New Books Network

Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family, and Inequality in Post-Socialist China (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Susanne Yuk-Ping Choi examines transformations in intimate lives in post-socialist China through the experiences and resistance of LGBTQ+ people. 

Drawing on ten years of research conducted between 2015 and 2025, and one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, Dr. Choi traces the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative ideals, and shows how LGBTQ+ people build communities amid intensified state crackdowns, develop new forms of personhood that subvert collectivist frameworks, and renegotiate intergenerational contracts. They navigate s...

Sandwiched between the long period of French colonization, and the brief return to the French empire before the Americans enter the scene, the Spanish period of Louisiana's history is often ignored by historians. Yet, according to University of North Alabama historian Frances Kolb Turnbell, scholars of Vast Early America and the American West ignore this three decade period at their own peril. In Spanish Louisiana: Contest for Borderlands, 1763-1803 (LSU Press, 2024), Turnbell argues that the Spanish period of Louisiana's history is a prime example of historical contingency. The people - Black, white, Indigenous, and the many who straddled such...

The English Christmas carol has been sung in court and cloister, tavern and field since medieval times. But with the first Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880—and with a view to encouraging revellers into church—the humble carol became integral to the Christmas tradition. Carol concerts are attended all over the world, and the service at King’s College, Cambridge, has been broadcast since 1928 to millions of listeners.

In Christmas Carols: An English Enchantment (Yale University Press, 2026), singer and author John Potter guides us through the development of this unique tradition. Carols, originating as secular delight...

In this episode, host Richard Lucas sits down with Polish entrepreneur, author, and publisher Marcin Osman for an insightful conversation tracing his remarkable journey through entrepreneurship, publishing, and personal transformation.

Marcin shares how his entrepreneurial path began two decades ago as a broke student attending Toastmasters in Kraków. Through humble curiosity, networking, and cold outreach, he built his first marketing agency—landing major clients before facing the hard lessons of business failure. Undeterred, Marcin pivoted into self-publishing, pioneering a pre-sale model that grew OSMPower into a 5M PLN/year publishing powerhouse. Over the years, OSMPower published Pol...

Huda Fahmy's latest, Huda F Would Love You? (Dial Books, 2026) is a funny and tender finale to the Huda F series, Huda has a plan to find love—but she might need to find herself first! It’s the summer after Huda’s high school graduation, and love is in the air! Or it’s about to be, anyway. Because Huda has the ingredients for a perfect love story: a butt-kicking girl power squad of new friends, and a plan to woo all the aunties into setting her up with their eligible sons. But when she finds herself caught between...

Water, Carbon, Time: Exploring Peatlands in a Warming World was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2026. Water, Carbon, Time is the story of Jennifer’s personal discovery of an overlooked natural wonder: peatlands. These murky ecosystems formed of decay are both full of life and crucial to our planetary wellbeing: covering only about three percent of the earth's surface, peatlands store more carbon than all the world's forests combined. In Water, Carbon, Time, Jennifer de Mooy shares her personal discovery of these natural wonders in all their variety and understated beauty, bringing much-needed attention to the restorative possibilities of...

John Stephen's The Age of Fury (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2026) takes place in Gilded Age New York, a fierce seventeen year-old Irish girl joins forces with a notorious gangster to hunt down her sister's killer. Told from both perspectives, their search for justice pulls them from the city’s darkest corners to glittering ballrooms, where a secret can mean death, and love comes at a perilous price. Two unlikely allies must venture into dangerous places--perhaps into each other's arms--to solve a brutal crime. 

Caitlin 
Mary, my darling twin. I came on the instant of getting your...

In this special installment of the University of Notre Dame Press's Books for Better Understanding, Paul Scherz, the Our Lady of Guadalupe Professor of Theology with the University of Notre Dame, and Travis Pickell, Assistant Professor at George Fox University, get together to discuss their books, The Ethics of Precision Medicine: The Problems of Prevention in Healthcare, and Burdened Agency: Christian Theology and End-of-Life Ethics, both available from the University of Notre Dame Press.

You can purchase The Ethics of Precision Medicine here

You can purchase Burdened Agency here

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Edward Blum interviews John William Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023)

In early North America, carrying watercraft—usually canoes—and supplies across paths connecting one body of water to another was essential in the establishment of both Indigenous and European mobility in the continent’s interior. The Chicago portage, a network of overland canoe routes that connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, grew into a crossroads of interaction as Indigenous and European people vied for its control during early contact and colonization. John William Nelson charts the many...

Why was the Japanese Army so brutal before and during World War Two? This haunting question anchors a sweeping investigation into the moral universe of Imperial Japan’s soldiers, tracing their path from the twilight of the samurai age to the ashes of Manila in 1945.

Punishment: Behind Japanese Military Brutality (Hurst, 2026) by Professor Danny Orbach uncovers a world in which war was conceived not merely as combat, but also as justice. Officers and soldiers learned to navigate two rival visions of war: one restrained by the ‘foreign gaze’ of the Western world, the other rooted in older tradit...

In American history, few tragedies have been as consequential—and as enduringly misunderstood—as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. Long remembered as a turning point in the struggle for labor protections, Fire in the Heart of the City: The Triangle Shirtwaist Tragedy and the Origins of Modern Charity (NYU Press, 2026) shows how the fire also helped transform another cornerstone of modern American life: the rise of modern charity.

Set in early twentieth-century New York, the book tells the extraordinary story of what happened when a catastrophic fire in Greenwich Village threw Adolph Ochs, the ambitious new p...

Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Princeton UP, 2026) retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated Today, 80 percent of U.S. workers do service work, from delivering takeout to mopping floors to teaching. Each time we are handed a bag of groceries or a cup of coffee, call for a cab or have our homework graded, we confront both the enormity and the intimacy of the contemporary service sector. Do these jobs have anything in common? Who is doing...

Exploring how digital visual effects have changed the representations of the body and identity in action films. When Harrison Ford appeared digitally de-aged in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, audiences witnessed more than a technical feat; they saw how visual effects are reshaping what bodies can be on screen. In Action Bodies: VFX, Identity, and Embodiment in Blockbuster Cinema, Drew Ayers (Eastern Washington University) examines how the contemporary action genre redefines embodiment across human, superhuman, animal, and machine forms. Ayers argues that action films are a crucial site for understanding how popular media both reflect and shape...

At a time when artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and digital technologies increasingly shape our understanding of what it means to be human, Fuchs argues that we need to recover a richer conception of the human person. Rather than viewing ourselves as information-processing systems or collections of neural mechanisms, he develops a philosophical vision centred on embodiment, relationality, and lived experience. The result is a compelling defence of human agency, dignity, and freedom against contemporary forms of reductionism and transhumanism.

Today we'll be discussing In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology (Oxford UP, 2021). We...

Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty: Genres of Tradition in Muslim South Asia (U Notre Dame 2026) explores the rich vast textual archive of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanavi, a South Asian Muslim theologian and Sufi. Mian’s deep and careful reading of Thanavi’s diverse genres of texts, such as letters, and those composed by his disciples, such as hagiographies and councils, captures the complex colonial era in which Thanavi and his students lived, but more importantly highlights how Thanavi’s Sufi community inhabited realities counter to their modern context, namely those of ethical practices and matters of the soul and heart...

Wednesday, Oct. 7—Over in the blink of an eye, the best flash fiction lingers long after we finish reading it. The incandescent works collected in Library of America’s American Flash Fiction: An Anthology showcase the vitality of this literary form with a rich history and dazzling present. Join celebrated flash authors Lynne Tillman, Venita Blackburn, and Ben Loory, along with volume editor David L. Ulin, for a dive into these miniature masterpieces of deceptive depth and power.

Hosted by Max Rudin

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For as long as human societies have been telling stories, the patriarchy has felt threatened by women. In this book, Eleanor Johnson provides an engaging cultural history of a figure she calls the “monstrous bitch,” the notorious female who has haunted the patriarchal imagination for centuries, feared for her sexual promiscuity, her exercise of reproductive agency and control, and her outspoken way of contesting patriarchal power.

In a narrative brimming with insight, Johnson traces the origins of female monstrosity to the demoness Lamashtu of ancient Mesopotamia, showing how this infanticidal, hypersexual, loudmouthed monster appears in different guises thro...

On the podcast today I am joined by Gareth Breen, Assistant Professor in anthropology at University of Sussex. Gareth is joining me to talk about his new book, Sublime Sociality: An (Auto)Ethnographic Theory of Chinese Christianity, out now with LSE Press. 

Sublime Sociality follows the deeply influential, nameless religious movement formed by a transnational Sino-Taiwanese community of followers of Witness Li. The movement is now considered one of the first indigenous Chinese Christian groups of the twentieth century and the only one to become a global phenomenon in the twenty-first. 

In this book, anthropologist Ga...

Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and then a magazine devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Black and white writers, a rare feat in those days, and herself wrote articles instructing white Southerners on why they shouldn’t support segregation—Smith firmly believed racism hurt white Americans, too. 

In 19...

Lise Shapiro Sanders is the author of Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early 20c Britain, published in October 2026 by Bloomsbury Academic Press. 

Reading for Pleasure analyzes the early 20th-century British romance as a genre directed at young working women, including those employed in factories, shops and department stores, and the service industry. It explores a range of popular romances in the form of novels, films, and periodicals, and thinks about how these texts provided a form of affective pleasure and virtual sensory experience that indulged the sensuality of sexual desire and as we...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • In a groundbreaking global exploration of the ideas that drove the American Revolution, a prize-winning historian shines a light on the defiance of marginalized peoples all over the world.

In her powerful new history of the American Revolution, Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. The thirteen colonies that became the United States, she reminds us, were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. In her sparkling and original Freedom Roun...

On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia’s night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the announcement of his arrival appeared under the title “The Night-Hawk, No. 1” with a cryptic epigraph from Romeo and Juliet: “I’ll be a candleholder and look on.” Who and what was the Night Hawk? As Dr. Matthew Warner Osborn reveals in Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), this was the sobriquet of a mysterious columnist for the weekly Mechanics’ Free Press, the...

Who has the “right” to learn Mandarin Chinese? In Multiracial Mandarin: Asian Americans and Impossible Language (U Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. David Shuang Song examines how matters of race and privilege shape US Mandarin language education and who has access to it. Through a two-year ethnographic study of two Bay Area high schools where diasporic and heritage speakers learn Mandarin alongside Black and Latinx students, Song advances a sociological and educational–linguistic inquiry into how language interacts with our understanding of identity and equity.

Comparing classroom activities in two public schools, Dr. Song investigates teachers who seek to make Ma...

Dr Raluca Bianca Roman's book is an ethnography of the Finnish Kaale, Finland's national Roma community, and of the impact of Evangelical Christianity on their social and political lives. It is based on more than a decade of fieldwork and on archival research from the early twentieth century onwards. The book follows Kaale families as they handle the consequences of settlement, urbanisation and a turn towards the nuclear household, and as many convert to Pentecostalism. It moves from family homes and prayer groups in Helsinki to small towns in Eastern Finland, and on to Roma settlements in Western Romania...

How AI is rewiring our social fabric—and how we can better shape our future.
 
The age of AI is not what you think. Rather than ushering in a fourth Industrial Revolution, AI has become a crucial social infrastructure of everyday life. It's embedded in the tools, platforms, and systems that organize our most intimate lives and our interactions with the most fundamental institutions of society, from government agencies to banks and schools. In these linkages are embedded assumptions about who we are, what we can do, and where we belong.
 
In Predicted: How AI Is Restr...

Drawing on decades of experience in recovery advocacy, Keith Keller's new book, The Warm Hug: Substance Use and How to Fix the Failure of Treatment and Recovery in America (Infinite Recovery, 2026), takes a candid look at the challenges facing substance use treatment and recovery systems in America. More importantly, Keith offers practical insights and solutions aimed at improving outcomes for individuals, families, communities, and professionals alike. Recovery, Keith emphasizes, is a skill that anyone can learn.

The book will resonate with those directly affected by substance use disorder, but its message extends beyond recovery circles. The Warm...

In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, Professor Tyrell Haberkorn discusses her new book, Dictatorship on Trial: Coups and the Future of Justice in Thailand (Stanford UP, 2024). This book examines five court cases brought during the regime of the National Council for Peace and order, involving protests and human rights. It features alternative judgments by the “Court of the People” which are offered alongside critical discussions of the actual case outcomes. 

Tyrell Haberkorn is a prominent scholar of Thailand, with interests in state violence and dissident cultural politics from the end of absolute monarchy in 1932 to the presen...

Contrasts classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with Confucian "zoetology" ("the art of living"). In Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2025), Roger T. Ames uses comparative cultural hermeneutics as a method for contrasting classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with classical Chinese "zoetology" ("the art of living"), which is made explicit in the Yijingor Book of Changes. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in "being qua being" or "being per se" (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for...

In this episode, hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Farid Hafez to discuss his most recently published book Governing Islam in Austria and Germany: From Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford UP, 2026). Hafez’s recent work centres on the comparative analysis of the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the German rule in Tanzania, Togo and Cameroon, and in particular their respective treatment of Muslims in each case to then in turn shed light on the current governing of Muslimness in both. Farid Hafez is an assistant professor in International Relations at William and Mary, and also a...

The first full biography of the controversial and complex First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler--an unjustly scandalized New Yorker, the second wife to President John Tyler, and a savvy and consequential political figure in the age of the Civil War.

Myths, rumors, and gossip have long circulated around First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler. Commonly believed to be politically insignificant, most of our fascination with Tyler surrounds her reputation as a highly desired superficial flirt. This salacious mythos was based on her status in a politically influential New York family and the popular rumor that she posed for a...

First released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons revolutionized game design and interactive media by allowing players to create and perform their own fictional characters in a fantasy world as expansive as their imaginations would allow. That freedom, and the rules that governed it, weren’t a creative coincidence. In How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play (Duke University Press, 2026), Dr. Aaron Trammell excavates the game as an artifact of a burgeoning counterculture obsessed with individualism as well as quantification. Mapping the world onto a grid, building characters whose every trait is assigned a point value, and advancing the game’s narrat...

From the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth century, a wide network of English-speaking men, women, and children took up residence in the Ottoman Maghrebi regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. There they formed expatriate communities, engaged with the societies around them, and undertook their businesses, from trading to captivity redemption to international politics.

Moving beyond official diplomatic records and printed texts, Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nat Cutter delves into thousands of personal letters and financial records, where we find friendship, conflict, adoration, derision, manipulation, and scandal across cul...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Christine Fischer Guy about her novel, The Instrument Must Not Matter (Wolsak & Wynn, 2026). 

She sees the score for the Bach-Brahms in her mind’s eye, hears the indigo notes unfurl.

In this sweeping coming-of-age novel gifted young classical pianist Lila Rys finds herself in New York City studying under famed teacher George Vrubel. The move from Toronto to the American city is terrifying, but Lila is determined to bring music back to the Rys family, where the story of her grandmother refusing to play Soviet music afte...

Katrin Kogman-Appel is a professor of Medieval Jewish history with research focusing on book culture, readers, and reading practices in medieval Europe and beyond. In The Kennicott Bible: A Masterpiece of Jewish Book Art (Bodleian Library, 2023) she discusses the text of the 24 canonized books of the Bible that is paired with David Kimchi's grammatical treatise “Sefer Miklol”. Katrin discussed the Kennecott Bible, a medieval Hebrew manuscript that contains unique illustrations and Masoretic text annotations. She explained that the manuscript draws inspiration from various sources including the Severa Bible and playing cards from the Rhineland and Netherlands, with some illustrations depict...

Classical Indian poetics prized the skillful use of alaṅkāras, or “ornaments”—literary figures of speech. Across more than a millennium, Sanskrit writers developed and elaborated an account of literary embellishment that is perhaps the world’s most complex and long-standing theory of figuration. Yet it remains the least studied of India’s major classical systems of thought.

An Alaṅkāra Reader (Columbia University Press, 2026) is a groundbreaking panoramic overview of this tradition, presenting extensive and accessible translations of key works that span its history, from the sixth to eighteenth century CE. These texts vividly show how Indian...

Discover the untold story of why homeschooling moved from the margins to the mainstream of American education. In this groundbreaking study Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2026), historian Dixie Dillon Lane traces the rise of homeschooling in the United States, from the modern movement's beginnings in the 1950s as a fringe activity to its current status as a widely accepted educational choice. Through compelling nationwide data and vivid case studies from Los Angeles County, Lane uncovers a powerful truth: homeschooling taps into long-held American beliefs in local control and...

Racism and Antiracism in Divided Germany (Cornell UP, 2026) addresses how racism expresses itself and what it means to be antiracist by tracing the history of racism and antiracist activism in East, West, and unified Germany. As far-right extremism surges in Germany today, Germans from across the political spectrum are increasingly grappling with the presence of racism in a country that is still coming to terms with its Nazi past. However, these public discussions are not always historically informed, and racism in Germany is often dismissed as a fringe phenomenon rather than part of mainstream society

The contributions...

David N. Gellman interviews Jesse Wegman on The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon Books, 2026).

Jesse Wegman tells the story of James Wilson, a Founding Father whose bold vision shaped American democracy but whose legacy was lost to scandal.

As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He went on to write the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the mor...

The Bund's grand facades and the leafy streets of the former French Concession are usually read as monuments to Western enterprise in China. But those buildings were raised by Chinese labor, and the concessions that defined old Shanghai could not have run without the Chinese who served, traded, and lived inside them. In Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City (Yale University Press: 2026), Michael Dillon sets out to tell the city's story from the Chinese side.

Michael's new book follows the city from a small fishing town on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, th...

The podcast covers the book Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo (U Washington Press, 2025), which is about satirical speech traditons from Amdo region of Tibet and the role of zurza in Tibetan cultural production and modernity. Tune in to find out more about satire, languages, cultures of what's funny and why.

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