New Books Network

Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when the...

In the bustling market towns and growing cities of medieval England between 1200 and 1600, public works were the lifelines of urban society. In Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. Roberta J. Magnusson offers the first comprehensive study of how medieval towns built, financed, and sustained their defenses, bridges, stre...

In Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri: The Rise and Fall of Manufacturing in America’s Hometown, 1890–1970 (LSU Press, 2026), Dr. Gregg Andrews examines the history of factory laborers in a celebrated Mississippi River town. In the late 1890s, shoe manufacturing transformed Mark Twain’s boyhood home from a steamboat village to a factory town. By the mid-1920s, the St. Louis–based International Sho...

In this episode, host Pierce Salguero sits down with Linda C. Ceriello, a scholar of mysticism and popular culture from Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Linda is one of the foremost scholars of metamodernism, with particular focus on contemporary spirituality and mystical experiences. She talks with us about what this concept of metamodernism means, and how it can open up new kinds of more ca...

In BDSM Practices in Poland: Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), cultural anthropologist and cultural studies scholar Jay Szpilka analyzes the way that BDSM is practiced in contemporary Poland. Based on extensive field research, she asks what social, cultural, and political conditions are necessary for BDSM to be possible to practice in the...

Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies (University of South Carolina Press, 2026) counters romantic portrayals of Gullah-Geechee culture as a static, geographically isolated remnant of the past. Across eight interdisciplinary essays, the book’s contributors trace an arc, described in time and space, from pre-Middle Passage Africa through the Caribbean and coast...

Minimalist Music (Bloomsbury, 2026) looks critically into the music's past, shows how the genre thrives across styles, and points the way toward minimalism's ongoing future. Minimalism as a genre is best defined not by any style or flavor but by its means. Certain rhythms and chords in other music may identify things like jazz or bossa nova or reggae; take those same elements and put them through...

Today’s guest, Krzysztof Rowiński, is the author of Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film (Routledge, 2026). This book focuses on the concept of non- redemptive failure, a type of failure that is not part of a larger narrative of success or narrative redemption, with attention to how the concept functions between literature, critical theory, and other fields....

In the three decades since the rise of the global internet, digitalization has transformed how media are made, circulated, and consumed, reshaping culture on a planetary scale. Yet the story of global media is not one of seamless connection or cultural homogenization. Planet Digital: A Global Media Cultures Reader (NYU Press, 2026) challenges the myth of a “global village,” revealing instead how...

Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the CUNY School of Public Health. We are discussing his book, Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since the 1960s (Columbia University Press, 2026). In March 2020, during one of the first major US outbreaks of Covid, New York became an epicenter of the spread. New York's con...

In an ancient kingdom, a princess takes inspiration from a visiting young woman to challenge her father's views and reach for leadership-and then discovers her muse is a man. The goddess mother of Greek mythology's most famous warrior, Achilles, will do anything to prevent her son's fated early death. In a desperate move, she hides Achilles, against his will, on an island-disguised in a girl's bo...

Dan Rood’s In the Shadow of the Great House (W.W. Norton & Co., 2026) is one of the first contemporary books to focus on the primary engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country: the plantation. The plantation was invented on the small Atlantic island of São Tomé in the 1500s, and the island also became the site, soon enough, of the first slave revolt. The brutal technology was then per...

Winston Churchill was born in a palace and was given a funeral worthy of a king. His family had enjoyed an intimate association with the British monarchy stretching back centuries. As King Edward VIII said of him, 'I have never met anyone of royal blood who exemplified in such high degree the ideal of the 'good king.' Churchill and the Crown (Oxford University Press, 2026) tells the story of Chur...

The history of Jews in the United States is often told as if they immigrated, gained citizenship, and almost immediately achieved full legal rights. Yet this story fundamentally misses how citizenship rights worked for Jews and countless others who arrived on American shores. In Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship, Lila Corwin Berman draws on case law, statutes, and d...

Exemplarity and Allusion in Macrobius' Saturnalia (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new framework for interpreting interactions with classical source material in Macrobius’ Saturnalia. It argues that the Saturnalia, an educational dialogue from the fifth century ce, does not view its Greco-Roman models as hegemonic sources of authority but engages with these texts in dynamic and critical ways. In particu...

Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into deb...

Pierce Salguero joins us to discuss his new co-edited volume, Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice. While modern mindfulness frames meditation purely as a wellness tool, the Buddhist tradition has long recognized its inherent psychological and physical risks. We explore multi-tradition historical texts, the anatomy of practice crises, and the ethical responsibility...

Who gets to be a creative worker? In Blame the Intern: On (Not) Breaking Into the Creative Economy, (Princeton University Press, 2026) Alexandre Frenette, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, examines the relationship between work and education in the difficult moment of the early career transition from university to industry. Drawing on a detailed case study of the music...

What was it like to live in a city experiencing occupation by a foreign army? What did it mean when a family had to quarter an officer in their home? More specifically, how did military occupation affect the women and men who lived in those cities, and alter the gender system? Lauren Duval’s The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omo...

The violence that spread across Harlem on the night of March 19, 1935 was the first large-scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation’s leading Black neighborhood. However, as many observers pointed out, the events were “not a race riot” of the kind that had marked the decades after the Civil War. Racial violence took a new form in 1935....

Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, Rao and Greve analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions, that is as stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Drawing...

Molly Crabapple joins Michael Stauch to discuss the history of the Jewish Labor Bund, the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (Random House, 2026). Once the most influential Jewish political force in Eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagin...

A new paradigm that honors the wisdom and wholeness of neurodivergent clients. Focusing on autism and what is medically known as ADHD, neurodivergent author Nyck Walsh takes readers on an anti-oppressive, intersectional journey into a new standard of care for neurodivergent clients and their therapists. Whether new to or well-versed in the neurodiversity paradigm, readers will learn how to best su...

A revealing look at the decline in formal employment in favor of hiring contractors, freelancers, temps, and marginal workers, who are excluded from traditional benefits and career ladders. Companies cannot exist without workers, but they are increasingly reluctant to have employees. Instead of providing the benefits and protections that have traditionally come with employee status, businesses are...

Annakeara Stinson's Nerve Damage: A Novel (Knopf, 2026) is a riotous revenge novel about a woman’s quest to escape her stalker ex-boyfriend—by stalking him herself. Clarice’s breakup with P.T. began the usual way—she discovered he was cheating. Then came the constant texts, the nonstop emails from burner accounts, countless phone calls from dozens of different numbers. He showed up outside her apa...