New Books Network

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New Books Network episodes

June 18 Alexander Vandewalle, "Characters and Characterization in Mythological Video Games" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
The first book-length study on mythology reception in video games, Characters and Characterization in Mythological Video Games (Bloomsbury, 2026) examines how video games characterize mythological characters from the perspectives of classical reception and game studies. Characters are vital to most stories, and many video games. They allow us to enter the fiction of a game, and facilitate our embodiment in the game world. Over time, what are initially blank slates transform into fictional existents with well-developed personalities and goals. In this context, narratology uses the term 'characterization' to refer to how character traits are ascribed to the entities we call 'characters'. How does characterization operate in games? How do players impact this process? How is mythology transformed by video games? What can games 'do' that other media cannot? After establishing a theoretical framework, this book moves to six case studies that each analyze mythological characters in a particular game: Smite, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Immortals Fenyx Rising, God of War, Theseus and Asgard's Wrath 2. The scope of these studies is diverse, incorporating examples from mainstream, indie and virtual reality gaming. While the book's main focus lies with Greco-Roman mythology, it also includes games with Norse and Egyptian settings, or with playable characters from a wide range of international mythological traditions. Through these case studies, Alexander Vandewalle leads his readers to an understanding of different modalities or 'languages' of mythology reception in games. He argues for a striking diversity in mythological games and their characters, and illuminates how the relationship between games and antiquity is fundamentally one of continuous dialogue and play.
Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.
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55 min
June 18 Shana Galen, "A Shop Girl's Guide to Wooing a Lord" (Berkley, 2026)
Romance novels—especially historical romance novels—thrive on heroes and heroines who don’t match in terms of social class. There must be conflict, after all, or the novel would end before it began. But not even George Bernard Shaw’s mismatched couple in Pygmalion (later My Fair Lady) can claim quite as much distance as Shana Galen’s Tamsin Archer and the Honourable Garret Kildare, the main characters in A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord (Berkley, 2026).
Tamsin’s once comfortable if never opulent life took a sharp downward turn when a Royal Navy press gang hauled her father off to unwanted service on a seagoing vessel, service from which he never returned. By 1813, when we meet her at age twenty-three, she’s doing her best to support her injured mother and two much younger siblings by selling flowers in the street. A young man named Garret speaks kindly to her and pays her a shilling when she’s expecting far less, and as a result she remembers him fondly, but it’s not until two years later that she meets him again. By then, a chimney sweep has taken her younger siblings and holds them hostage to payments she can never make and that he might not honor even if she did. She’s desperate to get them back.
In 1815, Garret’s life also makes a dramatic turn. His father, the Earl of Glenister, announces that the family has run out of money and must sell its ancestral lands in Ireland. Not exactly poverty, especially by Tamsin's standards, but still uncomfortable. Garret and his three brothers—Liam, Killian, and Daire—make a bet that one of them will secure the hand of an heiress, thus sparing their younger sister, Mariah, from having to marry an elderly and decrepit duke. But as Garret sets out to woo his heiress, he encounters Tamsin somewhere she’s not supposed to be …
Shana Galen, a former English teacher, has written more than fifty romances. A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord, first in her The Heiress Hunters series, is the latest. Find out more about her and her books here.
C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including one co-written with P.K. Adams. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in the summer or fall of 2026.
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29 min
June 18 Reinvention in an Era of Volatility
Caroline Stokes is a strategist who works with C-Suites and Boards to lead their organizations through AI disruption, climate risk, and geopolitical instability. Her new book Aftershock to 2030: A CEO's Guide to Reinvention in the Age of AI, Climate, and Societal Collapse is published by Broad Book Press and serves as a roadmap for leaders navigating the tidal wave of change going on today. The founder of Workplace EQ, Caroline Stokes is previously the author of the business book Elephants Before Unicorns, about which she was interviewed by Dan Hill for his previous NBN podcast, “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” in 2020.
Empathy, mental sovereignty, super hero: those three aspirations define this conversation well. Let’s unpack each term, in turn, to provide a sense of Caroline Stokes’ perspective on the world of work nowadays. One of Stokes’ points here is that emotional labor is of real value but the burden of getting it done rarely falls equally on people’s shoulders in business, with women often taking the greater load. Who should be stepping up more? CEOs, for whom empathy is rarely a Top 10 or even Top 30 strength of theirs. Sometimes hyper-masculinity gets in the way; other times, it might be that they feel blocked by the misperception that empathy entails just “dumping” one’s feelings on others at work, when in reality admitting vulnerability in relation to specific, mission-critical aspects of one’s job should really be the primary focus. In turn, what is “mental sovereignty” in Stokes’ work view? The term is meant to denote showing respect to everyone, regardless of rank, as part of creating a culture that highly values psychological safety. Finally, “super hero” enters the picture because, as a long-time executive coach, Stokes knows that within most if not all leaders lies a desire to be a difference-maker in ways that go beyond hitting the quarterly numbers alone. Within every leader, she believes, lurks a seven-year-old child eager to be a force for moral good as well as financial success for the enterprise overall.
Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.
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36 min
June 18 European Jews in the 21st Century
What is the status of Jews in Europe in the 21st century? How do they maintain vital communities? Do they desire to remain in Europe? To remain Jewish? Where are the trendlines headed? A mere 0.1% of Europe's population is Jewish. Proportionally, this figure is at its lowest since the turn of the first millennium. European Jews' numbers have continued to decline even after the Holocaust. Once a major center of world Jewry, Europe often goes largely unmentioned in conversations about the global Jewish community.
K., the European Jewish Review, is a new magazine founded in March 2021 to document and analyze the current situation of the 1.3 million Jews living in Europe. The magazine is devoted to reporting from and fostering dialogue across all the various communities of European Jewry.
Daniel Solomon, the English-language editor of K. will lead a discussion with members of the editorial board of K.: Stéphane Bou (Editor of chief of K., European Jewish Review), Macha Fogel (Author at K., European Jewish Review), and Danny Trom (Senior Researcher, EHESS).
This panel discussion originally took place on October 12, 2021.
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0 min
June 18 Charlotte Brooks, "The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution" (U California Press, 2026)
The story of the Moy family—U.S.-born Chinese-American siblings who grow up in the first half of the 20th century—is one that spans the Pacific, covering New York, Chicago, and cosmopolitan Shanghai. It’s a story that spans the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, and the early Cold War—and stars one sibling who was an early participant in the Kuomintang…and another who records propaganda for Germany and Japan during the Second World War.
In her new book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution (University of California Press, 2026), historian Charlotte Brooks follows the Moys as they confront discrimination in the United States, search for opportunity in cosmopolitan Shanghai, and wrestle with questions of loyalty, identity, and belonging that still resonate today.
Charlotte is a historian and author who has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American and Chinese diaspora history. Originally from California, she graduated from Yale and worked in mainland China and Hong Kong before earning a PhD from Northwestern University. She is a professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
In this conversation, we talk about Charlotte’s research, the lives of the Moy siblings, and what their experiences tell us about being Chinese American in a turbulent century.
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47 min
June 18 Michael D. Nichols, "Batman and the Classics: Echoes of Mythology, Literature and Philosophy in the Comics and Films" (McFarland, 2026)
Fans of Batman are used to seeing the Caped Crusader associate with the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman, but what if one were to put the Dark Knight into the company of figures such as Beowulf, Robin Hood, Oedipus, and Sun Tzu, among others? Batman and the Classics: Echoes of Mythology, Literature and Philosophy in the Comics and Films (McFarland, 2026) is the first book to compare famous Batman graphic novels, story arcs, and films to classic texts of literature and philosophy from around the world. Through this comparison we can see, for instance, how the epic warrior archetype of Beowulf or Roland persists in The Dark Knight Returns, or how the metaphor of the journey, found in such works as The Odyssey, occurs in the story arc Knightfall. By placing Batman stories into conversation with such classic texts, this book sheds light on the deeper meanings of key stories of the Dark Knight, as well as how long-lasting themes of literature and philosophy have persisted in the fiction of this popular character.
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44 min
June 17 Anna Harwell Celenza, "On the Record: Music that Changed America (Norton, 2026)
There is no shortage of books on music and politics, but Anna Harwell Celenza explores an interesting premise in her book On the Record: Music that Changed America (Norton, 2026). Each of the twelve chapters discusses a different instance when music, as Celenza writes, “sparked debates in the halls of Congress.” Arranged basically chronologically, Celenza tackles some of the most powerful and contentious issues in twentieth and twenty-first century American politics. From censorship to copyright law; from the Civil Rights Movement, to foreign policy during Apartheid, Celenza traces the extraordinary moments when music moved Congress, challenged power, and united people around shared ideals. The stories Celenza tells are just as much about music including the intertwined histories of “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing” or the making of Paul Simon’s album Graceland, as they are about US legislation or American politics. She offers readers a history of America heard through the songs and compositions that changed its course.
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1 hr
June 17 Audio and Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting, Panel #1
This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On May 13, 2026, Princeton’s Center for Human Values hosted a day-long conference titled Audio & Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting. It was co-sponsored by Princeton’s Journalism program, and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research.
In the first panel, podcaster Benjamen Walker discusses Tuning Time, a podcast about the politics of time stretching technology, with NYU media and disability studies professor Mara Mills. Professor Mills teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and is Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. Her work on “disability and media” spans disability arts and technoscience, with a focus on the history, politics, and cultures of electronics and digital media. Benjamen Walker is one of the co-founders of the podcast network Radiotopa from PRX, and for a decade hosted and produced his award winning program Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything.
The panel continues with a presentation by NYU musicologist Fanny Gribenski in which she discusses her current project, The Elephant in the Piano: Music, Ecology, Empire. The book, and podcast, is an investigation of the 19th century piano through a material history of its primary components: ivory, wood, felt, and metal. Professor Gribenski is a historical musicologist who specializes in the history of musical and sonic practices. Her first book, L'Église comme lieu de concert. Pratiques musicales et usages de l'espace (Paris, 1830–1905) analyzes the role of music in the production of sacred spaces. Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science, and Politics, 1859-1955 (University of Chicago, 2023) traces the rocky path towards international pitch standardization.
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1 hr 3 min
June 17 Samantha Ellis, "Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture" (Pegasus Books, 2026)
I had the privilege of speaking with writer Samantha Ellis about her deeply moving new book, Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture (Pegasus
Books, 2026). Our discussion explored not only the story of a
disappearing language, but also the broader questions of memory,
identity, and what it means to inherit a fragile cultural legacy.
At the heart of Ellis’s book is Judeo-Iraqi Arabic—also known as
Baghdadi Jewish Arabic or Hakimalna—a language once spoken by the Jews
of Iraq. Rich with layers of Hebrew and Judeo-Babylonian Aramaic, it
reflects over two millennia of Jewish life in the region. Today,
however, it stands on the brink of extinction. As Ellis shared, a
language is considered endangered when it is no longer passed on to
children, and Judeo-Iraqi Arabic may have only about a thousand speakers
remaining worldwide. Within a generation, it could fall silent.
Ellis described a powerful turning point in her own awareness: a
casual question from another parent about why she was not sending her
son to a nursery that spoke “her language.” Her spontaneous response—“my
language is dead”—became the catalyst for the journey that led to this
book. That moment captures the quiet grief of linguistic loss, but also
the urgency of preservation.
Our conversation traced the long arc of Iraqi Jewish history,
beginning with the Babylonian exile in 597 BCE. Iraqi Jews lived in the
region long before the arrival of Arabic, shifting over centuries from
Hebrew to Aramaic and later to Arabic, while preserving distinctive
linguistic features from earlier eras. This layered history lives on in
the language itself. Yet the mass departures of Iraqi Jews in the
mid-20th century—particularly the 1950–51 airlift—fractured this
continuity. Today, only a handful of Jews remain in Iraq.
And yet, as Ellis emphasized, culture does not disappear all at once.
Language may fade, but other forms of transmission endure. Food, in
particular, becomes a powerful vessel of memory. Ellis initially
resisted including recipes in her book, but came to understand that
cooking is itself a kind of language—a sensory bridge to the past. The
image of her mother carrying three rolling pins from Iraq is emblematic
of this continuity: tangible objects that hold intangible heritage. Even
the book’s title gesture—“always carry salt”—evokes protective
practices familiar across Mizrahi communities, small rituals that encode
belief, memory, and identity.
We also discussed the remarkable story of the Iraqi Jewish Archive,
discovered in 2003 in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein’s secret
police headquarters. The archive contains hundreds of thousands of
documents—school records, letters, communal registers—offering an
intimate portrait of everyday Jewish life in Iraq. Today, innovative
projects are using AI to transcribe and translate these materials across
multiple scripts, making them accessible to descendants and scholars
alike. Yet the archive’s ultimate fate remains uncertain, raising
complex questions about ownership, memory, and cultural restitution.
A particularly resonant theme in our conversation was Ellis’s
struggle with authenticity. As a second-generation Iraqi Jew raised in
the UK, she grappled with whether she had the “right” to tell this
story, especially without having visited Iraq herself. Her resolution—to
be “authentic to me”—offers an important model for thinking about
diasporic identity. Preservation, she suggests, does not require perfect
replication. It allows for adaptation, creativity, even reinvention.
One can honor tradition while also “messing with it,” whether by
adjusting a recipe or reimagining inherited practices.
Ellis introduces a beautiful concept she calls “milk language”—the
language absorbed in early childhood, through intimacy and care, even if
it is not the dominant language of one’s environment. This idea invites
us to reconsider how language lives within us, not only as a tool of
communication but as a carrier of emotional and cultural memory.
As an educator, I was especially struck by Ellis’s closing insight
and her implicit call to action: to speak with our elders while we still
can. There is a profound difference between hearing fragments of family
stories in childhood and sitting down, as an adult, to listen fully and
intentionally. These conversations do more than preserve history; they
create connection, continuity, and a deeper sense of self.
Always Carry Salt is not only a memoir. It is an
invitation—to remember, to document, and to carry forward what might
otherwise be lost. In a time when so many cultural threads are at risk
of unraveling, Ellis’s work reminds us that preservation begins with
attention, with curiosity, and with the willingness to listen.
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50 min
June 17 Joe P. L. Davidson, "Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times" (MIT Press, 2026)
There is no alternative. The End of History. Climate Apocalypse. It
seems that our contemporary moment is defined by the idea that things
can only get worse or, in the most optimistic reading, perhaps stay as
they are. Ideas for things getting better, utopian ideas, seem in short
supply. It is this which Joe Davidson confronts in his book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026).
Davidson links this apparent decline in utopian thinking to a change in
‘time consciousness’, the ways in which our sense of the future seems
less open to possibility than it once was. Despite this he notes the
persistence of utopianism in a new form, the ‘postdystopian utopia’
which takes account of the assumption the future will be worse and uses
this as a spur to utopian thinking. He then explores how this manifests
itself in various utopian works in different traditions, from Black
utopianism considering the tragedy of the slave trade, feminism mining
the nostalgia of previous battles to consider how things could be
different and climate change utopianism confronting catastrophe.
In our discussion we explore the changing fortunes and forms of
utopianism over time, the value of ‘utopian studies’, why Silicon Valley
tech-bros might be as utopian (or dystopian) as they make out and think
about why it is important we all imagine the possibility of different
worlds. Joe also makes a number of reading recommendations for
postdystopian utopian novels.
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 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts.
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1 hr 5 min