As we come to a close on this year, we’re excited to share a preview of some of our forthcoming 2024 books.
Inside the Mirror by Parul Kapur
Visionary twin sisters aspire to become artists in 1950s India in Parul Kapur’s Inside the Mirror (Nebraska, March), confronting a society hostile to women claiming their place in the world.
“Inside the Mirror is an extraordinary and moving story about twin sisters Jaya and Kamlesh as they struggle to pursue their passion and independence as women artists from a conservative society. Crafted with elegance and precision, and heartrending in its exploration of family drama, this novel is a beautiful and ambitious work of fiction.”—Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed
“With breathtaking lyricism and scorching insight, Kapur captures women in flux brilliantly. This profound book complicates the impact of colonialism and throbs with life. Inside the Mirror is an extraordinary novel.”—Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author of When Trying to Return Home
I Make Envy on Your Disco by Eric Schnall
The latest title in Zero Street Fiction, I Make Envy on Your Disco (Nebraska, May) is the story of a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor who, fed up with his life in New York, flies to Berlin for a gallery opening and finds a once-divided city brimming with excitement and possibility, yet facing an identity crisis of its own.
“This is a pendulum of a book, swinging between rolling in smoky Kreuzberg techno clubs and strolling the preppy lushness of New York’s Upper West Side, and never being quite sure when or where we’re going to slip off and land. A love letter to Berlin, to travel, and to saying yes to life.”—Alan Cumming
“Eric Schnall’s gorgeous debut is everything you want in a novel—perceptive and witty, melancholy and honest, kind and full of heart. Better yet, his story is populated with the most hilarious and singular characters you could hope to meet on the page.”—Jenny Jackson, New York Times best-selling author of Pineapple Street
Cast Out of Eden by Robert Aquinas McNally
Cast Out of Eden (Bison Books, May) explores John Muir’s role in the dispossession of Native Americans from U.S. wild lands and points a way toward reconciliation.
“To most Americans, John Muir is a folk hero, a writer and thinker who inspired the nation’s wilderness preservation movement. Robert McNally’s powerful new biography offers a darker vision, situating Muir’s life and work within America’s violent campaigns of Indigenous land dispossession and genocide. Cast Out of Eden is a vivid and absorbing read, one that will challenge everything you think you know about one of America’s most famous environmentalists.”—Megan Kate Nelson, author of The Three-Cornered War, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History
“Robert Aquinas McNally takes John Muir off his pedestal and paints him as a man of his times, blinded by his belief in white supremacy and his faith in manifest destiny. In doing so, McNally provides a helpful, needed context for our own era and its conflicts.”—Margaret Verble (Cherokee Nation), author of Maud’s Line, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
In Search of the Romanovs by Peter Sarandinaki
In Search of the Romanovs (Potomac Books, July) is a thrilling, true-life detective story about the search for the missing members of the Romanov royal family, murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, and one family’s involvement in the hundred-year-old forensic investigation into their deaths, clandestine burials, and the recovery and authentication of the remains.
“A remarkable family saga.”—Marilyn Swezey, historian and coeditor of The Romanovs Under House Arrest: From the Diary of a Palace Priest
“Cold case murders are difficult to solve—especially when they are a century old and exist in a closed and secretive society. . . . Peter Sarandinaki navigates the labyrinth of clues, nineteenth-century maps, murder confessions, DNA, and politics to make a brilliant addition to history.”—Brook Schaub, forensic investigator and member of the SEARCH Foundation
The Triumph of Life by Rabbi Irving Greenberg
The Triumph of Life (JPS, August) is Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s magnum opus—a narrative of the relationship between God and humanity expressed in the Jewish journey through modernity, the Holocaust, the creation of Israel, and the birth of Judaism’s next era.
“The Triumph of Life is a theological masterpiece: a deeply inspiring religious treatise and a revolutionary work of religious and ethical thought that will undoubtedly be studied in seminaries of all faiths, universities, and adult study groups for generations to come.”—Rabbi Avi Weiss, founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat
“With its combination of maturity and freshness, The Triumph of Life reminds one of such late-in-life masterpieces as Verdi’s Falstaff or Monet’s Water Lilies murals. Dazzling in its breadth and sweep, it skillfully integrates macroscopic views of Judaism and Jewish history with precise, often microscopic, details of that religion and history—thereby not only concretizing Rabbi Greenberg’s innovative vision but endowing those details with new meaning and significance.”—Lawrence Kaplan, translator of Halakhic Man and associate professor of Jewish studies at McGill University
Perfect Eloquence edited by Tom Hoffarth
Perfect Eloquence (Nebraska, May) is a tribute to Baseball Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully in the words of writers, broadcasters, and others who knew him and celebrate him not just for his sixty-seven years calling games for the Dodgers but for his values, actions, and contributions away from the game.
“Vin was more than a broadcaster, he was my friend.”—Sandy Koufax, Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher
“With his mellifluous voice, razor-sharp analysis, and expert storytelling, Vin Scully became the singular voice of the Dodgers for generations of fans. His talent and class were cherished, and he is dearly missed. This book reminds us of all that—and keeps his voice always in our ears and his spirit in our Dodgers-blue hearts.”—Annette Bening, Oscar, Emmy, and Tony Award–nominated actress
Antillia by Henrietta Goodman
The title poem of Antillia (Backwaters Press, March) refers to the phantom island of Antillia, included on maps in the fifteenth century but later found not to exist. The ghosts that haunt this collection are phantom islands, moon lakes, lasers used to clean the caryatids at the Acropolis, earlier versions of the self, suicides, a madam from the Old West, petroleum, snapdragons, pets, ice apples, Casper, and a “resident ghost” who makes the domestic realm of “the cradle and the bed” uninhabitable.
“Henrietta Goodman’s Antillia is a collection of searching lyric poems that remember, joke, free associate, interrogate, worry, and examine the roots of words in pursuit of sense or solace. The world depicted is one of potential chaos and harm, though a quest for love, joy, and understanding has not been abandoned. In one Proustian meditation, the smell of Windex conjures memories of the speaker’s grade school crush, yet further consideration yields recollections of a Cold War-era bomb shelter. The bewildered (or sardonic) speaker asks, ‘Windex leads to Martin leads to beauty leads to bomb?’ The volume’s title suggests that a new world might be accessed, though at present it’s more myth than fact. These aesthetically impressive poems stun with their vigor, candor, and wit.”—Christopher Brean Murray, author of Black Observatory: Poems
“‘In the South, everything bites / and f*cks and pretends not to,’ Henrietta Goodman writes in one of her trademark poems that are alive and daring and nervy: all heart and smarts, no pretense. We’re so fortunate to have this new book, which moves from lovers to sons to metaphorical-real lakes to a fancy cowboy bar’s ‘ropes / of neon acrylic squeezed straight from the tube’ to fine art to stinging truths—insisting on loving and facing head-on a world that keeps failing and falling.”—Alexandra Teague, author of Or What We’ll Call Desire
For the full list of books that will be published throughout the Spring/Summer 2024 season, check out our catalog!
