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This month’s featured titles include novels, a memoir by a pioneering veterinarian, and a Christian work on inner peace

For more titles by Big Red authors, peruse our previous round-ups.

Have you published a book you'd like to submit? Scroll down for details!

And did you know that Cornell has an online book club? Check it out!

The cover of "Middle Spoon"

Middle Spoon

Alejandro Varela ’01

“The novel explores the beautiful complexity of unorthodox, progressive family dynamics with tenderness and humor in equal measure,” says Kirkus, calling Varela’s work a “touching yet provocative queer love story about defying societal expectations.”

The story unfolds as a series of letters from a heartbroken man to the former lover who recently dumped him. As the reader soon realizes, the narrator’s situation defies assumptions: he’s married to a loving husband, has two children, and enjoys vibrant social and professional lives.

But he’s been devastated by the end of a polyamorous relationship with a younger man, and is penning the letters as a coping mechanism at the behest of his therapist.

“This isn’t the sort of connection easily erased in anything less than an indefinite period of time,” he writes to his ex. “I don’t foresee a shortcut to forgetting you, and I don’t know how to begin again without first forgetting you.”

Varela’s debut novel, The Town of Babylon, was a finalist for the National Book Award; Publishers Weekly named his short story collection, The People Who Report More Stress, one of 2023’s top works of fiction.

Breaking the Barnyard Barrier

Linda Rhodes, PhD ’88

“In the late 1970s the golden valley between Utah’s Wasatch Mountains was home to some of the best dairies in the country,” states the publisher, the University of Nevada Press.

“That was also where Linda Rhodes, a newly minted large-animal veterinarian, had to prove that a woman could do what the Mormon dairymen were sure was a man’s job. She was often scared that they were right.”

Rhodes’s memoir recalls her barrier-breaking career as a female vet in what was then a heavily male profession.

The cover of "Breaking the Barnyard Barrier"

The book received a blurb from Dr. Katherine Houpt, a professor emerita in CVM, who calls it a “fascinating account” of Rhodes’s early trials.

“Cattle medicine is difficult because the animals are large, not always cooperative, and given to calving in the middle of the night,” Houpt observes. “Struggling with cold, exhaustion, and the hostility of the farmers was a challenge—but a challenge Dr. Linda Rhodes was up to."

In addition to her PhD in physiology from CVM, Rhodes holds a veterinary degree from Penn.

The cover of "The Search for Shalom"

The Search for Shalom

Will Dickerson ’80, PhD ’92

Dickerson—who earned a master’s of divinity degree from Princeton as well as a doctorate in medieval history from Cornell—is a pastor who spent more than three decades with One Mission Hungary, a nonprofit based in Budapest, where he also taught English at a secondary school.

He previously penned The Fingerprint of God: Reflections on Love and Its Practice. His latest work is described as “not a self-help book” in the struggle against the anxiety of the modern age, but rather a guidebook toward shalom, the Hebrew word for peace.

“People spend their lives serving various idols, the most popular of which is Mammon [material wealth],” says the publisher, Wipf and Stock.

“They nurture their grudges, refuse to forgive, and live in the rubble of broken relationships. Some of those who consider themselves Christians, instead of serving as ministers of reconciliation, enlist as soldiers in the culture wars and end up fighting the wrong battles with the wrong weapons. Many people, therefore, live in a state of war.”

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Tell-Tale Treats

Jennifer Ng Chow ’01

The mystery novel is the third entry in Chow’s series about a woman named Felicity, who runs a magical bakery whose products have fantastical properties. This time, a woman visiting a local inn with a reunion group of high school friends drowns after eating one of Felicity’s enchanted almond cookies, one of her new recipes.

Is it somehow her fault? Or can she—with the help of her boyfriend and a magical bunny named Whiskers—solve the case and discover who’s really to blame?

The “Magical Fortune Cookie” series is Chow’s third in the cozy mystery genre featuring Asian cultural themes and protagonists.

The cover of "Tell-Tale Treats"

The CALS alum has also penned the “Sassy Cat” series, featuring heroine Mimi Lee and her talking kitty, and the “L.A. Night Market” series, about two cousins who solve crimes while running a food stall. Her other work includes YA novels.

The cover of "Haunted by the Civil War"

Haunted by the Civil War

Shirley Samuels

Samuels is the Litwin Professor of American Studies on the Hill. Her latest nonfiction book, from Princeton University Press, is subtitled Cultural Testimony in the Nineteenth-Century United States. In it, she studies the work of the era’s leading authors, artists, and others to explore why the Civil War continues to haunt America.

As she puts it in the introduction: “In other words, why does a series of often inchoate battles fought more than 160 years ago continue to be debated as though the victory or the loss contained something like the soul of the country?”

Samuels mines answers in the works of writers like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; statesmen including Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; the paintings of Winslow Homer; early photography; and illustrations in news media of the day.

Bonded by Evolution

Paul Eastwick ’01

Subtitled The New Science of Love and Connection, this nonfiction work by a professor at the University of California, Davis, parses psychology research for a general audience, with some self-help lessons woven in.

Part of Eastwick’s mission is to challenge decades-old findings in the field of evolutionary psych that cast heterosexual dating and mating in a Darwinian light: that men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and romance is a zero-sum game.

The cover of "Bonded by Evolution"

Such notions aren’t just unproductive, the Arts & Sciences alum argues—they have been hijacked by an incel culture and a “manosphere” that promotes misogyny and even violence.

“This book is for anyone who has felt that this popular scientific story of human mating is bleak—that if you look at it too directly or internalize it too deeply, you could become overwhelmed with cynicism and quit the whole gross spectacle,” he writes in the preface.

“In fact, the evolutionary psychological narrative is warped and distorted. There is a more optimistic, more interesting, and more accurate relational evolutionary story that connects the scientific facts. The real story is about how people evolved to form emotionally meaningful attachment bonds with each other, and how satisfying relationships stem from close interpersonal attunement and compatibility.”

The cover of "The Future Is Foreign"

The Future Is Foreign

Hilary Holbrow, PhD ’17

Holbrow, who earned a doctorate in sociology on the Hill, is an assistant professor of Japanese politics and society at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Her nonfiction work delves into how Japanese companies are coping with the steep decline in the nation’s native-born population, and the impacts of those efforts.

She argues that although labor shortages are inducing firms to hire more immigrants and women, not all employees benefit equally from the shift.

“Japanese women’s enduring overrepresentation in low-status clerical roles reinforces gender biases that hold all women back,” says the publisher, Cornell University Press.

“In contrast, the small but growing presence of white-collar Asian immigrant workers weakens the ethnic prejudices of their Japanese colleagues. Despite Japan’s reputation for xenophobia, white-collar immigrant men disproportionally reap the dividends of Japan’s shrinking population.”

To submit your book for consideration, email cornellians@cornell.edu. Please note that to be included, books must be recently published by a conventional publisher—not self published, pay-to-publish, publish on demand, partner-published, or similar—and be of interest to a general audience. Books not featured will be forwarded to Class Notes.

Published March 9, 2026

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