New Books Network

S. C. Bandreddi's debut YA historical fantasy novel The Game of Oaths (Candlewick Press,
2026). It’s 1896. Beneath a hotel in the heart of Paris is the famed le
Cirque des Ombres, led by ringmaster and Enchanteur Jean-Pierre. But
behind the dazzling spectacles, the circus performers are bound by
magical contracts, also making them potential players in the annual Game
of Oaths, an underground bloodthirsty tournament watched by the wealthy
elite. Twelve will compete. Eleven will die.

Seventeen-year-old
trapeze artist Falan Sunkara is out for revenge. After her sister ended
up as one of the unlucky eleven last year, Falan wants nothing more than
to make Jean-Pierre pay for her death. When she’s chosen to compete in
this year’s tournament, Falan is not above playing dirty and forging
unlikely alliances. But to be the last one standing, she has to
determine whom to trust and whose motives to question. Vengeance on top
of survival is a dangerous gamble—and in games like this, the house
always wins.
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Annakeara Stinson's Nerve Damage: A Novel (Knopf,
2026) is a riotous revenge novel about a woman’s quest to escape her
stalker ex-boyfriend—by stalking him herself. Clarice’s breakup with
P.T. began the usual way—she discovered he was cheating. Then came the
constant texts, the nonstop emails from burner accounts, countless phone
calls from dozens of different numbers. He showed up outside her
apartment and her office. He sent her flowers and poems, and, perhaps
most sinister of all, a link to the music video for Dido's “White Flag.”
Relief arrived only when Clarice finally obtained a restraining order
and one-way ticket from New York to L.A. Just as the restraining order
expires—and three years to the day since she left him—Clarice spots a
man who looks suspiciously like P.T. at a nightclub. Could it be him?
Her best friend thinks she’s imagining things. Her therapist wants her
to focus on healing her inner child. Her mother is busy planning her
wedding to her fourth husband. A psychic medium can reveal only that
P.T.’s energy is too volatile to locate on the spiritual plane. As
painful memories resurface, Clarice is convinced her ex has returned to
ruin her life. But with scant evidence to prove it, she takes
increasingly unhinged steps to uncover the truth, ultimately leading to a
place where paranoia and reality begin to blur. A profane and poignant
debut novel, Nerve Damage is a different kind of survivor narrative,
about how far one woman will go to wrest back control of her life in a
world determined to send her spiraling.
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Once
dominant and institutionalised, the Yakuza, one of Japan's best known
criminal organisations, is now shrinking under the combined pressure of
legal exclusion, social stigmatisation, and market regulation. Their
membership has dropped from more than 80,000 in 2009 to fewer than
20,000 in 2025. Yet their disappearance is far from complete. Based on
extensive fieldwork with active and former members, police officers,
lawyers, and journalists, in 21st Century Yakuza: Death of Japanese Organised Crime
(Oxford University Press, 2026), Dr. Martina Baradel examines how these
organisations adapt to repression and explores what happens when a
mafia begins to die.

21st Century Yakuza
illuminates how Japan's model of regulatory saturation has dismantled
the Yakuza's organisational capacity but left behind governance vacuums
in markets the state struggles to control. This book demonstrates
how the Yakuza persist through symbolic and residual forms of authority
even as their formal power erodes, and how their decline has fragmented
the criminal underworld. It traces the transformation of the Yakuza
from territorially embedded brokers of governance to marginal actors in a
more decentralised criminal landscape, including the delegation of
trading activities to non-affiliated networks.

Through a sharp lens on criminal decline and adaptation, 21st Century Yakuza offers a compelling portrait of a fading underworld and the new forms of disorder emerging
in its wake. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the
shifting boundaries of law, authority, and illicit power in contemporary
Japan.

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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A new paradigm that honors the wisdom and wholeness of neurodivergent clients. Focusing on autism and what is medically known as ADHD, neurodivergent author Nyck Walsh takes readers on an anti-oppressive, intersectional journey into a new standard of care for neurodivergent clients and their therapists. Whether new to or well-versed in the neurodiversity paradigm, readers will learn how to best support their neurodivergent clients in a way that prioritizes their well-being, honors their self-expertise, encourages their anti-ableist embodiment, and celebrates their joy. Bridging the theoretical with the practical, Walsh’s model offers a tangible framework that can be applied on its own or in tandem with other modalities. Neurodivergent Somatics in Therapy (Norton, 2026) is an intimate and engaging guide to providing accessible, liberatory, whole-person care that will benefit clients and therapists of all neurotypes.

Nyck Walsh, MA, LPC, (he/they) brings a whole person, anti-oppressive, intersectional, somatic lens to working with Autistic and KCS/VAST (what is commonly known as ADHD) folx. An Autistic and VAST counselor, Nyck is the director of Nyck Walsh Counseling & Training Center and creator of the Neurodivergent Somatics model. He curates reparative experiences for late identified Autistic and VAST folx to connect with their innate wisdom, dismantle ableism, be supported in their challenges, and unpack their lives through their unidentified and misunderstood Neurodivergent (ND) experience. His counselor education programs have created an international following, and both ND and neurotypical counselors alike report feeling deeply validated by his approach.

Registration for Public Programs event with Nyck at CIIS on July 16.

waHelena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies in the Somatic Psychology program. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).
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Molly
Crabapple joins Michael Stauch to discuss the history of the Jewish
Labor Bund, the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (Random House, 2026). Once the most influential Jewish political force in Eastern
Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly
anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an
imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.” In the first
popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary
world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious
rebels, clandestine revolutionaries
and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this
violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories
interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund’s
rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a
movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity,
was largely destroyed?

Highlights include:

Crabapple’s personal connection to the Bund through her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort;

How the Bund built a vibrant youth counterculture amid harsh anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe;

The significance of “Hereness” to the Bund’s politics and how it
distinguished the group from Zionist groups advocating the colonization
of Palestine;

A discussion of “theory-pilled nerds” and how Crabapple’s activism and
journalism since Occupy Wall Street shaped her insights into the inner
life of the Bund;

The future of anti-Zionism in the context of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestine.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun
(with Marwan Hisham), which was longlisted for a National Book Award.
She was a 2020 New America Fellow and her reportage is the winner of the
Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker,
and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R.
Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of
Modern Art.

Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
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