"Bad Nature"

New from Henry Holt & Company: Bad Nature: A Novel by Ariel Courage.

About the book, from the publisher:

Armed with a terminal diagnosis, a grudge, and a rental car, Hester sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of killing her father in this brilliantly subversive and bleakly funny debut novel.

When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and starts driving west. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two slowly make their way across the country. But will the revelations they experience along the way dissuade Hester from her goal?

Ragingly singular and surprisingly moving, Bad Nature is a story of stunning detours and twists until its final destination. Part road-trip novel, part revenge tale, part lament for our ongoing ecological crisis, it’s ultimately a deft examination of the indulgence of holding grudges, moral ambivalence, and the eternal possibility of redemption.

Visit Ariel Courage's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fear No Pharaoh"

New from Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery by Richard Kreitner.

About the book, from the publisher:

A dramatic history of how American Jews reckoned with slavery—and fought the Civil War.

Since ancient times, the Jewish people have recalled the story of Exodus and reflected on the implications of having been slaves. Did the tradition teach that Jews should speak out against slavery and oppression everywhere, or act cautiously to protect themselves in a hostile world?

In Fear No Pharaoh, the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner sets this question at the heart of the Civil War era. Using original sources, he tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who helped to shape a tumultuous time, including Judah Benjamin, the brilliant, secretive lawyer who became Jefferson Davis’s trusted confidante; Morris Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi who defended slavery as biblically justified; and Raphall's rival rabbis—the celebrated Isaac Mayer Wise, who urged Jews to stay out of the slavery controversy to avoid attracting attention, and David Einhorn, whose fiery sermons condemning bondage led to a pro-slavery mob threatening his life. We also meet August Bondi, a veteran of Europe’s 1848 revolutions, who fought with John Brown in “Bleeding Kansas” and later in the Union Army, and the Polish émigré Ernestine Rose, a feminist, atheist, and abolitionist who championed “emancipation of all kinds.”

As he tracks these characters, Kreitner illuminates the shifting dynamics of Jewish life in America—and the debates about religion, morality, and politics that endure to this day.

Visit Richard Kreitner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cat's People"

New from Delacorte: Cat's People: A Novel by Tanya Guerrero.

About the book, from the publisher:

A stray cat brings together five strangers over the course of one fateful summer in this heartwarming novel about love, found family, and the power of connection.

Núria, a single-by-choice barista with a little resentment for the “crazy cat lady” label, is a member of The Meow-Yorkers, a group in Brooklyn who takes care of the neighborhood’s stray cats. On her volunteering days, she starts finding Post-it notes left by a secret admirer in an area where her feeds her favorite stray—a black cat named Cat. Like most felines, he is both curious and observant, so of course he knows who the notes are from. Núria, however, is clueless.

Are the notes from Collin, a bestselling author and self-professed hermit with a weakness for good coffee? Are they from Lily, a fresh-out-of-high school Georgia native searching for her long-lost half sister? Are they from Omar, the beloved neighborhood mailman going through an early midlife crisis? Or are they from Bong, the grieving widower who owns Núria’s favorite bodega?

When Cat suddenly falls ill, these five strangers find themselves bonding together in their desire to care for him, and discover that chance encounters can lead to the meaningful connections they’ve all been searching for.

Visit Tanya Guerrero's wesbite.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Literature’s Refuge"

New from Princeton University Press: Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape by William Stroebel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Stories silenced or sequestered by a century of mass displacement between Europe and the Middle East—recovered and retold at last

In 1923, the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange uprooted and swapped nearly two million Christians and Muslims, “pacifying” the so-called Near East through ethnic partition and refugeehood. This imposition of borders not only uprooted peoples from their place in the world; it also displaced many of their stories from a place in world literature. In Literature’s Refuge, William Stroebel recovers and weaves together work by fugitive writers, oral storytellers, readers, copyists, editors, and translators dispersed by this massive “unmixing” of populations and the broader border logic that it set in motion. Stroebel argues that two complementary forces emerged as a template for the Eastern Mediterranean’s cultural landscape: the modern border, which reshuffled people through a system of filters and checkpoints; and modern philology, which similarly reshuffled their words and works. Philologists and publishers defined modern literature by picking apart, extracting, reformatting, or dispossessing refugee and diasporic texts across a racialized borderscape—a gray zone of semi-inclusion and semi-exclusion, semimobility and immobility.

Stroebel reaches into the chinks and crannies of this borderscape to reconstitute the rich textual geography between Greek Orthodoxy and Sunni Islam, between Greek-script, Arabic-script, and Latin-script literary traditions at the edges of Europe and the Middle East. Doing so, he offers a new methodological toolkit for rewriting the modern borderscapes of world literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Gatsby Gambit"

New from Viking: The Gatsby Gambit: A Novel by Claire Anderson Wheeler.

About the book, from the publisher:

America's most beloved literary characters.
A page-turning mystery.
The gilded opulence of the Roaring Twenties.
And a clever young woman of unusual persistence.

Be ready to re-think the world of Gatsby.

Freshly twenty-one and sporting a daring new bob, Greta Gatsby—younger sister to the infamous Jay—is finally free of her dull finishing school, and looking forward to an idyllic summer at the Gatsby Mansion, the jewel of West Egg. From its breathtaking views to its eccentric denizens, Greta is eager to inhale it all—even to the predictable disapproval of Mrs Dantry, Jay’s exacting housekeeper. Indeed, nothing could disrupt the blissful time Greta has planned… except finding out that Jay’s cadre of dubious friends—Daisy and Tom Buchanan, along with Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker—will be summering there, too.

It's hard to be noticed when the luminous Daisy Buchanan is in the room, and Jordan keeps rather too close tabs on handsome Nick Carraway for Greta’s liking. But by far the worst is Daisy’s boorish husband, Tom, whose explosive temper seems always balanced on a knife-edge. But soon, bad blood is the least of their problems, as a shocking event sets the Gatsby household reeling.

Death has come to West Egg, and with it, a web of scandal, betrayal, and secrets. Turning sleuth isn’t how Greta meant to spend her summer—but what choice does she have, when everyone else seems intent on living in a world of make-believe?

Deftly subverting romantic notions about money, power, and freedom that still stand today, THE GATSBY GAMBIT is a sparkling homage to, and reinvention of, a world American readers have lionized for generations.

Visit Claire Anderson Wheeler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The New Woman and Technologies of Speed in Fin-de-Siècle Literature"

New from Oxford University Press: The New Woman and Technologies of Speed in Fin-de-Siècle Literature by Eva Chen.

About the book, from the publisher:

This is the first literary study on the New Woman's interaction with modern speed culture through use of the typewriter and the bicycle. These technologies of speed are among the earliest to be associated with middle-class women, exposing them to the discipline of mechanized speed while allowing for the construction of a new machine-savvy, sped-up, and energized female subjectivity. Used for women's office work and daily movement, they demand from their women operators a response and adaptation to speed right from the beginning. The ability to catch up with, imitate, adjust to, and finally master this mechanized speed, is the key to the New Woman's enlarged freedom in the modern city.

By examining New Woman literature penned by George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Grant Allen, Geraldine Edith Mitton, and Mrs. Edward Kennard, and stories and comments published in popular magazines, this book examines how mechanized speed works on the New Woman typist and cyclist, first as discipline and control (in typewriting), then as commodity and conspicuous display (in cycling), and finally as rejuvenation, stimulation, and active thrill. Being fast, having speed, and adjusting to the shocks, as well as excitement of techno-aided speed, is a crucial part of what makes the New Woman new, as she stakes a claim to modern speed culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A/S/L"

New from Soho Press: A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton.

About the book, from the publisher:

A transformational, transformative story about video games, three queer friends, and the code(s) they learn to survive, from the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Trans Fiction

1998: Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, scattered across the country but joined by the Internet as they create Saga of the Sorceress, a video game that will change everything, if only for the three of them.

Eighteen years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on the scattered drives of its creators. Lilith works as a loan underwriter at a rinky-dink bank in Manhattan, a trans woman in a very cis world. Sash is in Brooklyn, working as a part-time webcam dominatrix. Neither knows that the other is in New York, or that Abraxa is just across the Hudson River, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s Jersey City home after a disaster at sea. They have never met in person and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress or her unfinished quest.

Weaving together the technologies of two decades, and a healthy dose of magic, A/S/L is a novel that queers our notions of nostalgia, friendship, and even the possibilities of fiction itself, confirming Jeanne Thornton as one of our best and most ambitious novelists.

Visit Jeanne Thornton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Invisible Blackness"

New from LSU Press: Invisible Blackness: A Louisiana Family in the Age of Racial Passing by Katy Morlas Shannon.

About the book, from the publisher:

Invisible Blackness explores the complex lives of Creoles of mixed race born in Louisiana to enslaved women and the white men who enslaved them. Individuals such as Alice Thomasson Grice forged their own identities―and often reinvented themselves―within the increasingly strict racial order of antebellum and postbellum Louisiana.

Alice Thomasson Grice occupied an unusual position among mixed-race Creoles of her era, as her white father recognized her formerly enslaved mother as his wife and raised Alice and her siblings as free people. After Alice married a white steamboat captain, Charles Grice, she and her children chose to identify as white. Invisible Blackness explores why Alice, her children, and friends in similar positions elected to cross the color line during the so-called “great age of passing” that spanned from 1880 to 1925.

While it’s impossible to quantify the number of people who crossed the color line at any given time, evidence suggests that the rate of passing corresponded closely with the severity of anti-Black oppression and discrimination. By the 1890s, when the Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow laws and lynchings were on the rise, Black people who could pass had a strong motivation to do so. For the Grices, passing afforded the only means of social, economic, and political advancement available to them.

Drawing on a vast array of primary sources, ranging from sacramental records and bills of sale to wills and military pension files, Invisible Blackness sheds light on how this liminal group of individuals defined themselves and shaped their identities. The lives of the Grices and people like them underscore that race is both a social construct and a significant lived reality. Beyond these broad, pressing historical questions lie issues of love, family, and the universal quest for belonging that transcend time, place, and race.

Visit Katy Morlas Shannon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"All That Life Can Afford"

New from G.P. Putnam’s Sons: All That Life Can Afford by Emily Everett.

About the book, from the publisher:

A taut and lyrical coming-of-age debut about a young American woman navigating class, lies, and love amid London’s jet-set elite.

I would arrive, blank like a sheet of notebook paper, and write myself new.

Anna first fell in love with London at her hometown library—its Jane Austen balls a far cry from her life of food stamps and hand-me-downs. But when she finally arrives after college, the real London is a moldy flat and the same paycheck-to-paycheck grind—that fairy-tale life still out of reach.

Then Anna meets the Wilders, who fly her to Saint-Tropez to tutor their teenage daughter. Swept up by the sphinxlike elder sister, Anna soon finds herself plunged into a heady whirlpool of parties and excess, a place where confidence is a birthright. There she meets two handsome young men—one who wants to whisk her into his world in a chauffeured car, the other who sees through Anna’s struggle to outrun her past. It’s like she’s stepped into the pages of a glittering new novel, but what will it cost her to play the part?

Sparkling with intelligence and insight, All That Life Can Afford peels back the glossy layers of class and privilege, exploring what it means to create a new life for yourself that still honors the one you’ve left behind.

Visit Emily Everett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Kids Are Online"

New from the University of California Press: The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life by Ysabel Gerrard.

About the book, from the publisher:

A nuanced, intimate picture of how young people live with and on social media.

Today's young people find themselves at the center of widespread debates about their online safety, and they are often told that social media platforms affect their mental health and body image by exposing them to cyberbullying and distressing images. Foregrounding their voices and experiences, The Kids Are Online explores how they navigate their identities across platforms and how they really feel about their young digital lives.

Ysabel Gerrard talked to more than a hundred teens to unpack the myths and realities of their social media use. Instead of framing today's big platforms as either good or bad, she identifies moments when young people encounter social apps in paradoxical ways—both good and bad at the same time. Using the concepts of stigma, secrecy, safety, and social comparison, she helps readers understand young people's experiences. The Kids Are Online proposes a series of recommendations for parents, families, schools, technology companies, and policymakers to imagine how we might build safer social media systems.

--Marshal Zeringue