Podcasts by New Books in Literary Studies
Interviews with Scholars of Literature about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Further podcasts by Marshall Poe
Podcast on the topic Bücher
All episodes
Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" Part 3: The Language from 2023-08-28T08:00
In Part 3, Professor Stephen Greenblatt offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll get an in-depth look at the powerful relationship between Antonio and Bassanio, t...
ListenShakespeare's Life, World and Works 5: How to Read Shakespeare from 2023-01-30T09:00
William Shakespeare, who lived in England from 1564 to 1616, is one of the world’s most popular and most captivating authors. Even four hundred years after his death, his plays still attract audien...
ListenGeneration Why?: Do We Need "Generations?" from 2023-01-04T09:00
Who gets to define generational cohorts and do they obscure more than illuminate? GuestsNeil Howe, author of Generations Tony Tulathimutte, author of Why There’s No ‘Millennial’ NovelLearn more a...
ListenGeneration Why?: Do We Need "Generations?" from 2023-01-04T09:00
Who gets to define generational cohorts and do they obscure more than illuminate? GuestsNeil Howe, author of Generations Tony Tulathimutte, author of Why There’s No ‘Millennial’ NovelLearn more a...
ListenOn Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot from 2022-12-20T09:00
In Paris in 1953, one of the strangest and most popular plays of the 20th century premiered, Waiting for Godot, written by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Since the premier, people have been tryin...
ListenOn William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" from 2022-12-19T09:00
William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in history, and Hamlet is his greatest work. In Hamlet, Shakespeare gave us one of the first modern characters in literature. We are invited into the mind...
ListenOn Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote" from 2022-12-16T09:06
Don Quixote was written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. He wrote it in two parts. Part one was published in 1605, and part two ten years later, in 1615. The story is centered around a middle...
ListenOn Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" from 2022-12-15T09:00
The French writer Marcel Proust was fascinated by life. But he was even more interested in how we perceive life. In 1908, when he was in his late 30s, he began to write a novel that explored themes...
ListenOn Voltaire's "Candide" from 2022-12-14T09:00
Many people made the European Enlightenment, but probably nobody better represents the movement’s spirit than the French writer and philosopher Voltaire. He was a man of letters and strong critic o...
ListenOn Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" from 2022-12-13T09:00
In 1967, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez published his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Because of that book, he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982. One Hundred Years of S...
ListenOn James Joyce's "Ulysses" from 2022-12-12T09:00
Perhaps more than any other book, Ulysses has the reputation of being difficult—it is dense, allusive, and often hard to follow. But Joyce wasn’t trying to be challenging for its own sake, or becau...
ListenOn Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs Dalloway" from 2022-12-08T09:00
In the early 20th century, Europe and North America were undergoing a radical transformation. Scientific, technological, and political changes disrupted many traditional forms of life. The growth o...
ListenOn James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" from 2022-12-05T09:00
The writer and activist James Baldwin grew up in a majority white America that saw white American lives as standard and universal, and Black American lives as different and particular. But in his 1...
ListenOn Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" from 2022-12-02T09:00
The Victorian era is known for its class rigidity and moral strictness. In her 1847 novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë gave us a robust, layered character who pushes against cultural norms and fully...
ListenOn Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" from 2022-11-30T09:00
When he was in his late 30s, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri got himself into some serious political trouble and was exiled from his beloved Florence. While in exile, he wrote one of the world’s g...
ListenOn George Orwell's "1984" from 2022-11-28T09:00
In 1948, English author George Orwell wrote what would become one of the defining novels of the 20th century, 1984. He was writing in the years following WWII and the beginning of The Cold War. It ...
ListenOn George Eliot's "Middlemarch" from 2022-11-25T09:00
By the time we reach middle age, our lives have taken certain paths. Sometimes these paths are close to what we imagined in our youth. But more often, they’re dramatically different. We come to rea...
ListenOn "The Mahābhārata" from 2022-11-23T09:10
When it comes to epic poetry, there’s a strong case to be made that the Ancient Indian story the Mahābhārata is the most epic. Clocking in at around 100,000 verses, the Mahābhārata is roughly seven...
ListenOn Matteo Maria Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato" from 2022-11-21T09:07
The Italian Renaissance was an era of rebirth in the arts, sciences, engineering, anatomy, and architecture. But also for literature. One of the most influential works from this period was Matteo M...
ListenOn H. G. Well's "The Time Machine" from 2022-11-15T09:00
When H.G. Wells was growing up in England in the 1860s, science wasn’t part of education or everyday life the way it is now. Even though the 19th century was an era of dramatic technological invent...
ListenOn Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" from 2022-11-10T09:00
Sometime around 450 BC in ancient Greece, a young Thucydides went with his father to hear the historian Herodotus speak. After the lecture, Thucydides announced that writing history was his life’s ...
ListenOn Toni Morrison's "Beloved" from 2022-11-09T09:00
In 1987, Toni Morrison published her fourth novel, Beloved, based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery with her child. Garner and her daughter were discovered by slave catch...
ListenOn Edward Said's "Orientalism" from 2022-11-08T09:00
Beginning in the 17th century, European countries began colonizing countries east of Europe. They imposed their own ideas over local cultures and extracted free labor and resources. One way that Eu...
ListenOn John Milton's "Paradise Lost" from 2022-11-04T08:00
As a young student at Christ’s College Cambridge, John Milton announced to the world that he was going to write the greatest poem that the world has ever seen. He didn’t want to sit among the epic ...
ListenOn "Grimms' Fairytales" from 2022-11-02T08:00
You probably already know the story of Snow White—as well as Little Red Riding Hood, Briar Rose, The Frog Prince, and so many others. These tales have a rich history of oral storytelling. They’ve t...
ListenOn Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" from 2022-11-01T08:00
When Thomas Mann published The Magic Mountain in 1924, tuberculosis had a deadly hold on Europe and the United States, killing one in seven adults in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If that...
ListenOn Augustine's "Confessions" from 2022-10-31T08:00
What is freedom? If we are free, why do we feel anxiety? How do I relate to the world? Saint Augustine of Hippo asked himself these questions around 400 AD as he wrote Confessions—indeed, as he liv...
ListenOn Cicero's "On Friendship" from 2022-10-28T08:00
There’s nothing better or more important in life than a good friend. For Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, the emphasis was on “good.” Cicero lived through the assassination of Caesar, one of...
ListenOn Franz Kafka's "The Trial" from 2022-10-27T08:00
When reading a crime novel, we usually learn the crime within the first few page turns; the trick is discovering the perpetrator. Perhaps this is what makes Franz Kafka’s 1914 book The Trial so hau...
ListenOn Samuel Smiles' "Self-Help" from 2022-10-26T08:00
Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help isn’t just an advice manual. It represents the invention of a genre, and not a moment too soon. Smiles was writing at a time when work conditions were extremely poor, and p...
ListenOn Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis' "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" from 2022-10-24T08:00
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is such a complex and clever allegory of Brazilian society that many readers didn’t initially understand just how searing its critique really was. Its author, J...
ListenOn Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" from 2022-10-21T08:00
By the early 19th century, slavery was still a brutal reality in southern U.S. states, and a growing movement to abolish slavery nationwide was taking hold. In 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe published...
ListenOn Fyodor Dostoevsky’s "The Brothers Karamazov" from 2022-10-20T08:00
The Brothers Karmazov is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s last novel. In it, he presents his ideas about culture, the human soul, and God, and he uses his characters, the brothers Ivan, Dimitri, and Alyosha, as...
ListenOn Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" from 2022-10-14T08:00
Joseph Conrad, who published 20 books and several best-sellers by the time of his death, was also a sailor. Heart of Darkness follows seaman Charles Marlow’s journey down a river in Africa. It is C...
ListenOn Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" from 2022-10-10T08:00
Watching our favorite TV shows and movies today, it’s easy to take the relatable characters and familiar settings for granted. But when Henrik Ibsen debuted his play A Doll’s House, realism was a s...
ListenOn John Hersey's "Hiroshima" from 2022-10-07T08:00
In August of 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Less than a year later, American journalist John Hersey traveled to Hiroshima and intervi...
ListenOn Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji" from 2022-10-06T08:00
We don’t even know the real name of the 11th century authorMurasaki Shikibu. But we do know that her book, The Tale of Genji, is arguably one of the most influential Japanese texts to date. Genji q...
ListenOn Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Faust" from 2022-10-05T08:00
Selling your soul to the devil in exchange for your deepest desire is a common theme in many western stories. The origins of this theme can be traced back to the German legend of Faust. The most we...
ListenOn Thomas of Monmouth's "The Life and Passion of William of Norwich" from 2022-08-03T08:00
There is only one surviving copy of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, but its story continues to haunt us. When 12th-century monk Thomas of Monmouth learned of a young boy’s murder in his...
ListenOn Thomas of Monmouth's "The Life and Passion of William of Norwich" from 2022-08-03T08:00
There is only one surviving copy of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, but its story continues to haunt us. When 12th-century monk Thomas of Monmouth learned of a young boy’s murder in his...
ListenOn Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days" from 2022-08-02T08:00
When French author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in the late 1800s, scheduled global travel was practically science fiction, and 80 days seemed impossibly fast. But his techno-futur...
ListenDisintermediation from 2022-07-14T20:00
Mark McGurl talks about disintermediation, a key term for internet commerce, and his new book about fiction in the age of digital self-publication. The fantasy of disintermediation lies at the hear...
ListenAutofictionalization from 2022-07-12T08:00
Claus Elholm Andersen talks about autofictionalization, a mode of narration that characterizes autotfiction, where the narrative consciousness or voice is placed with the experiencing character and...
ListenNegro Literature from 2022-07-11T08:00
Elizabeth McHenry talks about the moment in the history of African American literature in the decade following the 1896 legalization of segregation, the subject of her new book To Make Negro Litera...
ListenBook Proposal from 2022-07-07T08:00
Laura Portwood-Stacer talks with Kim about book proposals. Laura is a consultant for academic authors. Her book, titled, appropriately, The Book Proposal Book (Princeton UP, 2021), is a how-to-guid...
ListenSextuality from 2022-06-29T08:00
Stephen Guy-Bray talks about sexuality, a concept that brings together the the use of sexual metaphors in the description of textual production and the erotics that inhere in reading praxes. Among ...
ListenCognitive Cultural Studies from 2022-06-28T08:00
Torsa Ghosal talks about Cognitive Cultural Studies, a field that entails methodologies that situate the human mind in historical and cultural contexts, sometimes working against models of the mind...
ListenThe Hyperlocal from 2022-06-21T08:00
Nicholas Birns talks about ‘the hyperlocal’, a modality of American journalism in the early 1990s that he adapts to characterize a flexible and transposable concept of the local used in eighteenth ...
ListenRacial Affect from 2022-06-09T08:00
Oishani Sengupta talks about the felt experiences of racism, especially as they are represented in Victorian literature and its contemporary readership, which is the subject of her research. The co...
ListenModernist Mushrooms from 2022-05-30T08:00
Shalini Sengupta thinks together ‘the mycological turn’ in the humanities and the narrative and aesthetic work that mushrooms do in some modernist literature. She draws from Anna Tsing’s The Mushro...
ListenUndisciplining from 2022-05-27T08:00
Kim talks to Amy Wong, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, and Alicia Christoff about ‘Undisciplining’, a term they borrowed from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake and have used in an article and a journal issue to...
ListenDistant Reading from 2022-05-25T08:00
In this episode Kim talks with Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu about distant reading. Ama Bemma provides her Global Poetics Project as an awesome example of distant reading. She also references Franco More...
ListenAutotheory from 2022-05-23T08:00
In this episode Kim speaks with Lauren Fournier about autotheory. Lauren has recently published a book on the subject, titled Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (MIT Pre...
ListenLove as Critique from 2022-05-17T08:00
In this episode Saronik talks to Manasvin Rajagopalan about critical possibilities in varied literary ideations of love. Manasvin mentions Hannah Arendt’s concept of love as destruction, the concep...
ListenWitnessing from 2022-05-16T08:00
Ulrich Baer talks to Kim about the process and phenomenon of witnessing, which creates collective acknowledgement, understanding, and responsibility for trauma. Among other works, he talks about Sh...
Listen9/11 Family Novel from 2022-05-12T08:00
Saronik chats with Jay Shelat about the 9/11 family novel. They discuss how the attacks (re)dynamized constructions and perceptions of family. Jay refers to a few 9/11 family novels, including Burn...
ListenAdam Brown, "Judging 'Privileged' Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the 'Grey Zone'" (Berghahn, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Nazis’ persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to ...
ListenAndrii Danylenko, “From the Bible to Shakespeare: Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819-1897) and the Formation of Literary Ukrainian” (Academic Studies Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does a language develop? What are the factors and processes that shape a language and reflect the changes it undergoes? These seemingly routine questions entail a conversation that involves not...
ListenSandrine Sanos, “The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France” (Stanford University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013), examines the central roles that gender, sexual...
ListenHonorée Fanonne Jeffers, "The Age of Phillis" (Wesleyan UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jennifer J. Davis speaks with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, about The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan UP, 2020), Jeffers’s latest collection of poems centere...
ListenRobert D. Miller II, “The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations: An Old Testament Myth, Its Origins, and Its Afterlives” (Eisenbrauns, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
People have long been captivated by stories of dragons. Myths related to dragon slaying can be found across many civilizations around the world, even among the most ancient cultures including ancie...
ListenJill Talbot, “Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction” (University of Iowa Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We all know the commonplace that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. After reading Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (University of Iowa Press, 2012), I’m inclined to extend this wisd...
ListenYitzhak Lewis, "Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity" (SUNY Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Hasidic leader R. Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) has held a place in the Jewish popular imagination for more than two centuries. Some see him as the (self-proclaimed) Messiah, others as the for...
ListenHelen Bones, “The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World” (Otago University Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World (Otago University Press, 2018), Helen Bones, a Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University...
ListenJulia H. Lee, “Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937” (NYU Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Julia H. Lee is the author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011). Dr. Lee is an Assistant Prof...
ListenAdheesh Sathaye, “Crossing the Lines of Caste" (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to be a Brahmin, and what could it mean to become one? The ancient Indian mythological figure Vi?v?mitra accomplishes just this, transforming himself from a king into a Brahmin by...
ListenSamuel England, “Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts” (Edinburgh UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his thrilling and sparkling new book, Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Samuel England, Assista...
ListenDavid Tod Roy, “The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei” (Princeton UP, 1993-2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
By any measure, David Tod Roy‘s translation The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, Vol. 1-5 (Princeton University Press, 1993-2013) is a landmark achievement for East Asian Studies, transl...
ListenCatharine Abell, "Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2020), Catharine Abell draws our attention to the character of Emma Woodhouse. She is handsome, clever, and rich. Or, at least, that's...
ListenDavid Slucki et al., "Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust"?(Wayne State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In?Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust?(Wayne State University Press, 2020), Co-editors?David Slucki, Loti Smorgon Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at the Australian ...
ListenSami Schalk, “Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction” (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do werewolves, enslaved women and immortal beings have in common? And how can they shed light on contemporary questions of ableism and police brutality? In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, ...
ListenJeremy Dauber, “The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem” (Schocken, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The first comprehensive biography of famed Yiddish novelist, story writer and playwright Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber‘s welcome new book The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Aft...
ListenCaroline H. Yang, "The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form (Stanford University Press, 2020) explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US l...
ListenFrederik H. Green, "Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic" (Stone Bridge Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Xu Xu (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of no...
ListenBruno Chaouat, “Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism” (Liverpool University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Is Theory Good for the Jews?” asks author Bruno Chaouat, professor of French at the University of Minnesota, in Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemiti...
ListenJonathan D. Wells, “Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-endin...
ListenZena Hitz, "Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Do you have an active intellectual life? That is a question you may feel uncomfortable answering these days given that the very phrase “intellectual life” can strike some people as pretentious or s...
ListenDaniel Heath Justice, “Why Indigenous Literatures Matter” (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In a remarkable new book, Daniel Heath Justice, an author and professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies and English at the University of British Columbia, makes an argument for the vitality...
ListenElizabeth Winder, “Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953” (Harper, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly pronounced in the case of iconic figures of the ...
ListenSamantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody, "Monstrous Women in Comics" (UP of Mississippi, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In their new collection, Monstrous Women in Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody put together a critical volume on the ways women are made mons...
ListenLara Harb, "Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a delightful and formidable study on the details and development of poetics and...
ListenWojtek Sawa, “The Wall Speaks: Voices of the Unheard” (National Center of Culture, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Wojtek Sawa‘s The Wall Speaks: Voices of the Unheard (National Center of Culture, 2016) is a bilingual Polish-English project that engages with the intricacies of remembering and forgetting as part...
ListenHenrietta Harrison, “The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Henrietta Harrison‘s new book is the work of a gifted storyteller. In its pages, the reader will find Boxers getting drunk on communion wine, wolf apparitions, people waking up from the dead, balla...
ListenKeith A. Livers, "Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Conspiracy theories prove to be popular and widely-spread. As a rule, we do not tend to take them seriously, but it would be wrong to suggest that audiences are not intrigued by them. What can cons...
ListenEdgar Garcia, "Signs of the America: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs and Khipu" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his sixth thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin wrote, “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of t...
ListenLuisa Banki, “Post-Katastrophische Poetik: Zu W. G. Sebald und Walter Benjamin” (Wilhelm Fink, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
W. G. Sebald, one of the most prominent German-speaking authors of the late 20th century, has been discussed in German literary studies again and again. Nonetheless, many questions about him and hi...
ListenThe NBS Fall Seminar: Sports Memoirs from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One of the most crowded sections of the sports library is the one devoted to autobiographies and memoirs. The shelves here are constantly adding new titles, by both legends and bit players. For ins...
ListenCarl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962" (U Virginia Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
By 1935 William Faulkner was well established as an author of critically praised novels, yet the low volume of his sales forced him to seek work in Hollywood. As Carl Rollyson details in The Life o...
ListenHamsa Stainton, "Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (Oxford University Press, 2019), Hamsa Stainton explores the relationship between 'poetry’ and ‘prayer’ in South Asia through close examination ...
ListenMark I. Lurie, “Galantière: The Lost Generation’s Forgotten Man” (Overlook Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Though he never enjoyed the publishing success and fame of such friends as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, Lewis Galantière made a considerable contribution to literature over the course of...
ListenAnnette Kolodny, “In Search of First Contact” (Duke University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We all know the song. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” And now, thankfully, we all know the controversy; celebrating a perpetrator of genocide might say a few unpleasant things about the...
ListenIthamar Theodor, "The Bhagavad-G?t?: A Critical Introduction" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ithamar Theodor's The Bhagavad-G?t?: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2020) is a systematic and comprehensive introduction to one of the most read texts in South Asia. The Bhagavad-g?t? is at it...
ListenDeepra Dandekar, “The Subhedar's Son” (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This book is a translation and study of The Subhedar's Son (Oxford University Press, 2019), an award-winning Marathi biographical novel written in 1895 by Rev. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar, who writes a...
ListenStephan Resch, “Stefan Zweig und der Europa-Gedanke” (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Stefan Zweig und der Europa-Gedanke (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017), Stephan Resch analyzes the Austrian author’s relationship with Europe and the concept of pacifism. To date Stephan Zweig is a ...
ListenSarah Churchwell, “Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby” (Virago, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One phenomenon of movies made of classic novels is that the movie often says a lot more about the time of its making than about the time of the novel. And so Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is more...
ListenChris Richardson, "Batman and the Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Batman and The Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020), Chris Richardson presents a cultural analysis of the ways gender, identity, and sexuality are negotiated in the ri...
ListenJoshua Bennett, "Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020)...
ListenDiscussion with Dahlia Schweitzer (“Going Viral”) and Rob Thomas (“Veronica Mars”) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Follow-up interviews are always fun. Listen to my follow-up interview with Dahlia Schweitzer, author of Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World (Rutgers University Press, 2018). I t...
ListenCarmen Kynard, “Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies” (SUNY Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You know you are not going to get the same old story about progressive literacies and education from Carmen Kynard, who ends the introduction to her book with a saying from her grandmother: “Whenev...
ListenJ. S. Sutton and M. L. Mifsud, "A Revolution in Tropes: Alloiostrophic Rhetoric" (Lexington Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Aristotle, the co-called father of rhetoric, supposedly conceptualized his theory of persuasion as a means of bringing meaning to rest. But what if there’s another story, one in which forgotten tro...
ListenKathryn Hume, "The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why do contemporary writers use myths from ancient Greece and Rome, Pharaonic Egypt, the Viking north, Africa's west coast, and Hebrew and Christian traditions? What do these stories from premodern...
ListenMark Rifkin, “Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Duke University Press, 2017) engages fields including physics, phenomenology, native storytelling, and que...
ListenStacy Alaimo, “Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self” (Indiana UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana University Press, 2010), Stacy Alaimo approaches the concepts of “science, environment, and self” in an extremely n...
ListenDale Kedwards, "The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland" (D. S. Brewer, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, s...
ListenScott Henderson, "Comics and Pop Culture: Adaptation from Panel to Frame" (U Texas Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It is hard to discuss the current film industry without acknowledging the impact of comic book adaptations, especially considering the blockbuster success of recent superhero movies. Yet transmedia...
ListenBarry Wimpfheimer, “The Talmud: A Biography” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
?In The Talmud: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2018), Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, associate professor of religious studies and law at Northwestern University, introduces the reader to the Ba...
ListenKeith Clark, “The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry” (Louisiana State UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do you do if you accompany a friend on her research trip to Boston University’s Gotlieb Archival Research Center and end up finding a treasure trove of letters, news articles, hand written not...
ListenShyam Sharma, "Writing Support for International Graduate Students" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Listen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, author of Writing Support for International Graduate Students: Enhancing Transition and Success (Routledge, 2020). We talk about international students and...
ListenIan Burrows, "Shakespeare for Snowflakes: On Slapstick and Sympathy" (Zero Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Shakespeare for Snowflakes: On Slapstick and Sympathy (Zero Books, 2020), Ian Burrows examines the fraught meeting place of slapstick and tragedy, asking us under what literary and performative ...
ListenErin Edwards, “The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous” (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At the beginning of the 20th century, surrealists such as André Breton and Man Ray played a game called “Exquisite Corpse.” You can play it by drawing or by writing, and the rules are very simple. ...
ListenPatrick James and Abigail Ruane, “The International Relations of Middle-Earth: Learning from the Lord of the Rings” (University of Michigan Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Patrick James is the Dornsife Dean’s Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. A self-described intellectual “fox,” James works on a wide variety of subjects in...
ListenFinishing Your Book When Life Is A Disaster from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish...
ListenRoxann Prazniak, "Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art" (U Hawaii Press 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The “Mongol turn” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forged new political, commercial, and religious circumstances in Eurasia. This legacy can be found in the “sudden appearances” of common...
ListenSarah Schulman, “Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair” (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) examines how accusations of harm are appropriated and deployed ...
ListenThe NBS Summer Seminar: Sports Books for Children from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What did you read as a young sports fan? Maybe the sports pages in the local newspaper, or a glossy illustrated magazine? Did your school’s library carry biographies of famous athletes written for ...
ListenChristina Meyer, "Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid" (Ohio State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Yellow Kid was a ubiquitous figure at the end of the nineteenth century. Originally created by Richard F. Outcault, the Kid first appeared as a character in the comic strip Hogan’s Alley. He wa...
ListenBrian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...
ListenMark A. McCutcheon, “The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology” (Athabasca UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Canadian popular culture have in common? This is the question that Mark A. McCutcheon seeks to answer in his new book, The M...
ListenRon Kaplan, “501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die” (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
WorldCat is the largest online catalog in the world, accessing the collections of more than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories. Using the catalog, a subject search of particular spor...
ListenHelen Sword, "Stylish Academic Writing" (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Listen to this interview of Helen Sword, author of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012). We talk about bad writing, but a lot more about how to make it good. There's even a dog. Interviewer ...
ListenSteve Zeitlin, "The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness" (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This is a book of encounters. Part memoir, part essay, and partly a guide to maximizing your capacity for fulfillment and expression, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awaren...
ListenMira Beth Wasserman, “Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities” (U Penn Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Talmud’s m...
ListenNed Stuckey-French, “The American Essay in the American Century” (University of Missouri Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Clio, Erato, Polyhymnia–among the nine muses of Greek mythology, there’s no muse for the essay. And that’s not only because the essay doesn’t appear, in name, until Montaigne publishes his first b...
ListenPip Gordon, "Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond" (UP Mississippi, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The life and works of William Faulkner have generated numerous biographical studies exploring how Faulkner understood southern history, race, his relationship to art, and his place in the canons of...
ListenMitchell Nathanson, "Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original" (U Nebraska Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by Dr. Mitchell Nathanson, author of the book Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). Nathanson, a professor of law at the Jeffrey S. Moora...
ListenPablo Piccato, “A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (University of California Press, 2017) explores the definitive changes that the justice system as well as criminal ideas and practices under...
ListenBeth H. Piatote, “Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature” (Yale University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The suspension of the so-called “Indian Wars” did not signal colonialism’s end, only a different battlefield. “The calvary man was supplanted–or, rather, supplemented–by the field matron, the Hotch...
ListenCharles L. Leavitt IV, "Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Charles Leavitt steps back from the micro-histories focusing more narrowly on, for example, Italian cinema so as to we...
ListenDiana Senechal, "Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Diana Senechal examines words, concepts, and phrases that demand reappraisal. Targ...
ListenJannica Budde, “Turkish Women Writers in German Cities” (Königshausen and Neumann, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Germany, beginning in the 1960s, a major population shift took place. The reason for it was the German guest worker program. Due to the German ‘economic miracle,’ the country was in growing need...
ListenAndre Williams, “Dividing Lines: Social Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction” (University of Michigan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Andrei Williams‘ provocative new book on African American class divisions in Post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow America is sure to spark spirited debate among those interested in how the interplay of...
ListenVadim Shneyder, "Russia's Capitalist Realism: Narrative Form and History in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov" (Northwestern UP. 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Vadim Shneyder's new book, Russia's Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov (Northwestern, 2020) examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodo...
ListenIva Glisic, "The Futurist Files: Avant-Garde, Politics, and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930" (NIU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Futurism was Russia's first avant-garde movement. Gatecrashing the Russian public sphere in the early twentieth century, the movement called for the destruction of everything old, so that the past ...
ListenBrian Tochterman, “The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to say that a city can “die”? As Brian Tochterman shows in this compelling intellectual and cultural history, motifs of imminent death—of a “Necropolis” haunting the country’s gre...
ListenIan Condry, “The Soul of Anime” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You may come for the Astro Boy or Afro Samurai, but you’ll stay for the innovative ways that Ian Condry‘s new book brings together analyses of transmedia practice, collaboration, and materialities ...
ListenCaridad Svich, "The Hour of All Things and Other Plays" (Intellect Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Hour of All Things and Other Plays (Intellect Books, 2018) collects four plays by Caridad Svich, a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement playwright. The plays take place in Venezuela, Sub-Saharan ...
ListenKoritha Mitchell, ed., “Iola Leroy Or, Shadows Uplifted” by Frances E.W. Harper (Broadview Editions, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth c...
ListenEric Hayot, “On Literary Worlds” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Eric Hayot‘s new book is a bold, ambitious, and inspiring call for revising the way we think about, practice, and teach literary history. Pt. I of On Literary Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2012)...
ListenAnne Lounsbery, "Life is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her journey through the greatest monuments of 19th- and early 20th-century Russian literature, as well as through lesser-known works from women and regional writers, Anne Lounsbery (Professor an...
ListenKatelyn Knox, “Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First-Century France” (Liverpool UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Katelyn Knox’s book, Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First–Century France (Liverpool University Press, 2016) examines francophone literature, art, dance, music, and fashion, considering ho...
ListenBruce Rusk, “Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, ...
ListenJohn R. Gallagher, "Update Culture and the Afterlife of Writing" (Utah State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they interviews John R. Gallagher of University of Illinois about Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing (Utah State University Press, 2020) a dynamic ...
ListenEmily Petermann, “The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction” (Camden House, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction (Camden House, 2014; a new paperback edition has recently come out (Boydell and Brewer, 2018)) ...
ListenRichard W. Leeman and Bernard Duffy, “The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) is a compendium of 22 orations delivered by African Americans over a span of...
ListenKevin McGrath, "Vy?sa Redux: Narrative in Epic Mah?bh?rata" (Anthem Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Vy?sa Redux: Narrative in Epic Mah?bh?rata (Anthem Press, 2019), Kevin McGrath examines the complex and enigmatic Vy?sa, both the primary creative poet of the Sanskrit epic Mah?bh?rata and a key...
ListenMarcel Schmid, “Autopoiesis and Literature: The Short History of an Endless Process” (transcript, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book Autopoiesis and Literature: The Short History of an Endless Process (Autopoiesis und Literatur: Die kurze Geschichte eines endlosen Verfahrens [transcript, 2016]), Marcel Schmid, a ...
ListenMichael Gibbs Hill, “Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do “Rip van Winkle,” Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Aesop’s Fables have in common? All of them were translated into Chinese by Lin Shu (Lin Qinnan, 1852-1924), a major force in the liter...
ListenMatthew Miller, "The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge" (Northwestern UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge (Northwestern University Press, 2018), Matthew Miller explores the literary evolution of the modern e...
ListenNick Admussen, “Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry” (U Hawaii Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2016, Nick Admussen’s exciting new book Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry explores the development of twentieth-century prose poetr...
ListenAmir Eshel, “Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his very recent work, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past(University of Chicago Press, 2013), Amir Eshel presents us with a very interesting examination of what he refer...
ListenMartin Shaw, "Courting the Wild Twin" (Chelsea Green, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today I interview Martin Shaw. In Shaw’s new book, Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020), he writes, “Here’s a secret I don’t share very often. Myths are not only to do with a lon...
ListenLana Lin, “Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer” (Fordham UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In April 1923 Sigmund Freud detected a lesion in his mouth that turned out to be cancerous. From diagnosis to his death, he endured 33 surgeries and 10 prostheses. In 1932 alone, Freud consulted wi...
ListenKaty Price, “Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You were amused to find you too could fear “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.” The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of th...
ListenCarl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934" (UVA Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As a novelist, short story author, screenwriter, and Nobel laureate, William Faulkner looms large in modern American literature. Yet the very range of his work and the sources for his rich literary...
ListenHanna Engelmeier, “Man, the Ape: Anthropology and the Reception of Darwin in Germany, 1850-1900” (Bohlau, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The relationship between humans and apes has been discussed for centuries. That discussion took a new turn with the publication and reception of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natura...
ListenMichael Gordin, “The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When I agreed to host New Books and Science Fiction and Fantasy there were a number of authors I hoped to interview, including Michael Gordin. This might come as a surprise to listeners, because Mi...
ListenBrian Collins, "The Other R?ma: Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of Para?ur?ma" (SUNY Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Collins' book The Other R?ma Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of Para?ur?ma (SUNY Press, 2020) examines a fascinating, understudied figure appearing in Sanskrit narrative texts: Para?u...
ListenRuth von Bernuth, “How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic La...
ListenCosima Bruno, “Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation” (Brill, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Cosima Bruno‘s new book asks us to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the relationship between a poem and its translation? In the course of Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry throug...
ListenLeslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...
ListenAmelia Glaser, “Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising” (Stanford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the...
ListenChristopher Bush, “Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Orientalism, the ideograph, and media theory grew up together. In Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford University Press, 2010), Christopher Bush offers a wonderfully trans-disciplin...
ListenMartha Ackermann, "These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson" (Norton, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After a life lived in obscurity, Emily Dickinson emerged after death as one of the greatest poets of her time. In These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson (W. W. Nor...
ListenMehammed Mack, “Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture” (Fordham UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the recent past, anti-Muslim hate crimes and rhetoric have surged across America and Europe. Much of this public discourse revolves around questions of assimilation and where Muslim positions on...
ListenAnthony Bale, “The Book of Marvels and Travels” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anthony Bale‘s new translation of Sir John Mandeville’s classic account is an exciting and engaging text that’s accessible to a wide range of readers. The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford Univer...
ListenGreat Books: Melissa Schwartzberg on Rousseau's "The Social Contract" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Roussau's The Social Contract poses a central question for all of us. Why do we liv...
ListenKerry Wallach, “Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany” (U Michigan Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What did it mean to be perceived as Jewish or non-Jewish in Weimar Germany? How, in an age of growing antisemitism, was Jewishness revealed, or made invisible? Kerry Wallach of Gettysburg College, ...
ListenUlrich Plass, “Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature” (Routledge, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature (Routledge, 2007), Ulrich Plass makes the case for the importance and relevance of Adorno’s often forgotten and derided attempts...
ListenArchana Venkatesan, "Endless Song: Tiruvaymoli" (Penguin, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Endless Song (Oxford University Press, 2019) is Dr. Archana Venkatesan’s exquisite translation of the Tiruvaymoli (sacred utterance), a brilliant 1102-verse ninth century tamil poem celebrating the...
ListenChristopher B. Patterson, “Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific” (Rutgers UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Christopher B. Patterson‘s book Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018) reads English-language literary production from Southeast Asia and i...
ListenCory MacLauchlin, “Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces” (Da Capo, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you’ve spent any time in New Orleans, you can appreciate the challenge of putting the city’s joie de vivre into words.However, as a New Orleans native, John Kennedy Toole was steeped in the trad...
ListenGreat Books: Maureen McLane on Wordsworth's Poetry from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The British romantic poet William Wordsworth is best known for his moving evocations of nature, his celebration of childhood, and his quest to find a shared humanity in his poetry. He’s also widely...
ListenTill Nitschmann, “Theater of the Maimed” (Konigshausen and Neumann, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book Theater of the Maimed: Fictional Characters between Deformation und Destruction in Theatrical Works of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries (Knigshausen and Neumann, 2015)...
ListenJ. Hillis Miller, “The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his recent book, The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (University of Chicago Press, 2011), J. Hillis Miller sets outs to address Theodor Adorno’s famous proclamatio...
ListenRobert Elmer, "Piercing Heaven: Prayers of the Puritans" (Lexham Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Robert Elmer, who is a communications specialist at Seattle Pacific University, a prolific writer of historical fiction, and the author of over fifty published titles, has published a ground-breaki...
ListenBruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics and Narrative” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of...
ListenKoritha Mitchell, “Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930” (University of Illinois Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Koritha Mitchell‘s Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2012) is, as described on the publisher’s webpage, “...
ListenChristiane Gruber, “The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In our most recent public memory, images of the Prophet Muhammad have caused a great deal of controversy, such as satirical cartoons of Muhammad in French magazine Charlie Hebdo, or Danish newspape...
ListenHoda Yousef, “Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930” (Stanford UP, from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Literacy is often portrayed as a social good. Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Hoda Yousef has a different take ...
ListenNancy Hargrove, “T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University of Florida Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. ...
ListenJoseph Rex Young, "George R.R. Martin and the Fantasy Form" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“In the game of thrones you either win or you die”––with over 10 million viewers per episode of Game of Thrones, one of the most successful television shows of all time, George R.R. Martin definite...
ListenReiko Ohnuma, “Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Reiko Ohnuma‘s Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful treatment of animals in Indian Buddhist literature. Although they are l...
ListenJohn Cheng, “Astounding Wounder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Cheng‘s new book Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) uncovers the material and social circumstances that creat...
ListenGreat Books: Nicholas Johnson on Samuel Beckett from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Another heavenly day” is the opening line of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (1961), where Winnie sits buried to her waist in sand, with her husband Willie stuck a few feet away from her … but la...
ListenRobert Darnton, “A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Five decades ago, a young scholar named Robert Darnton followed up on a footnote that took him to the archives of the “Typographical Society of Neuchatel”(S.T.N.) in Switzerland, not far from the F...
ListenEllen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr., “Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind” (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Much ink has been spilled in telling the story of the making of Gone With the Wind– be it the book, the movie, or the subsequent musicals and merchandise. So it’s not only refreshing but downright ...
ListenConor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, "Southern Comforts: Drinking and the US South" (LSU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger about their edited collection, Southern Comforts: Drinking and the US South from Louisiana State University Pres...
ListenSergej Rickenbacher, “Wissen um Stimmung” (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Wissen um Stimmung (Knowledge of Mood), Sergej Rickenbacher, a post-doc at the University of Aachen, examines two works of Robert Musil from the perspective of knowledge and atmosp...
ListenRobert Lipsyte, “An Accidental Sportswriter: A Memoir” (Ecco, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the summer of 1957, Robert Lipsyte answered a classified ad. He was an English major who needed some cash, and The New York Times was looking for an editorial assistant. He went to work on the ...
ListenC. Baker and P. Phongpaichit, "From the Fifty J?taka: Selections from the Thai Paññ?sa J?taka" (Silkworm Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The J?taka tales, or stories of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisatta, are included in the P?li Canon and have for centuries been a rich source of inspiration in Theravada Buddhism. In additi...
ListenMarian Wilson Kimber, “The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word” (U Illinois Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Although largely forgotten today, elocution was a popular form of domestic and professional entertainment from the late nineteenth century until around World War II. Elocution is the dramatic readi...
ListenElizabeth West, “African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being” (Lexington Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Elizabeth West has written an insightful study about the presence of African spirituality in the autobiographies, poetry, speeches and novels of African American women, ranging from Phylis Wheatley...
ListenMargaret Hillenbrand, "Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The fact that secrecy and the concealment of information is important in today’s China is hardly a secret in itself, yet the ways that this secrecy is structured and sustained in such a vast societ...
ListenDidem Havlioglu, “Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History” (Syracuse UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press, 2017) by Didem Havlioglu is at once an intellectual history and biography of sor...
ListenCherene Sherrard-Johnson, “Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color” (Rutgers UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One lesson that the ever-present trickster figure in African American folklore teaches is how to use signifying to protect one’s intimate self. A challenge of writing Dorothy West’s life is getting...
ListenGreat Books: Amir Eshel on Paul Celan's Poetry from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paul Celan's poetry marks the end of European modernism: he is the last poet of the era where the poetic "I" could center a subjective vision of the world through language. Celan bears witness to t...
ListenAndrew Lees, “Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment” (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) is a fascinating account by one of the world’s leading and most decorated neurologists of the profound influence...
ListenCynthia Wachtell, “War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914” (LSU Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
My favorite book as a teenager (and in fact the only book I ever read as a teenager) was All Quiet on the Western Front. I liked it mostly for the vivid scenes of trench warfare. Teenage boys love ...
ListenMatt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...
ListenChristine Arce, “Mexico’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women” (SUNY Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Mexico’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women (SUNY Press, 2017), Christine Arce rightfully stresses that these two figures have greatly influenced Mexico’s nati...
ListenCharles J. Shields, “And So It Goes. Kurt Vonnegut, A Life” (Henry Holt, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The public image of Kurt Vonnegut is that of a crusty, irascible old man. Someone with whom one would want to drink, but never ever fall in love. The Vonnegut we meet in Charles J. Shields’s insig...
ListenGreat Books: Julie Carlson on Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus when she was nineteen years old on a bet. The novel spawned two centuries of creatures that turn against their makers...
ListenVivian Liska, “German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2016), Vivian Liska, Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Un...
ListenRosamund Bartlett, “Tolstoy: A Russia Life” (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
I vividly recall a time in my life–especially my late teens and early twenties–when I thought I could be anyone but had no idea which anyone to be. For this I blame (or credit) my liberal arts educ...
ListenElizabeth A. Wheeler, "HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth" (U Michigan Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Throughout her new book, HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth (University of Michigan Press 2019), Elizabeth A. Wheeler uses a fictional place called HandiLand as a yardstick for measuring how fa...
ListenAnn-Marie Priest, “A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century” (UWA Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century (UWA Publishing, 2018), Ann-Marie Priest, a lecturer at Central Queensland University, explores the lit...
ListenGregory Nagy on Homer’s “Iliad” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this installment of Faculty Insight, produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School, ThoughtCast speaks with the esteemed Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy about one of the earli...
ListenNicholas R. Jones, "Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain" (Penn State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nicholas R. Jones’s book, Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, 2019), analyzes white appropriations of black Afri...
ListenJulia Kerscher, “Autodidacticism, Artistry, Media Practice” (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Autodidacticism, Artistry, Media Practice (Autodidaktik, Artistik, Medienpraktik [Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016]), Julia Kerscher, postdoc at the University of Tubingen examines t...
ListenTom Perrotta on Flannery O’Connor from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
[Re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] Tom Perrotta, the esteemed author of Little Children, Election, The Abstinence Teacher and the recently published novel The Leftovers (S...
ListenJessie Labov, "Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture beyond the Nation" (Central European UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While there are still occasional uses of it today, the term "Central Europe" carries little of the charge that it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, and as a political and intellectual project it ha...
ListenChristopher J. Lee, “Jet Lag” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
My father has this personality quirk that drives me crazy. Whenever and wherever he travels, no matter how far, he refuses to reset his watch to the local time. For him, it’s always whatever time i...
ListenAlan Jacobs, “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011), Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at Wheaton College, discusses the state of...
ListenAndrew Ollett, "Language of the Snakes" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Andrew Ollett, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, argues in his book, Language of the Snakes: (University of California Pre...
ListenInterview with Australian Poets Leni Shilton and Renee Pettitt-Schipp from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this special episode of New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies, we are joined by two fantastic Australian poets. In her new poetic narrative, Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha S...
ListenEvander Lomke and Martin Rowe, “Right Off the Bat: Cricket, Baseball, Literature & Life” (Paul Dry Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Last spring’s Cricket World Cup was a major global event. Estimates of the television audience for the final matches ranged from 400 million to one billion, while the website ESPNcricinfo.com had a...
ListenGreat Books: John Callahan on Ellison's "Invisible Man" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ralph Waldo Ellison's masterpiece Invisible Man tells the story of an African-American man who insists on his visibility, agency, and humanity in a country dead-set on not seeing him. Barring him f...
ListenChristopher Grobe, “The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Christopher Grobe’s The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (New York University Press, 2017) traces the ways the performance of confession permeated and tra...
ListenAntonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliasotti, “Boy’s Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre” (McFarland, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Growing up in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Indy-car racing offered my friends and me some very exciting heroes. As children, we played “Indy 500” on our bikes in the cul-de-sac. As we became teenag...
ListenMelissa Walker and Giselle Roberts, "Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South" (U South Carolina Press) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Professors Melissa Walker of Converse College and Giselle Roberts of Australia’s La Trobe University, editors of the Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South series, discuss the field of documentar...
ListenChristopher Hager, “I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters (Harvard University Press, 2018), Christopher Hager trains our attention to “the cell-level transfers that created the meaning of the Civl War.”...
ListenLee Ambrozy, “Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anyone who has been following the news this year has likely heard of Ai Weiwei. This provocative and gifted Chinese artist-activist has made 2011 headlines for his controversial work Circle of Anim...
ListenCarl W. Ernst, “Hallaj: Poems of a Sufi Martyr” (Northwestern UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“I am the Real,” is the ecstatic statement often associated with the early Sufi poet Mansur al-Hallaj. In popular narratives about Hallaj this declaration of absolute unity with God is what led to ...
ListenHarrod Suarez, “The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora” (U Illinois Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Harrod Suarez‘s new book The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2017) focuses on the domestic workers that make up around a third of all overs...
ListenAlan Nadel, “August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle” (University of Iowa Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Many scholars consider August Wilson to be the premier American playwright of the 20th Century. Alan Nadel is surely one of their number. In the early 1990s, he focused our attention on Wilson’s pl...
ListenAndrew Milner, "Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism?" (Brill/Haymarket, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Brill/Haymarket, 2018) brings together twenty-six essays charting the development of Andrew Milner's distinctively Orwellian version of cul...
ListenMikhail Epstein, “The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature” (Academic Studies Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature (Academic Studies Press, 2018), Mikhail Epstein offers strategies on how to engage with texts in the current continuum. Based on the subve...
ListenGeorge Hunka, “Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros, and Contemporary Tragic Drama” (Eyecorner Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
George Hunka’s book Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros, and Contemporary Tragic Drama (Eyecorner Press, 2011) offers a series of challenges, provocations and meditations on Theatre (with a capital “...
ListenGreat Books: Hillary Chute on Art Spiegelman's "Maus" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Art Spiegelman's Maus is the story of an American cartoonist's efforts to uncover and record his father's story of survival of the Holocaust. It is also a cartoon, where the Jews are mice, the Naz...
ListenNicholas Hengen Fox, “Reading as Collective Action: Texts as Tactics” (U Iowa Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How can reading change the world? In Reading as Collective Action: Texts as Tactics (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Nicholas Hengen Fox, who teaches literature, writing and social justice courses...
ListenJ. E. Lendon, “Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins” (Basic, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Reading J. E. Lendon’s writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Price Elementary School, or rather to the large yard...
ListenAdrian Wisnicki, "Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Adrian Wisnicki talks about the British expeditionary literature of the late 1800s. Reading between the lines of Victorian travel accounts, Wisnicki sees outlines of a bigger story — local peoples,...
ListenKevin Patrick, “The Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero” (U Iowa Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Kevin Patrick examines the history of The Phantom—an American comic strip superhero that made his debut in 1936....
ListenJoyce Salisbury, “The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages” (Routledge, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
I have three cats. They have names (Fatty, Mini, and Koshka). They live in my house. I feed them, take them to the vet, and love them. When they die, I’ll be really sad. After having read Joyce Sal...
ListenGreat Books: Peter Brooks on Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We want to be happy, we want to get what we want, we want to love and be loved. But life, even when our basic needs are met, often makes us unhappy. You can't always get what you want, Freud noted ...
ListenJason Herbeck, “Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean” (Liverpool UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do gingerbread houses in Haiti teach us about the construction of identity in the French Caribbean? How do hurricanes and earthquakes reveal the connections between the tangible built environm...
ListenJoanna Levin, “Bohemia in America, 1858-1920” (Stanford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You’ve probably heard of hipsters. Heck, you may even be a hipster. If you don’t know what a hipster is, you might spend some time on this sometimes entertaining website. Where do hipsters come fro...
ListenLijun Zhang and Ziying You, "Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice" (Indiana UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The discipline of folkloristics in the People’s Republic of China is robust and well-funded. With thousands of scholars across the country, it is surprising then that there is relatively little und...
ListenMargarete Fuchs, “The Moving View: The Gaze in the Modern German Literature” (Rombach Verlag, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book Der bewegende Blick: Literarische Blickinszenierungen der Moderne (Rombach Verlag, 2014)—The Moving View: The Gaze in the Modern German Literature—Margarete Fuchs, a postdoc at the ...
ListenJeffrey Reznick, “John Galsworthy and the Disabled Soldiers of the Great War” (Manchester UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of the most popular and famous British writers of th...
ListenD. Gilhooley and F. Toich, "Psychoanalysis, Intersubjective Writing, and a Postmaterialist Model of Mind" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
More than anything else, Psychoanalysis, Intersubjective Writing, and a Postmaterialist Model of Mind: I Woke Up Dead (Routledge, 2019) bears witness to what’s possible when the raw pain and heartb...
ListenLisa Brooks, “Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lisa Brooks, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Ph...
ListenPhillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...
ListenRay Cashman, “Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border” (U Wisconsin Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do individuals on national or societal peripheries make use of tradition and to what ends? How can narratives discursively construct a complex worldview? These are some of the questions Ray Cas...
ListenGreat Books: Deborah Plant on Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
"It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.” This line from Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, captures what is at the heart of all great literature: the irr...
ListenLena Wetenkamp, “Europe Narrated, Contextualized and Remembered” (Koenigshausen and Neumann, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lena Wetenkamp‘s Europe Narrated, Contextualized and Remembered: The Discourse of ‘Europe’ in Contemporary German Literature (Europa erzhalt, verortet, erinnert: Europa-Diskurse in der deutschsprac...
ListenGreat Books: Emily Bernard on Larsen's "Passing" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nella Larsen's gripping 1929 novel Passing recounts the fateful encounter, first on a fancy Chicago hotel rooftop restaurant on a sweltering August afternoon and later in New York City, of two wome...
ListenGregory Laski, “Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Gregory Laski approaches the concept of democracy in his text, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018) from a variety of dimensions and perspectiv...
ListenAbigail Shinn, "Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning" (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why did early modern people change their religious affiliation? And how did they represent that change in writing? In this outstanding new book, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales...
ListenRebecca Janzen, “The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), Rebecca Janzen explores the complex interaction between the national body creat...
ListenS. Bergès, E. Hunt Botting, A. Coffee, "The Wollstonecraftian Mind" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019) is an extensive compendium of Mary Wollstonecraft as a writer, as an interlocutor, as a philosopher and political theorist, and as a feminist thinker. T...
ListenAmos Goldberg, “Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his most recent work, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017), Amos Goldberg examines Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust—a subject that...
ListenCarol Zaleski, "The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings" (FSG, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Starting in the early 1930s, a small group of academics and writers met weekly in a pub in Oxford, England to discuss literature, religion, and ideas. Known as the Inklings, it was in part from the...
ListenLiam Cole Young, “List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed” (Amsterdam UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The list is the origin of culture. At least, that’s according to Umberto Eco, whose words open Liam Cole Young‘s new book, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed (Amster...
ListenGreat Books: Benjamin Reiss on Thoreau's "Walden" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
America’s “environmental prophet,” Henry David Thoreau, set out for a simpler, more mindful, and more deeply lived life on Walden Pond on July 4th, 1845. How to live deliberately, being mindful of ...
ListenDavid J. Carlson, “Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature” (U of Oklahoma Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sovereignty is a key concept in Native American and Indigenous Studies, but its also a term that is understood in multiple ways. Working across the boundaries of legal and literary theory, David J....
ListenAbdullah Qodiriy, "Bygone Days" (Bowker, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mark Reese’s recent translation of Abdullah Qodiriy’s 1920s novel O’tkan Kunlar (Bygone Days) brings an exemplary piece of modern Uzbek literature to English-speaking audiences. The story, which si...
ListenDan Barker, “God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction” (Sterling, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For those of us who pay close attention in Sunday school, a troubling dissimilarity may begin to appear between what we are told of God’s personality and what we learn of it from His actions. For e...
ListenGreat Books: Glenn Wallis on Gibran's "The Prophet" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 The Prophet is book that’s changed people’s lives. It is a deceptively simple book, but it contains a radical insight. “Of what can I speak save of that which is even now movin...
ListenStephen Cushman, “Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War” (UNC Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian’s art through Cushman’s book, Belligerent M...
ListenD. J. Taylor, "The Lost Girls: Love and Literature in Wartime London" (Pegasus Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who were the Lost Girls? All coming from broken or failed Upper-middle Class families; the Lost Girls were all chic, glamorous, and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonett...
ListenTanja Angela Kunz , “Sehnsucht nach dem Guten” (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book Longing for the Good. The Relationship between Literature and Ethics in the Work of Peter Handke (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), Tanja Angela Kunz, a postdoc at the Humboldt University...
ListenK. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...
ListenMichel Leiris, “Phantom Africa” (Seagull Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti empl...
ListenCatherine A. Stewart, "Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Catherine A. Stewart is the author of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. Long Past Slavery examines t...
ListenSheshalatha Reddy, “British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) examines historical and literary texts relating to three rebellion...
ListenGreat Books: Catherine Stimpson on de Beauvior's "The Second Sex" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
"Woman is not born but made." This is only one of the powerful sentences in Simone de Beauvoir’s magisterial The Second Sex (1949). It means that there’s nothing natural about the fact that 50% of ...
ListenJacqueline Emery, “Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press” (U. Nebraska Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Native American students from across the United States attended federally-managed boarding schools where they were taught English, math, an...
ListenKeri Holt, "Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776-1830" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Keri Holt is the author of Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776-1830, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2019. Reading These United States explores...
ListenChristian Kirchmeier “Morality and Literature: A Historical Typology” (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book Morality and Literature: A Historical Typology (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013)—in German: Moral und Literatur. Eine historische Typologie—Christian Kirchmeier, post doc at the Universit...
ListenHelen Taylor, "Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why and how is fiction important to women? In Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives (Oxford University Press, 2020), Helen Taylor, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Exet...
ListenStephane Robolin, “Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing” (U. Illinois Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Writers have long created networks and connections by exchanging letters or writing back to one another in their poetry and fiction. Letters between Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Zo...
ListenEmily Colbert Cairns, "Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Emily Colbert Cairns’ book, Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), traces the biblical figure of Esther, the secret Jewish Quee...
ListenDavid Jacobson, “The Charm of Wise Hesitancy: Talmudic Stories in Contemporary Israeli Culture” (Academic Studies Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Charm of Wise Hesitancy: Talmudic Stories in Contemporary Israeli Culture (Academic Studies Press, 2017), David Jacobson, Professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University, offers an overview ...
ListenGreat Books: Rich Blint on James Baldwin's "Another Country" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
"If we - and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks [...] do not falter in our duty now, we may be able [...] to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our co...
ListenSarah Rivett, “Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), Princeton University English Associate Professor Sarah Rivett studies how colonists...
ListenEbony Elizabeth Thomas, "The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the...
ListenDinty W. Moore, “The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing your Novel or Memoir” (Ten Speed Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you’ve ever wondered how your favorite writers go about crafting their written works, or if you’ve ever been interested in writing a book yourself, chances are you’ve wandered into a bookstore o...
ListenEileen Botting, "The Wollstonecraftian Mind" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Eileen Hunt Botting is Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and co-editor with Sandrine Berges and Alan Coffee of the anthology The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019). The collection ...
ListenAndreas Gehrlach, “Thieves: Stealing in Literature, Philosophy, and Myth” (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book Thieves: Stealing in Literature, Philosophy, and Myth (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016)—in German: Diebe: Die heimliche Aneignung als Ursprungserzahlung in Literatur, Philosophie und Myth...
ListenTobias Boes, "Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Cornell University Press, 2019), Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's m...
ListenJ. Samaine Lockwood, “Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism” (UNC Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
J. Samaine Lockwood, Associate Professor in the English Department at George Mason University, specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and gender and sexuality studies. In an hour-lon...
ListenGreat Books: Carol Gilligan on Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter tells the dramatic story of a woman cast out of society for adultery and condemned to wear a badge of shame in Puritan New England. Renowned psyc...
ListenMichael Flier and Andrea Graziosi, eds. “The Battle for Ukrainian: A Comparative Perspective” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Language is one of the complex systems facilitating communication; language is a system producing the inside and the outside of the individual’s awareness of self and other. However, language is al...
ListenJacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America" (W. W. Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sister...
ListenCandace Ward, “Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation” (UVA Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Candace Ward’s Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation (University of Virginia Press, 2017) foregrounds an understudied group of writers: ...
ListenGonzalo Lamana, "How 'Indians' Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory" (U Arizona Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory (University of Arizona Press, 2019), Dr. Gonzalo Lamana carefully investigates the w...
ListenDaniel Kane, “Do You Have a Band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City” (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Often, poetry and punk rock are seen as distinct activities that occur in different locations with separate audiences. Many would also ascribe to them varying levels of cultural and political capit...
ListenIngrid Horrocks, "Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ingrid Horrocks talks about the way women travelers, specifically women wanderers, are represented in late-eighteenth century literature, particularly in the work of women writers. Horrocks in an a...
ListenRegine Jean-Charles, “Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary” (OSU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Regine Jean-Charles’ Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) foregrounds black women as speaking subjects in narrating ...
ListenGreat Books: Jared Stark on Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“On or around December 1910, human character changed.” Virginia Woolf’s 1927 masterpiece To The Lighthouse teaches us how to take stock of the experience of living in the modern age. We know that w...
ListenLaura Lee, “Oscar’s Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy” (Amberley, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Laura Lee’s Oscar’s Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy (Amberley Publishing, 2017) offers a detailed investigation of a conflict involving the writer and his two friends with whom he mainta...
ListenBarbara Spackman, "Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands" (Liverpool UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Barbara Spackman’s riveting study identifies a strand of what it calls “Accidental Orientalism” in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late 19th and ear...
ListenMartha J. Cutter, “The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narratives, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800-1853” (U. Georgia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world for centuries. Scholars have examined various aspects of the visual culture that was sla...
ListenAbdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, "Night and Day: A Novel" (Academic Studies Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Christopher Fort’s new translation of Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon’s Night and Day: A Novel (Academic Studies Press, 2019) (Kecha va Kunduz) gives readers a chance to dive into the world of ...
ListenJohn Rieder, “Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System” (Wesleyan UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A deft and searching exploration of genre theory through science fiction, and science fiction through genre theory, John Rieder‘s Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (Wesleyan Univer...
ListenDavid N. Gottlieb, "Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Cultural Memory" (Gorgias Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Cultural Memory (Gorgias Press, 2019), David N. Gottlieb explores the decisive - and, until now, under-appreciated - influence e...
ListenAdam Gaiser, “Shurat Legends, Ibadi Identities: Martyrdom, Asceticism and the Making of an Early Islamic Community” (U. South Carolina Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Adam Gaiser‘s majestic new book Shurat Legends, Ibadi Identities: Martyrdom, Asceticism and the Making of an Early Islamic Community (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), treats readers to a ...
ListenGreat Books: Ava Chin on Kingston's "The Woman Warrior" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What stories should we remember, and which ones are we forced to forget? What if we discover a truth from the past that shaped us even though we didn't know it? Maxine Hong Kingston's 1975 masterpi...
ListenJulia Fawcett, “Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801” (U. Michigan Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“How can the modern individual maintain control over his or her self-representation when the whole world seems to be watching?” This is the question that prompts Julia Fawcett‘s new book, Spectacul...
ListenSimon Brodbeck, "Krishna's Lineage: The Harivamsha of Vyasa's Mahabharata" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While typically circulating as a separate text, The Harivamsha forms the final part of the Mahabharata storyline. Beyond this, it is rich storehouse of cosmological, genealogical, theological mater...
ListenDeborah Parker and Mark L. Parker, “Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy” (U. of Virginia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, he’s created a non-stop torrent of news, so much so that members of the media regularly claim that he’s effectively trashed the traditional news cycle...
ListenGreat Books: Manthia Diawara on Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's 1958 Things Fall Apart transformed the world by vividly imagining the story of an African community in English, the language of the colonizers, and yet on its ...
ListenClayton Childress, “Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does a book come into being? In Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton University Press, 2017), Clayton Childress, Assistant Professor in the Department...
ListenEmilia Nielsen, "Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair" (U Toronto Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this interview, Prof. Emilia Nielsen discusses the problem of the usual breast cancer narrative. She says that the happy stories of breast cancer survivors are so common that any other types of ...
ListenAlessandro Duranti, “The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he served as Dean of Social Sciences from 2009-2016. In his book The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of ...
ListenClaire Chambers, “Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels” (Palgrave, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After the Rushdie affair in 1989 there was an important shift in the public life of British Muslims. Their image came under closer scrutiny which led to new social policies and self-perceptions. Th...
ListenRachel Seelig, “Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919-1933” (U. Michigan Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919-1933 (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Rachel Seelig, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Germanic Languages and L...
ListenEleanor Parker, "Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For all of their prominence in the popular imagination today, the historical record of the Viking presence in England is limited, with much of what we know about them dependent upon the literary ac...
ListenMykola Soroka, “Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko” (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of the oeuvre of one of the Ukrainian writers whose...
ListenAlberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...
ListenOmar Valerio-Jimenez and Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, eds. “The Latina/o Midwest Reader” (U. Illinois Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Latina/o Midwest Reader (University of Illinois Press, 2017) editors Omar Valerio-Jimenez, Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, and Claire F. Fox bring together an exceptional cadre of scholars to disp...
ListenJohn L. Brooke, "'There Is a North': Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War" (U Mass Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does political change take hold? In the 1850s, politicians and abolitionists despaired, complaining that the “North, the poor timid, mercenary, driveling North” offered no forceful opposition t...
ListenHanna Tervanotko, “Denying Her Voice: The Figure of Miriam in Ancient Jewish Literature” (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Denying Her Voice: The Figure of Miriam in Ancient Jewish Literature (Vandenhock and Ruprecht, 2016) Hanna Tervanotko first analyzes the treatment and development of Miriam as a literary charact...
ListenKerry Driscoll, "Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples (University of California Press, 2018; paperback edition, 2019) is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the...
ListenRahuldeep Singh Gill, “Drinking From Love’s Cup: Surrender and Sacrifice in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There is a long tradition of the study of Sikhism in Western academia. However, historiographical accounts still lack a clear vision of the early formation of the tradition. Rahuldeep Singh Gill, A...
ListenClaudia Moscovici, "Holocaust Memories: A Survey of Holocaust Memoirs, Histories, Novels, and Films" (Hamilton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Claudia Moscovici’s recent book, Holocaust Memories: A Survey of Holocaust Memoirs, Histories, Novels, and Films (Hamilton Books, 2019), is intended for educators and politicians to draw attention ...
ListenRon Edwards, “The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have ...
ListenCaroline Weber, “Proust’s Duchess” (Knopf, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“My greatest adventure was undoubtedly Proust. What is there left to write after that?” This is what Virginia Woolf said, full of admiration -- and envy, too. Delve into Marcel Proust in this conve...
ListenKarmen MacKendrick, “The Matter of Voice: Sensual Soundings” (Fordham UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Philosophers have long tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. But voices resonate among bodies and texts; they are s...
ListenAnn K. McClellan, "Sherlock’s World: Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC’s Sherlock" (U Iowa Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Sherlock’s World: Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC’s Sherlock (University of Iowa Press, 2018), Ann K. McClellan explores fan fiction inspired by one of the most-watch BBC series in histor...
ListenMichael Allan, “In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Michael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the d...
ListenRichard F. Thomas, "Why Bob Dylan Matters" (Dey Street, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, a debate raged. Some celebrated, while many others questioned the choice. How could the world’s most prestigious book prize be ...
ListenJacob Emery, “Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism” (Northern Illinois U. Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic ...
ListenLian Xi, "Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China" (Basic Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education. Years before, she had –at approximately the same time– converted to b...
ListenPatrick S. Tomlinson, “Trident’s Forge: Children of a Dead Earth, Book Two” (Angry Robot, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Patrick S. Tomlinson is a stand-up comic, political commentator, and the author of the Children of a Dead Earth series. In this interview, we discuss the first two books in the series, The Ark: Chi...
ListenKelsey Rubin-Detlev, "The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great" (Liverpool UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great (Liverpool University Press, 2019) is the first scholarly monograph devoted to the comprehensive analysis of the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of ...
ListenIra Dworkin, “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, i...
ListenElizabeth Chiles Shelburne, "Holding Onto Nothing" (Blair, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who...
ListenTony Hughes-d’Aeth, “Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt” (UWA Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his book, Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017), Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Stud...
ListenMark Alizart, "Dogs" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Man’s best friend, domesticated since prehistoric times, a travelling companion for explorers and artists, thinkers and walkers, equally happy curled up by the fire and bounding through the great o...
ListenAllan H. Pasco, “Balzac, Literary Sociologist” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Balzac, Literary Sociologist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Allan H. Pasco explores the talents of the writer whose reputation has been primarily based on his extraordinary gift to compose captivat...
ListenLiz Gloyn, "Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is it about ancient monsters that popular culture still finds so enthralling? Why do the monsters of antiquity continue to stride across the modern world? In Tracking Classical Monsters in Pop...
ListenLyn McCredden, “The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred” (Sydney UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred (Sydney University Press, 2017), Lyn McCredden, Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin University, explores the sacred and secular themes...
ListenJim Clarke, "Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy" (Gylphi, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ah, science fiction: Aliens? Absolutely. Robots? Of course. But why are there so many priests in space? As Jim Clarke writes in Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papac...
ListenMichelle D. Commander, “Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle D. Commander examines the (im)possibility of literal and figurative returns to Africa of...
ListenPaula McQuade, "Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paula McQuade, professor of English literature at DePaul University, is the author of a brilliant new account of Catechisms and Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University ...
ListenGary Kulik, “War Stories: False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers” (Potomac Books, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One often hears stories of World War II and Korean War veterans who came back from the war and refused to talk about what they had experienced in combat. They neither wanted folks at home to know w...
ListenJohn Shelton Reed, "Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s" (LSU Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology (emeritus) at the University of North Carolina, has been observing the South for decades. This week he and Al Zambone talk about New...
ListenMichael Muhammad Knight, “Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing” (Soft Skull Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Michael Muhammed Knight writes this book from a first-person perspective, as a piece of creative non-fiction. The book includes a liberal amount of swearing and sexual references, and Knight’s wri...
ListenAnnabel L. Kim, "Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions" (Ohio State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), Annabel Kim tangles with the question of difference so central to French feminism, theory...
ListenSusan Rubenstein DeMasi, “Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force Behind the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project” (McFarland, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Over the course of a long and adventurous life, Henry Alsberg was guided by the constancy of his passion for radical causes. This focus, as Susan Rubenstein DeMasi makes clear in Henry Alsberg: The...
ListenEmily Wilson, trans., "The Odyssey" (Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, ho...
ListenAugustine’s “Confessions,” a new translation by Sarah Ruden (Modern Library, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sarah Ruden holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the Un...
ListenKathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...
ListenBritt Rusert, “Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press,...
ListenTamara Hundorova, "The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s" (ASP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Tamara Hundorova’s The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s (Academic Studies Press, 2019) is a compelling study of the literary changes that mark Ukrainian literature at th...
ListenCarlo Rotella and Michael Ezra, eds. “The Bittersweet Science: Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside” (U. Chicago, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Boxing has always attracted writers because it issues a standing challenge to their powers of description and imagination, and also a warning–really a promise–that no matter how many layers of mea...
ListenAndrew Hobbs, "A Fleet Street In Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900" (Open Book, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The dominance of the London press in the British national media has long overshadowed the presence of local newspapers in Great Britain and the roles they played in their communities. As Andrew Hob...
ListenSarah Ruden, “The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible” (Pantheon, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this program, we talk to Sarah Ruden about her new book, The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (Pantheon, 2017). Novelist J. M. Coetzee praised the book, saying, “If...
ListenJ. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...
ListenRoy Bing Chan, “The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature” (U. Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Roy Bing Chan‘s new book explores twentieth-century Chinese literature that emphasizes sleeping and dreaming as a way to reckon with the trauma of modernity, from the early May Fourth period throug...
ListenVishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, "Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mah?bh?rata Textual Criticism" (Anthem Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Hindu great epic, Mah?bh?rata, exists today in hundreds of variant manuscripts across India. These manuscripts were painstakingly examined, sorted and reconstituted into the official Critical E...
ListenTerritory-A Literary Project about Maps: Discussion with Tommy Mira y Lopez from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As our name makes clear, the New Books Network focuses on books. And as a host who looks at contemporary literature, I have the pleasure of interviewing authors with new books, ones often published...
ListenNoah Cohan, "We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport" (U Nebraska, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of A...
ListenWilliam Kolbrener, “The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition (Indiana University Press, 2016), William Kolbrener, professor of English at Bar Ilan University in Israel, explores the life and thoug...
ListenLara Saguisag, "Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics" (Rutgers UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Histories and criticism of comics note that comic strips published in the Progressive Era were dynamic spaces in which anxieties about race, ethnicity, class, and gender were expressed, perpetuated...
ListenAllison E. Fagan, “From the Edge: Chicana/Chicano Border Literature and the Politics of Print” (Rutgers UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is a book? The answer, at first glance, may seem apparent: printed material consisting of a certain amount of pages. However, when a printed item goes under the scrutiny of readers, writers, e...
ListenYael Almog, "Secularism and Hermeneutics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed ...
ListenRebecca Gould, “Writers and Rebels: Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Rebecca Gould‘s Writers and Rebels: Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016) is the first existing comparative study of Chechen, Dagestani and Georgian literatures and...
ListenElizabeth DeLoughrey, "Allegories of the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While the mainstream discourses on global warming characterize it as an unprecedented catastrophe that unites the globe in a common challenge, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that this apparently cosmo...
ListenBenjamin Fondane, “Existential Monday” (NYRB Classics, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Benjamin Fondane, a Franco-Romanian writer and contributor to the development of existential philosophy in the 1930s and 40s, is in the process of being rediscovered. His work has gained a new rele...
ListenRafia Zafar, "Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It’s part of the ...
ListenAudrey Truschke, “Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Contemporary scholarship on the Mughal empire has generally ignored the role Sanskrit played in imperial political and literary projects. However, in Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal C...
ListenLeah Price, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Let’s talk about books! How, when, and what do you like to read? Have you ever thought about the history of books and reading? How about shape, size, or texture of your book? Where do books go afte...
ListenSteve Aldous, “The World of Shaft: A Complete Guide to the Novels, Comic Strip, Films and Television Series” (McFarland, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who’s the black private dick That’s a sex machine to all the chicks? (Shaft) Ya damn right Who is the man that would risk his neck For his brother man? (Shaft) Can you dig it? Who’s the cat t...
ListenGerry Milligan, "Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Gerry Milligan’s Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2018) takes as its subject the woman warrior in early modern Italy as she was an...
ListenCarrie J. Preston, “Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Carrie J. Preston‘s new book tells the story of the global circulation of noh-inspired performances, paying careful attention to the ways these performances inspired twentieth-century drama, poetry...
ListenJeremy Black, "England in the Age of Shakespeare" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jeremy Black’s impressive new book offers an enormously wide-ranging account of the social, political and religious cultures in which England’s greatest dramatist was formed and found success. Engl...
ListenJoseph Lumbard, “The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary” (HarperOne, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (HarperOne, 2015) represents years of effort from a team of dedicated translators and editors (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Joseph Lumbard, Maria Dakake, C...
ListenTim Frandy, "Inari Sami Folklore: Stories from Aanaar" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) is rich multivoiced anthology of folktales, legends, joik songs, proverbs, riddles, and other verbal art, this is the ...
ListenStephen H. Grant, “Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Henry and Emily Folger were linked together not just by their love for one another, but their shared passion for the works of William Shakespeare. In Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and ...
ListenKfir Cohen Lustig, "Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Differently than existing accounts that concentrate on Israeli and Palestinian nationalism, Kfir Cohen Lustig's Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global ...
ListenLaurence A. Rickels, “The Psycho Records” (Wallflower Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you ...
ListenJeffrey Saks, "Agnon Library of The Toby Press" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970) was born in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia (now part of Ukraine). Yiddish was the language of his home, and Hebrew the language of the Bible and the Talmud which he studied...
ListenSarah Hammerschlag, “Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University o...
ListenAndrew Newman, "Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities (University of North Carolina Press—Chapel Hill & The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019), Andrew N...
ListenChristopher Pizzino, “Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature” (U of Texas Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There’s a common myth about the history of comic books and strips. It’s the idea that the medium languished for decades as a sort of time-wasting hobby for children, but now has redeemed itself and...
ListenJennifer C. Lena, "Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts" ( Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did American elites change the meaning of Art? In Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts (Princeton University Press, 2019), Jennifer C. Lena, associate professor of arts...
ListenGleb Tsipursky, “Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-1970 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of Soviet leisure cult...
ListenGraham Thompson, "Herman Melville: Among the Magazines" (U Massachusetts Press 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
"What I feel most moved to write, that is banned?it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the otherway I cannot." Herman Melville wrote these words as he struggled to survive as a failing novelist. ...
ListenMeredith K. Ray, “Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in 17th-Century Italy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Meredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively o...
ListenJohn T. Lysaker, "Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the relationship between the form of writing and what can be thought? How is a writer’s thinking shaped by form? How is a reader’s? Does this matter for philosophy? In Philosophy, Writing, ...
ListenGlyne Griffith, “The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The BBC radio program “Caribbean Voices” aired for fifteen years and introduced writers like George Lamming, Louise Bennett, Sam Selvon and others to listeners on both sides of the Atlantic. Glyne...
ListenLindsey Green-Simms, "Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Cars promise freedom, autonomy, and above all, movement but leave whole cities stuck in traffic, breathing polluted air, exposed of deadly crashes, and dependent on vast the vast infrastructures of...
ListenAndre Carrington, “Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Have you ever watched a futuristic movie and wondered if there will actually be any black people in the future? Have you ever been surprised, disappointed, or concerned with the lack of diversity d...
ListenPolina Kroik, "Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work in American Film and Literature" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does thinking about gender and work help to rethink cultural hierarchies? In Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work in American Film and Literature(Routledge, 2019), Polina Kroik,...
ListenBenjamin Schreier, “The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History” (NYU Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is Jewish about Jewish American literature? While the imaginative possibilities are numerous many scholars approach literary products with an established notion of a Jewish identity before the...
ListenIthamar Theodor, "Exploring the Bhagavad G?t?: Philosophy, Structure and Meaning" (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Bhagavad G?t? remains to this day a mainstay of Hinduism and Hindu Studies alike, despite the profusion of books written on it over the centuries. While the G?t?’s profundity is evident, its me...
ListenMaria G. Rewakowicz, “Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets” (Academic Studies Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets (Academic Studies Press, 2014), Maria G. Rewakowicz explores a unique collaboration of the poets residing in the United States ...
ListenLenora Warren, "Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886" (Rutgers UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lenora Warren about her book, Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886, published by Rutgers University Press in 2019. Fire on the Water looks at...
ListenDavid Rosen and Aaron Santesso, “The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.” When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the atta...
ListenGrégory Pierrot, "The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With the Ta-Nehisi Coates–authored Black Panther comic book series (2016), recent films Django Unchained (2012), The Birth of a Nation (2016), Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner r...
ListenRandy Olson, “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” (U. Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Randy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured pr...
ListenJessica Vantine Birkenholtz, "Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz's Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal (Oxford University, 2018) represents the very first study of a fascinating Hindu phenomen...
ListenStephen Brockmann, “The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959” (Camden House, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Stephen Brockmann’s The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959 (Camden House, 2015) introduces readers to a specific atmosphere–political, cultural, and historical–that acco...
ListenAimee Bahng, "Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke UP, 2018), Aimee Bahng traces the cultural production of futurity by juxtaposing the practices of speculative finance against t...
ListenRichard Jean So, “Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network” (Columbia University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Richard Jean So’s new book studies a group of American and Chinese writers in the three decades after WWI to propose a conceptual framework for understanding intellectual and cultural relations bet...
ListenElizabeth R. Baer, "The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich" (Wayne State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (Wayne State University Press, 2017), Elizabeth R. Baer, professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College exami...
ListenDavid Willgren, “The Formation of the ‘Book’ of Psalms” (Mohr Siebeck, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How was the ‘Book’ of Psalms formed, and why? The first question relates to the diachronic growth of the collection, while the second relates to issues of purpose–to what end are psalms being juxta...
ListenTita Chico, "The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Can science be seductive? According to Tita Chico, the answer is a resounding yes. In her new book, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment(Stanfor...
ListenSara L. Crosby, “Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America” (U. Iowa Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode of the H-Law Legal History Podcast I talk with Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University at Marion, Sara L. Crosby about her new book, Poisonous Muse: The Female P...
ListenMelissa McCormick, "The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums is the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In The Tale of Genji. A Visual Companion, published by Princeton University Press in...
ListenMelissa Sweet, “Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Readers of all ages know E. B. White’s work. Charlotte’s Web is the first book many children are read aloud. Elements of Style remains an essential reference book. Almost everyone has a favorite wr...
ListenStijn Vanheule, Derek Hook and Calum Neill, "Reading Lacan’s Écrits" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lacan published his Écrits in 1966, a compilation of his written work up to that middle period in his teaching. Notoriously difficult to read, the editors of the book we’re discussing today describ...
ListenDavid Shafer, “Antonin Artaud” (Reaktion/U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Artaud lived with his neck placed firmly in the noose.” -Bauhaus* David Shafer’s new biography, Antonin Artaud (Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press, 2016), situates the life of th...
ListenCatherine Keyser, "Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Catherine Keyser about early twentieth century fiction and the role that modern food plays in literature as a language for talking about race and ra...
ListenVioleta Davoliute, “The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an improbably successful and paradoxically represe...
ListenAlexandra Popoff, "Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Memory and truth are malleable and nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union. To be a writer in that country was to face an ongoing dilemma: conform to State-mandated topics and themes, or consign ...
ListenEva Mroczek, “The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible, from multiple versions of biblical texts to revealed books not found in our canon. Despite this...
ListenSeán Moore, "Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Pol...
ListenDavid B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner, eds. “Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England” (Duquesne UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that offers new dimensions for reading and understanding Shakespeare...
ListenJinah Kim, "Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019), Jinah Kim explores questions of loss, memory, and redress in post WWII Asian diasporic decol...
ListenGail Ashton, ed. “Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015/2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dilapidated thirteenth-century walls as a playscape for today’s children, medieval relics made as fetish objects for twenty-first century enthusiasts, tourism at “the birthplace of King Arthur,” Ha...
ListenDean Anthony Brink, “Japanese Poetry and its Publics: From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Is classical Japanese poetry something to be enjoyed in private, an object of study for scholars, or an item of public life teeming with hints about how to understand and deal with our past and our...
ListenScott Bruce, ed., “The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters” (Penguin, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Like so many Americans, I’m a big fan of the undead. I look forward to a night of nail-biting when a new episode of The Walking Dead airs and I get excited when Hollywood gears up for the next big-...
ListenLorenzo Andolfatto, "Hundred Days’ Literature: Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910" (Brill, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Hundred Days’ Literature, Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910 (Brill, 2019), Lorenzo Andolfatto explores the landscape of early modern Chinese fiction through the lens of the...
ListenScot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle, “The Art of the Bible: Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World” (Thames and Hudson, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On today’s program, I talk with Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle about their new book, The Art of the Bible Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World, published by Thames and Hudson (and di...
ListenTiffany Florvil and Vanessa Plumly, "Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions, and Histories" (Peter Lang, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Black German Studies is an interdisciplinary field that has experienced significant growth over the past three decades, integrating subjects such as gender studies, diaspora studies, history, and m...
ListenChristian Lange, “Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Christian Lange’s Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which was recently awarded the British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society’s Book Prize, presents a rich, challe...
ListenBhakti Shringarpure, "Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Bhakti Shringarpure has written a fascinating, multidimensional analysis of the Cold War and decolonization and the often-under-explored connections between these events. In her book, Cold War Asse...
ListenJonathan Brooks Platt, “Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard” (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) by Jonathan Brooks Platt explores the national celebrations around the centennia...
ListenM. D. Foster and J. A. Tolbert, "The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World" (Utah State UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This volume introduces a new concept to explore the dynamic relationship between folklore and popular culture: the "folkloresque." With "folkloresque," Foster and Tolbert name the product created w...
ListenMatthew Pauly, “Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Matthew Pauly’s Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934 (University of Toronto Press, 2014) offers a detailed investigation of the language policy–officiall...
ListenChristopher Rea, "China's Chaplin: Comic Stories and Farces by Xu Zhuodai" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Hoaxes! Jokes! Farces and fun! Cristopher Rea's China’s Chaplin (Cornell University Press, 2019) introduces the imagination of Xu Zhuodai (1880–1958), a comic dynamo who made Shanghai laugh through...
ListenMary Chapman, “Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton” (McGill-Queens UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016) is a collection of works–previously published and newly discovered–pro...
ListenAmos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos, "Original Plumbing: The Best of Ten Years of Trans Male Culture" (Amethyst Editions, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos first launch Original Plumbing in 2009, they created a magazine the world desperately needed: a creative and celebratory biannual publication about trans men, by tr...
ListenKathryn Kleppinger, “Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and Media in France, 1983-2013” (Liverpool UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “paradox of ethnic minority writing” in the work o...
ListenStephen R. Duncan, "The Rebel Café: Sex, Race, and Politics in Cold War America’s Nightclub Underground" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The art and antics of rebellious figures in 1950s American nightlife?from the Beat Generation to eccentric jazz musicians and comedians?have long fascinated fans and scholars alike. In The Rebel Ca...
ListenScott Donaldson, “The Impossible Craft” Literary Biography” (Penn State UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Admiring books that appeal to our hearts and souls, rather often we want to know more about the writers who create them. If a book is a dialogical and communal entity–as readers we also participate...
ListenAnne A. Cheng, "Ornamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her original and thought-provoking book Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anne A. Cheng illustrates the longstanding relationship between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. So doi...
ListenJennifer Glaser, “Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination” (Rutgers UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Jennifer Glaser, Associate Professor of English and comparative literature ...
ListenEleonor Gilburd, "To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a noticeable shift in Soviet attitudes towards the West. A nation weary of war and terror welcomed with relief the new regime of Nikita Khrushchev and its focus...
ListenDaniel Moran,”Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers” (U. of Georgia Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Daniel Moran’s Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (University of Georgia Press, 2016) provides a compelling investigation of how O’Connor’s initial reputation of a...
ListenKara Ritzheimer, "'Trash,' Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Convinced that sexual immorality and unstable gender norms were endangering national recovery after World War One, German lawmakers drafted a constitution in 1919 legalizing the censorship of movie...
ListenKate Partridge, “Intended American Dictionary” (Miel Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We commonly think of Walt Whitman as the great American poet, the gray-bearded bard who captures the democratic music of our country with, as he called it, his “barbaric yawp.” And, sure enough, Wh...
ListenSharon Kirsch, "Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric" (U Alabama Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Sharon Kirsch (she/hers)--Associate Prof. of English and rhetorical studies in the New College at...
ListenKristen Case, “Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self” (Essay Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first...
ListenTsering Döndrup, "The Handsome Monk and Other Stories" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A series of stories ranging from two-page narrative excerpts to 90+ page novellas, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2019), translated by Columbia PhD student Christop...
ListenKristin Stapleton, “Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kristin Stapleton’s new book opens onto a political crisis in China, and into a spirit of reform touched off by student demonstrations on May 4, 1919. Ba Jin was a teenager from a well-off family i...
ListenBrian Cremins, "Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia" (UP of Mississippi, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Cremins' book Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) explores the history of Billy Batson, a boy who met a wizard that allowed him to transform into a...
ListenAlisa Solomon, “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof” (Metropolitan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Metropolitan, 2013), Alisa Solomon, Director of the Arts and Culture concentration in the MA program at Columbia University’s Gradua...
ListenAnnie McClanahan, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture" (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When teaching a public course called “The Age of Debt” this winter break, I had the strange realization that one of the the most successful readings in that course, the one which most clearly expla...
ListenMark R. Andryczyk, “The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian History” (U. of Toronto Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Mark R. Andryczyk takes his readers to an intriguing territory of dense narratives, arising from a comple...
ListenJohn West, "Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion and Politics in Restoration England" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Dryden is often regarded as one of the most conservative writers in later seventeenth-century England, a time-serving “trimmer” who abandoned his early commitments to the English Republic to b...
ListenJan Schwarz, “Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust” (Wayne State UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University, Sweden, reveals that in th...
ListenRichard Averbeck, "Paradigm Change in Pentateuchal Research" (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For some two hundred years now, Pentateuchal scholarship has been dominated by the Documentary Hypothesis, a paradigm made popular by Julius Wellhausen. Recent decades, however, have seen mounting ...
ListenEllen Widmer, “Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ellen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand...
ListenRobbie Richardson, "The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As they explored and struggled to establish settlements in what they called ‘new found lands’, the encounter with the peoples of those lands deeply affected how the British saw themselves. From the...
ListenE.R. Truitt, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of curren...
ListenNiall Geraghty, "The Polyphonic Machine: Capitalism, Political Violence, and Resistance in Contemporary Argentine Literature" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What options for resistance are left to the author of fiction in a nation structured by totalizing political and economic violence? This is the question at the heart of Niall Geraghty’s eloquent an...
ListenIsabelle Hesse, “The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, ...
ListenDirk Jongkind, "An Introduction to the Greek New Testament, Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge" (Crossway, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Is the New Testament text reliable? What do we do with textual variants? How do I use the Greek New Testament? This short book, An Introduction to the Greek New Testament, Produced at Tyndale House...
ListenRobert K. Elder, et. al. “Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park” (Kent State UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Before the war, before the novels, before the four marriages and the safaris, the plane crashes and the bullfighting fascination, Ernest Hemingway was simply a young boy growing up in Oak Park, Ill...
ListenJinhua Dai (ed. Lisa Rofel), "After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Although not all that well known to English-speaking audiences, cultural critic and Peking University professor Jinhua Dai’s incisive commentaries and critiques of contemporary Chinese life have el...
ListenRobert O’Kell, “Disraeli: The Romance of Politics” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Benjamin Disraeli was unique among British prime ministers in the 19th century in many ways, but perhaps none more so than for his career as a novelist. Whereas many scholars have treated Disraeli’...
ListenDerrick Spires, "The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With talk about birthright citizenship and border walls running rampant in Trump’s America, there are many scholars reaching back to antebellum America to historically ground today’s citizens in de...
ListenMark R. E. Meulenbeld, “Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mark R. E. Meulenbeld’s new book looks closely at the relationship between vernacular novels and vernacular rituals in Ming China. Focusing on a particular novel called Canonization of the Gods (Fe...
ListenMelanie Ramdarshan Bold, "Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom" (Palgrave, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Does publishing have a diversity problem? In Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, an associate professor at UCL’s Centre for Publishing...
ListenJosh Lambert, “Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture” (NYU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York University Press, 2014), Josh Lambert, Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at U...
ListenDan Golding, "Star Wars after Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 2012 George Lucas shocked the entertainment world by selling the Star Wars franchise, along with Lucasfilm, to Disney. This is the story of how, over the next five years, Star Wars went from nea...
ListenAisha Geissinger, “Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Aisha Geissinger’s monograph, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015), contributes to the growing field of interse...
ListenRobin Truth Goodman, "The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The book I’m bringing you today, The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019) is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of the art of contemporary femini...
ListenJessa Crispin, “The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Biography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that there are certain ways lives can be lived. This ...
ListenJohn Givens, "The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak" (Northern Illinois UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Dr. John Givens of the University of Rochester discusses classics ...
ListenSarah Wald, “The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl” (U. of Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America is ...
ListenSusan Lepselter, "The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, and UFOs in the American Uncanny" (U Michigan Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When we talk about stories of alien abduction in the United States, we often do so through a framework of belief vs. disbelief. Do I think this story is true, or do I think it’s false? Anthropologi...
ListenSusan Kavaler-Adler, “The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers” (ORI Academic, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in private practice and founder of The Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis where she is a training anal...
ListenRyan Hackenbracht, "National Reckonings: The Last Judgement and Literature in Milton’s England" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ryan Hackenbracht, who is an associate professor of English at Texas Tech University, has just published one of the most innovative and stimulating discussions of the interplay between literature a...
ListenAna Foteva, “Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe” (Peter Lang, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Starting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th throu...
ListenWilliam Poole, "Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost" (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is widely recognised as the greatest epic poem in the English language – and it is buried in the commentary of thousands of other texts. William Poole, who is Joh...
ListenPi-Ching Hsu, “Feng Menglong’s ‘Treasury of Laughs’: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour” (Brill, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kin...
ListenChristina Yi, "Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The fact that Korea’s experience of Japanese imperialism plays a role in present-day Japan-Korea relations is no secret to anyone. Questions of guilt, responsibility and atonement continue to bubbl...
ListenMingwei Song, “Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China...
ListenAdriana X. Jacobs, "Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry" (U Michigan Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry(University of Michigan Press, 2018), Adriana X. Jacobs offers a translation-centered reading of twentieth-century modern Hebr...
ListenRoy Fox, “Facing the Sky: Composing Through Trauma in Word and Image” (Parlor, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
All of us experience trauma at various points throughout our lives. On one end of the spectrum, we have negative experiences from which we tend to think we can recover quickly. This might include a...
ListenA. M. Ruppell, "The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why would anyone want to study Sanskrit, an ancient complex tongue? What’s the best way to go about doing so? Sanskrit is the highly sophisticated language of ancient India which remained in vogue...
ListenDana Sajdi, “The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant” (Stanford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her stunning new book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford University Press, 2012), Dana Sajdi, Associate Professor of History at Boston Co...
ListenRaj Balkaran, "The Goddess and The King in Indian Myth" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why are myths of the Indian Great Goddess couched in a conversation between a deposed king and forest-dwelling ascetic? What happens when we examine these myths as a literary whole, frame and all? ...
ListenMaria C. Fumagalli, “On the Edge: Writing the Border Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic” (Liverpool UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The border that divides the island of Hispaniola has been the site of commercial and cultural exchanges, labor migrations, environmental change, and violence. Maria Cristina Fumagalli‘s wonderful, ...
ListenChakravarthi Ram-Prasad, "In Dialogue with Classical Indian Traditions: Encounter, Transformation and Interpretation" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why does the narrative motif of ‘dialogue’ pervade Hindu texts? What role does it serve? Join me as I speak with Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Fellow of the British Academy, and distinguished professo...
ListenAyesha Ramachandran, “Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At what point does the world end? More importantly, how did this idea of a whole, unified world emerge to begin with? In Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago ...
ListenPu Wang, "The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture" (Harvard Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With questions over how ideas are translated across borders and between languages as acute as ever today, it is sometimes easy to forget that our efforts to understand each other are mediated throu...
ListenEmily Troscianko, “Kafka’s Cognitive Realism” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her first monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (Routledge, 2014), Emily Troscianko set out to answer a brief, cogent question: “Why is Kafka so brilliant? Why do I still want to read his work af...
ListenMargaret Leslie Davis, "The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey" (TarcherPerigee, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Of the millions of books that have been published, few are as renowned or as coveted today by collectors as the famous Bible printed in the 15th century by Johannes Gutenberg. In The Lost Gutenberg...
ListenSeth Jacobowitz, “Writing Technology in Meiji Japan” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Seth Jacobowitzs new book opens with a balloon ride and closes with a record-scratching cat, and in between it offers a fascinating history of Meiji media focused on technologies of writing and scr...
ListenShonaleeka Kaul, "The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dr. Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural historian of early South Asia specializing in working with Sanskrit texts. She is Associate Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru Univer...
ListenStern, et al., “The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee” (Penn State UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee (Penn State UP, 2015) is unique. The book, edited by David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-E...
ListenThomas A. Wayment, "The New Testament: A Translation for Latter-day Saints" (BYU, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dr. Thomas A. Wayment, professor of Classics at Brigham Young University, has done something remarkable — he has retranslated the New Testament. This new translation from the best available Greek m...
ListenKate Bolick, “Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own” (Crown, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“There still exists little organized sense of what a woman’s biography or autobiography should look like,” Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in her 1988 classic, Writing A Woman’s Life, noting, “Even less ...
ListenJoel Elliot Slotkin, "Sinister Aesthetics: The Appeal of Evil in Early Modern Literature" (Palgrave, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why did creative writers in early modern England write so forcefully about the relationship between aesthetics and morality? How did they imagine creative work to reflect religious categories and m...
ListenMarlene Daut, “Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865” (Liverpool UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Marlene Daut tackles the complicated intersection of history and literary legacy in her book Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-18...
ListenRalph James Savarese, "Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the earliest days of medical research into autism, both psychologists and the general public have characterised those on the autism spectrum as literal-minded, unimaginative and lacking in emp...
ListenSarah Phillips Casteel, “Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Phillips Casteel, associate professor of English at Carleton University, explores the repr...
ListenJoseph Vogel, "James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era" (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
By the 1980s, critics and the public alike considered James Baldwin irrelevant. Yet Baldwin remained an important, prolific writer until his death in 1987. Indeed, his work throughout the decade pu...
ListenMinsoo Kang, trans. “The Story of Hong Gildong” (Penguin Classics, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Minsoo Kang‘s new translation of The Story of Hong Gildong (Penguin Classics, 2016) is a wonderful rendering of a text that is arguably the “single most important work of classic…prose fiction of...
ListenKurt Raaflaub, "The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works" (Pantheon, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
That the Roman leader Gaius Julius Caesar is so well remembered today for his achievements as a general is largely due to his skills as a writer. In The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works (...
ListenSulak and Kolosov, eds., “Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres” (Rose Metal Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Marcela Sulak was planning classes in the MFA program she directs at Bar Ilan University, it became clear that the traditional prose/poetry binary was not going to work. In both her own and he...
ListenDiscussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...
ListenTahneer Oksman, “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016), Tahneer Oksman explores the graphic memoirs of sev...
ListenT. Troianowska and A. Polakowska, "Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918 (University of Toronto Press, 2018) consists of sixty essays written by authors from all over the world who specialize in Pol...
ListenEubanks, Abel and Chen, eds., “Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1.2: Collecting Asias” (U of Minnesota Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Verge: Studies in Global Asias is an inspiring and path-breaking new journal that explores innovative forms for individual and collaborative scholarly work. I had the privilege of talking with Char...
ListenAndrew Sobanet, "Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his 1924 biography of Mahatma Gandhi, writer Romain Rolland embraced the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence and decried the “dictators of Moscow” and the “idolatrous ideology of the Revolution....
ListenJean-Michel Rabate, “The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Calling into question common assumptions regarding the supposedly antagonist relationship between literary criticism and psychoanalytic reading, Jean-Michel Rabatepaints a picture of reconciliation...
ListenAnindita Banerjee, "Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East" (Peter Lang, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do we project imagined worlds? After all, why do we find ourselves mesmerized by imagined worlds? A collection edited by Anindita Banerjee, Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East (Peter...
ListenHillary Chute, “Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP, 2016), Hillary Chute analyses the documentary power in the comics-form sometimes known as “graphic novels...
ListenRichard Salomon, "The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandh?ra: An Introduction with Selected Translation" (Wisdom Publications, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode of New Books in Buddhist Studies, Dr. Richard Salomon speaks about his book The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandh?ra: An Introduction with Selected Translation (Wisdom Publicatio...
ListenFriederike Kind-Kovacs, “Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain” (Central European UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Central European University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed description of the social practices, debates and di...
ListenBradford Vivian, "Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of New Books in Communications, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Bradford Vivian (he/his) of Penn State University on his fabulous new book Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical In...
ListenJames Davis, “Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean” (Columbia University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This terrific book follows the itinerary of Eric Walrond’s peripatetic life. Born in Guyana in 1898, Walrond lived in Barbados, Panama, New York, Paris, London. As a writer and sharp observer of th...
ListenAdrienne Brown, "The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race" (John Hopkins UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Adrienne Brown joins the New Books Network this week to talk about her fascinating 2017 book, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (John Hopkins University Press, 2017), wh...
ListenMaris Kreisman, “Slaughterhouse 90210: Where Great Books Meet Pop Culture” (Flatiron Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The concept sounds simple: Maris Kreizman‘s Slaughterhouse 90210: Where Great Books Meet Pop Culture (Flatiron Books, 2015), based on her popular Tumblr, pairs up classic celebrity and television i...
ListenJo Mackiewicz, "Writing Center Talk over Time: A Mixed-Method Study" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Listen to this interview of Jo Mackiewicz, author of Writing Center Talk over Time: A Mixed-Method Study (Routledge 2018). We talk about talk, tutor talk, student talk, spoken written-language, and...
ListenOded Nir, "Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction" (SUNY Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a new understanding on Israeli literature and literary history. Using Marxist theorization of the...
ListenLeigh Claire La Berge, “Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What stories do we tell about finance? How does financial print culture shape our lives? Our guest today explores the narratives we have been told, and tell, about finance. A literary scholar, Leig...
ListenLucas A. Dietrich, "Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Lucas A. Dietrich investigates how ethnic literatures to...
ListenPema Tseden, "Enticement" (SUNY Press 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Though most renowned for his award-winning Tibetan films, Pema Tseden, is also a prolific author and translator. Enticement(State University of New York Press 2018) is a collection of Pema Tseden’s...
ListenGeorge Cotkin, “Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
George Cotkin is an emeritus professor of history at California Polytechnic State University. In his book Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (Oxford University Press, 2015) ...
ListenMichael M. Knight, "Muhammad's Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Muhammad's Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage by Michael Muhammad Knight (UNC Press, 2020) joins the emerging subfield of literature in Islamic Studies exploring embodiment and mate...
ListenGil Ben-Herut, "?iva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Raga?ega?u" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Studies of Hindu saints tend to focus primarily on the saints themselves—their words, teachings, and practices—rather than tending to the often complex and complicated world of texts and traditions...
ListenJodi Eichler-Levine, “Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature” (NYU Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature (New York University Press, 2013), Jodi Eichler-Levine, associate professor of Religion Studies ...
ListenV. Nesfield and P. Smith, "The Struggle for Understanding: Elie Wiesel's Literary Works" (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel’s writings, from his earliest works to his final novels. Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) was one of the most important literary voices to emerge from the Holocaust. The Nazi...
ListenR. B. Jamieson, "Jesus’ Death and Heavenly Offering in Hebrews" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When and where did Jesus offer himself to God? What role does Jesus’ death play in his high-priestly self-offering in heaven? Answering these questions are crucial for understanding the book of Heb...
ListenNanxiu Qian, “Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform” (Stanford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nanxiu Qian, professor at Rice University, discusses her new book Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform (Stanford University Press, 2015). Qian argues ...
ListenMatthew Hart, "Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020) explores how texts—literary and visual—help us engage with the space that goes beyond the limits of...
ListenRichard Gombrich, "Buddhism and Pali" (Mud Pie Slices, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Richard Gombrich's new book, Buddhism and Pali (Mud Pie Slices, 2018), puts the richness of the Pali language on display. He introduces the reader to the origins of Pali, its linguistic character, ...
ListenRanen Omer-Sherman, “Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film” (Penn State UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), Ranen Omer-Sherman, a professor at the University of Louisville, looks at literar...
ListenJeremy M. Glick, "The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution" (NYU Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What if the Haitian Revolution, perhaps the only “successful” Black revolution in history, weren’t over? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Jeremy Matthew...
ListenAimée Israel-Pelletier, "On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt" (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In On the Mediterranean and the Nile: The Jews of Egypt (Indiana University Press, 2017), Aimée Israel-Pelletier, Professor and Head of French at the University of Texas at Arlington, looks at the...
ListenLeah Garrett, “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel” (Northwestern UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Finalist, 2015 National Jewish Book Award In her new book Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2015), Leah Garrett, the Loti Smorgon (P...
ListenChristine Hong, "A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The image of the US as leading a good war to establish liberal democracy and move towards racial equality dominate the discourses of the Cold War. In her work, A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militaris...
ListenShanna de la Torre, "Sex for Structuralists: The Non-Oedipal Logics of Femininity and Psychosis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What might Levi-Strauss and structuralism have to offer to psychoanalysis beyond the incest prohibition and the Oedipus complex? What happens if we understand Lacan’s notion of the symbolic as crea...
ListenKimberly Fain, “Colson Whitehead: The Postracial Voice of Contemporary Literature” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Colson Whitehead’s fiction has drawn varied criticism. On the one hand, there’s the scholarship of the African diaspora, a tradition that takes the long view of Whitehead–extrapolating him from the...
ListenJulia S. Charles, "That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this chronologically and thematically ambitious study of racial passing literature, Julia Charles highlights how mixed-race subjects invent cultural spaces for themselves—a place she terms that ...
ListenJanelle Adsit, "Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing" (Bloomsbury, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today, we're talking to Janelle Adsit about her book, Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing (Bloomsbury, 2017). In it, Adsit takes a hard look at the way American colleges and universities teach cre...
ListenMegan Marshall, “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life” (Mariner Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor in writing, literature and publishing. Her book Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Mariner Books, 2013) won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize...
ListenMegan Sandberg-Zakian, "There Must Be Happy Endings: On a Theater of Optimism and Honesty" (3rd Thing Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Megan Sandberg-Zakian’s There Must Be Happy Endings: On a Theater of Optimism & Honesty (3rd Thing Press, 2020) makes a powerful case for “militant optimism” in an age of chaos. The essays in this ...
ListenM. Evans, S. Moore, and H. Johnstone, "Detecting the Social: Order and Disorder in Post-1970s Detective Fiction" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How can detective fiction explain the social world? In Detecting the Social: Order and Disorder in Post-1970s Detective Fiction(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Mary Evans and Hazel Johnstone, both from ...
ListenTom Sperlinger, “Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation” (Zero Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Tom Sperlinger, Reader in English Literature and Community Engagement at the University of Bristol, joins New Books in Education to discuss Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation ...
ListenKoritha Mitchell, "From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Koritha Mitchell, Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, has written a complex, interdisciplinary, and important analysis focusing on black women as the lens to explore the in...
ListenNicholas J. Moore, "Repetition in Hebrews: Plurality and Singularity in the Letter to the Hebrews, Its Ancient Context, and the Early Church" (Mohr Siebeck, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Is repetition always bad? The Letter to the Hebrews lies at the heart of a tradition that views repetition always negative. But is this the best understanding of Hebrews? Nicholas Moore says, ‘No.’...
ListenIlan Stavans and Jorge J. E. Garcia, “Thirteen Ways of Looking At Latino Art” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As demographic trends continue to mark the so-called “Latinization” of the U.S., pundits across various media outlets struggle to understand the economic, cultural, and political implications of th...
ListenIan Foster, "Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas" (UP of Mississippi, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas (UP of Mississippi, 2019) author Christopher Ian Foster analyzes increasingly urgent q...
ListenOmid Safi, “Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It's often touted that Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the United States. That may be the case but popular renderings of the writings of this 13th-century Muslim have largely detached him ...
ListenDavid Snowdon, “Writing the Prizefight: Pierce Egan’s Boxiana World” (Peter Lang, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When ESPN anchor Stuart Scott passed away from cancer this past January, he was widely hailed for his innovative style, which mixed heavy does of African American slang and pop culture references. ...
ListenZakkiyah Imam Jackson, "Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In a world where black(ened) flesh, particularly feminine flesh, is considered the ontological zero of humanness, what interventions and complications are available from art and speculative fiction...
ListenAlan Jacobs, "The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Alan Jacobs is a renowned literary critic, with a talent for writing that books that speak to our current predicaments. A professor at Baylor University, his recent work includes a “biography” of t...
ListenAnna M. Shields, “One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anna M. Shields has written a marvelous book on friendship, literature, and history in medieval China. One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Harvard University Press,...
ListenErin A. McCarthy, "Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry and the Reading Public in Early Modern England" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Erin McCarthy, who teaches digital humanities at Newcastle University, Australia, has just published a fabulous new book about the ways in which the printing of poetry impacted upon the reading and...
ListenAndrew S. Curran, "Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely" (Other Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Denis Diderot has long been regarded as one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, thanks to his editorship of the influential multi-volume Encyclopédie. As Andrew S. Curran explains i...
ListenMariahadessa Ekere Tallie, “Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation” (Grand Concourse Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Poetry is far more than crafting verse. Poetry is a way of thought and a way of being. It seeps into every aspect of a poet’s life only to reveal that it is the life that seeped into poetry. In a s...
ListenScholarly Communication: Kit Nicholls on the Writing Center and the University from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Listen to this interview of Kit Nicholls, Director of Cooper Union Center for Writing. We talk about writing, thinking, the university, and what everyone cares about. Interviewer : "That's the key,...
ListenVictoria Brownlee, "Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Victoria Brownlee is the author of an exciting new contribution to discussions of early modern religion and literature. Her new book, Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England...
ListenMrinalini Chakravorty, “In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a masterful account of the importance of the stereotype in English language South Asian literature. M...
ListenDanielle Haque, “Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature” (Syracuse UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In many popular accounts of contemporary “Western” society there is an inherent contradiction between the principles underlying liberal secularism and Islam. This type of binary discourse about “re...
ListenJames Baldwin, "Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This 2018 reprint of Little Man, Little Man exemplifies communal and collaborative textual production. The story was written by James Baldwin and illustrated by French artist Yoran Cazac. It was pu...
ListenAlexander Etkind, “Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Un...
ListenRosanne Carlo, "Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing" (Utah State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing (Utah State UP, 2020) approaches writing studies from the rhetorical flank, the flank which, for many, is the only flank the disci...
ListenAna Paulina Lee, "Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford University Press, 2018), Ana Paulina Lee (Columbia University) analyzes representations of the Chinese in Brazilian cult...
ListenDerek Sayer, “Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History” (Princeton UP 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Prague, according to Derek Sayer, is the place “in which modernist dreams have time and again unraveled.” In this sweeping history of surrealism centered on Prague as both a physical location and t...
ListenCoulter George, "How Dead Languages Work" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After reading How Dead Languages Work (Oxford University Press 2020), Coulter George hopes you might decide to learn a bit of ancient Greek or Sanskrit, or maybe dabble in a bit of Old Germanic. Bu...
ListenJames R. Rush, "Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer’s Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 up until today, the relationship between Indonesian nationalism, Islam, and modernity has been a key subject of debate. One of the central figur...
ListenCarlos Rojas, “Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Carlos Rojas‘s new book is a wonderfully transdisciplinary exploration of discourses of sickness and disease in Chinese literature and cinema in the long twentieth century. As its title indicates, ...
ListenJudith G. Coffin, "Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired Coffin to explore the intimate bond betwee...
ListenMelanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith, "American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity" (UP of Florida, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As scholars and readers, we often view literary history in rigid, simplistic terms. We imagine that nineteenth-century aesthetic and thematic preoccupations withered away as 1899 became 1900, only ...
ListenNick Sousanis, “Unflattening” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and knowledge. Unflattening (Harvard University Press, ...
ListenLissette Lopez Szwydky, "Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century" (Ohio State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode of New Books in Literary Studies we speak with Lissette Lopez Szwydky, author of the new book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio State UP, 2020) A comprehensive s...
ListenMcKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...
ListenGreg Barnhisel, “Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy” (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Greg Barnhisel‘s new book, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (Columbia UP, 2015) examines how modernism was defanged, re-packaged, and resold during the Cold War...
ListenWilliam Germano, "Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books" (U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When I put down Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (U Chicago Press, 2016) I looked up and began to wonder. I wondered about the book on gnomic p...
ListenAlec Nevala-Lee, "Astounding" (Dey Street Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding is the first comprehensive biography of John W. Campbell, who, as a writer and magazine editor, wielded enormous influence over the field of science fiction in the mid-...
ListenMagda Romanska, “The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor” (Anthem Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jerzy Grotowsky and Tadeusz Kantor were influential in avant-garde theater in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, receiving high critical regard despite the fact that audiences could not understand th...
ListenMargrit Pernau, "Emotions and Colonial Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her stunning and conceptually adventurous new book Emotions and Colonial Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (Oxford University Press, 2020), Margrit Pernau examines the varied a...
ListenEric D. Weitz, “Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What can the Weimar Republic teach us about how democracies fail? How could the same vibrancy that gave us cultural touchstones spawn Nazism? In his new book Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Pr...
ListenPaul K. Saint-Amour, “Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paul K. Saint-Amour, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is a ruminative thinker and meticulous writer. These traits pay dividends in the surprising insights of his ne...
ListenRobert Bartlett, "Against Demagogues: What Aristophanes Can Teach Us about the Perils of Populism and the Fate of Democracy" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With Against Demagogues: What Aristophanes Can Teach Us about the Perils of Populism and the Fate of Democracy (University of California Press, 2020), Robert Bartlett provides a stirring argument f...
ListenSteven Shaviro, “Discognition” (Repeater Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it lik...
ListenEva Illouz, “Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best-Sellers, and Society” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Eva Illouz is professor of sociology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and president of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her book Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best Sellers, and...
ListenNadia Nurhussein, "Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton University Press, 2019), Nadia Nurhussein explores late nineteenth and twentieth century African American cultural engagement wit...
ListenPeter Zinoman, “Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung” (U California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Over the course of the 1930s, Vietnamese author V? Tr?ng Ph?ng published eight novels, hundreds of works of narrative nonfiction, stories, plays, essays and articles. He was a best-selling writer i...
ListenAndrew Cayton, “Love in the Time of Revolution” (UNC Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Andrew Cayton is a distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In his book Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change (Unive...
ListenChristopher Lupke (trans.), "A History of Taiwan Literature" (Cambria Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ye Shitao was a Taiwanese public intellectual who rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. His encyclopedic A History of Taiwan Literature was published in 1987, the same yea...
ListenAlisha Gaines, “Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does one show empathy towards someone across racial lines? In her new book Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Dr. Alisha Gaines ana...
ListenLital Levy, “Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Since the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish settlement in Palestine and the revival of Hebrew as a national language have profoundly impacted the relationship between Arabic and Hebrew. In a hi...
ListenSianne Ngai, "Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard University Press, 2020), Sianne Ngai continues her theoretical work of demystifying the vernacular aesthetic categories enc...
ListenMark Polizzotti, “Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto” (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The success of a translator may seem to lie in going unnoticed: the translator ducks out of the spotlight so that the original author may shine. Mark Polizzotti challenges that idea in a provocativ...
ListenPaula T. Connolly, “Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790-2010” (U of Iowa Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The “peculiar institution” upon which the US nation was founded is still rich for examination.Perhaps this is why it is a subject to which 21st century authors continue to return. In this explorati...
ListenK. Grenier and A. Mushal, "Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) explores commemorative practices as they developed in the nineteenth century. The editors of the vol...
ListenJ.R. Osborn, “Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Arabic script is astounding! Not only because it represents one of the most commonly spoken languages today –that is, the Arabic language– but because it has represented dozens of other languages ...
ListenWen Jin, “Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms” (Ohio State University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Wen Jin’s book, Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms (Ohio State Press, 2012), compares histories and modes of multiculturalism in China and t...
ListenJohn Locke, "Queen of the Gangsters: Stories by Margie Harris" (Off-Trail Publications, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Queen of the Gangsters: Stories by Margie Harris (Off-Trail Publications, 2011), is the first anthology of work of crime fiction writer Margie Harris. Edited by John Locke, Queen of the Gangsters b...
ListenAnindita Banerjee, “Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader” (Academic Studies Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (Academic Studies Press, 2018) offers a compelling investigation of the genre whose development was significantly reshaped in the se...
ListenHelena Gurfinkel, “Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature” (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is a father? In Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014), Helena Gurfinkel offers an insightful new vision of fatherhood th...
ListenR. Rosenberg and R. Rubinstein, "Teaching Jewish American Literature" (MLA, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this interview, Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein (editors), engage our listeners in a conversation about different approaches to teaching Jewish American Literature, complicating what it ...
ListenNathan Kravis, “On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sometimes, a couch is a only a couch, but not in Dr. Nathan Kravis’s new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). In a live interview con...
ListenMark Dennis and Darren Middleton, eds., “Approaching Silence: New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo’s Classic Novel” (Bloomsbury, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to be a martyr? What does it mean to be an apostate? How should we understand people who choose one or the other? These are the questions asked by Shusaku Endo in his novel Silenc...
ListenJoshua Kotin, "Utopias of One" (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Joshua Kotin’s Utopias of One (Princeton University Press, 2017) analyzes a particular and peculiar sub-genre of utopian literature. Kotin identifies works by Thoreau, Dubois, the Mandel’shtams, an...
ListenPhilip Lutgendorf, “The Epic of Ram” (Harvard University Press, 2016-) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the R?mc...
ListenRobert P. Burns, “Kafka’s Law: ‘The Trial’ and American Criminal Justice” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Professor Robert P. Burns of Northwestern University School of Law offers an insightful critique of the modern American criminal justice system in his new work Kafka’s Law: ‘The Trial’ and American...
ListenKristin J. Jacobson, "The American Adrenaline Narrative" (U Georgia Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kristin J. Jacobson In her new book, The American Adrenaline Narrative (University of Geo...
ListenGary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, “Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The vast chasm between classical economics and the humanities is widely known and accepted. They are profoundly different disciplines with little to say to one another. Such is the accepted wisdom....
ListenJustin Martin, “Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians” (Da Capo Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Biography is, both etymologically and in its conventional forms, the writing of a life. But what is the role of place within that? And how do the stories of lives- some of them well known, others l...
ListenJessica Martell, "Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire" (U Nevada Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Jessica Martell about her new book, Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire, published in 2020 by University ...
ListenNaomi Seidman, “The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell In Love With Love, And With Literature” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell In Love With Love, And With Literature (Stanford University Press, 2016), Naomi Seidman, Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts at the University of Toront...
ListenSarah M. Allen, “Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sarah M. Allen‘s new book looks at the literature of tales in eighth- and ninth-century China. Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University ...
ListenMartin Paul Eve, "Close Reading with Computers" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history. This book asks what happens when such telescopic techniques function as a microscope ...
ListenJonathan Shandell, “The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era” (U Iowa Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The role of the artist in the cause of Black freedom has been a hotly debated topic for generations now. Dr. Jonathan Shandell’s The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (University...
ListenWilt Idema, “The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun” (Columbia University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Wilt Idema‘s new book traces a story and its transformations through hundreds of years of Chinese literature. The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun (Columbia University Press, 2014) col...
ListenGregory A. Daddis, "Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazi...
ListenJustyna Weronika Kasza, “Hermeneutics of Evil in the Works of End? Sh?saku: Between Reading and Writing” (Peter Lang, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In literature, evil can appear in a broad spectrum of shapes, images and motifs. For End? Sh?saku, the problem of evil is central to the reality of human existence, and it has to be accepted as suc...
ListenTamara T. Chin, “Savage Exchange” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Tamara Chin‘s new book is a tour de force and a must-read for anyone interested in early China, the history of economy, or inter-disciplinarity in the humanities. Focusing on the reign of Han Emper...
ListenDonald Ostrowski, "Who Wrote That?: Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov" (NIUP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
dWho Wrote That?: Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov (Northern Illinois University Press) is Harvard historian Donald Ostrowski’s sustained reflection on what we can learn from compar...
ListenGary Alan Fine, “Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most people have heard of the Masters of Fine Arts–“MFA”–degree, but few know about the grueling process one must undergo to complete one. In Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice o...
ListenSusan Byrne, “Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote” (University of Toronto Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Please listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law an...
ListenKaren E. H. Skinazi, "Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Media portrayals of Orthodox Jewish women frequently depict powerless, silent individuals who are at best naive to live an Orthodox lifestyle, and who are at worst, coerced into it. In Women of Val...
ListenMelissa Terras, “Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How have academics been represented in children’s books? In Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cult...
ListenR. Keller Kimbrough, “Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater” (Columbia UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully t...
ListenFilippo Menozzi, "World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time (Palgrave Macmillan) Filippo Menozzi offers to look at literature and literary processes through the prism of non-synchronism. The boo...
ListenDavid E. Fishman, “The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis” (ForeEdge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (ForeEdge, 2017), David E. Fishman, Professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in N...
ListenJenny Kaminer, “Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture” (Northwestern UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jenny Kaminer‘s new book, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2014) analyzes Russian myths of motherhood over time and in particul...
ListenKen M. Penner, "The Lexham English Septuagint" (Lexham Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of New Books in Christian Studies, we welcome Ken M. Penner, Professor of Religious Studies at St Francis Xavier University. After a career that has combined biblical studies and di...
ListenVictoria Lamont, “Westerns: A Women’s History” (U Nebraska Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Westerns are having a bit of a moment in the early twenty-first century. Westworld was recently nominated for eight Emmys, the hit show Deadwood is slated for a return to television in the next few...
ListenPaola Iovene, “Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paola Iovene‘s new book is a beautiful exploration of visions of the future as they have shaped a range of texts, genres, and editorial practices in Chinese literature from the middle of the twenti...
ListenLaura Westengard, "Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (University of Nebraska Press), Laura Westengard examines the intersection of queerness and the gothic. Westenga...
ListenJeffrey Kahan, “Shakespeare and Superheroes” (ARC Humanities Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do Shakespeare and superheroes have in common? A penchant for lycra and capes? A flair for the dramatic? Well, according to Shakespeare scholar, English Professor and comic-book fan Jeffrey Ka...
ListenSteven Shaviro, “The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North ...
ListenJohn Barton, "A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book" (Viking, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Barton is no stranger to Holy Scripture. Having spent much of his academic career as a chaplain and professor of theology at the University of Oxford, his latest book is an attempt to shed lig...
ListenStephanie L. Derrick, “The Fame of C. S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
C. S. Lewis remains one of the most popular religious writers, and one of the most widely discussed children’s writers. I had the chance to catch up with Stephanie L. Derrick about her new book, Th...
ListenSteven Fielding, “A State of Play” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trol...
ListenRichard van Leeuwen, "The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction" (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the impressive volume of The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Brill), Richard van Leeuwen thoroughly examines an array of intricate ways in which the Thousand and One Night...
ListenSara J. Brenneis, “Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015” (U Toronto, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To be quite honest, I had no idea there were any Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen. That’s perhaps an unusual way to begin a blog post. But it reflects a real gap in the literature about the Holoca...
ListenJoshua S. Mostow, “Courtly Visions: The Ise Stories and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation” (Brill, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In pre-modern Japan, Ise monogatari (also known as the Ise Stories or Tales of Ise) was considered to be one of the three most important works of literature in the Japanese language. Joshua S. Most...
ListenArti Dhand, "Woman as Fire, Woman as Sage: Sexual Ideology in the Mahabharata" (SUNY Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Hindu tradition has held conflicting views on womanhood from its earliest texts—holding women aloft as goddesses to be worshipped on the one hand and remaining deeply suspicious about women’s s...
ListenJacqueline Rose ,”Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
I left the kitchen radio on while reading Jacqueline Rose‘s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) in preparation for this interview. It was June. Putting the book ...
ListenBeth Driscoll, “The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty-First Century” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), B...
ListenLauren F. Klein, "An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved...
ListenLaila Amine, “Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light” (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At the heart of Laila Amine’s book is a crucial question: where is Paris? This question may be surprising for anyone who can readily point to the French capital on a map. Geography is, after all st...
ListenMelek Ortabasi, “The Undiscovered Country” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Melek Ortabasi‘s new book explores the work of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), a writer, folk scholar, “eccentric, dominating crackpot,” “brilliant, versatile iconoclast” and much more. The Undiscovere...
ListenGuy Raffa, "Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Guy Raffa, Associate Professor of Italian Studies at UT Austin, about his new book, Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy (Harvard ...
ListenNick Hubble, “The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question” (Edinburgh UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nick Hubble’s The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) is a thrilling, and timely challenge to the orthodoxy that proletarian and high-modernist literatur...
ListenWai-yee Li, “Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature” (Harvard Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Wai-yee Li‘s new book explores writing around the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, paying careful attention to the relationships of history and literature in writing by women, abo...
ListenValerie Wayne, "Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury, 2020) reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English...
ListenScott Spector, “Modernism Without Jews?: German Jewish Subjects and Histories” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Was there anything particularly Modern about Modern Jews? Was there something characteristically Jewish about Modernism? In this episode, we hear from Scott Spector, professor of History and German...
ListenHarleen Singh, “The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Rani of Jhansi was and is many things to many people. In her beautifully written book The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Harleen Singh e...
ListenAllison L. Rowland, "Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood" (Ohio State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The way that we talk about living beings can raise or lower their perceived value. On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Allison L. Rowland (s) about zoetrop...
ListenM. Cooper Harriss, “Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is a milestone of American literature and the idea of invisibility has become a key way for understanding social marginalization. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisib...
ListenBridget Conor, “Screenwriting: Creative labor and professional practice” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Bridget Conor’s new book, Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice (Routledge, 2014), looks closely at the creative practice and profession of screenwriting for film and television i...
ListenXiaoqiao Ling, "Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China" (Harvard Asia Center, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As much of the world’s population is currently discovering, living through a historical cataclysm is a more common fact of human existence than one might think. Perhaps one reason why this is easil...
ListenRebecca Reich, “State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin” (Northern Illinois UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues that Soviet dissident writers used literary narra...
ListenLawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century develo...
ListenK. Keeling and S. Pollard, "Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature" (U Mississippi Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard about their new book, Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature, published June 2020 by University of Mississippi Press. ...
ListenMegan Ward, “Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character” (OSU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Artificial intelligence and Victorian literature: these two notions seem incompatible. AI brings us to the age of information and technology, whereas Victorian literature invites us to the world of...
ListenShengqing Wu, “Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937” (Harvard Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Shengqing Wu’s gorgeous new book begins by exploring the image of the treasure pagoda to introduce readers to an aesthetics of ornamental lyricism in Chinese poetry at the turn of the twentieth-cen...
ListenNaomi Appleton, "Many Buddhas, One Buddha: A Study and Translation of Avad?na?ataka 1-40" (Equinox, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Naomi Appleton's new book Many Buddhas, One Buddha: A Study and Translation of Avad?na?ataka 1-40 (Equinox Publishing, 2020) introduces a significant section of the important early Indian Buddhist ...
ListenMarc Leeds, “The Vonnegut Encyclopedia” (Delacorte Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Originally published in 1994, Marc Leeds’ The Vonnegut Encyclopedia (Delacorte Press, 2016) was initially conceived of as a comprehensive A-Z guide to the expansive oeuvre of the American author Ku...
ListenNabil Matar, “Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall and Progress of Mahometanism” (Columbia UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall and Progress of Mahometanism (Columbia University Press, 2014), Nabil Matar masterfully edits an important piece of scholarship from seven...
ListenBarry Witham, "From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting: The Labor Plays of Manny Fried" (SIU Press 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting: The Labor Plays of Manny Fried (SIU Press 2020) collects three plays by Manny Fried alongside a thorough explanation of his work and life by theatre scholar Barry ...
ListenJulia Miele Rodas, “Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe” (U Michigan Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ever since the first clinical account of autism was published by Dr. Leo Kanner in 1943, Western culture has tended to mythologise the disorder as impenetrable, non-verbal and characterised by sile...
ListenWilliam Chittick, “Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Where does love come from and where will it lead us? Throughout the years various answers have been given to these questions. In Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God (Yale University...
ListenKim Adrian, "Dear Knausgaard: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle" (Fiction Advocate, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 2009, a novel was released in Norway with a fairly simple premise; the author would simply write about himself, his life and his attempts to write. The autobiographical novel would be the first ...
ListenOlga Borovaya, “The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When did Ladino literature emerge? According to Dr. Olga Borovaya, author of The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and his Readers (Indiana University Press, 2017), the history of La...
ListenMark Rifkin, “Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Mark Rifkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensbo...
ListenGaurav Desai, "Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination" (Columbia UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013), offers an alternative history of East Africa in the Indian Ocean world. Rea...
ListenLily Wong, “Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure w...
ListenMartin Joseph Ponce, “Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading” (NYU Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Martin Joseph Ponce‘s recently published book, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (NYU Press, 2012), traces the roots of Filipino literature to examine how it was sh...
ListenVanita Reddy, "Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity and South Asian American Culture" (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Vanita Reddy, in her book Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity and South Asian American Culture (Duke University Press, 2016), locates diasporic transnationality, affiliations and intimacies thr...
ListenZhang Tianyi (tr. David Hull), “The Pidgin Warrior” (Balestier Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just...
ListenChristina Laffin, “Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Known primarily as a travel writer thanks to the frequent assignment of her Diary in high school history and literature classes, Nun Abutsu was a thirteenth-century poet, scholar, and teacher, and ...
ListenBrett Dakin, "American Daredevil: Comics, Communism, and The Battles of Lev Gleason" (Chapterhouse Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In American Daredevil: Comics, Communism, and The Battles of Lev Gleason (Chapterhouse Publishing, 2020), Brett Dakin, Gleason’s great-nephew delves into the life of his famous relative. Gleason ro...
ListenSumana Roy, “How I Became a Tree” (Aleph, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “...
ListenEric LeMay, “In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and Experiments” (Emergency Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.” But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “...
ListenAri Linden, "Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity" (Northwestern UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Ari Linden analyzes Karl Kraus’s oeuvre while engaging in the conversation about modernism and modernity, which i...
ListenSteven Gimbel, “Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Humor and its varied manifestations—jesting joking around, goofing, lampooning, and so on—pervade the human experience and are plausibly regarded as necessary features of interpersonal interactions...
ListenLori Emerson, “Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound” (University of Minnesota, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How much do we really think about the technology that we spend so much time using? More specifically, have you really ever considered the possible effects that the use of technology like your lapto...
ListenBradley Lewis, "Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical Practice" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychiatry has lagged behind many clinical specialties in recognizing the importance of narrative for understanding and effectively treating disease. With this book, Bradley Lewis makes the challen...
ListenIrina Dumitrescu, “The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) i...
ListenXiaojue Wang, “Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
1949 was a crucial year for modern China, marking the beginning of Communist rule on the mainland and the retreat of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. While many scholars of Chinese literature ...
ListenOludamini Ogunnaike, "Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Arabic Madih Poetry and its Precedents" (Islamic Texts Society, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Around the world Muslims praise the Prophet Muhammad through the recitation of lyrical poetry. In West Africa, Arabic praise poetry has a rich history informed by local literary, spiritual, and rit...
ListenSucharita Adluri, “Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse? While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideo...
ListenMichael Saler, “As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford, 2012), historian Michael Saler explores the precursors of the current proliferation of digital virtual worlds. S...
ListenGreil Marcus, “Under the Red White and Blue" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If Jay Gatsby is the embodiment of patriotism, what does that mean for America? Join NBN host Lee Pierce and author Greil Marcus as they take a deep dive into how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of th...
ListenReginald Jackson, “Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls” (U Michigan Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past, live in ...
ListenLucy Hughes-Hallett, “Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War” (Knopf, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize, Lucy Hughes-Hallett‘s biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio is a book with a big mission: to write inventively about the life of someone with whom most everyone ...
ListenSuri Hustvedt, "Memories of the Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How Do We Write Our Personal History at the Same Time That It’s Written for Us? Today I talked to Suri Hustvedt about this question and others as we discuss her book Memories of the Future (Simon a...
ListenJay Geller, “Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews” (Fordham UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (Fordham University Press, 2017), Jay Geller, Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Vanderbilt U...
ListenRobert Mitchell, “Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds, of Keats’ urn and a laboratory cylinder full of ...
ListenAliyah Khan,?"Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean"?(Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean?(Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and pub...
ListenKirstin Squint, “LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature” (LSU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe has quickly emerged as a crucial voice in twenty-first-century American literature. Her innovative, award-winning works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism capture t...
ListenChristopher P. Hanscom, “The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), Christopher P. Hanscom explores literary modernism in the work of t...
ListenPernilla Myrne, "Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World: Gender and Sex in Arabic Literature" (IB Taurus, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, I talk with Pernilla Myrne about her exciting and excellently researched book Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World: Gender and Sex in Arabic Literature, published w...
ListenElizabeth M. Sanders, “Genres of Doubt: Science Fiction, Fantasy and the Crisis of Victorian Faith” (McFarland, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Victorians left an indelible stamp on culture that continues to be in evidence today, not least of which is their refinement of the realist fiction medium known as the novel and their innovatio...
ListenColette Colligan, “A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris 1890-1960” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books, including many of a sexually explicit, pornogr...
ListenC. Jester and C. Svich, "Fifty Playwrights on their Craft" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Fifty Playwrights on their Craft (Bloomsbury, 2018), Caroline Jester and Caridad Svich talk to writers from the US, the UK, and countries around the world about what it means to be a playwright ...
ListenAri Heinrich, “Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body” (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese ...
ListenAdam Henig, “Alex Haley’s Roots: An Author’s Odyssey” (2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family still stands as a memorable epic journey into the history of African Americans during the enslavement period and after. The 1977 televis...
ListenMatthew Pettway, "Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion" (UP of Mississippi, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth...
ListenRebekah J. Buchanan, “Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics” (Peter Lang, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the ri...
ListenRobert Darnton, “On the Future of Libraries” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Robert Darnton, author of books, articles, and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. Darnton joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the future ...
ListenJeremy Black, "Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s World through Maps" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jeremy Black, the prolific professor of history at Exeter University, has published a stunningly attractive volume entitled, Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s World through Maps ...
ListenChristopher G. White, “Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irreconcilable ways of understanding the world, whose ...
ListenScott Cook, “The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation” (Cornell East Asia Program, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s always a joy when I have the opportunity to talk with the author of a book that is clearly a game-changer for its field. In The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation (Corne...
ListenAhmed El-Shamsy, "Rediscovering the Islamic Classics" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ahmed El-Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an astonishing scholarly feat that pr...
ListenElias Muhanna, “The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Described as a small book about a very large book, The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Elias Muhanna tells the story of an e...
ListenErin Khue Ninh, “Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature” (NYU Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Erin Khue Ninh is the author of Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (New York University Press, 2011), which in 2013, won the Literary Studies Book Award from the Asso...
ListenJeffrey Reznick, “John Galsworthy and the Disabled Soldiers of the Great War” (Manchester UP, 2009) from 2010-05-18T16:09:05
You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of the most popular and famous British writers of th...
ListenJeffrey Reznick, “John Galsworthy and the Disabled Soldiers of the Great War” (Manchester UP, 2009) from 2010-05-18T16:09:05
You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of the most popular and famous British writers of th...
Listen