New Books Network

Daniel A. Bell joins the podcast to discuss his new book, Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Present, and Future (Princeton UP, 2026). This isn't your standard, dusty history — it’s a series of modernized dialogues that grew out of Bell’s own classroom at the University of Hong Kong. In this episode, Daniel tells us about the time he spent as an academic Dean at Shandong University, and where he saw firsthand how ancient Legalist ideas about strict punishment were making everyday life, and even faculty meals, feel rigid and 'joyless'. We talk about why he chose to write the book as a 'heavyweight match' between the descendants of thinkers like Confucius and Zhuangzi, and why he believes the ancient concept of 'harmony' is actually about celebrating differences rather than enforcing sameness. Whether we're talking about the 'fire exit' of modern divorce laws or the high stakes of corruption in Beijing, Daniel shows why these ancient voices are still the most relevant ones in the room.

The book is an entertaining introduction to ancient Chinese thinkers, and what they can teach us about today’s most pressing political questions in China and beyond. China’s most original, diverse, and fascinating political debates took place more than two millennia ago, but they have profoundly shaped Chinese political thinking and practice ever since and, remarkably, their influence on the country’s leaders is only growing today. Yet these timeless debates which are very likely to influence the answers to such questions as whether China should use military force to take control of Taiwan seem far too little understood in the West. In this enlightening and entertaining book, Professor Bell takes the greatest thinkers from China’s past — Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Shang Yang, Han Feizi, Zhuangzi, and Mozi—and puts them in dialogue with each other in modern settings.
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There must be a shift in the Zeitgeist of the publishing world, because after a long drought in Gothic novels, this is the second one I’ve encountered in little more than a month. The Fourth Wife (Kensington, 2026) takes place near Salt Lake City, Utah, during the years when the Mormon community there still practiced polygamy but was coming under increasing pressure from the US government to abandon the practice, pressure that included a law making multiple, simultaneous marriages a criminal offense.

It’s 1882. Twenty-year-old Hazel Russon, a talented pianist, has grown up in a polygamous family, but she has a secret agreement with her childhood friend Elijah Crowther that they will become each other’s only spouse once they are permitted to marry. When Elijah’s father, a powerful figure in Salt Lake City society, summons Hazel and informs her that Elijah has rejected her in favor of a return to the fundamental principles of Mormon life—the most fundamental of which is polygamy, known only as the Principle—she is shattered by her love’s betrayal. As a result, she allows Elder Crowther to talk her into becoming the fourth wife of Brother Jacob Manwaring, a wealthy older man who promises Hazel a home of her own, including a piano.

Hazel has long struggled with what most of us in the twenty-first century would categorize as an anxiety disorder, in part caused by the difficulty she has in meeting the extreme demands of her religion for female submissiveness. And although initially attracted to Jacob, she soon discovers that not everything Elder Crowder told her about her husband-to-be was the truth…. 

It’s all delightfully creepy and fast-paced, and the interactions among Jacob’s wives are even more interesting than those between them and Jacob. 

Linda Hamilton studies and writes about nineteenth-century Mormon life as both a historian and a novelist—including, most recently, The Fourth Wife.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in the summer of 2026.
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Supreme Pressure: The Rejection of John J. Parker and the Birth of the Modern Supreme Court Confirmation Process (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) examines the 1930 Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker, a turning point in American judicial politics. Alarmed by some of his past statements and opinions, labor and civil rights groups mounted a fierce campaign to block his confirmation. Not only was control of the Supreme Court hanging in the balance, but Parker's nomination symbolized a profound clash of ideologies, political agendas, economic doctrines, and interpretations of the Constitution. Their efforts sparked a dramatic Senate revolt, marking the first successful grassroots campaign to block a Supreme Court nominee.

By exploring the circumstances of Parker's rejection, this book traces how that battle laid the foundation for today's highly partisan and contentious confirmation process. The book also reintroduces Parker as a consequential but largely forgotten figure in American jurisprudence--one whose rulings helped shape the South's legal response to Brown v. Board of Education. Beyond the nomination fight, it delves into Parker's political campaigns, judicial opinions, and relationships with key public figures, charting his dramatic rise, humiliating defeat, and enduring influence.

Packed with intrigue, strategy, and the clash of competing ideologies, this is the story of how one nomination forever changed the rules of the game.
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Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, Jane Kim and her brother, Kevin, dutifully embodied the model minority myth as their parents demanded: both stellar tennis players and academically gifted, they worked hard to make their parents proud. Jane went on to law school. Kevin came close to becoming a professional tennis player.

But where they started is nowhere near where they have ended up: Jane has stopped going to her law school classes, and Kevin, now a policeman, has become increasingly distant. Their parents, each on their own path toward the elusive American Dream (their mother hell-bent on having the perfect house and the perfect family, their father obsessed with working his way up from one successful business to the next), don't want to see the family unraveling. When Kevin goes missing, no one recognizes his absence as the warning sign it is until it erupts, forcing them all to come to terms with their past and present selves in a country that isn't all it promised it would be.

Both deeply serious and wickedly funny, American Han (Algonquin Books, 2026) is a profound story about striving and assimilation, difficult love, and family fidelity. A searing portrait that challenges assumptions about the immigrant experience, Lisa Lee's debut introduces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.

Lee is the recipient of the Marianne Russo Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction, and a Pushcart Prize. She has received additional fellowships and awards from Kundiman, Millay Arts, Hedgebrook, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Tin House, Jentel Artist Residency, the Korea Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, Tusculum Review, Reed Magazine, New World Writing, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles and grew up in Napa, California.

Recommended Books:

Giada Scodellaro, Ruins, Child

Morgan Day, The Oldest Bitch Alive

Elaine H. Kim, “Home is Where the Han Is”

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste (U Wisconsin Press, 2024). In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation’s victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them.

With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—up to a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.
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