New Books Network

From author Justin C. Key comes The Hospital at the End of the World: A Novel (Harper, 2026), set in a near future where artificial
intelligence runs the world, involving a young medical student who must
unravel family secrets to uncover the truth of his father’s mysterious
death.

In a time not so far from our own, society is run
by a global AI system controlled by an all powerful corporation. The
Shepherd Organization oversees every medical school in the country save
one in New Orleans, the renegade Hippocrates which still insists on
human-led medicine. It is the last choice school for an ambitious young
New Yorker named Pok. But after his father—himself a physician—dies
under mysterious circumstance that seems connected to “the shepherds”
and their megalomaniacal young CEO, Pok finds himself on a quest for
answers that leads right to Hippocrates. Once enrolled, he stumbles upon
a further mystery: a strange illness is plaguing newcomers to New
Orleans who grew up under shepherd rule. What is causing this fatal
anomaly? And how does it relate to the mystery of Pok’s father’s death
and his own mysterious past?

Justin C. Key is a practicing psychiatrist and a speculative fiction writer. He is the author of the debut novel The Hospital at the End of the World and the story collection The World Wasn’t Ready for You. His stories have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Lightspeed, and on Tor.com. He received a BA in biology from Stanford University and completed his residency in psychiatry at UCLA. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.
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Rachel Orr is celebrating her nineteenth year at Prospect Agency, where she represents both authors and illustrators in projects ranging from board books through YA. She previously worked for eight rewarding years at HarperCollins Children’s Books. A native of Pittsburgh and a graduate of Kenyon College, she currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, with her husband and two children, where she enjoys dancing, running and reading, of course. In our interview, Rachel shares her journey in children's publishing and provides great tips for aspiring authors.
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Central to modern biology and the study of life is the concept of the
organism—roughly, a body with interconnected parts that make specific
contributions to the development and functioning of the whole. There
are competing organism concepts even today, but the 18th century was a
critical period in which thinkers gradually shed prior ideas of life in
terms of a body with a principle of spontaneous motion, a body as a mere
physical mechanism, or a body infused with vital spirits. In When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian approaches to the concept of organism (Routledge, 2026),
Philippe Huneman combines extensive scholarship in the history and
philosophy of biology with Kantian critical philosophy and metaphysics
to trace Kant’s contributions to the emerging organism concept. Huneman
discusses the Critique of the Power of Judgment and other
writings in which Kant developed a view of organisms as natural purposes
and in which part-whole reasoning by the faculty of judgment is a
condition of the possibility of thinking of organisms at all. Huneman,
who is director of research at the Institute of History and Philosophy
of Science and Technology at CNRS and University of Paris 1 –
Pantheon-Sorbonne, provides an account of Kant’s thinking that is
accessible yet promises to bring this neglected aspect of Kant into
dialogue with contemporary Kantian scholarship. 
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Curtis Dozier's The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate
(Yale University Press, 2026) explores how white nationalist thought
leaders use ancient Greece and Rome to claim historical precedent for
their violent and oppressive politics.It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist
movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans
from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website
incorporates an image of the Parthenon into its logo, and rioters wore
Spartan helmets in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
These juxtapositions may appear incongruous to people who associate the
ancient world with enlightened political ideals and sophisticated
philosophical inquiry. But, as Dozier points out in this
thought-provoking book, it’s hard to imagine a historical period better
suited to rhetorical use by white nationalists. Indeed, some of the most
widely admired voices from ancient literature and philosophy endorsed
ideas that modern white supremacists promote, and the social and
political realities of the ancient world provide models for political
systems that white supremacists would like to establish today.

Part
introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part
exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual
history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past,
this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know
much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this
knowledge with disturbing success.

Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at
Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized
website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Morteza Hajizadeh
is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
18th
and 19th Century British Literature.
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Walt Whitman’s outrage at American politics and politicians was surpassed only by his passionate faith in democracy’s future. Both his anger and his hope fire his visionary prose writings on democracy, gathered for the first time in a new Library of America paperback edited by acclaimed political commentator and literary critic David Bromwich.

Join Bromwich, Mark Edmundson (author of Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy) and Karen Karbiener (The Modern Scholar: Walt Whitman and the Birth of Modern American Poetry) for an exploration of our essential poet of democracy and his prophetic vision for the country that speaks directly to our present moment.
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