"Cover Story"

Coming soon from Montlake: Cover Story by Rachel Lacey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Rachel Lacey, author of Stars Collide, serves up a steamy tale of Hollywood fame and subterfuge about a glamorous actress and the sexy bodyguard posing as her girlfriend.

Natalie Keane is one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies, but she’s paid a steep price for her fame. After she was stalked eight years ago, the ensuing media frenzy almost broke her. So when a new threat arises, Natalie agrees to extra security, but she wants to keep it under wraps. The last thing she needs is another tabloid spectacle, especially during awards season.

Taylor Vaughn has made a career as a bodyguard to the stars, but an injury has kept her sidelined for the past three months, jeopardizing her future in the job she loves. When an opportunity arises to work for Natalie Keane, Taylor jumps at the chance―even before knowing the details of the assignment.

From the moment they meet, Natalie knows this could work: Taylor, the bodyguard, masquerading as her girlfriend. The perfect cover story. But as circumstances push the two women closer, the lines between fantasy and reality begin to blur.

Visit Rachel Lacey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"When Detroit Played the Numbers"

New from Wayne State University Press: When Detroit Played the Numbers: Gambling's History and Cultural Impact on the Motor City by Felicia B. George.

About the book, from the publisher:

A testament to the tenacious spirit embodied in Detroit culture and history, this account reveals how numbers gambling, initially an illegal enterprise, became a community resource and institution of solidarity for Black communities through times of racial disenfranchisement and labor instability. Author Felicia B. George sheds light on the lives of Detroit's numbers operators―many self-made entrepreneurs who overcame poverty and navigated the pitfalls of racism and capitalism by both legal and illegal means. Illegal lottery operators and their families and employees were often exposed to precarity and other adverse conditions, and they profited from their neighbors' hope to make it through another day. Despite scandal and exploitation, these operators and their families also became important members of the community, providing steady employment and financial support for local businesses. This book provides a glimpse into the rich culture and history of Detroit's Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods, linking the growing gambling scene there with key characters and moments in local history, including Joe Louis's rise to fame and the recall of a mayor backed by the Ku Klux Klan. In succinct and engrossing chapters, George explores issues of community, race, politics, and the scandals that sprang up along the way, discovering how "playing the numbers" grew from a state-proclaimed crime to an encouraged legal activity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Good Deed"

Coming soon from Red Hen Press: The Good Deed by Helen Benedict.

About the book, from the publisher:

Set in 2018 against the ironic backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful, Homeric island of Samos in Greece, The Good Deed follows the stories of five women: Amina, who is nineteen and has just been released from one of Bashar al-Assad's secret and torture-ridden prisons in Syria; Leila, a Syrian widow with two little sons, who has lost her daughter and granddaughter to smugglers on a Turkish beach; Nafisa, who survived civil war and gang rape in Sudan only to see her entire family murdered, save for one daughter; Farah, Leila's lost daughter; and finally, an American named Hilma, who came from New York to Samos to escape her own dark secret, only to become entangled in conflict with the very people she wishes to help.

Drawing from four years of interviews with refugees on Samos, along with twelve previous years of work on the Iraq War, Benedict has written The Good Deed as a series of lyrical, intensely felt alternating voices, following these women’s everyday lives in the camp, as well each of their backstories—stories of families, love, secrets, violence, war, and flight. When Hilma, the American, unwittingly does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.

In essence, The Good Deed is about the struggle never to lose hope, even in the face of war and the world’s hostility to refugees; the complexities that arise out of trying to help others; the healing power of friendship; and the everlasting bonds between mothers and children.

Learn more about Helen Benedict and her work at her official website.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War"

New from McGill-Queens University Press: Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline by Matthieu Grandpierron.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why do great powers go to war? Why are non-violent, diplomatic options not prioritized? Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War argues that world leaders react to status decline by going to war, guided by a nostalgic, virile understanding of what it means to be powerful. This nostalgic virility – a system of subjective beliefs about power, bravery, strength, morality, and health – acts as a filter through which leaders articulate glorified interpretations of history and assess their power and their country’s status on the international stage. In this rigorous study of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Matthieu Grandpierron tests the theory of nostalgic virility against the two more common theoretical frameworks of realism and the diversionary theory of war. Consulting thousands of newly declassified government documents at the highest levels of decision making, Grandpierron examines three specific cases – the early years of the Indochina War (1945–47), the British reconquest of the Falklands in 1982, and the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 – convincingly contending that status-seeking behaviour and nostalgic virility are more relevant in explaining why a leader chooses war and conflict over non-violent, diplomatic options than the dominant frameworks. Looking to the recent past, Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War considers how this new model can be applied to current conflicts – from the Russian war in Ukraine to Chinese actions in the South China Sea – and provides surprising ways of thinking about the relationship between power, decision makers, and causes of war.

--Marshal Zeringue

"These Bodies Between Us"

New from Delacorte Press: These Bodies Between Us by Sarah Van Name.

About the book, from the publisher:

A wistful coming-of-age story with a haunting twist about four friends who spend their summer learning to become invisible—but disappearing comes at a cost.

Four girls. Four girls skating home, both sides of the road, fearless. Four girls at the mouth of an infinite ocean, sugared and salted with sand and seawater, the tide licking their sunburned feet.

This summer, they’re going to disappear.

For seventeen-year-old Callie and her best friends Talia and Cleo, every summer in their small North Carolina beach town is as steady as the tides. But this year, Cleo has invited enigmatic new girl Polly to join them, creating waves in their familiar friendship. And Cleo has an idea, gleaned from private YouTube videos and hidden message boards: they’re going to learn how to make themselves invisible.

Callie thinks it’s a ridiculous, impossible plan. But the other girls are intoxicated by the thought of disappearing, even temporarily—from bad boyfriends, from overbearing families, from the confusing, uncomfortable reality of having a body altogether. And, miraculously, it works.

Yet as the girls revel in their reckless new freedom, they realize it’s getting harder to come back to themselves… and do they even want to?

Visit Sarah Van Name's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Misrecognitions"

New from Cornell University Press: Misrecognitions: Plotting Capital in the Victorian Novel by Ben Parker.

About the book, from the publisher:

Misrecognitions mounts a vigorous defense of the labyrinthine plotting of Victorian novels, notorious for their implausible concluding revelations and coincidences. Critics have long decried Victorian recognition scenes—the reunions and retroactive discoveries of identity that too conveniently bring the story to a close—as regrettable contrivances. Ben Parker counters this view by showing how these recognition scenes offer a critique of the social and economic misrecognitions at work in nineteenth-century capitalism.

Through a meticulous analysis of novels by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Misrecognitions tracks how the Victorian novel translates the financialized abstractions of capital into dramas of buried secrets and disguised relations. Drawing on Karl Marx's account of commodity fetishism and reification, Parker contends that, by configuring capital as an enigma to be unveiled, Victorian recognition scenes dramatize the inversions of agency and temporality that are repressed in capitalist production. In plotting capital as an agent of opacity and misdirection, Victorian novels and their characteristic dialectic of illusion and illumination reveal the plot hole in capitalism itself.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mother Doll"

New from The Overlook Press: Mother Doll: A Novel by Katya Apekina.

About the book, from the publisher:

Prize-winning author Katya Apekina’s Mother Doll is a sharp and visceral nesting doll of a novel, about four generations of mothers and daughters and the inherited trauma cast by Russian history.

Zhenia is adrift in Los Angeles, pregnant with a baby her husband doesn’t want, while her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world is dying on the opposite coast. She’s deeply disconnected from herself and her desires when she gets a strange call from Paul, a psychic medium who usually specializes in channeling dead pets, with a message from the other side. Zhenia’s great-grandmother Irina, a Russian Revolutionary, has approached him from a cloud of ancestral grief, desperate to tell her story and receive absolution from Zhenia.

As Irina begins her confession with the help of a purgatorial chorus of grieving Russian ghosts, Zhenia awakens to aspects of herself she hadn’t been willing to confront. But does either woman have what the other needs to understand their predicament? Or will Irina be stuck in limbo, with Zhenia plagued by ancestral trauma, and her children after her?

Ferociously funny and deeply moving, Mother Doll forces us to look at how painful secrets stamp themselves from one generation to the next. Katya Apekina’s second novel is a family epic and a meditation on motherhood, immigration, identity, and war.

Visit Katya Apekina's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Shopping All the Way to the Woods"

Coming soon from Yale University Press: Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America by Rachel S. Gross.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping

No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild spaces supposedly untouched by capitalism first requires shopping. With consumers spending billions of dollars on clothing and equipment each year as they seek out nature, the American outdoor sector grew over the past 150 years from a small collection of outfitters to an industry contributing more than 2 percent of the nation’s economic output.

Rachel S. Gross argues that this success was predicated not just on creating functional equipment but also on selling an authentic, anticommercial outdoor identity. In other words, shopping for the woods was also about being—or becoming—the right kind of person. Demonstrating that outdoor culture is commercial culture, Gross examines Americans’ journey toward outdoor expertise by tracing the development of the nascent outdoor goods industry, the influence of World War II on its growth, and the boom years of outdoor businesses.

Visit Rachel S. Gross's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Swan's Nest"

New from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: The Swan's Nest: A Novel by Laura McNeal.

About the book, from the publisher:

A tender and engrossing historical novel about the unlikely love affair between two great 19th-century poets, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett.

On a bleak January day in 1845, a poet who had been confined to her room for four years by recurrent illness received a letter from a writer she secretly idolized but had never seen. “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,” Robert Browning wrote, “and I love you too.”

Elizabeth Barrett was ecstatic. She was famous for her poetry but completely cut off from the kind of international travel that Browning used to fuel his obscure, unsuccessful, innovative poems, one of which was written from a murderer’s point of view. They began an affectionate correspondence, but Elizabeth kept delaying a visit. What would happen when he saw her in person? What was Robert really like? Could she persuade her father and brothers that he was honorable, even though she had never met his family? And what would happen if she gave in to Robert’s wild proposal that they go to Italy and see if the sun could cure her?

McNeal brilliantly tells the story of how Robert and Elizabeth fell in love with each other’s words and shocked her conservative, close-knit family and the literary world. Sensitively and lyrically written, as rich as the lovers' own poetry, The Swan's Nest will sweep up readers in the triumphant story of two people forced to choose between a safe, stable life and the love they felt for each other.

Visit Laura McNeal's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Laura McNeal & Link.

The Page 69 Test: The Incident on the Bridge.

Writers Read: Laura McNeal (May 2016).

My Book, The Movie: The Incident on the Bridge.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Fear"

New from Vintage: The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia by Arthur Goldwag.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, a probing exploration of the bizarre and dangerous conspiracies that have roiled America over the past decade and captured the minds of so many Americans

Some of the conspiracy theories now gripping American politics contend that Joe Biden was executed and replaced by a clone and that John F. Kennedy Jr., faked his death and will one day return to slay Trump’s enemies. But who is susceptible to them, and what makes them so politically potent?

Investigating the historical roots of our peculiar brand of political paranoia, Arthur Goldwag helps us make sense of the senseless and, in so doing, uncovers three uncomfortable truths: that it is older than Trumpism and will outlast it; that theocratic authoritarianism is as hardwired in our American heritage as the principles of the Enlightenment; and that the fear that our system is “rigged” is not altogether unfounded. A probing, surprising, and critical examination of America’s paranoid style, The Politics of Fear sheds new light on the age-old question: What exactly are we so afraid of?

Visit Arthur Goldwag's website.

--Marshal Zeringue