New Books Network

From the bestselling author of literary sensation The Art of Fielding comes an urgent, deeply felt story of friendship, art, love, and grief, following two young women on the brink of irrevocable change.
Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief—The Brightness follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way out of sleepy, Midwestern Westish College and into a larger world that will upend their connection and everything they thought they understood about their own place within it.
At 27, Pella’s life looks settled: she’s a recent college grad, engaged to Mike, her longtime boyfriend, and helping her friend Owen pull off his own destination wedding on Block Island. But over that wild wedding weekend, Pella’s past and present collide spectacularly, blowing up her plans and sending her spiraling toward an unplanned future in New York City. Meanwhile, back at Westish College, 21-year-old Irma’s involvement with a politically charged prank—one that has roiled both the campus and the world beyond—threatens to derail her brilliant future. As Irma and Pella cycle through possibilities and identities, both navigate the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.
In stunning scenes and spectacular characters—each drawn with an almost superhuman vividness and humanity—Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in.
Energetic, funny, and deeply human, this much-anticipated follow-up to The Art of Fielding confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and deep-seeing writers of our time.
Recommended books:
Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
Chad Harbach is the author of the bestselling novel The Art of Fielding, which has been translated into more than twenty languages, and a founder of n+1. He was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He lives in Northern California with his son Ansel, and their dog, Curtis.
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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A comprehensive study of the Mishnah that argues it manifests an implicit theory of what performing rituals accomplishes

Jews are known for having many ritual practices. Many of these come from the Bible, but Jewish ritual practice as we know it today is as much a product of the earliest rabbis who lived in the late-second and early-third centuries. These rabbis created the text known as the Mishnah, which collects, develops, and records in great detail rules about the proper way to carry out traditional rituals, what the text terms mitsvot. Naftali S. Cohn’s book Ritual: An Ancient Jewish Perspective (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026) is a comprehensive study of ritual in the Mishnah, focused especially on the fundamental questions of the nature of ritual, what ritual does or accomplishes, and what motivates people to do rituals, all according to the Mishnah’s authors.

Reading the text of the Mishnah closely and drawing widely from the analytic toolbox of ritual studies, Cohn argues that ritual, in the perspective of the Mishnah’s authors, has multiple effects. Performing mitsvot—and refraining from the mitsvot “not to do”—shapes individual bodies by choreographing a person’s interactions with the objects, spaces, times, and other bodies that form the environment in which they act. It shapes collective bodies by enabling social life and creating group identity, even as it establishes differences between people and social hierarchy. Doing mitsvot also activates cultural ideas, connecting the people of Israel to their God, their past, their place, and each other. Repeated ritual action, further, forges body habits and generates the powerful feelings of obligation and, at times, even joy and love, which move people to continue to carry out these rituals. Mitsvot, according to the Mishnah, have the power to shape Israeliteness, or Jewishness, in its every facet. By focusing so much attention on ritual behavior, Cohn shows how the Mishnah can also be understood as a rumination on the fundamental nature of activity itself, of doing, being, moving, and engaging with the world.
New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review
Naftali Coen is chair of religions and cultures at Concordia University in Montreal
Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Have you ever had one of those days when you’ve had to explain to a leading Senator that the woman approaching his table is actually a Soviet spy hoping to bed and blackmail him? Well, Danny Grossman has.
As a twenty-six-year-old diplomat serving in Leningrad during the Cold War, Grossman’s phones were tapped, his home was bugged, his neighbor went out the window, his houseguest was attacked, his consulate was rocked by something called Chernobyl, his movements were tracked by an ambitious young KGB officer named Vladimir Putin—and that was only the beginning!
With autocracy rising around the world, Grossman has written a stunning meditation on the politics of oppression, the nature of dreamers, and the resilience of ordinary people under siege.
In Seeing Red: Spies, Lies and My So-Called Life as a Diplomat (2026), welcome to a very private peek behind the Iron Curtain.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The earliest written record of a political boundary in England dates from around 880, when King Alfred and Danish warlord Guthrum formalised a legal treaty to divide lands between them. How did Alfred and his descendants think about the borders of “English” territory? And what can these markers tell us about the English kingdom itself?
In Border Land: Frontiers of Early England (Yale UP, 2026), Professor Ryan Lavelle takes readers on a journey around the borders and edges of early medieval England. From an oak tree used as a marker by St Augustine, through Alfred’s famous treaty, to 1066 and beyond, Lavelle explores how land was divided and the ways in which boundaries were perceived. He argues that there was no one unified “England” until after the Norman Conquest—and in fact the lands were divided several times between the death of Æthelstan and the invasion of William the Conqueror. This is a fascinating account that reshapes our thinking about the origins of the “lands of the English.”
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Digging Beneath Bones, teri elam’s debut poetry collection, travels through memory, lineage, rupture, and return, illuminating the body that navigates this rite of passage—a Black, Southern woman of a certain age—moving through the comfort and discomfort of relationships, dysfunction, family, truth, and self. It explores memory as a concept, a need, and a loss. A portrait of caretakers, aunties, nieces, and Black boy joy, it highlights meaning through music, television, myth, prayer, and the small altars of daily life. Above all, it is a love letter to a mother from a daughter, looking through their kaleidoscope, shining light on the broken bits of colored glass that create an infinite number of shapes, holding their testimony and memory.
teri elam is a poet, essayist, and screenwriter. She has been a Two Sylvias Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize and Perugia Press finalist. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, The Future of Black: Afrofuturism and Black Superheroes, Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology, and Kwame Alexander’s This Is The Honey. Her poem “Counterpoint,” about legendary jewel thief Doris Payne, received honorable mention in december magazine’s Jeff Marks Memorial Prize contest. A Cave Canem and The Watering Hole Graduate Poetry Fellow, elam has film and poetry reviews and artist interviews in Birmingham Poetry Review, Heavy Feather Review, Callaloo, The Rumpus, Incluvie, and Rough Draft Atlanta. You can find teri at her website and on Instagram.
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