New Books Network

Karen L. Bowen and Dirk Imhof join Jana Byars to talk about their new book, The Burgeoning European Print Trade: The Distribution of Prints Via the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp (Harvey Miller, 2025). The European print trade is an evocative topic. Not only art historians, but social, cultural, and economic historians all agree that it was of vital importance in the Early Modern Period, as the conveyer of established icons, as well as the most recent imagery and news. Yet, thus far it is often discussed solely on the basis of tantalizing, isolated case studies. Bowen and Imhof's ground-breaking publication will address this significant lacuna by demonstrating in unprecedented detail how booksellers were routinely engaged in the extensive international distribution and sale of hundreds of thousands of prints annually between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Based upon the exceptionally well-preserved archives of the renowned Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp, this book presents the often-overlooked interwoven worlds of booksellers and print sellers, while documenting Antwerp's continued fame for the production and distribution of prints. Together with a remarkable array of clients, ranging from the cultivated and influential elite to ordinary laymen, these figures provide palpable examples of suppliers, buyers, and middlemen that reveal how they interacted with one another. Simultaneously, this work illuminates numerous critical related topics, ranging from how prints were priced and the relative quantities in which they were sold, to the importance of national and professional networks in these transactions. The result is an essential, novel study that clarifies how the print trade worked in practice during a burgeoning period in its evolution.

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Who makes a living from the music industry? In Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy: From Taping to Napster to TikTok (Anthem Press, 2026) David Arditi, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington, looks at the history of technology in the music industry. This history illustrates the way the industry continues to profit even as artists struggle to make money. The book charts the development and evolution of listeners’ uses of formats and technologies, from cassette tapes and CDs through sharing to streaming, demonstrating how the record industry has initiated moral panics to stop threats to their profits. This is in a context where listeners and independent labels have found new ways to engage with music because of these same formats and technologies. An engaging and accessible overview of issues central to creative industries, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary culture.

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Welcome to the Imperfect Buddha Podcast on the New Books Network. Today, we’re stripping away the incense and serenity to look at the cold, hard wall of practice.

We are joined by Mark Shinji Blacknell, author of Just Stare at the Damn Wall!. Mark isn't your typical "mindfulness guru"—he’s been a Marine, a bus driver, and an alcoholic, bringing a crude and down to Earth view of enlightenment to Zen.

In this episode, we dig into the friction between Mark’s focus on simple biology and the Soto establishment he knows all too well. We’ll be asking:

From meditating with prisoners on death row to the often dirty and frustrating reality of being a practitioner, Mark joins us to explain why the only way to fail a practice is to stop: the rest is all part of the process. Is this book just a very long way of telling us to shut up? Let’s find out.

Host’s webpage: here

Mark Blacknell: here

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In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast Dr Hanna Torsh talks to Katharina Gensch (University of Hamburg) about her new paper "English language education for older adults in a multilingual urban environment," which has just been published in Educational Gerontology.

Gensch, K. (2025). English language education for older adults in a multilingual urban environment. Educational Gerontology, 1-14. Paper here

Abstract. This paper explores how older adults in the German capital of Berlin react to the perceived increase of English as a commonly used language in their urban environment. Drawing from an interview study with participants of English classes for older adults, the article identifies different attitudes expressed in reaction to linguistic changes in their environment. These attitudes include embracing the concept of an international city and linguistic diversity, framing anglicization as an integral – yet not necessarily well-liked – part of certain neighborhoods, and rejecting it as a discriminatory, ageist practice. Furthermore, the interviewees were found to employ English learning and use as a versatile strategy to participate more fully in their environment’s communicative practices. Due to global dynamics, older adults living in multilingual cities can be expected to become an ever more relevant population group. Research on the language practices of older adults in multilingual environments often focuses on the perspective of migrants’ language acquisition and practices. The article argues that, against the background of globalization, educational gerontology will need to focus more on foreign language acquisition – including research on older migrants, but also on older adults who do live in countries where their first language is the official one, but nevertheless make use of an additional language in order to fully participate in their daily surroundings’ communicative practices.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Rolling Stone's first decade was truly rock and roll: chaotic, wild, and unpredictable. Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine (U California Press, 2026) by Peter Richardson charts the origins and evolution of the magazine during its formative early years in San Francisco. Founded in 1967 by a 21-year-old college dropout, Rolling Stone and its editors were steeped in the Bay Area's counterculture and viewed rock and roll as the animating spirit of a social revolution. Reaching beyond music, the magazine delved into the tempestuous culture and politics of the time.
Acclaimed author Peter Richardson takes readers inside the iconic magazine during an era of legendary events, major cultural figures, and unforgettable music. Showing how Rolling Stone became a journalistic juggernaut—nurturing music-focused writers like Cameron Crowe, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus as well as New Journalism giants Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe—this book reveals how Rolling Stone both exemplified and critiqued the counterculture. Always more than the definitive rock magazine, Rolling Stone leveraged the power of popular music to deliver groundbreaking coverage of historic events, setting a new standard for the next generation of American journalism.

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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As Melissa Butcher puts it in her book The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future (Manchester UP, 2026) when asked to rank the importance of freedom to them most Americans would put it as an 11 out of 10. So, what happens when the idea of freedom becomes not something that unites Americans but rather, through its different interpretations, ideals and priorities becomes something that polarises Americans? Based upon extensive fieldwork and interviews with Americans across the states, Butcher is able to explore not just the different conceptions of freedom of America across realms such as justice, COVID, the rural/urban divide and religion, but also gives us an insight into how Americans think about America and how, especially at the local level, there are areas of hope which confound the claims we hear at the national level.

In our conversation we discuss issues such as how she identified her places to visit and people to speak to, the daily experiences of crossing the US/Mexico border at El Paso, Texas, the important conversations that can come from speaking to people as people rather than labels and why, precisely, so many Americans bring up postmodernism at the same time that Universities no longer teach it.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts.

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Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood.

Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss.

Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience.

Guest Dr. Michaela Hulstyn is Associate Director of the Structured Liberal Education Program at Stanford University. Her research interests include philosophy and Literature; 20c and 21c French and Francophone African thought, cognitive approaches to aesthetics; global phenomenology; intermediality; decolonization; narrative. In addition to her monograph, she has published articles related to a number of these topics in forums such as Modern Fiction Studies, Philosophy and Literature, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites.
Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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Public scholarship is one of those things that most academics are interested in, but unfortunately for them, they don't know how to actually get started. It's not their fault: nobody's ever taught them how, because it's not a part of graduate curricula. The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook (JHU Press, 2026) is intended to solve that part of the "hidden curriculum" by offering scholars a practical series of steps on how to get started writing for the public, and from there, all of the different directions that they can go in.

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In Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Leslie Barnes examines the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under global imperialism. She explores the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogates the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. Engaged with debates concerning the status of transactional sex, Sex Work in Southeast Asia explores the symbolic force and concrete conditions of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam, considering how these debates and the figures they ensnare are mediated by fiction and creative nonfiction. The book’s scenes of ambivalence show how the aesthetic treatment of sex work stretches the paradigms we use to make sense not only of sex work, but also of art, the evidentiary status of testimony and the spectacles of pleasure and suffering. Contesting essentialism and authenticity, and working to suspend judgement, these scenes encourage a re-examination of what we think we know about sex work, how we know it and what we do with that knowledge.

Leslie Barnes is an Associate Professor of French Studies at the Australian National University. She is author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (2014) and co-editor of The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (2021). We previously chatted on New Books about her work on the great Cambodian film director Rithy Panh, so was excited to speak with her again about Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film.

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In Sarah Wambaugh and the Plebiscite: The Turbulent History of a Democratic Alternative to War (Cambridge UP, 2026) Dr. Andrew Park tells the story of the rise and fall of the plebiscite, once seen as a promising democratic solution to international conflict which – more than once – became embroiled in controversy and war in the first half of the twentieth century. The book's central figure is the brilliant but largely forgotten American scholar Sarah Wambaugh, the leading expert on the plebiscite technique whose dramatic career took her to many of the world's political hotspots. The norms she developed for the technique continue to shape how self-determination and popular suffrage in international affairs are thought about and conducted today. In a world where borders are again being redrawn by force and democracy everywhere appears under strain, this book is a timely and compelling reminder that such events are not new.

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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