"My Documents"

New from One World: My Documents: A Novel by Kevin Nguyen.

About the book, from the publisher:

The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this sharp and touching novel about coming of age at the intersection of ambition and assimilation.

Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family. As young adults, they’re on the precipice of new ventures: Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naïve freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America creates a national panic, prompting a government policy that pushes Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.

Cut off entirely from the outside world, forced to work jobs they hate, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long, dusty days in camp and acclimate to life without the internet. That is, until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this connection as a chance to tell the world about the horrors of camp—and as an opportunity to bolster her own reporting career in the process.

Informed by real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen’s novel gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to one another, and to ourselves, after tragedy.

Visit Kevin Nguyen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Superhero Blockbuster"

New from the University Press of Mississippi: The Superhero Blockbuster: Adaptation, Style, and Meaning by James C. Taylor.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Superhero Blockbuster: Adaptation, Style, and Meaning builds an innovative framework for analyzing one of the most prominent genres in twenty-first-century Hollywood. In combining theories of adaptation with close textual analysis, James C. Taylor provides a set of analytical tools with which to undertake nuanced exploration of superhero blockbusters’ meanings. This deep understanding of the films attends to historical, sociopolitical, and industrial contexts and also illuminates key ways in which the superhero genre has contributed to the development of the Hollywood blockbuster.

Each chapter focuses on a different superhero or superhero team, covering some of the most popular superhero blockbusters based on DC and Marvel superheroes. The chapters cover different aspects of the films’ adaptive practices, exploring the adaptation of stylistic strategies, narrative models, and modes of seriality from superhero comic books, while being attentive to the ways in which the films engage with the wider networks of texts in various media that comprise a given superhero franchise. Chapter 1 looks back to the first superhero blockbuster, 1978’s Superman: The Movie, examining its cinematic re-envisioning of the quintessential superhero and role in establishing Hollywood’s emerging model of blockbuster filmmaking. Subsequent chapters analyze the twenty-first-century boom in superhero blockbusters and examine digital imaging and nostalgia in Spider-Man films, Marvel Studios’ adaptation of a shared universe model of seriality in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the use of alternate timeline narratives in X-Men films. The book concludes by turning its analytical toolkit to analysis of DC Studios’ cinematic universe, the DC Extended Universe.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hard Town"

New from Grand Central Publishing: Hard Town by Adam Plantinga.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of the USA Today bestseller The Ascent, a retired Detroit cop must unravel the mystery of a small desert town.

After surviving a deadly prison break, ex-Detroit cop Kurt Argento is ready for some quiet. Still working through his grief over the passing of his wife, Argento finds himself house-sitting for a friend with his loyal companion, Hudson, a Chow Chow-Shepard mix. It's a simple life, but it's one that Argento is content to live. Then Kristin Reed shows up, begging Argento to find her missing husband and son.

Argento starts to notice that Fenton, Arizona is more than meets the eye. First there's the large, overly equipped public safety team complete with specialized tactics and sophisticated weaponry. Then there's the unusual financial boosting of failing small businesses by the U.S. government. Finally, there's a man with no name with unprecedented control over the town. Argento finds himself unraveling not just the truth behind the disappearance of a family, but a conspiracy that's taken a whole town to cover up.

Fenton, Arizona is going to push him further than he’s ever had to go. And along the way, he may just lose a part of himself. Because justice isn't as black and white as Argento would like to believe.

Visit Adam Plantinga's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"After the Death of God"

New from the University of Chicago Press: After the Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche by Espen Hammer.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fresh history of nineteenth-century philosophy’s many ideas about secularization.

The secularization thesis, which held that religious belief would gradually yield to rationality, has been thoroughly debunked. What, then, can we learn from philosophers for whom the death of God seemed so imminent? In this book, Espen Hammer offers a sweeping analysis of secularization in nineteenth-century German philosophy, arguing that the persistence of religion (rather than its absence) animated this tradition. Hammer shows that Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche, each in their own way, sought to preserve and transform religion’s ethical and communal aspirations for modern life. A renewed appreciation for this tradition’s generous thought, Hammer argues, can help us chart a path through needlessly destructive conflicts between secularists and fundamentalists today.

Visit Espen Hammer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This Is Not a Game"

New from Dutton: This Is Not a Game: A Novel by Kelly Mullen.

About the book, from the publisher:

MURDER
MARTINIS
A GRANDMOTHER-GRANDDAUGHTER SLEUTHING DUO
DACHSHUNDS (x2)
A GLAMOROUS ISLAND MANOR

Widow Mimi lives on idyllic Mackinac Island, where cars are not allowed and a Gibson martini with three onions at the witching hour is compulsory. Her estranged granddaughter, Addie, is getting over the heartbreak of not only being dumped by her fiancé, Brian, but also being cut out of the deal for the brilliantly successful video game Murderscape they invented together (with Addie doing most of the heavy lifting).

When Mimi gets an invitation from local socialite Jane Ireland—a seventysomething narcissist who’s having a salacious affair with her son-in-law—to a charity auction, she invites Addie. But Mimi doesn’t tell her that a blackmail threat from Jane looms over the party’s invitation.

Once they arrive, a big storm rolls in, trapping everyone in the mansion. And then, Jane is murdered. Soon Mimi and Addie’s strained relationship is put to the test when they must team up to narrow down the suspects. When another body turns up, the sleuthing pair realize someone else is playing a deadly game, and they might not survive the night.

Visit Kelly Mullen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"After Spaceship Earth"

New from Yale University Press: After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions by Eva Diaz.

About the book, from the publisher:

An expansive look at the contemporary artists confronting, challenging, and reimagining R. Buckminster Fuller’s techno-utopianism to envision sustainable futures

Architect and designer R. Buckminster Fuller’s (1895–1983) concept of “Spaceship Earth,” one of the most powerful metaphors of the twentieth century, imagines our planet as a monumental vehicle sustained by the interdependence of human technologies and natural ecologies. In this book, Eva Díaz explores that metaphor through the work of contemporary artists from around the world who grapple with Fuller’s project to promote the equitable distribution of global assets through design, and with the technocratic euphoria of his era.

Beginning with a focus on Fuller’s iconic geodesic dome design and moving to the extraplanetary implications of his ideas, Díaz illuminates how artists including John Akomfrah, Mary Mattingly, Trevor Paglen, Jacolby Satterwhite, Hito Steyerl, and many others draw from Fuller’s mode of experimental design research to create provocative alternatives to corporate control and surveillance. These artists probe the space “race” and colonization as powerful means to readdress histories of violence and racial inequity. Díaz critiques the ecological costs of technological innovation and the role that techno-utopianism has played in political, economic, gender, and racial domination. Highlighting Afrofuturism, ecofeminism, and new ideas of citizenship, After Spaceship Earth conveys the vital afterlives of Fuller’s concept for today’s world-builders, posing vital questions of its usefulness and limits.

Visit Eva Diaz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Snares"

New from Random House: The Snares: A Novel by Rav Grewal-Kök.

About the book, from the publisher:

A Punjabi American lawyer at a mysterious federal intelligence agency fights to keep his career, marriage, and morality intact in this gripping post-9/11 drama from a thrilling new voice.

“Are you happy where you are? Toiling in the trenches of the Justice Department?”

In the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency, Neel Chima, a former naval officer and federal prosecutor, is recruited to join a new federal intelligence agency—one with greater than usual powers and fewer than usual restrictions. Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and the selection of foreigners for drone assassination—men who often look just like his Sikh family members. As both his ambitions and his moral qualms mount, he is drawn farther and farther away from his wife and two young daughters. When he makes a critical mistake at work, he is left vulnerable to shadowy figures in the intelligence world who seek to use him in their own, still more radical counterterrorism missions. If he agrees, the world of power will open up even wider to him. If he doesn’t...

Is Neel an insider or an outsider? The hunter or the hunted? An idealist or a mercenary? What truths, and whose lives, is he willing to sacrifice? The novel plunges readers into the human turmoil behind the faceless operations—the torture, secret assassinations, and drone strikes—of the American security state, creating an eye-opening meditation on morality, violence, and the price of a human soul.

Visit Rav Grewal-Kök's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Near Birth"

New from the University of California Press: Near Birth: Contested Values and the Work of Doulas by Andrea Lilly Ford.

About the book, from the publisher:

This insightful study of contemporary birthing uses the work of doulas to explore the questions raised near birth: What do we value, and how do we navigate those values when they are tangled in conflict?

Pregnancy, birthing, and infant care offer a microcosm of cultural debates. In this ethnography of childbearing in Northern California, Andrea Ford examines how people's birthing decisions and experiences relate to and construct the American ideal of the individual through the values of progress, experience, autonomy, equality, authenticity, immunity, and redemption.

Both an anthropologist and a doula who has observed and participated in dozens of births, Ford explores how parents, practitioners, activists, laws, technologies, media, and medical institutions shape the politics of care. Near Birth shows that questions about the best way to have a baby concern much more than health procedures. In the answers lie often-unacknowledged claims about what kinds of personhood matter and what ways of living are valued and valuable.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Make Sure You Die Screaming"

New from Flatiron Books: Make Sure You Die Screaming: A Novel by Zee Carlstrom.

About the book, from the publisher:

An electrifying debut about a nonbinary corporate burnout embarking on a road trip from Chicago to Arkansas to find their conspiracy-theorist father, who has gone missing—for fans of Detransition Baby and Chain-Gang All-Stars

The newly nameless narrator of Make Sure You Die Screaming has rejected the gender binary, has flamed out with a vengeance at their corporate gig, is most likely brain damaged from a major tussle with their now ex-boyfriend, and is on a bender to end all benders.

A call from their mother with the news that their MAGA-friendly, conspiracy-theorist father has gone missing launches the narrator from Chicago to deep red Arkansas in a stolen car. Along the way, the narrator and their new bestie—a self-proclaimed "garbage goth" with her own emotional baggage (and someone on her tail)—unpack the narrator’s childhood and a recent personal loss that they refuse to face head-on.

An unflinching interrogation of class rage, economic (im)mobility, gender expression, and the rot at the heart of capitalism, Make Sure You Die Screaming is the loud, funny, tragic, suspenseful road trip novel of our times.

Visit Zee Carlstrom's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Not All In"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare by Tiffany D. Joseph.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examines how health policy shifts fail to fully serve immigrant communities due to structural racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric and enforcement measures.

Despite progressive policy strides in health care reform, immigrant communities continue to experience stark disparities across the United States. In Not All In, Tiffany D. Joseph exposes the insidious contradiction of Massachusetts' advanced health care system and the exclusionary experiences of its immigrant communities.

Joseph illustrates how patients' race, ethnicity, and legal status determine their access to health coverage and care services, revealing a disturbing paradox where policy advances and individual experiences drastically diverge. Examining Boston's Brazilian, Dominican, and Salvadoran communities, this book provides an exhaustive analysis spanning nearly a decade to highlight the profound impacts of the Affordable Care Act and subsequent policy shifts on these marginalized groups.

Not All In is a critical examination of the systemic barriers that perpetuate health care disparities. Joseph challenges readers to confront the uncomfortable truths about racialized legal status and its profound implications on health care access. This essential book illuminates the complexities of policy implementation and advocates for more inclusive reforms that genuinely cater to all. Urging policymakers, health care providers, and activists to rethink strategies that bridge the gap between legislation and life, this book reminds us that in the realm of health care, being progressive is not synonymous with inclusivity.

Learn more about the book and author at Tiffany D. Joseph's website.

The Page 99 Test: Race on the Move.

--Marshal Zeringue