New Books Network

John chats with writer and journalist Simon Elegant about his third novel, a crime thriller set during the Hong Kong protests of 2019. City on Fire is published by Pegasus Crime, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The novel follows Inspector Killian Tong’s investigation of a brutal murder against a backdrop of political chaos, police tensions, and also personal conflict – Killian’s half-sis...

Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of history, for over a hundred years enslaved Black people used these canals, constructed for white plantation owners, to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida. In The Inner Passage: An Untol...

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Kazakhstan inherited the remnants of one of the world's most contaminated landscapes: the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known locally as the Polygon. Resigned to dispossession, residents have chosen to remain on the abandoned nuclear test site, despite the isolation and the radioactive environment, rather than face marginalization or the rigors of a neol...

Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Returns to Marrakesh, co-translated by Claudia Esposito and Laura Reeck and published by Syracuse University Press in 2026, chronicles Meddeb’s successive visits to the Red City from 1968 through the 1990s, tracing both his personal journey and Marrakesh’s transformation across three pivotal decades. Through his distinctive blend of poetic prose and attentive observation,...

The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Katie Barclay tells the surprising history of our most intimate gesture: the kiss. Richly illustrated, it explores a millennium of kisses, asking how and why the kiss has retained its power over the centuries, and what it might mean today. From the furtive kisses of fated lovers Heloise and Abelard to The Godfather’s ‘kiss of d...

Outsmarting Cancer: Risk Reduction and the Power of Prevention (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) reframes one of the most pressing medical challenges of our time: how to prevent cancer. In this timely and accessible book, physician and medical researcher Adam Barsouk, MD, presents a sweeping examination of cancer's true origins-biological, environmental, dietary, infectious, industrial...

Bring the breadth of Jewish history and civilization into your classroom with ready-to-use teaching modules curated by experts. The Posen Library is an educational resource grounded in primary sources and made broadly accessible through the creation and curation of engaging contextual material. Its goal is to highlight the varieties of Jewish culture and civilization across time and space for Engl...

Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labor, manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar economy. Their efforts woul...

As part and parcel of China’s compressed modernization, processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have been transforming rural Chinese people’s lives in unprecedented ways. This has led to different, often adverse outcomes for the affected populations – China’s “landless peasants” - as well as to the construction of divergent narratives abou...

In the mid-1930s a group of New York Yiddishist intellectuals established the Central Jewish Library and Press Archive, whose collections became the nucleus of the YIVO Library when the Institute relocated from Vilna to New York in 1940. Over the succeeding decades, the Library grew by leaps and bounds, thanks to the dedication of its librarians and supporters. It emerged as a “collection of colle...

The Ancient Israelite World (Routledge, 2024) presents a collection of studies by international experts on various aspects of ancient Israel’s society, economy, religion, language, culture, and history, synthesizing archaeological remains and integrating them with discussions of ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts. Driven by theoretically and methodologically informed discussions of...

In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Mikhail Pelevin about his book Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times (Iran and the Caucasus Monographs, vol. 5, Brill, 2025). Love, Honour and God is a survey of three centuries of Pashto literary and educational writing, from roughly 1530 to 1830, the period Pelevin identifies as classical in the history of Pashto letters. M...

Parallel Journeys: Eurasian History through Travelers’ Eyes (Cambria Press, 2026) is a comparative history of Eurasia told through travel writing and cross-cultural encounters. In this anthology, Anthony Barbieri pairs accounts from twenty-eight travelers across different historical periods, placing side-by-side travelers looking or going East with those looking or going West. Spann...

The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, sports scholars, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire.  In The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press, 2026)...

In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Nabi Sahak about his book, Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics revisits one of the most contested borders in the modern world. The roughly 2,640-kilometre line drawn in 1893 by Mortimer Durand and Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, which today divides Pashtun...

How the nuclear guardrails were dismantled. What arms control actually did (risk management, predictability, geography), how it unravelled from the 2000s onward, and why its collapse matters more now as we see a resurgence of strategic instability and armed conflict. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What does it take to turn a self-published book into a traditional publishing deal? Science writer Siri Carpenter — executive director of The Open Notebook and author of The Craft of Science Writing — joins host Sarah Russo on The Publishing Playbook to break down her path from self-publishing to an expanded second edition with University of Chicago Press. Siri shares how she landed an a...

Today I’m speaking with neuroscientist Stave Ramirez about bullshit and memory. Steve is an associate professor at Boston University, where he runs a lab dedicated to uncovering the mysteries of memory. How memory works, and importantly, how it doesn’t, are crucial questions for understanding everything from the validity of eyewitness testimony to understanding how people overcome traumatic experi...

How Manhattan's Koreatown functions as a new ethnic enclave In the past decade, Korean entertainment has gained global recognition, with Korean movies and TV shows winning Oscars and Emmys, and K-Pop groups becoming wildly popular. In Manhattan, Koreatown has become a popular destination for both locals and tourists, drawing them in with its bars, restaurants, and day spas. In Koreatown, NYC:...

How do authoritarian regimes silence critics across borders? And what are the repressive tools and strategies that authoritarian regimes use transnationally? In this episode we are joined by Arild Engelsen Ruud, Mubashar Hasan and Karin Zackari to discuss the role of digital surveillance, emotional blackmail, enforced family isolation, psychological harassment, and the imprisonment of relatives on...

In Oklahoma, one out of every six residents is poor. One in five children lives in poverty and faces food insecurity. In Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity (U Oklahoma Press, 2026), native son and sociologist Robert Lee Maril follows in the tradition of the national bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Evicted to illuminate the lived experience of...

The Mahabharata, Volume 8 (U Chicago Press, 2026) is a translation of the twelfth book of The Mahābhārata, an epic tale of history and kingship, reinforced with legends, romances, and metaphysical, theological, and ethical teachings written in Sanskrit 1700 or more years ago. The Book of Peace is focused particularly on the ways people can escape the cycle of rebirth and realize sub...

Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman has a new book out that focuses on the reality of women running for president in the United States, and the fictional representations of this idea that we have seen over the past hundred years. The Fictional Female Presidency in Film, Television, and Literature: Representations from 1932 to 2024 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) takes up a number of different an...

Restoring the Ancient Religion: The Theurgic Orthopraxy of Iamblichus (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026) reconsiders Iamblichus’ Response to Porphyry, Late Antiquity’s seminal work on theurgy, which is often referred to as De Mysteriis. Was this text intended to be more than just a defense of ritualism or a philosophical crossing of metaphysical wits between Porphyry and Iamblichus? Th...

Michael Brand is a CX strategist and trainer, based in Switzerland, who has been named a Thinkers 360 Top 50 Global Thought Leader on Customer Loyalty. Dr. Vincent Covello directs the Center for Risk Communications, and is a nationally and internationally recognized trainer, researcher, consultant, and expert in emergency, crisis, risk, and change communications. Deanna Leonard is a futurist, exec...