New Books in Literary Studies

At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became th...

Today, I am excited to talk to Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz about the new collection of essays they have edited. Milton’s Moving Bodies (Northwestern University Press, 2024) gathers essays from Erin Webster, John Rumrich, Reginald Wilburn, Stephen Fallon, Achsah Guibbory, and Angelica Duran, among others. As our conversation will indicate, each essay has a unique and compelling approach...

The opening of classified documents from the Soviet era has been dubbed the "archival revolution" due to its unprecedented scale, drama, and impact. With a storyteller's sensibility, in Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford University Press, 2024), Cristina Vatulescu identifies and takes on the main challenges of reading in these archives. This transn...

Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency. When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for prece...

Today’s book is: That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Amanda Jones, which offers her story of life as a small-town librarian. One of the things she values most about books is how they can affirm a young person's sense of self. So in 2022, when she caught wind of a local public hearing that would discuss “book content,” she knew what was at stake. Schools...

Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University English professor and no stranger to Recall This Book, is the author of two books on Victorian literature and one about Jennifer Egan. For this episode of Recall This Story, Ivan reads Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Foxcastle.” It was first published in The New Yorker in 1975 and became the final story in her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin. Before diving into the story...

During a desert thunderstorm outside Tucson, Lydia Millet joined the Novel Dialogue conversation with hosts John Plotz and Emily Hyde, with Emily playing the role of critic. Lydia—author more than a dozen novels and story collections and recently the nonfictional We Loved it All (Norton, 2024)—also works at the Center for Biological Diversity. Wild creatures gambol, flap, swim, and crawl their way...

In this episode of Madison's Notes, we sit down with Julia Yost, senior editor at First Things and author of the new book Jane Austen's Darkness (Wiseblood Books, 2024). Yost offers a fresh and provocative perspective on the beloved novelist, exploring the moral complexities, spiritual struggles, and often-overlooked shadows in Austen’s works. From the subtle critiques of social conventions to th...

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited Taiwanese Queer author, Kevin Chen, to talk about his LGBTQ novel, Ghost Town (Europa Editions, 2022) 鬼地方 and its fever worldwide. In our conversation, Kevin shared with us how he first “come out” as a gay writer in Taiwan in the 90s, and how his writings was influenced by key Taiwanese LGBTQ authors and continue to be shaped by his migratory experienc...

Firsthand: How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis While Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things (U Michigan Press, 2024) is an exploration—both suspenseful and comic—of the creative process in research writing. The book takes the reader through the ins and outs of a specific research journey, from combing through libraries and archives to the intellectual challenges...

Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Karen Lystra is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. These laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay connected to those they loved. This book displays the personal exp...

An understanding of Dante the theologian as distinct from Dante the poet has been neglected in an appreciation of Dante's work as a whole.  That is the starting-point of Dante the Theologian (Cambridge UP, 2022). In giving theology fresh centrality, the author argues that theologians themselves should find, when they turn to Dante Alighieri, a compelling resource: whether they do so as historians...

Sam Sax is a queer, jewish, writer and educator. They're the author of Yr Dead (McSweeney's Books, 2024), longlisted for The National Book Award and PIG named one of the best books of 2023 by New York Magazine and Electric Lit. They're also the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and Bury It winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They're the two...

Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America (University of Georgia Press, 2021) Dr. Liliana Naydan analyses representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don De...

Between 1911 and 1912, Prague was home to Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka, two of the twentieth-century’s most influential minds. During this brief but remarkable period, their lives intertwined in surprising ways, driven by a shared intellectual restlessness and a desire to confront life’s most profound questions. Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Un...

Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) traces these ideas through the ent...

Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500 (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Leila Norako asks why medieval romances reimagining the crusades ending in a Christian victory circulated in England with such abundance after the 1291 Muslim reconquest of Acre, the last of the Latin crusader states in the Holy Land, and what these texts reveal about t...

Little is known about the boy detective in Japanese detective fiction despite his popularity. Who is he, and what mysteries does he unveil about cultural understandings of youth in Japanese society? Manga, Murder and Mystery: The Boy Detectives of Japan’s Lost Generation (Bloomsbury, 2023) answers these questions by exploring the figure of the shonen (boy) detective in commercially successful mang...

Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’ War on Terror on television, and then visit your family in the very places that the U.S. army invaded and occupied. These experiences shape the work of novelist Jamil Jan Kochai, author of 99 Nights in Logar and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, wh...

Darwin called the Galápagos archipelago “a little world within itself,” unaffected by humans and set on its own evolutionary path – strange, diverse, and unique. Islands are repositories of unique cultures and ways of living, seed banks built up in relative isolation. Island is an archipelago of ideas, drawing from research and first-hand experience living, working, and travelling to islands as fa...

In Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance (Knopf, 2024) by Dr. Ramie Targoff, discover the lives and work of four ambitious Renaissance women who, against all odds, made themselves heard-and read-in the time of Shakespeare In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Dr. Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth i...

In both modern fiction and the biblical texts of 1 Samuel 13-2 Samuel 1, the character of Jonathan serves as a key literary and theological figure. Throughout In Search of Jonathan: Jonathan Between the Bible and Modern Fiction (Oxford UP, 2023), Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer interprets Jonathan's portrayal in traditional biblical literature and modern fiction. Each chapter provides first an analysis of Jon...

In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian through Her Letters (Harvard University Press, October 2024), Deborah Parker chronicles the making and empowerment of a female connoisseur, curator, and library director in a world where such positions were held by men. Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian (1908–1913) and the first Director of the Morgan...

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanisation of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled...

In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizin...