New Books Network

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New Books Network episodes

July 10 Vignesh Rajahmani, "The Dravidian Pathway: The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the Politics of Transition in South India" (Hurst Publishers, 2025)
In
the rich political landscape of Tamil Nadu, few movements have had as
profound and enduring an impact as the Dravidian movement. Vignesh
Rajahmani’s The Dravidian Pathway (Hurst
Publishers, 2025) offers a compelling and detailed account of how the
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) transformed a powerful socio-cultural
and anti-caste movement into a highly successful electoral political
force.
Focusing on the pivotal decades of the mid-20th century,
Rajahmani
traces the strategic leadership of key figures including Periyar E.V.
Ramasamy, C.N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, and others. The book explores
how the DMK skilfully synthesised
anti-caste ideology, demands for linguistic pride and Tamil identity,
socioeconomic reforms, and educational mobility. This synthesis not only
resonated deeply with marginalised communities but also enabled the
party to translate ideological commitments into concrete welfare
policies and political power.
The Dravidian Pathway is
particularly valuable for its nuanced examination of the transition from
movement to party, shedding light on the organisational innovations —
such as the spread of reading rooms (padippakams)
— that helped build a robust Dravidian public sphere in the 1950s and
1960s. Rajahmani’s work provides fresh insights into one of modern
India’s most distinctive and influential regional political traditions.
This timely
study is essential reading for anyone interested in South Indian
politics, federalism, identity politics, and the enduring legacy of
social justice movements in India.
Host: Dhiren Swain is a joint PhD Candidate in Urban Studies at The University of Melbourne and IIT Madras.
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57 min
July 10 Ali Fard, "Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data
(University of Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Ali Fard peers through
this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global
computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological
development of the cloud computing paradigm, Dr. Fard exposes an
ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and
marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.
Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes
the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform
capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote
regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers
that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with
compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses,
Dr. Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the
growing economies of data extraction.
Breaking
down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes
visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird
today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of
the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban
space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization.
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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44 min
July 10 Yiddish Tangos and Klezmer Mambos
This panel discussion will explore the remarkable influence of Latin American music and dance on the culture of Yiddish speaking communities in the United States. Ronald Robboy will discuss Latin American musical influences upon Yiddish theater composers, including Sholom Secunda, Abraham Ellstein, and Alexander Olshanetsky; Sonia Gollance will discuss the popularity of dances like the Tango and Mambo in the Borscht Belt, as exemplified by movies like Dirty Dancing and Mamboniks; and Josh Kun will discuss the influence of Latin American music on post-war Jewish music and the influence of Jewish music on U.S. Latino/a artists.
This event forms part of Carnegie Hall’s Nuestros sonidos festival.
This panel discussion originally took place on March 10, 2025.
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1 hr 6 min
July 10 What are the Limits of Political Speech? A Conversation with Erik J. Olsen
A New Approach to Political Speech: Democratic Theory, Constitutional Law, and Public Liberty After January 6 (de Gruyter, 2026) challenges conventional understandings of political speech and its relationship to democracy. Through a focused case study of Donald Trump's role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election and the prosecutions stemming from it, Erik Olsen develops a critique of the prevailing view that political speech is a private right that is only instrumentally related to political action. He advocates instead for a theoretical framework that treats political speech as a form of communicative action and balances the protection of free expression with the need to safeguard core democratic practices and processes. He thus outlines a more robust First Amendment jurisprudence that can better defend both public liberty and democratic institutions from authoritarian threats in the current era of democratic backsliding.
Erik J. Olsen is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Seattle University.
Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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1 hr 18 min
July 10 Juliet McShannon “Rescue” (Spring, 2026)
Juliet McShannon speaks to Emily Everett about her story “Rescue,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. The story follows a woman on her search for a lost dog through a neighborhood very different from her own, and explores ideas of loss, class, community, and healing. Juliet also discusses how her childhood in Apartheid South Africa, and young adulthood practicing law during the time of transition that followed, has shaped her writing.
Juliet McShannon is an emerging fiction writer who was born in England, raised in South Africa where she practiced law, and now lives in the Colorado Desert in Southern California. She is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and was selected as a Luso-American Fellow for Disquiet International. Her writing has appeared in Five Points Literary Journal, the New England Review, The Guardian, The Independent, The Star, and elsewhere.
Read the story in The Common at thecommononline.org/rescue.
Follow Juliet on Instagram at @julietmcshannon.
The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.
Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. In 2025 her debut novel All That Life Can Afford was a Reese’s Book Club pick, and her work appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column. Previous publications include the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.
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31 min
July 10 Daniel Cohnitz and Jussi Haukioja, "Foundations for Metasemantics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Metasemantics studies the foundations of meaning, asking what makes it the case that certain words have the meanings that they do. But what makes metasemantic theories true? This question has been all but ignored in philosophy of language. In this book, Cohnitz and Haukioja address this issue and argue that just as in metasemantics, both internalist and externalist answers are available for this foundational question.
The authors introduce and defend meta-internalism, arguing that the foundations of reference and meaning are anchored in the individual dispositions and psychological states of language users, offering an alternative to meta-externalist views that would appeal to broader community-based or otherwise external factors. Meta-internalism is, moreover, compatible with semantic externalism as usually understood, and provides an explanation of why externalism is true. Through a critical examination of prominent theories and thought experiments, the book explores fundamental issues like reference failure, conceptual engineering, and the metaphysical implications of reference, as well as the methodology of theories of reference. With its focus on the foundations of metasemantics, the book provides a fresh and empirically informed perspective on one of the core questions in the philosophy of language. Foundations for Metasemantics (Oxford University Press, 2025) is essential reading for philosophers, scholars, and students seeking to understand the underlying principles that support our theories of meaning and reference.
Daniel Cohnitz is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Utrecht University.
Jussi Haukioja is Professor of philosophy at NTNU Trondheim, Norway.
Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.
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1 hr 10 min
July 09 Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill, "Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story" (Da Capo, 2026)
With his shag haircut and white Stratocaster guitar, Jeff Beck was an
icon known and loved by millions. Yet somehow, he maintained the
ineffable low profile cool of a cult hero as he glided through six
decades of musical trends with nary a lapse in taste. Not to say he ever
played it safe. What other guitarist can lay claim to performing with
opera star Luciano Pavarotti, mainstream television personality Kelly
Clarkson, and professional degenerates like Guns N’ Roses with equal
grace and wit? Or as Beck himself once quipped, “I’m an awkward son of a
bitch when it comes to doing the expected.”
In Blow by Blow: The Jeff Beck Story (Da
Capo, 2026), Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill return to chart the
unexplored life of rock’s greatest and perhaps most enigmatic
instrumentalist. Culled from approximately 30 hours of interviews with
the late guitarist himself, numerous conversations with those closest to
him, and extensive research, the book sheds new light on the genius
that Jimmy Page once said, “shifted the whole sound and face of electric
guitar music.”
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53 min
July 09Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach, "Freedom to Know: Creating Community with Ambedkar, Du Bois, Iqbal, Ramabai and Tagore" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
Freedom to Know: Creating Community with Ambedkar, Du Bois, Iqbal, Ramabai and Tagore (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) asks
how a (world) community can be created to allow structural minorities
equitable access to intellectual and material resources
Draws on a range of primary sources

Brings the work of W.E.B. Du Bois into conversation with his Indian contemporaries

Adds a novel historical perspective to recent scholarship on critical social epistemology

Diversifies current ways of doing Indian philosophy
Abstract: In this book, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach studies how
Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956), W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Mohammed Iqbal
(1877-1938), Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) and Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941) diagnose the epistemic oppression they perceive and
experience, their analysis of the coloniality of being as its cause, and
their proposals to counter it. Kirloskar-Steinbach explores how these
voices seek to co-create a space in which they can experience what it
means to be free from the conceptual domination of academic frameworks,
relish that freedom with their collaborators and, in the equal
participation that that space affords, develop open-ended concepts that
help them to resist the coloniality of being.
Jessica Zu's
personal reflection: This book models for readers and scholars alike on
how to practice "hermeneutical democracy." The notion of hermeneutical
philosophy resonates strongly with Artruso Escobar's philosophy of
"pluri-verse" instead of Eurocentric metaphysics of "uni-verse", Roger
Ames's "zeotology" or philosophy of the living in Chinese traditions,
and Brook Ziporyn's mystical atheism against the dominant paradigm of "nous as arché".
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56 min
July 09 Pratap Kumar Penumala and Arvind Sharma, "The Bloomsbury Handbook of Hindu Ethics" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
With the plurality of Hinduism in mind, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Hindu Ethics focuses on the human, sociological and situational ethical framework underpinning Hindu ethics. Chapters go beyond the traditional classical sources-such as the Vedas, epics, mythological narratives and Dharmasastra texts-to include lesser known vernacular based moral texts, as well as contemporary sources from organizations, intellectuals and movements of religious, social and political nature.
Going beyond only theological and philosophical discussions, this handbook presents a truly multidisciplinary approach to Hindu ethics. This book will benefit not only scholars and students within religious studies and philosophy, but also those from sociology, history, theology, law, anthropology and literature.
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34 min
July 09 Kit Chapman, "The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry" (Profile Books, 2026)
The first chemists were Sri Lankan forgers who crafted
unimaginably strong steel millennia before it should have been
possible. They were alchemists in Roman Egypt, who designed apparatus
still in use today. They were Stone Age leatherworkers, Tang Dynasty
herbalists and Mayan stoneworkers.
The Enlightenment is usually
credited with the origins of chemistry, but in truth, the science
blossomed gradually. As early innovators distilled, smelted, forged and
fermented their way through the centuries, they blurred science and
mysticism in search of answers to life's greatest mysteries.
In reading The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry (Profile Books, 2026), join
Kit Chapman on a global quest to achieve immortality, cure all disease
and transmute lead into gold as he reveals the illuminating stories of
how the alchemists first broke new ground and shaped the scientific
method.
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1 hr 19 min