"The Art of Vanishing"

New from Viking: The Art of Vanishing by Laura Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

A young woman chafing at the confines of marriage confronts the high cost of craving freedom and adventure

At twenty-five, as her wedding date approached, Laura Smith began to feel trapped. Not by her fiancé, who shared her appetite for adventure, but by the unsettling idea that it was hard to be at once married and free.

Laura wanted her life to be different. She wanted her marriage to be different. And she found in the strangely captivating story of another restless young woman determined to live without constraints both an enticement and a challenge. Barbara Newhall Follett was a free-spirited trailblazer who published her first novel at 11, enlisted as a deck hand on a boat bound for the south China seas at 15 and was one of the first women to hike the Appalachian trail. Then in December 1939, when she was not much older than Laura, she walked out of her apartment on a quiet tree-lined street in Brookline, leaving behind a fraying marriage, and vanished without a trace. Obsessed by her story, Laura set off to find out what had happened.

The Art of Vanishing is a riveting mystery and a piercing exploration of marriage and convention that asks deep and uncomfortable questions: Why do we give up on our childhood dreams? Is marriage a golden noose? Must we find ourselves in the same row houses with Pottery Barn lamps telling our kids to behave? Searingly honest and written with a raw intensity, it will challenge you to rethink your most intimate decisions and may just upend your life.

Visit Laura Elaine Smith's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Gone World"

New from G.P. Putnam’s Sons: The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch.

About the book, from the publisher:

Inception meets True Detective in this science fiction thriller of spellbinding tension and staggering scope that follows a special agent into a savage murder case with grave implications for the fate of mankind…

Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL’s family–and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can’t share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. Libra–a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL’s experience with the future has triggered this violence.

Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future reveals that it’s not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time’s horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself.

Luminous and unsettling, The Gone World bristles with world-shattering ideas yet remains at its heart an intensely human story.

Visit Tom Sweterlitsch's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Friend"

New from Riverhead Books: The Friend: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez.

About the book, from the publisher:

A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.

While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog’s care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.

Visit Sigrid Nunez's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Suburban Islam"

New from Oxford University Press: Suburban Islam by Justine Howe.

About the book, from the publisher:

For many American Muslims, the 9/11 attacks and subsequent War on Terror marked a rise in intense scrutiny of their religious lives and political loyalties. In Suburban Islam, Justine Howe explores the rise of "third spaces," social surroundings that are neither home nor work, created by educated, middle-class American Muslims in the wake of increased marginalization. Third spaces provide them the context to challenge their exclusion from the American mainstream and to enact visions for American Islam different from those they encounter in their local mosques.

One such third space is the Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb Foundation, a family-oriented Muslim institution in Chicago's suburbs. Howe uses Webb as a window into how Muslim American identity is formed through the interplay of communal interpretive practices, institutional rituals, and everyday life. The diverse Muslim families of the Webb Foundation have transformed hallmark secular suburbanite activities like football games, apple picking, and camping trips into acts of piety--rituals they describe as the enactment of "proper" American Muslim identity. Howe analyzes the relationship between these consumerist practices and the Webb Foundation's adult educational programs, through which participants critique what they call "cultural Islam." They envision creating an "indigenous" American Islam characterized by gender equality, reason, and pluralism. Through changing configurations of ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic class, Webb participants imagine a "seamless identity" that marries their Muslim faith to an idealized vision of suburban middle-class America.

Suburban Islam captures the fragile optimism of educated, cosmopolitan American Muslims during the Obama presidency, as they imagined a post-racial, pluralistic, and culturally resonant American Islam. Even as this vision aims to be more inclusive, it also reflects enduring inequalities of race, class, and gender.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Self-Portrait with Boy"

New from Scribner: Self-Portrait with Boy: A Novel by Rachel Lyon.

About the book, from the publisher:

A compulsively readable and electrifying debut about an ambitious young female artist who accidentally photographs a boy falling to his death—an image that could jumpstart her career, but would also devastate her most intimate friendship.

Lu Rile is a relentlessly focused young photographer struggling to make ends meet. Working three jobs, responsible for her aging father, and worrying that the crumbling warehouse she lives in is being sold to developers, she is at a point of desperation. One day, in the background of a self-portrait, Lu accidentally captures on film a boy falling past her window to his death. The photograph turns out to be startlingly gorgeous, the best work of art she’s ever made. It’s an image that could change her life…if she lets it.

But the decision to show the photograph is not easy. The boy is her neighbors’ son, and the tragedy brings all the building’s residents together. It especially unites Lu with his beautiful grieving mother, Kate. As the two forge an intense bond based on sympathy, loneliness, and budding attraction, Lu feels increasingly unsettled and guilty, torn between equally fierce desires: to use the photograph to advance her career, and to protect a woman she has come to love.

Set in early 90s Brooklyn on the brink of gentrification, Self-Portrait with Boy is a provocative commentary about the emotional dues that must be paid on the road to success, a powerful exploration of the complex terrain of female friendship, and a brilliant debut from novelist Rachel Lyon.

Visit Rachel Lyon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mandatory Separation"

New from Stanford University Press: Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine by Suzanne Schneider.

About the book, from the publisher:

Is religion a source of political stability and social continuity, or an agent of radical change? This question, so central to contemporary conversations about religion and extremism, has generated varied responses over the last century. Taking Jewish and Islamic education as its objects of inquiry, Mandatory Separation sheds light on the contours of this debate in Palestine during the formative period of British rule, detailing how colonial, Zionist, and Palestinian-Muslim leaders developed competing views of the form and function of religious education in an age of mass politics.

Drawing from archival records, school syllabi, textbooks, newspapers, and personal narratives, Suzanne Schneider argues that the British Mandatory government supported religious education as a supposed antidote to nationalist passions at the precise moment when the administrative, pedagogic, and curricular transformation of religious schooling rendered it a vital tool for Zionist and Palestinian leaders. This study of their policies and practices illuminates the tensions, similarities, and differences among these diverse educational and political philosophies, revealing the lasting significance of these debates for thinking about religion and political identity in the modern Middle East.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Which Way Tree"

New from Little, Brown and Company: The Which Way Tree by Elizabeth Crook.

About the book, from the publisher:

Early one morning in the remote hill country of Texas, a panther savagely attacks a family of homesteaders, mauling a young girl named Samantha and killing her mother, whose final act is to save her daughter’s life. Samantha and her half brother, Benjamin, survive, but she is left traumatized, her face horribly scarred.

Narrated in Benjamin’s beguilingly plainspoken voice, The Which Way Tree is the story of Samantha’s unshakeable resolve to stalk and kill the infamous panther, rumored across the Rio Grande to be a demon, and avenge her mother’s death. In their quest she and Benjamin, now orphaned, enlist a charismatic Tejano outlaw and a haunted, compassionate preacher with an aging but relentless tracking dog. As the members of this unlikely posse hunt the panther, they are in turn pursued by a hapless but sadistic Confederate soldier with troubled family ties to the preacher and a score to settle.

In the tradition of the great pursuit narratives, The Which Way Tree is a breathtaking saga of one steadfast girl’s revenge against an implacable and unknowable beast. Yet with the comedic undertones of Benjamin’s storytelling, it is also a timeless tale full of warmth and humor, and a testament to the enduring love that carries a sister and brother through a perilous adventure with all the dimensions of a legend.

Visit Elizabeth Crook's website.

The Page 69 Test: Monday, Monday.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia"

New from Belt Publishing: What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 2016 headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America’s “forgotten tribe” of white working class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. Following the election, demystifying Appalachia and locating the roots of its dysfunction quickly became a national industry, shoring up the success of J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy and the author’s rise to fame as the media’s favorite working-class whisperer with broad appeal to liberals and conservatives alike. Personal anecdotes that demonstrated the enduring failures of American progress spoken through the mouthpiece of colorful and bereaved mountain folk became its own genre of election writing – the “Trump Country” piece – and in its creation reduced the region’s rich and complex history to a series of character studies.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America’s recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking Appalachian stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to for Appalachians. The book offers a must-needed insider’s perspective on the region.

Visit Elizabeth Catte's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Who's in the Money?"

New from Edinburgh University Press: Who's in the Money?: The Great Depression Musicals and Hollywood's New Deal by Harvey G. Cohen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Harry and Jack Warner were among the most important advocates and fundraisers of President Franklin Roosevelt during his 1932 presidential campaign, supporting his New Deal legislation in successful Great Depression musicals like 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade. But while the Warner brothers posed as exemplars of the New Deal in real life and in their movies, they were attempting to reverse Roosevelt's policies within their studio and their industry.

Using newly unearthed primary sources, this groundbreaking book examines the bitter and little known struggle in Hollywood and Washington D.C. during 1933 to create a National Recovery Administration (NRA) code of practice for the motion picture industry. But through the manipulation of New Deal legislation, Harry and Jack Warner, along with other studio moguls, sought to curtail workers' rights and salaries instead of bolstering both sides of the labour/management divide as they were supposed to do under NRA regulations, attempting to serve the economic pain of the Depression as much as possible onto artists and craftsmen, not owners or management. With its tales of Hollywood stars and employees fighting to win a fair share of the proceeds of their labour, the creation of the NRA code makes for an intriguing story of financial survival, political intrigue and backstabbing during the worst of the Great Depression.

The Page 99 Test: Duke Ellington's America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fire Sermon"

New from Grove Press: Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro.

About the book, from the publisher:

Married twenty years to Thomas and living in Nashville with their two children, Maggie is drawn ineluctably into a passionate affair while still fiercely committed to her husband and family. What begins as a platonic intellectual and spiritual exchange between writer Maggie and poet James, gradually transforms into an emotional and erotically-charged bond that challenges Maggie’s sense of loyalty and morality, drawing her deeper into the darkness of desire.

Using an array of narrative techniques and written in spare, elegant prose, Jamie Quatro gives us a compelling account of one woman’s emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual yearnings—unveiling the impulses and contradictions that reside in us all. Fire Sermon is an unflinchingly honest and formally daring debut novel from a writer of enormous talent.

Visit Jamie Quatro's website.

--Marshal Zeringue