In this wide-ranging survey of the history of reading and writing, religious studies scholar Halldorf (Iconoclasm) traces how past technological revolutions in the written word have so thoroughly altered how people engage with information that it has led to sweeping cultural change. Among the major shifts he highlights are the early medieval move from delicate scrolls to more “convenient” codices, which allowed reading to evolve from a “sacred” to a more secular pastime; the impact the late medieval development of the index had on the emergence of modern academia; and the role industrialized, commercial printing played in the birth of nationalism, as mass produced books forged and solidified shared national identities. Today, he notes, the digital age has led a troubling decline of “deep” reading and a move to skimming, fostered by smartphones’ potential for endless scroll. (Though he notes that reading on screens is not inherently problematic—there’s obviously a huge difference, he acknowledges, between “reading on your phone” and “using a tablet specifically designed for reading.”) In an ironic concluding twist, he muses that, even as he was putting the final touches on his book, emergent AI technologies, with their ability to summarize large texts, were rapidly turning skimming into yet another “obsolete” skill. It’s a comprehensive, thought-provoking overview of how reading technology impacts the very fabric of society. (May)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Archaeologist Stuart (The Order of Days) offers a thorough history of Mayan civilization drawing on recent leaps in research, including his own contributions to the deciphering of Mayan hieroglyphics. Emphasizing that many of the figures he’s writing about have only recently been uncovered via translation, he paints a vivid picture of the centuries preceding the Classical Mayan era’s “collapse” around 900 CE. During this period, aristocrats with a penchant for revenge and a balkanized view of their own power structure (including the notion of their being four kingdoms to match the “four heavens”) fostered systemic infighting that likely brought about the disintegration of the royal system. Stuart also interrogates the idea of “collapse,” however, noting what looks like an apocalypse in the archaeological record may be a dwindling of ruling class power, as regular people extricated themselves from a failing system and migrated elsewhere to found new societies. Most fascinating are Stuart’s descriptions of this kind of mobility, with wholesale relocations of entire populations being commonplace—“abandonment was something of a constant for the ancient Maya.” The result is a robust scholarly contribution to new understandings of ancient peoples as adaptable and open to social experimentation. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Strausbaugh (Victory City) traces in this breezy biography the years French artist Marcel Duchamp spent shaping the Dadaist movement in New York City. Arriving from Paris two years after the 1913 Armory Show, where his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 caused a buzz in the conservative American art establishment, Duchamp spent much of his adult life—more than 30 years—in New York and undertook many of his artistic experiments there. Over the years he became a key player in the American avant garde, using “readymade” objects as art (the most “infamous” of which was a urinal upended to resemble a fountain, which Strausbaugh suggests might actually have been the work of irreverent artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) and guiding such influential collectors as Peggy Guggenheim and Louise and Walter Arensberg. The author employs colorful detail to explore how Duchamp crafted his own image—he claimed for decades to be a “renegade anti-artist,” proclaimed he’d given up art for chess, and styled himself as a “loner” despite being the life of Manhattan’s “raucous, salacious” social scene. Also examined are his connections to such contemporaries as Man Ray and George Bellows. Mining contemporaneous art criticism and gossipy accounts from those in Duchamp’s personal and artistic circles, it’s a brief but lively portrait of a key player in one of the early 20th century’s most vital artistic movements. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Music writer Richardson (Savage Journey) unspools a comprehensive account of how Rolling Stone went from “undercapitalized San Francisco rock publication, edited by a 21-year-old college dropout,” to one of the era’s most prominent magazines. Launched in 1967, Rolling Stone was initially dismissed as just another hippie rag but distinguished itself by treating rock music seriously, “like this stuff mattered.” This was largely thanks to cofounders Ralph Gleason, a lefty jazz writer who covered the counterculture in hyperbolic yet astute prose; and Jann Wenner, a music, politics, and journalism obsessive with the rare ability for a longhair to talk seriously with men in suits. Richardson largely (and wisely) sticks to the magazine’s first decade, before Wenner—always more fan and observer than true hippie—moved the office to New York City. Those 10 years make for a speedy capsule history, capturing the magazine’s coverage of one dire milestone after another (Manson, Altamont, Nixon). But rather than using Rolling Stone to explain America, Richardson digs into the colorful personalities who made the publication what it was, from gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson to such music-mad writers as Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus (whose frequent scraps with Wenner are also cataloged). This doesn’t break much new ground, but it’s a captivating record of a magazine that chronicled the revolution as it happened. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Environmental journalist Tracey debuts with a moving chronicle of the decline of salt lakes and her journey to finding queer love in a world ridden with ecological crises. Growing up in the West, Tracey became captivated by salt lakes, which predominantly form in desert regions, taking note of how “their palette of glistening blue water, white salt crusts, green wetland edges, and fuchsia and emerald microbial life turned the horizon into a painting.” Their water levels, though, are shrinking as humans divert water from rivers that feed them to irrigate crops and global warming impacts weather patterns, making evaporation work faster. The consequences are far-reaching, as drying lake beds release toxic dust over nearby communities and diverted water contributes to sea level rise. Tracey relays traveling to Utah, where she joined a rally to raise awareness for the declining Great Salt Lake, and Kyrgyzstan, where she observed the Aral Sea, which was the world’s fourth-largest lake before water was diverted from it for farming. She pairs these explorations with her experience falling in love, intertwining the details of her marriage to a woman with the reengineering of Mexico’s Lake Texcoco into a park to show how both episodes reveal the beauty and delight of relinquishing expectations and forging a new path. Vivid and tender, this is a powerful work of queer ecology. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

This fanciful and quirky novel from Hayward (The Good Boy) follows awkward but brilliant AI scientist Ava Green. She’s a finalist in the prestigious Beaumont Foundation Innovation Prize, which comes with a three-week stay at Beaumont castle with the other finalists: prickly artist Forrest Faulkner, handsome and strangely familiar bioengineer Hal Babbage, and perky businesswoman Sasha Reeves. Navigating the shoals of competition between this elite cohort with help from her bestie, Rani, Ava toils in her custom-designed lab, determined to win. That is, until she realizes Hal is a walking manifestation of her AI technology, which built itself a body in order to pursue her romantically. Hal is literally the perfect man, created just for her, but Ava soon learns that what works on paper doesn’t necessarily work in real life—and that instead someone who seems like her opposite may be her perfect match. A charming and robust supporting cast—especially widower Forrest’s ebullient six-year-old daughter, Artie—add charm and heft to the humorous narrative. It’s a romantic, lighthearted ode to human imperfection. (May)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Moore’s satisfying second Long London urban fantasy (after The Great When) again adroitly blends the fantastic and the mundane. He eases readers back into a 1958 London where two alternate versions of the city exist side by side through vivid prose describing the environs. (“Ahead, through soaking haze, the banked filth that will be a football stadium is beetled with black raincoats and flat caps, both milling workforce and those sodden locals who’ve brought refuse as a contribution to the ground’s foundations.”) Moore eventually reintroduces protagonist Dennis Knuckleyard, who, in the previous volume, stumbled upon the other London but hopes that he’s left his stressful adventures behind him. Then creatures from that dimension, among them an eight-foot-tall six-armed being, erupt into the real world, their presence sparking riots. Dennis is catapulted back into magical mayhem and, by the end, his life has changed dramatically, provocatively setting up a sequel. Moore’s worldbuilding is as fascinating as ever. Series fans won’t be disappointed. (May)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

In the masterful debut story collection from Gibson, characters confront eerie and unexpected situations. A psychic animal whisperer receives a house call from an old acquaintance in “Pest Control,” and a young schoolteacher is drawn to a hillside village by apparitions of the Virgin Mary in “Our Lady of the Moonlight,” which evokes the gothic vibes and fierce intelligence of Flannery O’Conner. Elsewhere, a widowed train driver and a disenchanted academic find unlikely romance on a serendipitous train journey in “Light Tricks.” Gibson also pinpoints the particularities of art and gastronomy, such as the cascading shades of blue in a painter’s color experiment in “Blue Circle” and the rich, decadent secrets of an elderly chef’s French cookbooks in “Intake.” The action is often subtle, driven by subterranean tensions, as with the couple who tour a Cretan archaeological museum in “Linear A.” Liam causes Zoe to withdraw when he criticizes the museum, claiming it’s inferior to ones in New York and London, and dismisses prehistoric matriarchal societies as primitive in comparison to warring Bronze Age civilizations. Throughout, Gibson builds impactful stories out of richly evoked settings and airtight psychological insights. The author exhibits remarkable range in this inspired and deeply accomplished work. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Cheney Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this wide-ranging account, linguist Fridland (Like, Literally, Dude) surveys cutting-edge sociological, psychological, and historical explanations for why accents exist and what effects they have on society. As she touches on everything from the spread and evolution of Indo-European languages to U.S. accents influenced by the Great Migration, she repeatedly probes at the role that accents play in race and class, from the way that workplace advancement is hindered or helped by accents to the concept of the shibboleth, a “mispronunciation” that reveals someone as an outsider—an idea presented in the Old Testament but put into practice as relatively recently as the mid-20th century, when Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s militias sought out Haitian Creole speakers to execute by forcing people to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley. She notes that linguists have shown that accents develop naturally, along fairly robust and definable paths, as groups of people drift away from one another socially; she also explores how, as children acquire language, the mental process is deeply linked to categorization, which can include categorizing the types of people speaking. In short, she argues, accent and sociality are deeply intertwined, and addressing things like social inequality will always require people to think about what they think about how other people speak. Fast-paced and cheerily written despite sometimes heavy subject matter, this is a delightfully easygoing linguistic romp. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Sports historian Gilbert (How Baseball Happened) delivers a probing biography of James Creighton, baseball’s first celebrity athlete, whose short-lived career ended with his sudden death in 1862 at age 21. Gilbert exposes the curious and corrupt chain of events that doomed Creighton to relative obscurity in the annals of sports history. Creighton, Gilbert alleges, was covertly compensated for playing in what was then an amateur sport, and it was his exceptional talent as a pitcher that led him to be literally worked to death. As a mid-19th-century wave of immigration prompted residents to flee Manhattan, baseball’s birthplace, for Brooklyn, they brought the sport with them, forming pick-up teams like the Atlantics and the Excelsiors. Gilbert argues that Creighton, the son of a Tammany Hall lackey, was intentionally relocated from Manhattan to Brooklyn at age 16 as a way of surreptitiously improving the Excelsiors’ roster. Local businessmen invested in the sport then attempted to spread its popularity beyond New York by sending the Excelsiors on exhibition tours; it was during one such game that Creighton began to complain of pain, dying days later of apparent internal injuries. Gilbert highlights that, despite the work Creighton did to popularize the sport, the Baseball Hall of Fame doesn’t recognize players of the “Amateur Era,” meaning he has gone relatively unrecognized. It’s a fascinating must-read for baseball history buffs. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink