ODY New Books Collection

A Terrible Intimacy

"From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a revelatory account of slavery, uncovering a surprising web of relationships between Black and white people that ranges far beyond the familiar template of 'master-slave' dynamics. A white man hosts a wedding party for his enslaved servant and finds himself charged with a criminal offense; an overseer turns up dead after getting drunk with a slave; two men, one poor and white and the other enslaved, team up to plot a murder. Through six criminal cases in antebellum Virginia, A Terrible Intimacy describes a startling variety of encounters between white and Black Virginians. Contrary to our common assumption, fully half of the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties. Cruelty was baked into the system, yet in households of five, ten, or fifteen people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well, sharing religious worship, folkways, and domestic dynamics. Slaves, slave owners, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861 most white men in Virginia were ready to fight for the right to own other humans. Revealing a society in which white Americans recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors, even as they remained committed to a system that exploited and abused them, A Terrible Intimacy offers striking new insights into the complexity of life in the old South." -- Dust jacket

Small Town Girls

"Appalachia--a distinctly American landscape, dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings-has been the great setting for Jayne Anne Phillips's work. She grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia and has always kept it close, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled. In these essays, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She recreates the place she calls home, both its history and its foundational truths. She traces her journey across the country in search of love and work and belonging, and offers insights into the fellow writers and cultural touchstones that helped shape her path. From the local beauty salon to the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud, from Jean Shrimpton and Barbara Stanwyck to Stephen Crane and Breece D'J Pancake, Jayne Anne ponders her relationship with inspiration, religion, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries. Tender, inviting, sparkling with wisdom and open-heartedness, Small Town Girls is a portrait of an inimitable artist as well as a love letter to the place and the people who have made her who she is." -- Provided by publisher

The Shock of the Light

"Twins Tessa and Theo are roots of the same tree, in tune with one another's every thought and desire. As World War II takes hold across Europe, both are eager to do their part. Theo is recruited by the RAF and disappears into the skies, while Tessa jumps at the chance to join the Special Operations Executive, devoted to spying and sabotage behind enemy lines. It will be dangerous, highly classified work, but Tessa, despite all she shares with Theo, is no stranger to secret-keeping. Two years later, Theo comes home. Tessa does not. Theo, wounded, broken by the loss of his fellows and his sister, is indefatigable, angry, driven, a clandestinely gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal--and he will pay a price for pursuing answers about Tessa's fate. Decades later, PhD candidate Edie is deep into her research on the Special Operations Executive during the war. When she finds Theo in London, they form an unlikely partnership, and together they finally uncover the truth about Theo's beloved sister--a truth that stretches back to the summer Tessa spent in France before the war had even begun."-- Provided by publisher

Ruby Falls

"In 1928, a Chattanooga man disappears down a hole in the ground and discovers a 150-foot waterfall in the middle of a mountain that he names after his wife: Ruby Falls. Within months, visitors can buy tickets to see the falls for themselves. Ada Smith has been sneaking into the caves at night, entranced by the natural wonders around her and the freedom granted by this new underground world. But it's tough timing for a natural wonder. As the country flounders in the Great Depression, a shrewd public relations ploy seems like the only way to save Ruby Falls. A famous mind reader agrees to launch himself into the caverns where he will attempt to locate a hidden hatpin using only his psychic abilities. He'll be joined by five others: his manager, his wife, a guide, a Chattanooga businessman, and a reporter from the Chicago Times. But they're not alone in the caverns. Ada and another guide, Quinton, have been asked to follow the mind reader's party at a distance, staying out of sight. They are a safety net, in case of a broken leg or busted flashlights. One of them will be dead before the end of the day. Faced with a corpse and the stark reality that one of the people in her midst is a killer, Ada needs to get everyone--the murderer and the innocents--back aboveground before their light runs out."-- Provided by publisher

Revenge for the Sixties

Politico editor Peter Canellos presents a biography of conservative Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. The book begins with Alito's upbringing in an Italian-American New Jersey suburb and the culture shock he experienced as a middle-class student at Princeton University. These experiences shaped Alito's opinions on liberalism and progressive social change, driving him toward organizations like the Federalist Society. Canellos documents how Alito's professed dedication to originalism is flexible rather than fixed.

Red Sheet

"Turn to the first page and disavow what you think you know. This is 1960s Los Angeles like you've never seen it before, in a daring work of historical fiction from bestselling author of The Enchanters and Widespread Panic. It's late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The U.S. prevailed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from domestic Communist Party members embedded in L.A. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job. Freddy Otash is named lead investigator. He encounters commie malfeasance at every turn. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There's a murder on Halloween night. It links to ex-VP and gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and possibly two homicides eight years back. Now Freddy is working double duty: he's commanding the probe and is hired to keep Nixon out of trouble. Meanwhile, integrationist fever is sweeping L.A. and the police department comes under its fire. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for city council and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride. And the long-forgotten but still-stunning folk singer Judy Henske is on a collision course with the love of her life, the freewheeling Freddy O. The stage is set for chaos and Freddy thrives on chaos. Red Sheet is a work of subversive art. It embodies "indigenous American berserk" with a uniquely crazed and brilliant passion."-- Provided by publisher

Rasputin

This historical biography by Antony Beevor examines the life and influence of Grigori Rasputin within the final years of imperial Russia. The book explores Rasputin's relationship with the Romanov court, including his influence on members of the imperial family, and situates his role within the political and social conditions preceding the Russian Revolution of 1917. Drawing on archival sources and historical research, the work analyzes themes of power, rumor, court politics, and the decline of the Russian monarchy.

Permanence

From the critically acclaimed author, Sophie Mackintosh comes the story of a clandestine affair and an alternate city seemingly designed to foster it. Clara and Francis are in love, but nobody knows it. For months they have been stealing away from their respective lives, leaving no trace of their relationship behind. Their time together is always excruciatingly sweet and all too short. Until one day they wake up in an apartment neither of them recognizes, with no memory of how they got there. They find themselves in a new, unnamed city, a self-contained sanctuary where adulterers live openly as couples. Here there are fountains and old town squares and perfect cafes with checkered tablecloths. Ripe fruits wait on the counter each morning, invisible threads bind each lover to the other, and their primary responsibility is to enjoy one another. Contact with the real world is impossible and the city's whims are mysterious-but now those stolen afternoons never have to end. How much would you sacrifice for a life you never thought possible? And how long can you stay in paradise before the cracks start to show? An exploration of desire, novelty, and choice,'Permanence' explores the tantalizing quandary of what, if anything, can withstand the daily toll of "forever."-- Provided by publisher

Paul Klee

"Celebrated for his colorful, fantastical paintings, Paul Klee (1879-1940), a pioneer of modernism and expressionism, is regarded as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Though he is remembered for the chromatic style of his most famous works, Klee's late work reflects a dark and dramatic transformation, providing insight into the artist's psychological landscape. Forced to flee Nazi persecution in 1933, Klee faced final years that were marked by exile, illness, and political upheaval. Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds takes the unsettling last decade of Klee's life as its subject, arguing that he accepted his vulnerability as a strength--one that enabled him to develop a personal rebuff of fascism through a lexicon of abstraction. With 120 illustrations highlighting works from throughout Klee's career, this catalog traces the evolution of his artistic practice and frames his late work in the context of his oeuvre. Essays by leading scholars and curators reexamine Klee's legacy and the importance of his late masterpieces as an artistic defiance against oppression. This books complements the exhibition Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds on view at the Jewish Museum March 20 to July 26, 2026." -- Publisher website

The Palm House

"Laura's long friendship with Edmund Putnam is tested when he resigns from Sequence magazine--one of the few places he has ever felt he belonged. Putnam repines. His sweet-natured father has recently died, which has not improved his mood. Meanwhile Laura's relentlessly 'outward-facing' mother is still at large and toting a new boyfriend as if he were a marotte. Laura, too, needs a new job, and a place to live that doesn't have centipedes in the kitchen. Gwendoline Riley's seventh novel explores acceptance and affinity. Young people don't drink anymore but Laura and Putnam are no longer young. Over wine and crisps the pair reflect on what has brought them to where they are. There are memories of childhood package holidays, teenage friendships and obsessions, peculiar love affairs, bad parties. Life is fleeting. Sequence magazine means something, but what? Might Putnam plot a return?" -- Provided by publisher

The Oyster Diaries

"From the author of the cult classic Lives of the Saints, a diaristic novel of middle-aged reckoning that roves from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, from court records to Don Giovanni, all of it riotously narrated by one of American fiction's most singular voices. Delery Anhalt--middle-aged, prone to "embroidering everything into vast ideals" like Don Quixote, but incapable of identifying the Shakespearean villains in her life, like Desdemona--is at a crossroads in life. Her father and his peers, the old guard of New Orleans, are entering their twilight years, her daughters are stepping into adulthood, and she is navigating the uncertainty of being midway upon the journey of her life. Caught between a generation fixed in the past and one intent on changing the future, Delery decides to take stock of herself and the people around her through a series of diaries brimming with wry observations of her upbringing in New Orleans and daily travails in Washington D.C., and frank appraisals on what she calls her lions at the gate: the interior demands of insecurity, ego, annoyance, operatic wrath (felt most keenly towards bad houseguests), and remorse. A disarmingly funny and poignant portrayal of the vicissitudes of adulthood that is as exuberant as it is indignant, The Oyster Diaries sees the return of the beloved character Claude Collier from The Lives of the Saints. Full of uncomfortable hilarities and potent truths, this novel proves to us, once again, that Nancy Lemann is one of our most fearless and original writers on the human condition." -- Provided by publisher

One Leg on Earth

Yosoye, a 23-year-old architect, moves to Lagos to begin her career with an architectural firm involved in the development of a luxury waterfront project. As she settles into city life, she becomes aware of a series of unexplained drownings involving pregnant women and begins to question the project's impact on its surroundings. After discovering that she is pregnant, Yosoye finds herself confronting unsettling events connected to local folklore, the city's history, and the consequences of urban development.

On Witness and Respair

The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay. Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair. From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as "the heir apparent to Toni Morrison" (LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy's footsteps when she promises always to "Tell it straight. Tell it all." True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood: the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright's novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies: including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner's sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward's powers as "one of America's finest living writers" (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience

Of Loss and Lavender

"In this achingly beautiful novel of trauma, memory, and identity, two Iraqi men struggle to start a new life in the US after the Gulf War. Sami, a retired doctor, lives with his son and grandchildren in Brooklyn. As he tries to navigate this new city, it becomes increasingly clear he is losing his memory due to dementia. Every day he sinks deeper into old memories of a life in Iraq before the war. Omar arrived in the US with no family. He has run away from Iraq with a fake identity. As a deserter, he was punished by having an ear cut off. In Baghdad, this is an unmissable mark of shame. Omar works menial jobs, creates a new identity-comically passing as Puerto Rican-and dreams of reconstructive surgery to get his ear, and his dignity, back. Their stories converge powerfully when it becomes clear they were connected in Iraq at a moment that was pivotal for them both. Deftly exploring the aftermath of war and relocation, Of Loss and Lavender creates a moving portrait of life in exile." -- Provided by publisher

No Way Home

David Lynch meets Fight Club in T.C. Boyle's No Way Home, an obsessive psychological study that illuminates the darkness that lurks inside all of us.

Newcomers

A man thought to be a Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid fleeing poverty are hardly the images we have of America's august founders. In Newcomers, Alan Mikhail upends the traditional story of America's origins through the revelatory tale of a seventeenth-century immigrant couple by the names of Anthony and Grietje. Married in Amsterdam, the destitute pair emerged from lives of piracy and prostitution in Europe and arrived in 1630s Dutch New Amsterdam, hoping to build a new life. Upon landing on New York City's shores, the swarthy Anthony was attacked for being the Muslim he was not, while Grietje, branded a whore by crude harbor denizens, would become the model of an independent colonial American woman, defiantly mooning her attackers rather than accepting their derision. They endured intense bigotry on crooked neighborhood warrens and in the primitive watering holes of New Amsterdam, battling Dutch authorities and brawling with their neighbors, their appearances in court so frequent that their rebellious existence is seared into the records of early America forever. Eventually ejected from New Amsterdam by Dutch authorities in 1639, they were exiled to the "frontier," to what is now Gravesend Brooklyn, where they and their four daughters farmed and seized land from Native Americans while fighting English colonists from the north. After Grietje died, Anthony moved back to what had become English Manhattan and ended up being one of the richest men in seventeenth-century New York. What is ironic is that this rowdy couple's descendants include some of the most distinguished names in American social and political history, among them the Vanderbilts and President Warren G. Harding. "Through meticulous research" (Russell Shorto), Mikhail has done nothing less than reframe America's original family story, in the process showing that where we have immigration, prejudice trails never far behind. Indeed, we learn of harsh, anti-Muslim sentiment through Anthony and of female defiance, rare that it was, through Grietje. "Promising to change the way we understand Colonial Gotham's formative first years" (Susanah Shaw Romney), Alan Mikhail's Newcomers tells the story of America's fledgling beginnings in a way that it has never been depicted before."-- from jacket flap

Muskism

A pyrotechnic examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age. Everyone's got an Elon take. He's a messiah. A menace; a genius; a clown. The verdicts differ, but they share one theme: they treat him as an individual. Muskism argues otherwise. Elon Musk isn't a glitch in the system--he is the system. His worldview promises sovereignty through technology: plug in, power up, and become self-reliant. But the more you connect, the more he owns you. If Fordism defined the capitalism of the twentieth century, Muskism may define the twenty-first. Fordism helped build the welfare state. Musk undoes it. He thrives on dependence while preaching freedom. His cars run on subsidies; his satellites run the battlefield; his social networks train the AI that trains us. Muskism sells itself as the future but entrenches age-old hierarchies. It offers autonomy for some and exclusion for others. It's pro-natalist but anti-immigrant, futurist but reactionary. It speaks of humanity but warns against empathy. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff cut through the hype and the hate to reveal what Musk really represents: a new political economy, where to be "free" means to serve a Technoking. Muskism isn't about the man. It's about the machine that made him--and the world he's making next

Murder in the Rue Marat

"How an enigmatic masterpiece of the French Revolution became a talisman of the revolutionary spirit in our own time. Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat depicts the painter's friend and fellow revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat collapsed in his bath after being fatally stabbed by a female assassin who stands just outside the frame. In this fascinating book, Thomas Crow traces the radical legacy of a painting that has been called the Pietà of the French Revolution, showing how David's masterpiece captures the saga of that violent era in the single figure of Marat, and how it reveals itself anew today. Crow begins by describing how the painting's enduring power came to the fore during the countercultural tumult of the 1960s, discussing how his vocation as a scholar arose out of his own encounter with the work. He then takes readers back to 1793, telling the story of the painting's creation through the eyes of David, his subject, and Marat's charismatic assassin, Charlotte Corday. Charting the history of its impact across more than two centuries, Crow shows how this multilayered portrait surfaced in succeeding waves of political dissent as an enduring talisman of popular insurgency. Beautifully illustrated, Murder in the Rue Marat is an art historian's disarmingly personal account of a painting whose hidden complexities bear witness to the promise and peril of revolution in Marat's time and our own." -- Jacket flap

Middlemen

"Middlemen rewrites literary history from the perspective of one of its most important but least visible figures: the literary agent. Chronicling the story of agents in the United States from the 1950s to today, Laura McGrath uncovers their critical role in the making of American literature. From the famed three-martini lunch to the Frankfurt Book Fair, Middlemen takes readers behind the scenes to show how agents influence what we read. Along the way, it explains why many debut novelists never publish another book, why agents champion short story collections even though they sell poorly, how agents advocate for writers of color in a system that values whiteness, and why there are so many New York novels. Weaving together original archival research, data analysis, and interviews with scores of agents and other publishing professionals, Middlemen demonstrates that agents--eighty percent of whom are in fact women--are much more than "middlemen." As intermediaries between author and publisher, agents act as advocates, matchmakers, negotiators, and tastemakers, and they must balance artistic values with the commercial imperatives of publishing conglomerates. The book describes the decisive role agents have played in celebrated novels--from Jack Kerouac's On the Road to Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist--but also in the creation of entire literary categories like the debut novel, the story collection, postmodernism, multiethnic fiction, and world literature. Featuring profiles of agents past and present such as Sterling Lord, Lynn Nesbit, Candida Donadio, Marie Brown, and Andrew Wylie, along with perspectives from agents at all stages of their careers, Middlemen is an entertaining and eye-opening account of how literary fiction--and the literary canon--is made."-- Provided by publisher

Marked by Time

"Sociologist Robert J. Sampson's influential research redefines how we view crime and youth outcomes in the Unites States. By shifting the focus from individual and family traits to generational change and social character, he reveals the flaws in our assumptions about life trajectories and advocates for a fresh approach to social policy." -- Provided by publisher