Armchair Travel (11/10/26)

Visit another country (or even another time) without leaving your house with these four adventurous reads!

WEEB by Lin King
9781250443922 | 4/20/27

Having recently graduated from a prestigious university, a young woman who goes by “Rina” moves to Tokyo to complete academic research and tutor English on the side. But this is mostly a front for her true obsession: Kagami, the cerebral master alchemist from her favorite anime.

But Rina isn’t like other weebs. With fluent language skills, a racially ambiguous face, and an invented name, she can almost pass as part-Japanese. She has meticulously studied Japanese culture, its colonial history, the particularities of its customs and linguistics; she is ambitious, calculating, clever. The only thing that feels real to Rina, about herself, is her devotion to Kagami. She will do whatever she can to have the purest possible experience of him that she craves—and specifically, of his voice, which belongs to a middle-aged voice actor named Fujimoto Fumitaka. With help from her secretly Taiwanese idol-in-training neighbor, the eerily perfect child influencer she tutors, her favorite fan art creator, and an astute hairdresser, Rina infiltrates the Japanese entertainment industry, though the results are not what she expects.

Whip-smart, irreverent, and audaciously satirical, WEEB captures the glittering, magical energy of a cult anime, alongside a piercing commentary on race, appropriation, and belonging. As proficient in online fandom as it is in cultural theory, this is a tantalizing, provocative quest that unravels how our desires define and derange us.

THE BLACK CATS BOOKSHOP by Piergiorgio Pulixi; translated by Antony Shugaar
9781250445209 | 1/26/27

The Black Cats Bookshop in Southern Italy has everything a crime fiction lover could dream of: shelves stacked with Christie, Penny, Osman, and King, a book club full of amateur detectives who once solved a real-life cold case . . . and a terrifying masked killer on the loose.

Inside the bookshop that owes its name to former stray cats Miss Marple and Poirot, who wandered in one day and decided to stay, grumpy bookseller Marzio Montecristo meets weekly with a group of self-appointed crime experts: a melancholy pipe-smoking pensioner, an elderly woman obsessed with bloody thrillers, a lively Franciscan monk partial to historical crime novels, and a goth girl who seems to have murderous fantasies of her own. The cats attend as well, of course.

But there is a killer afoot. Thanks to their literary expertise, Marzio and his club once solved a baffling cold case within days, spotting parallels between the real crime and plotlines from books they had read. Now, confounded by a series of brutal murders, policewoman Angela Dimase must turn to the unlikeliest of consultants: Marzio Montecristo’s book club.

With wit, warmth, lightness of touch, and countless loving nods to the great works that shaped the mystery genre, Piergiorgio Pulixi rewrites the rules of cozy crime fiction, delivering a story that will appeal to everyone who loves a good crime novel.

GOOD LOOKS & BAD MANNERS: AMERICAN WOMEN WHO SHOOK UP PARIS, FROM THE BELLE EPOQUE TO THE NEW WAVE by Joanna Scutts
9781250445094 | 4/20/27

A narrative history of American women’s love affair with Paris, from the Belle Epoque to the gritty and glamorous jazz age, through WWII and the cultural transformations beyond. Starting in the late-19th century, the era of ocean liners and Impressionism, young American women followed their ambitions across the Atlantic to make a home in the irresistible city of Paris. Long before Emily in Paris, or even the advent of mass tourism, these plucky Americans fell in love with Paris and the freedoms it offered. This enchanting character-driven cultural history tells the story of the American women whose creativity, boundary-pushing, and dauntless spirit shaped, and in turn were shaped by, the city of Paris.

Famous figures like Edith Wharton, Julia Child, and Angela Davis take their place among a riotous assembly of lesser-known artists and adventurers. The book invites us into the art scene of the 1870s, where Americans like Mary Cassatt and May Alcott (sister of Louisa) made a home for themselves outside the male-only Ecole de Beaux Arts, to the 1920s, where Isadora Duncan and Josephine Baker captivated audiences, to the hardships of WWII, shouldered by writers like Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein, and the cultural transformations beyond.

Often on their own for the first time, these women flaunted their talents and navigated limited budgets with thriftiness and good humor. Facing less (or at least different kinds of) sexism and racism than back home, the Americans cultivated a vibrant expat sisterhood. At its heart, this book is a love story, a celebration of a Paris both mythologized and realized by the daring American women who chose to call it home.

THE ENIGMAS by Emilia Hart
9781250388223 | 4/6/27