Book deals: April 2022 edition

Let’s face it: The publishing world can be slow-moving. From peer review through editing and design, it takes time—sometimes a lot of it—to produce a polished book. But we’re too excited to keep every signing under wraps. We’re pleased to share details about a few of our latest acquisitions below, including a new book from anthropologist Khiara Bridges exploring reproductive justice and inequality in maternal health, called Expecting Inequality. In case you missed it, you can browse several other new deals and forthcoming books in our February 2022 edition.

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The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum by Daniel Oberhaus

Matthew Browne, acquisitions editor at the MIT Press, has acquired world rights to The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum by journalist Daniel Oberhaus. The Silicon Shrink is a guide to the future of our minds seen through the lens of familiar and emerging digital technologies. It combines deep research with new reporting to create a narrative-driven, critical examination of how modern technology is both exacerbating mental health problems and providing novel forms of therapeutic care. Slated for publication in fall 2024.

A photo of author Kiara Bridges, pictured from the waist up, standing with her hands behind her back against a stark white background. She wears a red dress with a buff sleeve and structured skirt and large hoop earrings.

Expecting Inequity: Race, Class, and Reproductive Justice by Khiara M. Bridges

Browne has also acquired Expecting Inequity: Race, Class, and Reproductive Justice by Khiara M. Bridges, Professor of Law at University of California, Berkeley. An ethnography of class-privileged Black women navigating race and class as they intersect during pregnancy, childbirth, and beyond, pitched as Evicted meets The New Jim Crow within a reproductive justice framework. Slated for publication in fall 2025.

How to Be an Urban Naturalist: And Save the World with Citizen Science by Menno Schilthuizen

Beth Clevenger, senior acquisitions editor at the MIT Press, has acquired How to Be an Urban Naturalist: And Save the World with Citizen Science by Menno SchilthuizenWritten by Menno Schilthuizen, How to Be an Urban Naturalist is a manifesto for a new dawn of natural history in which city dwellers are empowered to explore urban nature and collaborate to make change in their own neighborhoods. Schilthuizen is a taxonomist, ecologist, and evolutionary biologist at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, and a professor of evolution and biodiversity at Leiden University. Slated for publication in fall 2024.

Inventions and Innovations: A Brief History of Infatuation, Overpromise, and Disappointment by Vaclav Smil

Clevenger has also acquired Inventions and Innovations: A Brief History of Infatuation, Overpromise, and Disappointment by Vaclav Smil. From one of the most brilliant and capacious thinkers of our time, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts. Among Smil’s other books with the MIT Press are Energy and CivilizationGrowthand Made in the USA. Slated for publication in spring 2023.


Explore all of the MIT Press’s new and forthcoming book