New Books Network

Fascists of the World, Unite?: A History of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) analyzes the ideas and forms of international cooperation between Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and fascist movements from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, and Britain. The study examines how fascists attempted to unite across borders by forming international organizations and networks, hosting conferences and exhibitions, disseminating multilingual publications, and exchanging propaganda. Their transnational cooperation was fuelled by shared ideas of ultranationalism, anti-liberalism, anti-communism, antisemitism, racism, white supremacism, and Europeanism. The book argues that fascist internationalism, marked by contradictions, limitations, and an Italo-German rivalry, emerged in the 1930s as a counter-reaction to liberal and communist internationalism. The epilogue discusses reverberations in the Second World War and the postwar period and outlines the relevance of this history for understanding contemporary forms of far-right internationalism.

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Our second episode on “The Literary Ecosystem” features scholars of contemporary literary culture Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette in conversation with host Aarthi Vadde. Like the good close readers we all are, we begin by thinking about how the metaphor of the “literary ecosystem” works. Sarah values the way it brings relationships between cultural institutions to the foreground but prefers the base-superstructure model of Marxian critique. Dan, too, moves away from “naturalizing” metaphors although he sees the ecosystem’s potential for pithily naming the interplay of literary production, circulation, and reception.
From here the conversation ranges widely as we consider the economic and social forces shaping contemporary literature – be they the conglomeration of publishing houses (see Dan’s Big Fiction) or the impact of platform capitalism upon authorial labor (see Sarah’s Content Machinesand Aarthi’s We the Platform). We acknowledge the hollowing out of institutions meant to cultivate appreciation for literature and ponder the viability of platforms like Substack for reconstituting a literary sphere. Finally, what would a discussion of the literary ecosystem be without addressing the elephant in the room: AI. We bracket the author scandals to address the supporting players under threat: the translators, the audiobook narrators, the humans who bring books to readers across languages and formats. Come for the literary sociology; stay for the inside scoop on “prompting” a dark romance novel.
Mentions
Marx – base-superstructure model
Bruno Latour – actor-network theory
Sophie Bishop – Influencer Creep
Andrew de Waard - Derivative Media
Pierre Bourdieu – The Rules of Art

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Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camaraderie, its virtues and its vices.
This experiment in reading Public Books articles aloud--akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side--follows on from JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles and 2026 article about the Pope and AI. You can consult the footnotes on Agnes Heller and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original 2019 form here.

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After Caesar's assassination, the triumvirs drew up a kill list; one such target, a man named Lucius Plotius Plancus, fled to a villa near Naples and tried hiding behind a curtain. The soldiers found him anyway–thanks to his heavy perfume.
Pliny the Elder, writing a century later, used the perfume to suggest the killing was justified. Historians have often taken that at face value, as proof that Rome despised Eastern luxuries. Jeremy Simmons reads it as a joke—Pliny was calling the man a walking corpse.
In Jeremy’s latest book Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade (Princeton, July 2026) he asks what happened when goods like pepper and perfume arrived at their destinations. The goods took on new lives: perfume became a way of talking about death, pepper a medicine prescribed for its heat, Roman coins turned pendants in South Asia—or how soldiers knew the price of spices even on remote Hadrian’s Wall.
Jeremy is an assistant professor of history and the college at the University of Chicago.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Sea of Treasures. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Chris Pearl's Declarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution (U Virginia Press, 2024) is a fascinating exploration of the American Revolution's causes and consequences on the Pennsylvania frontier. The history of the Fairplay settlement on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River - which (allegedly) declared independence from Pennsylvania AND the British Empire on July 4, 1776 - reveals the complicated, intertwined nature of the Revolution in the backcountry. Pearl illuminates how many groups - Indigenous and colonial - vied for control in these woods from the 1740s through the 1790s, telling a fascinating story of settler colonialism and Native resilience.
By intertwining the experiences of Indigenous Americans, rebellious colonial squatters, opportunistic land speculators, and imperial government agents, Pearl reveals how conflicts within and between them all set the terms and ultimately shaped the meaning of the American Revolution. In the crucible of this conflict, memories, histories, and animosities collided and converged with tremendous consequences. Declarations of Independence delves into the racial violence over land and sovereignty that suffused the Revolutionary Age and helps restore Indigenous peoples to their central position at the founding of the United States.

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