New Books Network

In his new book The Public House in Central Europe: Inns, Tavern, and Alehouses in Cracow during the Jagiellonian Dynasty (Lexington Books, 2024), Peter Dobek takes us into the daily life of the medieval tavern in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Cracow. This is the ‘Golden Age’ of Poland Lithuania and the crepuscule between the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. The taverns were the public space where different categories of people mixed: travelers, merchants, diplomats, clerics, prostitutes, gamblers, and rogues. This book a time machine: Dobek writes social history as attentive and detailed narrative. We learn about the economy of the petty entrepreneur, the special roles of Jews in medieval Poland, the gray areas where prostitution and gambling thrived. Dobek’s prose is lively, his research impressive, and his conclusions important.

Peter Dobek is a scholar of medieval Europe particularly medieval Poland with a focus on public houses (inns, taverns, and ale houses). He received his PhD from Western Michigan University in 2019. In addition to other publications, his book is the Public House in Central Europe.
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A journey into the power of conscious breathing for therapy and everyday life.

Breathing is at the center of our lives, yet we are only beginning to tap into its full potential as a tool for healing. Conscious breathing is a powerful mechanism for transforming our physiological, emotional, and brain states, and is the fastest way to cultivate integrated presence. However, its full capacity for facilitating healing, personal development, stronger relationships, self-actualization, and personal and collective love is vastly unrecognized and underutilized.

In Breathwork and Psychotherapy: Clinical Applications for Healing and Transformation (W. W. Norton, 2025), breathwork expert Jessica Dibb offers compelling reasons to integrate the power of breathwork with psychotherapy and other healing and wellness practices. Here readers will find inspiration for daily breathwork practice as well as the methods, case examples, and actionable advice needed to incorporate breathwork into therapeutic sessions. Seamlessly marrying ancient wisdom with contemporary science, this insightful guide is for clinicians, breathwork practitioners, and anyone interested in exploring the transformative power of breath.

For 20% off the purchase price of the book: Breathwork and Psychotherapy: Clinical Applications for Healing and Transformation by Jessica Dibb, for a 20% discount, in the U.S. click here, in the UK, Ireland, Europe, the Middle East, India, Pakistan and South Africa: Click here and use promo code: WN286

To learn more about the Universal Breathing Declaration — the project Jessica Dibb mentioned in our interview — please visit the Universal Breathing Declaration website. It was launched in March 2026 by Jessica Dibb, Dan Siegel, and Jack Kornfield.   Be part of co-creating a world where all can breathe safely, freely, joyously!

Jessica Dibb

Through life-long exploring of pathways for physical and psychological health and development, awakened consciousness, and living from love, Jessica Dibb’s work centers conscious breathing—synthesizing depth psychology, consciousness studies, science, individualized spirituality, and somatic, emotional, and cognitive energy and wholeness. Extensively trained in ballet and yoga, during biology and pre-med studies at UC Irvine, she had an epiphany: Breathing is a universal and unifying medicine in every situation, for everyone.

Jessica advocates rigorous training and ethical standards that support powerful, safe, multi-dimensional, nuanced Breathwork to access our deepest potential. She founded a 1200+ hour Breathwork and Psychospiritual Facilitation Program at Inspiration Consciousness School; is the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance founding co-director and ethics chair; and created the "Breath Immersion—From Science to Samadhi" conferences.

Jessica develops innovative processes for embodying psycho-spiritual wholeness using Breathwork with established and emergent wisdom teachings to cultivate presence, wisdom, and love throughout our lifespan—in relationship with all life and this breathing planet.

For more information about Jessica and her work, please visit her website here
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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Donna Vorreyer about her poetry collection, Unrivered (Sundress Publications, 2025).

Donna Vorreyer strikes gold with Unrivered, a stunning collection of poems that meditate on grief, regret, longing, self-love, and acceptance. Reeling from the loss of her parents, Vorreyer’s speaker is forced to grapple with her own mortality, and with the complicated feelings that come with aging. At times whispering softly in our ears, at times spitting venom with every word, Vorreyer charts the ways loss impacts the body and our perceptions of self, and how we are to keep on living. With a heroic sonnet crown woven through the book like the loose stitches in her grandmother's quilt, Vorreyer offers hope, courage, and gratitude in the face of our deepest fears. The result is a masterful and gripping story of loss and acceptance. Offering up rending, apocalyptic elegy, ironic detachment, or passionate, joyful celebration of life, Unrivered is bound to both take your breath away and give it a new form.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length poetry collections: To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), and Unrivered (2025), all from Sundress Publications. Recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, Baltimore Review, and Booth. Her visual art has been featured in North American Review, Waxwing, About Place, Penn Review, Ilanot Review, Double Back Review, Pithead Chapel, and other journals. Donna currently lives and creates in the western suburbs of Chicago and runs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
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Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the
University College London and a founder of the Global Informality
Project. Her research focuses on informal practices, and she has written
several Russia-focused books, including Russia’s Economy of Favours, How Russia Really Works and Can Russia Modernise. The Global Informality has also published 3 volumes of its Global Encyclopaedia of Informality. Alena is here today to talk about her new book Russian Pendulum: Paradoxes, Practices and Patterns (UCL Press, 2026), which has been shortlisted for the 2026 Pushkin House Book Prize.

Adam Quinn is a Glasgow-based researcher whose work focuses on
activism, social movements and state-society relations in the
Post-Soviet space. 

Alena’s new book: art, music, text in a new UCL Press book in open access:

Russian Pendulum: here

The accompanying music: Delphian Records classical album The System Made Me Do It composed by Benjamin Woodgates: here

And a brilliant review of the music: here

Plus, a nice mention in the BBC sounds for dark: here

Enjoy the podcast!
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In her recent publication, Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, scholar Ayala Fader tells the fascinating, often heart-wrenching stories of married ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women in twenty-first-century New York who lead “double lives” in order to protect those they love. Drawing on five years of fieldwork with those living double lives and the rabbis, life coaches, and religious therapists who minister to, advise, and sometimes excommunicate them, Fader investigates religious doubt and social change in the digital age. In following those living double lives, who range from the religiously observant but open-minded on one end to atheists on the other, Fader delves into universal quandaries of faith and skepticism, the ways digital media can change us, and family frictions that arise when a person radically transforms who they are and what they believe.

Join YIVO for a discussion of this recent publication featuring Fader in conversation with Josh Lambert, professor and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on September 22, 2022.
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