devices both capture and distort the therapeutic process itself—a dynamic that connects to broader questions about digital media and user-screen relations in contemporary society. Written in an experimental and literary style that moves fluidly between the academic, the personal, and their uncanny in-betweens, Into the Loop offers a unique window into the repetitive cycles that shape our most intimate relationships and the possibilities for transformation within them.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Darkrooms"

New from William Morrow: Darkrooms: A Novel by Rebecca Hannigan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Two unforgettable women investigate the disappearance of a missing girl in a small Irish town brimming with secrets—in this haunting debut from a new crime writing talent, perfect for fans of Tana French and Flynn Berry.

What secrets lurk in the Hanging Woods?

On the night of the Summer Solstice in 1999, nine-year-old Roisin O’Halloran marched into the Hanging Woods, the mysterious copse that had inspired fear in decades of children in the small Irish town of Bannakilduf. She was never seen again.

Twenty years later, two women are drawn together to discover the truth of what happened to Roisin: Roisin’s older sister Deedee, a rookie cop who’s barely hanging on to the appearance of keeping it all together, and Roisin’s childhood best friend Caitlin, a petty criminal who was the last person to see the young girl before she disappeared, now returned to her hometown after her mother’s death.

Reluctantly brought together after decades of mistrust, Caitlin and Deedee must reckon with their shadowy pasts, the monsters that still haunt them, and the role they each may have played in Roisin’s disappearance.

With old wounds made fresh, the unresolved events of that summer years ago rise to the surface, and the truth threatens to reshape the small town that would prefer the past remain buried.

The siren of the Hanging Woods rings out once more. After all, nothing can stay hidden forever.

Visit Rebecca Hannigan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The White Pedestal"

New from Yale University Press: The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate by Curtis Dozier.

About the book, from the publisher:

How white nationalist thought leaders use ancient Greece and Rome to claim historical precedent for their violent and oppressive politics

It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website incorporates an image of the Parthenon into its logo, and rioters wore Spartan helmets in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. These juxtapositions may appear incongruous to people who associate the ancient world with enlightened political ideals and sophisticated philosophical inquiry. But, as Curtis Dozier points out in this thought-provoking book, it’s hard to imagine a historical period better suited to rhetorical use by white nationalists. Indeed, some of the most widely admired voices from ancient literature and philosophy endorsed ideas that modern white supremacists promote, and the social and political realities of the ancient world provide models for political systems that white supremacists would like to establish today.

Part introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past, this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this knowledge with disturbing success.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rage of Swords"

New from Bloomsbury USA: Rage of Swords by David Gilman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this thrilling historical adventure, Master of War Sir Thomas Blackstone must travel into enemy lands with a price on his head as he seeks gold and alliances for King Edward's war with France.

THE MASTER OF WAR RIDES AGAIN.

1368, Northern Italy. As the Hundred Years' War smoulders, the Duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III, sets out from Paris to wed the Lord of Milan's daughter. The union could forge an alliance as vital as any victory on the battlefield.

But the road to Milan is a road to betrayal.

Riding ahead is Sir Thomas Blackstone, the legendary Master of War. Blackstone is tasked with securing the gold that, together with the marriage alliance, will fuel the House of Plantagenets' fight against France. But with a bounty on his head, Blackstone will have to outthink and outfight foes deadlier than any he has faced before.

Yet the gravest threat may lie closer to home. Blackstone's son, Henry, has inherited his father's unerring fate to walk where peril waits...

Visit David Gilman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life by Aleksandr Prigozhin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores how modernist fiction interrogated the many promises of ubiquitous media connectivity as key to collective life.

In Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life, Aleksandr Prigozhin explores how modernist fiction responded to its changing media environment in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers used diverse forms of media, broadly conceived—from print, architecture, and radio to soil and infrastructure—as metaphors for the contradictions of common life, while highlighting both the promises and failures of media modernity.

Media's complex relationship to affect and sociality allowed modernists to imagine how disparate lives might be linked together through modes of impersonal intimacy. Through close readings of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Andrei Platonov, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among others, Prigozhin reveals how their works leverage media's ability to connect and divide. These texts grapple with the challenges of mass democracy, imperial decline, and the growing ubiquity of media communication, offering a nuanced vision of the difficulties of mediated human connection.

This interdisciplinary study bridges literature, media theory, and cultural history, showing how modernist novels illuminate the entangled relationship among materiality, affect, and social structures. Tracking their engagement with media and matter, Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life reveals a politics of the common at the heart of modernist fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

"You'll Never Forget Me"

New from Bantam: You'll Never Forget Me: A Novel by Isha Raya.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this captivating cat-and-mouse thriller, a struggling actress is only just beginning to enjoy the life sheʼs always wanted after inadvertently killing her rival—but now she must contend with the woman who threatens to take it all away.

Struggling actress Dimple Kapoor wouldn’t call herself a murderer, per se—she’d prefer the term “opportunist.” Years ago, she did what had to be done to get herself out of a bad situation. And now, after accidentally killing her Hollywood rival, Irene Singh, at a party, she’s simply seizing the chance to nab her dream leading role and resuscitate her career in the process. Thereʼs only one problem: Someone else at the event witnessed the crime . . . and caught it all on camera.

With everything she’s ever wanted within reach, Dimple will stop at nothing to keep stardom in her grasp. But Irene’s parents have hired Saffi Mirai Iyer, one of the best private investigators in the business. Living up to her reputation, Saffi immediately zeroes in on Dimple, who feels she has no choice but to raise the stakes. Playing along with Dimple’s facade, Saffi invites her on to the case, suggesting she act as bait to draw out the killer—and as the two women’s cat-and-mouse game intensifies, Saffi starts to wonder if she may have finally met her match.

With their careers at risk, both women must fight the potent chemistry drawing them closer together. Dimple needs Saffi dead and for her theories to die with her. And Saffi needs Dimple behind bars, but catching her elusive prey won’t be so easy—especially as emotions begin to cloud her judgment. When ambition and desire collide, only the most cunning will survive.

Visit Isha Raya's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Stolen Representation"

New from Cambridge University Press: Stolen Representation: Black Disfranchisement and State Legislative Politics in the American South by Michael P. Olson.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the decades after Reconstruction, African Americans were systematically removed from the electorate in the American South using tools such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Stolen Representation draws on significant amounts of new historical data to explore how these tools of Black disfranchisement shaped state legislative politics in the American South. The book draws on contemporary scholarship to develop theoretical arguments for how disfranchisement plausibly affected roll-call voting, committee assignments, and policymaking activity in southern state legislatures, and uses rich data on each of these areas to demonstrate disfranchisement's profound effects. By analyzing state legislative data and drawing on historical sources to help characterize the nature of politics in each state in the period around disfranchisement, Olson offers a nuanced, context-driven exploration of disfranchisement's effects, making a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between racial discrimination at the ballot box and public policymaking in the United States.

Visit Michael Olson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Lost Lambs"

New from Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Lost Lambs: A Novel by Madeline Cash.

About the book, from the publisher:

Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction.

The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic orbits: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone—or something—is monitoring the town’s citizens.

Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy—one that may just bring them closer together.

Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. With it, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue.

Visit Madeline Cash's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Forms and Fictions of Victorian Art Instruction"

New from Oxford University Press: The Forms and Fictions of Victorian Art Instruction by Kimberly J. Stern.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Victorian period gave rise to revelatory new approaches to art instruction. A growing investment in standardized education, the rise of exhibition culture, and an expanding body of literature devoted to the teaching of art all contributed to very public and sometimes contentious debates about art pedagogy. Surveying a range of instructional scenarios-from the schoolroom to the Royal Academy - The Forms and Fictions of Victorian Art Instruction reveals the creative and even radical methods nineteenth-century writers brought to questions that inform educational debate to this day. What is the role of art in the learning process? Should art instruction provide students with practical skills, or does art defy such instrumental concerns? Above all, is it possible for art instruction to impose structure on the learning process while also nurturing the creative autonomy art demands? Through an interdisciplinary and deeply historical account of art instruction that incorporates fiction, poetry, art manuals, and innovative hybrid genres, this book contends that nineteenth-century writers defended the educational value of art by abandoning expository writing in favor of highly experimental literary forms. In this way, The Forms and Fictions of Victorian Art Instruction supplies a new history of art teaching―one that sheds light on the educational and cultural dilemmas we continue to face today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last of Earth"

New from Random House: The Last of Earth: A Novel by Deepa Anappara.

About the novel, from the publisher:

From the award-winning author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line comes a stunning historical novel set in nineteenth-century Tibet that follows two outsiders—an Indian schoolteacher spying for the British Empire and an English “lady” explorer—as they venture into a forbidden kingdom.

1869. Tibet is closed to Europeans, an infuriating obstruction for the rap­idly expanding British Empire. In response, Britain begins training Indians—permitted to cross borders that white men may not—to undertake illicit, dangerous surveying expeditions into Tibet.

Balram is one such surveyor-spy, an Indian schoolteacher who, for several years, has worked for the British, often alongside his dearest friend, Gyan. But Gyan went missing on his last expedition and is rumored to be imprisoned within Tibet. Desperate to rescue his friend, Balram agrees to guide an English captain on a foolhardy mission: After years of paying others to do the exploring, the captain, disguised as a monk, wants to personally chart a river that runs through southern Tibet. Their path will cross fatefully with that of another Westerner in disguise, fifty-year-old Katherine. Denied a fellowship in the all-male Royal Geographical Society in London, she intends to be the first European woman to reach Lhasa.

As Balram and Katherine make their way into Tibet, they will face storms and bandits, snow leopards and soldiers, fevers and frostbite. What’s more, they will have to battle their own doubts, ambitions, grief, and pasts in order to survive the treacherous landscape.

A polyphonic novel about the various ways humans try to leave a mark on the world—from the enduring nature of family and friendship to the egomania and obsessions of the colonial enterprise—The Last of Earth confirms Deepa Anappara as one of our greatest and most ambitious storytellers.

Visit Deepa Anappara's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Between Dung and Blood"

New from the University of California Press: Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean by Manuela Ceballos.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between Dung and Blood investigates the stories of two sixteenth-century saints: the Spanish Christian Teresa de Jesús and the Moroccan Sufi Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī, both from families of converts. Through the stories of these saints, Manuela Ceballos reveals the roles played by blood and bodily pollution as substances and symbols in the religious and political fabric of the early modern Western Mediterranean. Drawing primarily on Arabic and Spanish sources, the author argues that in Morocco and Iberia, ideas about blood and bodily pollution helped shape processes of bodily differentiation as well as social hierarchies based on notions of ritual purity and impurity. Providing an inside look at the dynamics within Moroccan and Iberian societies as they grappled with the social and religious upheaval of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ceballos shows that the real and imagined border between geographies and religious traditions could, at times, be porous and conducive to shared beliefs.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Scavengers"

Coming soon from Viking: Scavengers: A Novel by Kathleen Boland.

About the novel from the publisher:

A rollicking debut novel about a cautious daughter and her eccentric, estranged mother venturing west in search of buried treasure—and a way back to each other—before they run out of patience, money, and options

After being fired for taking an uncharacteristic risk at her commodities trading job, Bea Macon sublets her New York apartment and books a one-way ticket to stay with her mother, Christy, a free spirit who has been living in Salt Lake City on Bea’s dime.

Usually the responsible one, Bea isn’t about to admit exactly why she’s suddenly decided to visit, but she isn’t the only one keeping secrets: Christy has a man. She has a map. She has . . . a username on a forum devoted to unearthing $1 million in buried treasure that an antiquities dealer claims to have hidden somewhere in the western U.S.?

Bea is convinced this is just another one of her mother’s wild larks, an elaborate way to refuse, as she has for Bea’s entire life, to finally grow up. But Christy believes she’s onto something—and she’s arranged a rendezvous in a rural town called Mercy with the guy she’s been obsessively trading theories with online to prove it. Out in the desert that one woman believes to be a promised land, the other a wasteland, they find themselves barreling toward a more high-stakes, transformative escapade than either of them could have imagined.

Populated with unforgettable characters and set against one of the world’s most oddly enrapturing landscapes, Scavengers is a funny and heartbreaking novel about old injuries, new beginnings, and the lengths to which we’ll go to find, escape, and reinvent ourselves.

Visit Kathleen Boland's website.

--Marshal Zerigue

"Lives of the Imaginary Artists in Cold War California"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Lives of the Imaginary Artists in Cold War California by Monica Steinberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

How artists created fictionalized identities to realize works that resisted political overreach and art historical conventions.

This book explores how a group of real California artists created imaginary artists, engaging with the political climate of the Cold War era and frustrating the discipline of art history. They employed pseudonymity, obfuscation, anonymity, (auto)biografiction, imaginary portraiture, heteronymity, role-playing, doubling, and alter ego. Often laced with humor, these exploits facilitated stylistic experimentation, provoking reactions from art viewers and governing authorities alike, and disrupting reliance on documentation and attribution within art history.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Ed Kienholz, Walter Hopps, Robert Alexander, Wally Hedrick, George Herms, and Wallace Berman activated imagined and secret identities, provoking reactions within a conservative environment gripped by communist paranoia. As political concerns shifted in the 1960s and 1970s to movements for peace and equality, artists including Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Lynda Benglis, Larry Bell, Judy Chicago, Lowell Darling, and Eleanor Antin redirected these tactics to probe the rise of celebrity culture and the administrative state. These practices also became the precursor for later interventions by Bruce Conner, Asco, Allen Ruppersberg, Senga Nengudi, and others.

Considering a compelling range of visual material, including paintings, sculptures, and performed intrusions as well as publications, postcards, and advertisements, Monica Steinberg examines why these imaginary artists appeared when and where they did—and to what ends.

Visit Monica Lee Steinberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Epicenter of Forever"

Coming February 1 from Lake Union: The Epicenter of Forever: A Novel by Mara Williams.

About the book, from the publisher:

A moving story about family, forgiveness, and unexpected love―where the fault lines of a fractured past become the foundation for building something new.

Eden Hawthorne spent idyllic childhood summers in Grand Trees, a mountain town perched along a restless earthquake fault in the heart of California’s fire country. But her family and future were shattered there, and she vowed never to return―until news of her estranged mother’s illness forces her back twenty years later.

Still reeling from her recent divorce, Eden has to confront her mom’s found family, including single father Caleb Connell, who blames Eden for the seismic rift that drove her away. But as they move beyond a battle of wills, Eden and Caleb discover shared wounds and intertwined histories―and succumb to an attraction that feels fated.

When her mother’s condition worsens, Eden faces an impossible choice between the man she’s falling for and the mother she’s just beginning to forgive. And with time running out, Eden fears her decision will doom her to relive the aftershocks of past heartbreak.

Visit Mara Williams's website.

Q&A with Mara Williams.

The Page 69 Test: The Truth Is in the Detours.

My Book, The Movie: The Truth Is in the Detours.

Writers Read: Mara Williams (August 2025).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Future Is Foreign"

New from ILR Press: The Future Is Foreign: Women and Immigrants in Corporate Japan by Hilary J. Holbrow.

About the book, from the publisher:

Japan is at the forefront of global population decline. The Future Is Foreign investigates how elite Japanese firms are responding to this unprecedented challenge. Hilary Holbrow argues that labor shortages push Japanese firms to hire more immigrants and women, and to ease excessive demands on all workers. At the same time, not all employees benefit equally.

Japanese women's enduring overrepresentation in low-status clerical roles reinforces gender biases that hold all women back. In contrast, the small but growing presence of white-collar Asian immigrant workers weakens the ethnic prejudices of their Japanese colleagues. Despite Japan's reputation for xenophobia, white-collar immigrant men disproportionally reap the dividends of Japan's shrinking population.

The Future Is Foreign sheds new light on the processes that perpetuate inequality in Japanese firms, and in organizations worldwide. While managers and policymakers often assume that increasing women and minorities' representation in leadership will erode prejudice, Holbrow reveals that the people we see when we "look down" the organizational hierarchy are more important to the social construction of bias than are the people we see when we "look up."

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bitter Fall"

Coming January 13 from Severn River: Bitter Fall (Detective Justice, 2) by Bruce Robert Coffin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Summer’s last breath meets autumn’s first kill in Greenville, Maine.

On a moonless stretch of backcountry road, Detective Brock Justice stares down at a crime scene that refuses to play by the rules. A woman lies dead, the apparent victim of a lethal roadside crash—until a stab wound is found hidden beneath her clothing. Two causes of death. Zero easy answers.

Reunited with his partner, Detective Chloe Wright, Justice begins pulling at threads too many people want left alone. The victim had secrets—the kind worth killing for. And each suspect carries enough baggage to sink a body in Moosehead Lake. An ex-boyfriend with a violent past. A married fitness trainer with too much to lose. A combat veteran living off the grid, haunted by ghosts of his own.

As golden leaves turn blood-red against pewter skies, Justice is fighting more than just a killer. The fallout from testifying against a fellow trooper clings to him like a bad debt, and someone inside the department is making sure he pays for it.

Then a game warden’s trail camera captures something deep in the woods. But it isn’t just a clue—it’s a warning.

Fans of Craig Johnson's Longmire and C.J. Box's Joe Pickett will find themselves right at home in this dark corner of Maine.

Visit Bruce Robert Coffin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mirrors of Empire"

Coming February 1 from State University of New York Press: Mirrors of Empire: Courtiers, Diplomats, and Intellectuals in Mughal India by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

About the book, from the publisher:

Approaches the history of the Mughal Empire at the level of human experience, through a diverse group of autobiographical narratives.

Starting from 1526, the Mughals ruled over much of India for three centuries, perhaps the most important Islamic empire in the early modern world. This period saw the production of a fascinating variety of memoirs and autobiographies in which residents of the empire reflected on their own lives, on Islam in a Hindu context, and on the relationship of individual subjects to their new rulers. Those written by Mughal royalty--especially Babur and Jahangir--are well known. This book considers the less well-known writings of diverse others, from the poet laureate Faizi to those who were not part of elite society but a few notches below it, such as the lowly envoy Asad Beg and characters like Mirza Nathan and Abdul Latif, who lived dangerously on the Bengal frontier. Also considered are prolific Hindu writers, such as Bhimsen Saksena and the witty Anand Ram Mukhlis, who lived in Delhi through the turbulent 1730s and 1740s. Together, they offer an original and differently critical perspective on the empire--its religious, social, and political tensions, as well as its strategies for overcoming them.

Covering over two centuries of such materials, Mirrors of Empire is a work of cultural history that is also firmly rooted in social history. It incorporates extensive translations from Persian, including materials that are little-known even to historians and specialists, and shows the transformation of the empire from its difficult emergence, to its expansive height, to its phase of disintegration in the middle of the eighteenth century. Gracefully written, the book approaches the Mughal Empire at the level of human experience, rendering it accessible and not a mere abstraction.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum"

New from Kensington: The Mysterious Death of Junetta Plum (A Harriet Stone Mystery) by Valerie Wilson Wesley.

About the book, from the publisher:

At the darkly glamorous height of the Roaring 20s, an independent Black intellectual and her bi-racial foster child are immersed in the vibrant world of the Harlem Renaissance – and a shocking murder on Striver’s Row – in this thrilling Jazz Age mystery for reader of Nekesia Afia, Jacqueline Winspear, Avery Cunningham’s The Mayor of Maxwell Street.

1926: Harriet Stone, a liberated, educated Black woman, and Lovey, the orphaned, biracial 12-year-old she is bound to protect, are Harlem-bound, embarking on a new, hopefully less traumatic chapter in their lives. They have been invited to move from Connecticut by Harriet’s cousin, Junetta Plum, who runs a boardinghouse for independent-minded single women.

It’s a bold move, since Harriet has never met Junetta, but the fatalities of the Spanish flu and other tragedies have already forced her and Lovey to face their worst fears. Alone but for each other, they have little left to lose—or so it seems as they arrive at sophisticated Junetta’s impressive brownstone.

Her cousin has a sharp edge, which makes Harriett slightly uncomfortable. Still, after retiring to her room for the night, she finally falls asleep—only to awaken to Junetta arguing with someone downstairs. In the morning, she makes a shocking discovery at the foot of the stairs.

What ensues will lead Harriet to question Junetta’s very identity—and to wonder if she and Lovey are in danger, as well. It will also tie Harriet to five strangers. Among them, Harriet is sure someone knows something. What she doesn’t yet know is that one will play a crucial role in helping her investigate her cousin’s murder . . . that she will be tied to the others in ways she could never imagine . . . and that her life will take off in a startling new direction....

Visit Valerie Wilson Wesley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Aerial Archives of Race"

New from the University of California Press: Aerial Archives of Race: African American Cultural Expressions and the Black Nuclear Pacific by Etsuko Taketani.

About the book, from the publisher:

Opening new perspectives in transpacific studies, Etsuko Taketani examines the genealogy and contours of the aerial imaginary and the corollary shifting planetary imaginary that evolved in a transnational space she names the “Black nuclear Pacific.” Following the first dropping of an atom bomb on humans and the subsequent military occupation of Japan by the United States, Black-Japanese encounters happened on a scale unimaginable before World War II. Analyzing texts by a diverse range of artists, writers, and political thinkers who had formative interactions with occupied Japan—including the NAACP’s Walter White, lawyer Edith Sampson, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and Malcolm X—Taketani uncovers African American cultural expressions that include a quasi–alien abduction narrative, the literary creation of a new tribe in the image of a rainbow, a Black futuristic apocalypse, and a racial fantasy of the Mother Plane. Aerial Archives of Race tracks the Black networks and exchanges with Japan that provoked new ways of thinking about (human) races on planet Earth.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Oxford Blood"

New from Wednesday Books: Oxford Blood by Rachael Davis-Featherstone.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first in a series of compelling and skillful dark academic thrillers from a brilliant new voice in YA fiction.

Love, Lies, Legacy…

Eva has one dream: to study English at Oxford University. Not only will she receive a world-class education – getting into Oxford is a path to freedom.

But when Eva and her best friend George are invited to interview week, they find themselves in the cutthroat ultra-competitive world of elite academia, and at the center of gossip on anonymous student forum Oxford Slays. When Eva finds George dead near the steps of a statue in the college, she knows he’s been murdered – but all eyes are now on her. Can she clear her name, catch the true killer and win her place at Beecham College?

Eva has one week to prove her innocence, and Oxford Slays will be watching.

Oxford Blood is a riveting murder mystery thriller, packed with narrative twists and turns, complex and appealing characters and a captivating, authentic setting in its searing examination of the true cost of privilege.

Visit Rachael Davis-Featherstone's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Realism after the Individual"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel by Rafael Walker.

About the book, from the publisher:

A study of the transformation of the realist novel in the hands of early-twentieth-century American writers, who adapted this quintessentially nineteenth-century genre to the conditions of their age.

Realism after the Individual offers a new theoretical paradigm for understanding realist novels published in the United States between 1900 and 1920, a period that has been described wrongheadedly as a “gulf” or a “valley” in American literary history. In this generation of writers, only three have remained in favor among critics: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser. Others have disappeared from view altogether—writers such as Robert Grant, Robert Herrick, and Booth Tarkington, all of whom were critically acclaimed bestsellers in their day.

As Rafael Walker shows, this generation of writers deserves new attention for the way they revised many core facets of the nineteenth-century novel in response to the historical shifts around it. This generation of novelists not only rejected liberal individualism but also formulated alternative paradigms for conceptualizing selfhood. The result was a slew of woman-centered realist novels that broke with literary precedent: The novels punish characters not for desiring too much but for failing to desire enough, they depict subjectivity not as private and interior but as outward-facing, and they view closure not as the novel’s aim but as a convention to flout. Realism after the Individual both revises prevailing views of American realism and lays the foundation for an alternative account of the development of literary modernism, one that illuminates the continuity between realism and the modernism that followed it.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Hitch"

Coming soon from Roxane Gay Books: The Hitch by Sara Levine.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of the cult classic Treasure Island!!!, a delightfully unhinged comedy following a woman as she attempts to exorcise the spirit of a dead corgi from her nephew and renegotiate the borders of her previously rational world

Rose Cutler defines herself by her exacting standards. As an anti—racist, Jewish secular feminist eco—warrior, she is convinced she knows the right way to do everything, including parent her six—year—old nephew Nathan. When Rose offers to look after him while his parents visit Mexico for a week, her brother and sister—in—law reluctantly agree, provided she understands the rules—routine, bedtime, homework—and doesn’t overstep. But when Rose’s Newfoundland attacks and kills a corgi at the park, Nathan starts acting strangely: barking, overeating, talking to himself. Rose mistakes this behavior as repressed grief over the corgi’s death, but Nathan insists he isn’t grieving, and the dog isn’t dead. Her soul leaped into his body, and now she’s living inside him. Now Rose must banish the corgi from her nephew before the week ends and his parents return to collect their child.

With the ferocious absurdity of Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and the dark, brazen humor of Melissa Broder’s Death Valley, The Hitch is a tantalizingly bizarre novel about loneliness, bad boundaries, and the ill—fated strategy of micromanaging everything and everyone around you.

Visit Sara Levine's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Nigerian Hip-Hop"

New from Oxford University Press: Nigerian Hip-Hop: Race, Knowledge, and the Poetics of Resistance by Tosin Gbogi.

About the book, from the publisher:

Nigerian, or Naija, hip-hop has existed for close to 45 years, and throughout its rich history has been influenced by not only imperialist media flows but also enduring discourses of African anti-colonialism and pan-Africanism and the long cultural traffic between Africa and the African diaspora. In Nigerian Hip-Hop, Tosin Gbogi draws upon close readings of lyrics and other media and oral interviews with more than fifty artists to engage fully with the culture on its own terms, examining questions lying at the intersection of rap poetics, race, knowledge, and popular culture. Troubling the conventional paradigm in which hip-hop in Nigeria stands squarely for imperialist machinery, he directs attention to the culture's provocative meditations on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism. Gbogi tracks these meditations across a wide range of sources, including lyrics, music videos, cover arts, liner notes, photographs, social media, archival materials, and oral interviews. Placing these sources in conversation with one another, he examines them closely for what they reveal about the contemporary trajectories of African popular culture and youth resistance.

The first comprehensive and systematic study of Nigerian hip-hop--one of the world's oldest and most vibrant of such scenes--this book attends to the literary forms, the density of ideas, historical encounters, ideological struggles, and the lively internal debates that have animated the culture for more than four decades. In highlighting these, Gbogi engages with a broad array of topics and themes, including those having to do with race, ethnicity, class, gender, language, media and popular culture, youth cultures, and poetry.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Truth of Carcosa"

Coming soon from Union Square & Co.: The Truth of Carcosa by Jacob Rollinson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Evil books, shadowy corporations, and interdimensional monster collide in this dark, masterful tribute to Robert Chamber's cult classic, The King in Yellow.

In 1984, exiled author Salvatore Archimboldi accepts the help of a psychotherapist to write his new book. He hopes to transform his traumatic memories into literary genius. But the resulting book, The Truth of Carcosa, is pure evil. Horrified, Archimboldi suppresses the book and wills all traces of it, his correspondence, and any copies to be destroyed.

Long after Archimboldi's death, in a chaotic age of resurgent nationalism and violence, one of the only havens for his work is the ALI, the Archive for Literary Investment, where a biographer and his protégée search through Archimboldi’s correspondence for clues on the evil manuscript as they attempt to stop unscrupulous firms with their own plans for the manuscript.

Told from the perspective of a madman obsessed with The Truth of Carcosa and a ragtag group of friends, it becomes clear that this book is more than a book—and that it might be the answer to a bewildering set of questions:

Why is the Archive so desperate to preserve Archimboldi's work?

Why do so many corporations seem hellbent on seizing any scrap of this mysterious manuscript—and at whatever cost?

What are the strange, dancing monsters that appear wherever Archimboldi's work is discovered?

And who—or what—is the Yellow King?

Visit Jacob Rollinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"When Doing Good Isn't Good Enough"

New from Georgetown Press: When Doing Good Isn't Good Enough: How a Commitment to Justice and Solidarity Transformed Catholic Relief Services by Suzanne C. Toton.

About the book, from the publisher:

A powerful case study demonstrating how principled commitment and strategic vision can fundamentally redefine an organization's impact and purpose

In the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide, humanitarian organizations faced a profound moral reckoning. The devastating failure to address the systemic social, economic, and political inequalities created fertile ground for the mass atrocities and exposed critical gaps in traditional aid approaches. The very foundations of international relief work were challenged.

When Doing Good Isn't Good Enough offers an unprecedented look at the significance of Catholic Social Teaching, particularly its teaching on justice, for transforming Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in a time of institutional crisis after the Rwanda genocide. Toton traces the process by which CRS arrived at the decision to adopt justice as its operating lens and its methodical effort to integrate justice into every region and level of its operations. It provides a window into CRS's deep commitment to the people it serves; the challenges of implementing right relationships while working within diverse ethnic, cultural, and religious contexts; the lessons learned; and the institutional changes it catalyzed.

For organizational leaders, relief and development professionals, scholars, and people who belong to faith-based movements, this book provides a powerful case study of institutional transformation across cultures―demonstrating how principled commitment and a strategic vision can fundamentally redefine an organization's impact and purpose.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Bookbinder's Secret"

Coming soon from St. Martin's Press: The Bookbinder's Secret: A Novel by A. D. Bell.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Every book tells a story. This one tells a secret.

A young bookbinder begins a hunt for the truth when a confession hidden beneath the binding of a burned book reveals a story of forbidden love, lost fortune, and murder.

Lilian ("Lily") Delaney, apprentice to a master bookbinder in Oxford in 1901, chafes at the confines of her life. She is trapped between the oppressiveness of her father’s failing bookshop and still being an apprentice in a man’s profession. But when she’s given a burned book during a visit to a collector, she finds, hidden beneath the binding, a fifty-year-old letter speaking of love, fortune, and murder.

Lily is pulled into the mystery of the young lovers, a story of forbidden love, and discovers there are more books and more hidden pages telling their story. Lilian becomes obsessed with the story but she is not the only one looking for the remaining books and what began as a diverting intrigue quickly becomes a very dangerous pursuit.

Lily's search leads her from the eccentric booksellers of London to the private libraries of unscrupulous collectors and the dusty archives of society papers, deep into the heart of the mystery. But with sinister forces closing in, willing to do anything for the books, Lilian’s world begins to fall apart and she must decide if uncovering the truth is worth the risk to her own life.

Visit A.D. Bell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Entertaining Ambiguities"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Entertaining Ambiguities: Sexuality, Humanism, and Ephemeral Performances in Fifteenth-Century Italy by Ralph J. Hexter.

About the book, from the publisher:

An exploration of the intersection of male—male sexual activities and subcultures with Italian humanism and university culture

Entertaining Ambiguities explores the intersections of male—male sexual activities, subcultures, and coded language with classical reception, university culture, and Italian humanism. Through his excavation of a pair of Latin comedies—Janus the Priest and The False Hypocrite, written and performed by law students at the University of Pavia in 1427 and 1437, respectively—Ralph Hexter shows how these plays expand our understanding of the range of contemporary attitudes to male—male sexual behavior beyond previously studied registers, whether legal, ecclesiastical, or natural scientific.

The plot of the two plays, one of which is an adaptation of the other, involves the entrapment of a priest who is eager for sexual activity with men. Digging deeply into precisely how the student ringleader of the entrapment plot persuades the priest to visit him in his rooms for an assignation, Hexter uncovers the coded language that the student uses to seemingly establish himself as a member of a network of like—minded men, convincing the priest to let his guard down. Hexter reads this coded language within his examination of the context of the plays’ performance and circulation—including careful reading of a range of Italian and Latin sources, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, Apuleius’s Golden Ass, comedies by Plautus and Terence, and Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus, among others. In doing so, he demonstrates how passages throughout both plays disrupt received ideas about the period’s sexual conventions and sexual possibilities. Reading against the grain against orthodox expectations, Hexter reveals the plays’ seemingly moralizing endings to be more suggestive and more ambiguous than they appear.

Including an appendix presenting the first published English translations of both plays, Entertaining Ambiguities offers a new account of the history of sexuality, changing social mores, and intellectual exchange at the dawn of the Renaissance.

--Marshal Zeringue

"It Should Have Been You"

Coming soon from Pamela Dorman Books: It Should Have Been You: A Novel by Andrea Mara.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A gripping new thriller from Andrea Mara, the #1 international bestselling author of ALL HER FAULT, now streaming on Peacock

Your neighbors have secrets. How far would they go to keep them?

You press send and your message disappears. Full of secrets about your neighbors, it’s meant for your sister. But it doesn’t reach her – it goes to the entire local community WhatsApp group instead.

As rumor spreads like wildfire through the picture-perfect neighborhood, you convince yourself that people will move on, that this will quickly be forgotten. But then you receive the first death threat.

The next day, a woman has been murdered. And what’s even more chilling is that she had the same address as you – 26 Oakpark – but in a different part of town. Did the killer get the wrong house? It won’t be long before you find out…

Visit Andrea Mara's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bukovina"

New from Princeton University Press: Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland by Cristina Florea.

About the book, from the publisher:

The making and remaking of Bukovina, a disputed Eastern European borderland, from the eighteenth century to the present day

Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book, Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.

Drawing on a wide range of archives and published sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, Florea integrates stories of ethnic and linguistic groups—rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles—who lived side by side in Bukovina, all of them navigating constant reconfiguration and reinvention. Challenging traditional chronologies in European history, she shows that different transformations in the region occurred at different tempos, creating a historical palimpsest and a sense among locals that they had lived many lives.

A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe.

Visit Cristina Florea's website.

--Marshal Zeringue