48 new eBooks and audiobooks coming out March 19 – 25, 2024

By Kobo • March 19, 2024New eBooks and Audiobooks

The books we’re most looking forward to this week

In 2018 Christine Blasey Ford appeared before the US Senate Judiciary Committee as they considered the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. She was there to describe a sexual assault she experienced at a high school party which she alleged to have been perpetrated by boys including Kavanaugh. What happened then and since is a matter of public record. Ford was subjected to harassment and abuse online, including falsehoods about her background that went viral faster than they could be debunked. In One Way Back: A Memoir, we hear the story behind her testimony, including months of attempts to inform the relevant people in government of what she had to say without exposing her family and herself to backlash. And we learn about her experience afterwards, the people who reached out in support while she feared for her safety, and how she feels now about her decision to come forward then—and now.

When Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was published in 1990, it rapidly became a touchstone in women’s studies, queer theory, and a variety of other academic disciplines due to Butler’s incisive writing on what common notions of gender signify while rendering other aspects of identity invisible. If that sounds not terribly revolutionary as a concept, that’s a sign of how far Butler’s influence has reached: when we talk (or argue) about what gender is (or isn’t) today, we do so more or less in a framework built by Butler over thirty years ago. In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Butler looks again at what gender signifies, but in the context of our contemporary debates, asking why an adherence to traditional gender roles seems to go hand-in-hand with nationalism. And Butler offers a vision of what meaningful resistance to authoritarianism might look like if it’s to offer an alternative of true liberty.

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been central to debates on American literature almost from the moment it was published almost 140 years ago. The story of the errant young white boy known as “Huck” and the runaway slave Jim rafting down the Mississippi to escape their respective and wildly differing fates offers a satirical view of post-Civil War America that hasn’t lost much of its edge. In Percival Everett’s novel James, the celebrated novelist and poet imagines the life of Jim as he gets word of his imminent separation from his wife and daughter by way of being sold to a man in New Orleans. By giving us this view into Jim’s interior life, Everett raises the stakes of the familiar adventure story. And yet Everett has retained the comic tone of Twain’s original story in James, offering a new appreciation for Twain’s craft while revealing the continuing relevance of this story of the difference race makes in one’s experience of America.