New Books Network

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, governments around the world have expelled, en masse, more than 30 million people. Yet despite its prevalence, mass expulsion remains an understudied phenomenon as scholarly attention has been directed toward the gravest atrocities—genocide and mass killing—or toward forced migration more broadly. Mass Expulsion: The Politics of Forced Population Remov...

In Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026), analysing the past two decades of literature on Holocaust memory and migration stories, Agnes Mueller engages with writers such as W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Edgar Hilsenrath, Benjamin Stein, Mirna Funk, Fred Wander, Barbara Honigmann, Julia Franck, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Olga Grjasnowa, and Kat K...

In 1984, Paul Simon was at a professional and personal crossroads. His new marriage was failing and his career was in danger of stalling. He was forty-two, navigating a digital age, searching for inspiration in a scene driven by music videos, synthesizers, and drum machines. Driving around that summer, a bootleg cassette of “township jive”—the street music of South Africa—kept him company. Lent to...

Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers (U Toronto Press, 2024) sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic portrait of Dom Romani communities living between Palestine and Jordan, zooming in on everyday life in working-class neighborhoods, and under conditions of perpetual war and instability...

American pop culture loves newsies. The children who bawled out headlines and sold newspapers on city streets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been depicted countless times in movies, Broadway shows, books, music, and more, but somehow it’s only ever the stories of newsboys that are told. Scholarly literature too has focused mostly on boy newsies. Yet for nearly as long as...

Democracy or Carbon Oligarchy?: Climate and Energy Politics between Crisis and Decarbonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) tackles a critical question. Why has the world struggled so much to coordinate policy to address climate change, despite political and scientific consensus? Despite landmark agreements and expanding knowledge, emissions have fallen unevenly and progress has repeatedly...

Alfie Marcus is ordinarily the host of On the Cusp Between Strategy and Ethics, where he interviews authors about the intersection of organizational strategy, corporate responsibility, and the changing role of business in society. Today, however, I’m in the host seat and Alfie is joining as the guest to discuss his own new book, Comeback: Can Great Companies Rise Again? from the Uni...

In Legal Weapons of the Wealthy: The Offshoring of Elite Conflict in Emerging Markets (Cornell University Press, 2026), Dr. Nikhil Kalyanpur examines a striking feature of today's global legal order: the use of foreign courts by elites to settle domestic disputes. On the surface, the "outsourcing" of disputes by elites from countries with fragile judiciaries looks like a search for fair treatment...

In this episode, Melissa Fuster and Rosi Song of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective introduce the journal’s latest issue, Fall 2026 (volume 26, issue 3), now available online. Melissa talks with Rosi about what goes into putting a Gastronomica issue together and the backstory of issue 26.3. Rosi shares the inspiration behind her editorial letter and the issue’s thematic focus on mi...

In the Anthropocene, a question has become increasingly urgent: What does it mean to be human? Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s conservation frontier, Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier (University of Arizona Press, 2025) invites us to recognize the centrality of the human condition in the face of an increasingly uncertain world and imagine future forms of coexist...

In the Anthropocene, a question has become increasingly urgent: What does it mean to be human? Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s conservation frontier, Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier (University of Arizona Press, 2025) invites us to recognize the centrality of the human condition in the face of an increasingly uncertain world and imagine future forms of coexist...

Baruch Fischhoff's Bounded Disciplines and Unbounded Problems: A Vision for Management Science (Oxford University Press, 2025), part of the Clarendon Lectures in Management series) tackles a central tension in academia that disciplines are organized around narrow, bounded methods and theories, while the real-world problems society faces such as climate change, public health, financial cr...

In this interview, Shaun Gallagher discusses The Self and its Disorders (Oxford University Press, 2024) A ground-breaking theory of the self as a pattern Interdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy of mind, phenomenology, cognitive psychology, psychiatry, and dynamical systems analysis Discusses the role of self-narrative in self-formation, its breakdown in various psychopathologies, and...

Race and Place: School Desegregation in Prince George's County, Maryland (Rutgers University Press, 2025) considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George's County, Maryland from 1945 through 1973. Organized around several successive policies that emerged in this tim...

We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound of natural disasters that wipe out communities in an instant. How can we survive the future on such a planet, amid intensifying climate change? This question is particularly poignant along the Ring of Fire, a tectonic belt in the Pacific region that routinely faces some of the most devastating disasters in the world. Based on ethno...

Truth Commissions and International Law: Jurisdiction, Representation, Authority (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines how truth commissions construct authoritative accounts of conflict, and how they account for the plurality of accounts across affected communities. Dr. Valeria Vázquez Guevara examines three of the earliest and most influential truth commissions: Argentina (1983–1984), Chile...

What do the people closest to power really think about the system they serve? That’s perhaps one of the most important questions one could ask about North Korea, still one of the world’s least understood countries.  Today, we’re joined by Jieun Baek, author of Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness (Yale UP, 2026). She...

Amid global dialogue on the nature of human enhancement, this book traces humanity's pursuit of self-transcendence and enhancement from ancient times to the present, as reflected in diverse traditions across the globe. Transhumanism and Divine Humanity in Global Traditions (Routledge, 2026) examines how the term "transhuman" can move beyond its scientific and technological origins b...

The idea of civility goes back to classical Rome and the ways in which citizens engaged one another within the republic. The term itself is often used in a number of different ways, reflecting expected behavior, particularly in public spaces, and as a mechanism to manage human interaction. But civility and the use of this idea often shape hierarchical relationships within society and within politi...

Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate? In Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice (Princeton UP, 2026), Jonathan Quong considers central issues in political philosophy through the lens of this single question. He explores and evaluates recent influential work on this topic and then proposes a novel approach of his own. The puzzle at the hea...

Stephen Lee Naish's Point Break: Movies Minute by Minute (Bloomsbury, 2026), in Bloomsbury's Timecodes Series, is a detailed, minute-by-minute critical exploration of Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 action film "Point Break". Moving sequentially through the film's two-hour runtime, the book blends formal analysis, cultural history and theory, action genre study, and personal reflection and interp...

Elisa Tamarkin, an English prof of high repute (Anglophilia and Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance) at UC Berkeley, joins RTB to discuss Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon. It is an extended reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War, set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in the nation’s city newspapers, and framed th...

Edward Blum interviews Holly White on her new book Constructing American Childhood: Age-Based Laws and the Illusion of Protection in the Early United States. As of 2025, in the United States an eleven-year-old child can be charged with a federal crime while in many states it’s illegal to leave a twelve-year-old home alone. Twenty-six states allow children younger than sixteen to marry while t...

I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Adelaide, my guest explores how the logic of history, defined around trivalent logic (the “maybes,” the “ifs,” the ont...

The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars (Princeton UP, 2023) is an essential handbook for writing fundable grants. This easy-to-use guide features writing samples, a glossary of important terms, answers common questions, and explains pitfalls to avoid. Dr. Betty Lai focuses on skills that are universal to all grant writers, not just specific skills for one type of grant or...