"The Ingredients of Happiness"

New from Severn House: The Ingredients of Happiness by Lucy Burdette.

About the book, from the publisher:

Is there a recipe for the perfect life?

Thirty-two-year-old 'happiness guru' Dr Cooper Hunziker has it all - a dream job as assistant psychology professor at Yale University, a soon-to-be published self-help book, The Happiness Connection, and the perfect man. But there's a problem. Cooper isn't happy.

Of course, it doesn't help that she's facing cut-throat competition for her tenure at Yale, an accusation of plagiarism that could cost her everything, or that her new book has irritated the department chairman, who assigns her to co-lead a happiness group at the New Haven Library.

As her friendship with the other women in the group flourishes, Cooper finds herself questioning her choices. Forced to face a life-changing betrayal and her own traumatic past, can she navigate a path to happiness with the help of a gargoyle's wisdom?

Visit Lucy Burdette's website, Twitter perch, and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: An Appetite For Murder.

Writers Read: Lucy Burdette (January 2012).

The Page 69 Test: Death in Four Courses.

The Page 69 Test: A Scone of Contention.

My Book, The Movie: Unsafe Haven.

The Page 69 Test: A Dish to Die for.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Coral Lives"

Coming soon from Princeton University Press: Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America by Michele Currie Navakas.

About the book, from the publisher:

A literary and cultural history of coral―as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor

Today, coral and the human-caused threats to coral reef ecosystems symbolize our ongoing planetary crisis. In the nineteenth century, coral represented something else; as a recurring motif in American literature and culture, it shaped popular ideas about human society and politics. In Coral Lives, Michele Currie Navakas tells the story of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a cherished personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including works by such writers as Sarah Josepha Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and George Washington Cable, Navakas shows how coral once helped Americans to recognize both the potential and the limits of interdependence―to imagine that their society could grow, like a coral reef, by sustaining rather than displacing others.

Navakas shows how coral became deeply entwined with the histories of slavery, wage labor, and women’s reproductive and domestic work. If coral seemed to some nineteenth-century American writers to be a metaphor for a truly just collective society, it also showed them, by analogy, that society can seem most robust precisely when it is in fact most unfree for the laborers sustaining it. Navakas’s trailblazing cultural history reveals that coral has long been conceptually indispensable to humans, and its loss is more than biological. Without it, we lose some of our most complex political imaginings, recognitions, reckonings, and longings.

Visit Michele Navakas's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"At the End of Every Day"

New from Atria Books: At the End of Every Day: A Novel by Arianna Reiche.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this haunting debut novel—perfect for fans of Iain Reid, Jeff VanderMeer, and Julia Armfield—a loyal employee at a collapsing theme park questions the recent death of a celebrity visitor, the arrival of strange new guests, her boyfriend’s erratic behavior, and ultimately her own sanity.

Delphi has spent years working at a vast and iconic theme park in California after fleeing childhood trauma in her rural hometown. But after the disturbing death of a beloved Hollywood starlet on the park grounds, Delphi is tasked with shuttering The Park for good.

Meanwhile, two siblings with ties to The Park exchange letters, trying to understand why people who work there have been disappearing. Before long, they learn that there’s a reason no one is meant to see behind The Park’s curtain.

What happens when The Park empties out? And what happens when Delphi, who seems remarkably at one with The Park, is finally forced to leave?

At once a novel about the uncanny valley, death cults, optical illusions, and the enduring power of fantasy, Reiche’s debut is a mind-bending teacup ride through an eerily familiar landscape, where the key to it all is what happens at the end of every day.

Visit Arianna Reiche's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Z Generation"

New from Hurst: Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia's Fascist Youth by Ian Garner.

About the book, from the publisher:

How did Vladimir Putin galvanize the Russian people to back his genocidal war in Ukraine and why are so many of them willing to embrace fascism? This vivid, on-the-ground narrative reveals how Russia's fascist generation came into being-and the dark future that awaits the country if that hold cannot be broken.

Wartime Russia is drowning in fascist symbols. Zealous patriots attack journalists, opposition activists, and anyone suspected of betraying the motherland. Russians are urged to join the cause by hordes of online trolls and sleek videos of angry young men bellowing patriotic slogans. State television terrifies viewers with trumped up tales of anti-Russian conspiracies and genocidal yearnings. Child soldiers proudly parade across Red Square. This is Russia in the 2020s: a land of performative rage and nationalist untruth, where play-acting, pretense and broken promises are a way of life. But in a world where pretense has become the norm, a terrifying, apocalyptic mindset is seizing the Russians of tomorrow.

As enrapturing as it is terrifying, Z Generation reveals how Russia ended up where it is today, and where its young people are headed: a fascist generation more zealous, violent and ideological than anything the country has seen before.

Visit Ian Garner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"History's Angel"

New from Bloomsbury: History's Angel by Anjum Hasan.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the Man Asian Literary Prize-longlisted author, the story of a middle-aged man in contemporary India discovering that neither his life nor his country are as stable as he thought.

Alif is a middle-aged, mild-mannered history teacher, living in contemporary Delhi, at a time when Muslims in India are seen either as hapless victims or live threats. Though his life's passion is the history he teaches, it's the present that presses down on him: his wife is set on a bigger house and a better car while trying to ace her MBA exams; his teenage son wants to quit school to get rich; his supercilious colleagues are suspicious of a Muslim teaching India's history; and his old friend Ganesh has just reconnected with a childhood sweetheart with whom Alif was always rather enamored himself.

And then the unthinkable happens. While Alif is leading a school field trip, a student goads him and, in a fit of anger, Alif twists his ear. His job suddenly on the line, Alif finds his life rapidly descending into chaos.

Meanwhile, his home city, too, darkens under the spreading shadow of violence. In this darkly funny, sharply observed and deeply moving novel, Anjum Hasan deftly and delicately explores the force and the consequences of remembering your people's history in an increasingly indifferent milieu.

Visit Anjum Hasan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Privatization and Its Discontents"

New from Cambridge University Press: Privatization and Its Discontents: Infrastructure, Law, and American Democracy by Matthew Titolo.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Privatization and Its Discontents, Matthew Titolo situates the contemporary debate over infrastructure in the long history of public–private governance in the United States. Titolo begins with Adam Smith's arguments about public works and explores debates over internal improvements in the early republic, moving to the twentieth-century regulatory state and public-interest liberalism that created vast infrastructure programs. While Americans have always agreed that creation and oversight of 'infrastructure' is a proper public function, Titolo demonstrates that public–private governance has been a highly contested practice throughout American history. Public goods are typically provided with both government and private actors involved, resulting in an ideological battle over the proper scope of the government sphere and its relationship to private interests. The course of that debate reveals that 'public' and 'private' have no inherent or natural content. These concepts are instead necessarily political and must be set through socially negotiated compromise.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Interpreter"

Coming September 19 from Harper Paperbacks: The Interpreter: A Novel by Brooke Robinson.

About the book, from the publisher:

With the taut psychological drama of The Silent Patient and the propulsive storytelling of The Club, a chilling debut thriller about a London-based interpreter with dark secrets—and the enemy determined to take her down.

Innocent or guilty: it all hinges on a single word...

Thanks to a nomadic childhood, Revelle Lee is fluent in ten languages, which she puts to use at crime scenes and in courtrooms across London. Being a court interpreter is a stressful job, one that makes her privy to the most personal and often dark details of others’ lives.

In the meantime, she’s close to adopting a six-year-old boy named Elliot from foster care. Revelle is determined to be the mother she never had, and to make up for a terrible mistake she made years ago. Though the sweet, loving little boy is learning to trust her, she’s begun receiving disturbing messages which she suspects are from his birth family.

When one of her cases involves a murder victim she knew slightly, Revelle fears she’s seeing a miscarriage of justice play out. Putting both the adoption and her career at risk, she deliberately mistranslates a Polish man’s alibi to put his accused friend behind bars, even though he insists he’s innocent.

Revelle thinks she’s gotten away with it free and clear. But someone seems to know what she’s done—and about her long-ago error and its terrible consequences. And they intend to destroy Revelle’s life, piece by piece.

Visit Brooke Robinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Style and Solitude"

New from The MIT Press: Style and Solitude: The History of an Architectural Problem by Mari Hvattum.

About the book, from the publisher:

How modern notions of architectural style were born—and the debates they sparked in nineteenth-century Germany.

The term style has fallen spectacularly out of fashion in architectural circles. Once a conceptual key to understanding architecture’s inner workings, today style seems to be associated with superficiality, formalism, and obsolete periodization. But how did style—once defined by German sociologist Georg Simmel as a place where one is “no longer alone”—in architecture actually work? How was it used and what did it mean? In Style and Solitude, Mari Hvattumseeks to understand the apparent death of style, returning to its birthplace in the late eighteenth century, and charting how it grew to influence modern architectural discourse and practice.

As Hvattum explains, German thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century offered competing ideas of what style was and how it should be applied in architecture. From Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s thoughtful eclecticism to King Maximilian II’s attempt to capture the zeitgeist in an architectural competition, style was at the center of fascinating experiments and furious disputes. Starting with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s invention of the period style and ending a century later with Gottfried Semper’s generative theory of style, Hvattum explores critical debates that are still ongoing today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Three Deaths of Willa Stannard"

New from Crooked Lane Books: The Three Deaths of Willa Stannard: A Thriller by Kate Robards.

About the book, from the publisher:

A missing child, a small town’s secrets, and a desperate killer set the stage for a darkly wrought debut novel that will haunt readers long after the last page. Perfect for fans of Julia Heaberlin and Chevy Stevens.

It’s not that they’ve been all that close in the past few years, but sisters Willa and Sawyer Stannard are bonded by the ups and downs of the life they’ve lived with their mercurial single mother. When Willa is found dead in her apartment from an apparent suicide, Sawyer just knows it’s not possible. A cryptic note from the acclaimed broadcast journalist leads police to rule out foul play. Shattered by grief—and obsessed by the idea that her sister’s death was not a suicide—Sawyer plunges into a search for the truth.

When Sawyer learns that Willa was writing an explosive true crime book about the decades-old disappearance of a toddler that rocked a small town hundreds of miles away, she’s even more convinced that Willa’s death is suspicious. Believing it is somehow connected to the research Willa was doing for the book, Sawyer begins to trace her sister’s steps, deep into a community she can’t begin to understand and to a truth that could destroy her as easily as it did Willa.

As she masterfully ratchets up the suspense, Robards never loosens her grip in a debut novel sure to keep readers guessing—and talking.

Visit Kate Robards's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Bureaucracy of Empathy"

Coming soon from Cornell University Press: The Bureaucracy of Empathy: Law, Vivisection, and Animal Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain by Shira Shmuely.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Bureaucracy of Empathy revolves around two central questions: What is pain? And how do we recognize, understand, and ameliorate the pain of nonhuman animals? Shira Shmuely investigates these ethical issues through a close and careful history of the origins, implementation, and enforcement of the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act of Parliament, which for the first time imposed legal restrictions on animal experimentation and mandated official supervision of procedures "calculated to give pain" to animal subjects.

Exploring how scientists, bureaucrats, and lawyers wrestled with the problem of animal pain and its perception, Shmuely traces in depth and detail how the Act was enforced, the medical establishment's initial resistance and then embrace of regulation, and the challenges from anti-vivisection advocates who deemed it insufficient protection against animal suffering. She shows how a "bureaucracy of empathy" emerged to support and administer the legislation, navigating incongruent interpretations of pain. This crucial moment in animal law and ethics continues to inform laws regulating the treatment of nonhuman animals in laboratories, farms, and homes around the worlds to the present.

Follow Shira Shmuely on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue