New Books in Literary Studies

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. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports at Villanova University, examines the life of Jim Bouton, a journeyman pitcher whose 1970 book, “Ball Four,” was a lightning rod for controversy and became one of the bes...

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 Awareness (Cornell University Press, 2016) taps into the artistic side of what we often take for granted: the stories we tell, the people we love, the metaphors used by scientists, even our sex lives. A folklo...

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 could not hinder the creation of a new, modern society. Over the next two decades, the protagonists of Russian Futurism pursued their goal of modernizing human experience through radical art. The success...

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 Africa, and Southwest Detroit, as well as cyberspace and the place of dreams. In these works, Svich interrogates themes of globalization and environmental collapse in language that is poetic, rough, hear...

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 and Chair of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University) investigates the long-standing trope of the “provinces” – an imaginary space of static non-modernity where time stands stil...

In Vyāsa Redux: Narrative in Epic Mahābhārata (Anthem Press, 2019), Kevin McGrath examines the complex and enigmatic Vyāsa, both the primary creative poet of the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata and a key character in the very epic he composes. In doing so McGrath focuses on what he considers the late Bronze Age portions of the epic feature prioritizing the concerns if the warrior class. In his discussio...

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 look at the life of a text in the 21st century. Looking at wealth of case studies among Amazon reviewers, redditors, and established journals, Update Culture is a deep diver into the many factors that co...

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 epic in postwar German literature. Examining works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge, it illustrates imaginative artistic responses in German fiction to the physical and ideological divisio...

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 long time ago. They have a promiscuous, curious, weirdly up-to-date quality. They can’t help but grapple their way into what happened on the way to work this morning, that video that appalled you on YouTube...

Brian Collins' book The Other Rāma Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of Paraśurāma (SUNY Press, 2020) examines a fascinating, understudied figure appearing in Sanskrit narrative texts: Paraśurāma, i.e., “Rāma with the Axe”. Though he is counted as among the ten avatāras of Viṣṇu, his biography is quite grisly: Paraśurāma is best known for decapitating his own mother and launching a genocidal...

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 worlds often defy easy assessment. In The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), Carl Rollyson uses both an extensive range of archival collect...

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 scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administr...

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. Norton, 2020), Martha Ackermann traces her evolution as a poet by focusing on some of the key moments in her life that defined and shaped her as a writer. The daughter of a prosperous attorney, Dickinson di...

"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 live under conditions of inequality, violence, dependency and general unhappiness (just look on twitter!) if society is made by us and for us? Why does it seem that modern human beings are not liberated but...

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 poet Nammalvar’s mystical quest for union with his supreme lord, the Hindu great god Viṣṇu. In this interview we discuss the sophisticated structure and profound content of the Tiruvaymoli, along with t...

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 poet Nammalvar’s mystical quest for union with his supreme lord, the Hindu great god Viṣṇu. In this interview we discuss the sophisticated structure and profound content of the Tiruvaymoli, along with t...

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-breaking anthology of prayers that he has collected from English and American puritans. The value of Piercing Heaven: Prayers of the Puritans (Lexham Press, 2020) is that it provides access into a world of rel...

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 considered the first modern poet because he turns his experiences, memories, and the workings of his mind (earlier "spots of time") into the main subject of his accessible poetry. That hadn’t happened b...

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 newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The sometimes violent backlash to these images has reinforced the popular narrative that Islam is aniconic and iconoclastic. In The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Te...

“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 definitely wins. The success of the show is even more amazing considering it’s genre television––fantasy, to be exact. Some assert that the power of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series u...

“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 language, memory, and consciousness are not all she has. Beckett’s plays, novels, poetry, radio plays, and prose reveal our deepest humanity by stripping language to its bare essentials. Beckett wrote much...

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 Press’s Southern Literary Studies Series. This collection of seventeen essays focuses on the mythologies and representations of alcohol production, distribution, and consumption (or rejection) in the literat...

The Jātaka tales, or stories of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisatta, are included in the Pāli Canon and have for centuries been a rich source of inspiration in Theravada Buddhism. In addition to these classical Jātaka, a number of other non-canonical Jātaka tales emerged in Southeast Asia and were widely circulated throughout the region. Collections of these tales are conventionally referr...

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 society is not especially well understood. A lot more must be at play than simply the PRC state’s vast censorship apparatus when it comes to obscuring everything from the leadership’s private lives to dark cha...

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 the Holocaust as the irredeemable rupture in European civilization, but he does so in German, the language of the perpetrators who murdered his parents along with millions of others. How do you bear witne...