New Books in Literary Studies

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers across East and Southeast Asia have found themselves turning to Thai soap operas known as “Boys Love series” as a source of comfort and joy. Originally deriving from Japanese comic book culture, Boys Love, or BL, represents just one of many instances where the queer popular culture of Japan has transformed sexual culture in Southeast Asia through the development of new expressions of gender and sexuality. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Thomas Baudinette shines the spotlight on the influence of Japanese queer popular across Southeast Asia, highlighting how, across the region, young consumers – most prominently from sexual minority communities – have been turning away from Western media to draw upon Japanese popular culture in the ongoing search for affirmative representation and tools to not only make sense of their minoritised sexualities, but to also advocate for their emancipation. About Tom Baudinette: Dr Thomas Baudinette is Senior Lecturer in Japanese and International Studies, Department of Media, Communication, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature at Macquarie University. Thomas’s scholarly research focuses upon the role of Asian popular culture in informing knowledge about gender and sexuality across East and Southeast Asia. His first book is Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo (University of Michigan Press, 2021). His second book is Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) studies Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) in relation to maritime criticism. Juan-José Martín-González draws upon the intersections between maritime criticism and postcolonial thought to provide, via an analysis of the Ibis trilogy, alternative insights into nationalism(s), cosmopolitanism and globalization. He shows that the Victorian age in its transoceanic dimension can be read as an era of proto-globalization that facilitates a materialist critique of the inequities of contemporary global neo-liberalism. The book argues that in order to maintain its critical sharpness, postcolonialism must re-direct its focus towards today’s most obvious legacy of nineteenth-century imperialism: capitalist globalization. Tracing the migrating characters who engage in transoceanic crossings through Victorian sea lanes in the Ibis trilogy, Martín-González explores how these dispossessed collectives made sense of their identities in the Victorian waterworlds and illustrates the political possibilities provided by the sea crossing and its fluid boundaries. Dr. Juan-José Martín-González teaches at the University of Málaga. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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 Moretti’s book Distant Reading (Verso, 2013) and Ted Underwood’s essay “A Genealogy of Distant Reading” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11 no. 2 (2017). Take a look at her short blog post on big data at the Network for Digital Humanities in Africa, for more of her insights on distant reading. In the longer version of our conversation Ama Bemma gave the African literary blog Brittle Paper as another example of contemporary digital humanities work. She also mentions James Yeku’s symposium on African digital storytelling. Towards the end we discuss Alan Liu’s commentary on cultural criticism in the digital humanities, and the philosophical amusements of “What is Digital Humanities?” Make sure when you visit that last page that you reload the page! Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow (2021-2022) and a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, who researches post-1960s global literary networks, focusing on poetry and poets from around the world. You can read her essay on “Poetry from Afar: Distant Reading, Global Poetics, and the Digital Humanities” in Modernism and Modernity. Image by Saronik Bosu Music used in promotional material: “These many stairs” by Tendon Levey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Popular representations of the past are everywhere in Japan, from cell phone charms to manga, from television dramas to video games to young people dressed as their favorite historical figures hanging out in the hip Harajuku district. But how does this mass consumption of the past affect the way consumers think about history and what it means to be Japanese? By analyzing representations of the famous sixteenth-century samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi in historical fiction based on Taikōki, the original biography of him, this book explores how and why Hideyoshi has had a continued and ever-changing presence in popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan. The multiple fictionalized histories of Hideyoshi published as serial novels and novellas before, during, and after World War II demonstrate how imaginative re-presentations of Japan’s past have been used by various actors throughout the modern era. In The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: Historical Fiction and Popular Culture in Japan (Harvard UP, 2022), Susan Furukawa discovers a Hideyoshi who is always changing to meet the needs of the current era, and in the process expands our understanding of the powerful role that historical narratives play in Japan. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

An interview with novelist Elif Batuman. The international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot now has a sequel. In Either/Or (Penguin, 2022), Batuman picks up the story as her character, Selin, returns for her sophomore year at Harvard. Either/Or, like its predecessor, is a novel of ideas wrapped in a campus novel, told in a voice so unique that you may never get over it. Elif and I talk Cartesian dualism, Voltron’s tardiness, the novel of ideas vs the thinking novel, eros defused over the body, and so much more. You can’t miss this episode. Books Recommended in this episode: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go John William, Stoner Nino Haratischvili, The Eighth Life Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Against a groundswell of critiques of global English, Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton UP, 2022) argues that literary studies are yet to confront the true political import of the English language in the world today. A comparative study of three centuries of English literature and media in India, this original and provocative book tells the story of English in India as a tale not of imperial coercion, but of a people’s language in a postcolonial democracy. Focusing on experiences of hearing, touching, remembering, speaking, and seeing English, Akshya Saxena delves into a previously unexplored body of texts from English and Hindi literature, law, film, visual art, and public protests. She reveals little-known debates and practices that have shaped the meanings of English in India and the Anglophone world, including the overlooked history of the legislation of English in India. She also calls attention to how low castes and minority ethnic groups have routinely used this elite language to protest the Indian state. Challenging prevailing conceptions of English as a vernacular and global lingua franca, Vernacular English does nothing less than reimagine what a language is and the categories used to analyze it. Akshya Saxena is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She studied English literature at the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, before earning her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Her areas of study are 20th and 21st-century literature and media of the English-speaking world, with a special interest in the racialized and caste-marked practices of mediation that shape language. Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on literary rhetoric and economic thought. He co-hosts the podcast High Theory and is a co-founder of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Fierce Appetites: Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in my Present and in the Writings of the Past (Sandy Cove, 2022), Dr. Elizabeth Boyle weaves together the past and the present together, creating a beautiful memoir and reflection. To quote the book blurb, “Not only does Elizabeth Boyle write dazzling accounts of ancient stories, familiar and obscure, from Ireland and further afield, but she uses her historical learning to grapple with the raw and urgent questions she faces, questions that have bedeviled people in every age. She writes on grief, addiction, family breakdown, the complexities of motherhood, love and sex, memory, class, education, travel (and staying put) with unflinching honesty, deep compassion, and occasional dark humour.” This book is for academics and non-academics alike and for those interested in musings on the Middle Ages, a multifaceted life, and the events of 2020. Fierce Appetites was published by Sandycove, an imprint of Penguin Books, in 2022. Dr. Elizabeth Boyle is a lecturer in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University and former Head of the Department. She is the author of numerous works, including the History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland (Routledge, 2021) which was featured on a previous New Books in Irish Studies podcast. Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher, who recently graduated with her PhD in History from the University of Liverpool and is an editorial assistant for the Church Archaeology journal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What is a detail? How is it different from xijie, its Chinese counterpart? Is "reading for the details" fundamentally different from "reading for the plot"? Did xijie xiaoshuo, the Chinese novel of details, give the world its earliest form of modern fiction? Inspired by studies of vision and modernity as well as cinema, this book gazes out on the larger world through the small aperture of the detail, highlighting how concrete literary minutiae become "telling" as they reveal the dynamics of seeing and hearing, the vibrations of the mind, the complexity of the everyday, and the imperative to recognize the minute, the humble, and the hidden. In a strain of masterpieces of xijie xiaoshuo, such details play a key role in pivoting the novel from didacticism towards a capacious modern form. Examining the Chinese detail as both a common idiom and a unique concept, and extrapolating it from individual works to the culture at large, reveals under-explored areas of the Chinese novel: its psychological depths, its connections with other genres and forms, its partaking in Chinese material life and capitalist modernity, as well as repressions and difficulties surrounding its reception in national and international contexts. With carefully chosen case studies, Xiao’s book not only exemplifies the value of deep reading in approaching complex works of Chinese fiction as world literature, it also throws light on the aesthetics and politics of "the unseen," which has become central to a humanist tradition that flows across literature, cinema, and other art forms. Jiwei Xiao is Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures (Chinese) at Fairfield University. She is a scholar of comparative literature and Chinese cinema. Her wide-ranging publications have appeared in New Left Review, New York Review of Books, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, MCLC, and Journal of Contemporary China. Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature (Routledge, 2022) is her first book. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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 Press, 2021). In the episode she points to Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts as the book that made the term famous, but refers us to a longer history of autotheoretical feminist writing, including work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks. She also mentions critical research by Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism” and the book I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus. Lauren is a writer, curator, and artist, who currently holds a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in visual studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently co-editing a special issue of ASAP Journal on Autotheory with her colleague Alex Brostoff. Her novella, All My Dicks, is forthcoming with Fiction Advocate. Image: Art by Sona Safaei-Sooreh Music used in promotional material: ‘Braided Flower’ by Lee Maddeford Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Alice Dailey’s How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol (Cornell University Press, 2022) is an exploration of Shakespeare’s chronicle plays through the theoretical rubric of modern technology. Dailey is Professor of English at Villanova University and is the author of the monograph The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (from Notre Dame Press). How to Do Things with Dead People is a study of the representational strategies of the porous boundary between past and present, and dead and undead, in Shakespeare’s history plays. Drawing on Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Lee Edelman, Peggy Phelan, and Derrida, Dailey creates new space for how we might think about the unruly interrelationships of the present, the past, and the future, including how twentieth-century technology can reanimate our engagement with early modern theories of kingship, ableism, and reproductive futurity. John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Elizabeth Oyler and Katherine Saltzman-Li's book Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age (Cornell UP, 2022) draws on literary works, artifacts, performing arts, and documents that were created by or about the samurai to examine individual "imprints," traces holding specifically grounded historical meanings that persist through time. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume assess those imprints for what they can suggest about how thinkers, writers, artists, performers, and samurai themselves viewed warfare and its lingering impact at various points during the "samurai age," the long period from the establishment of the first shogunate in the twelfth century through the fall of the Tokugawa in 1868. The range of methodologies and materials discussed in Cultural Imprints challenges a uniform notion of warrior activity and sensibilities, breaking down an ahistorical, monolithic image of the samurai that developed late in the samurai age and that persists today. Highlighting the memory of warfare and its centrality in the cultural realm, Cultural Imprints demonstrates the warrior's far-reaching, enduring, and varied cultural influence across centuries of Japanese history. Contributors: Monica Bethe, William Fleming, Andrew Goble, Thomas Hare, Luke Roberts, Marimi Tateno, Alison Tokita, Elizabeth Oyler, Katherine Saltzman-Li. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Since the original airing of this episode in June 2021, Roger Reeves' second book Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. was published by W.W. Norton, and the paperback edition of David Ferry's translation of The Aeneid was published by the University of Chicago Press. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way. In conversation with Elizabeth for this episode of Recall this Book, originally broadcast back in 2021, poets Roger Reeves and David Ferry join the procession through the underworld, each one leading the other. They talk about David’s poem Resemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave he just visited, eating in the corner of a small New Jersey restaurant and “listening to a conversation/With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back/From where they went to when they went away?” Roger reads “Grendel’s Mother,” in which the worlds of Grendel and Orpheus and George Floyd coexist but do not resemble each other, and where Grendel’s mother hears her dying son and refuses the heaven he might be called to, since entering it means he’d have to die. Mentioned in this episode David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by David Ferry, University of Chicago Press Roger Reeves, Error! Hyperlink reference not valid., Copper Canyon Press Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric , Harvard University Press. Read transcript of the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Hakkenden is a classic work of Japanese literature: the story of the eight warriors, born from Princess Fuse and the dog Yatsufusa, has been adapted to manga, movies and anime. And its tropes continue to pop up in Japanese popular culture today. But there’s so much story in Hakkenden that Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One―An Ill-Considered Jest (Cornell University Press: 2021), a new translation by Glynne Walley, doesn’t even get to the eight warriors before it’s end! Glynne’s translation sets the scene for the emergence of the eight dog warriors, translating everything in the book–including the medicine ads the author included to help pay the bills. In this interview, Glynne and I talk about what makes Hakkenden so special, Glynne’s translation choices, and how its themes and tropes persist to the present day. Glynne Walley is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon and author ofGood Dogs: Edification, Entertainment & Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Cornell East Asia Series, 2018), the first monograph-length study of Hakkenden, a landmark of premodern Japanese fiction. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hakkenden. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

On a near-daily basis, data is being used to narrate our lives. Categorizing algorithms drawn from amassed personal data to assign narrative destinies to individuals at crucial junctures, simultaneously predicting and shaping the paths of our lives. Data is commonly assumed to bring us closer to objectivity, but the narrative paths these algorithms assign seem, more often than not, to replicate biases about who an individual is and could become. While the social effects of such algorithmic logics seem new and newly urgent to consider, Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century Us Literatures (U Michigan Press, 2022) looks to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. to provide an instructive prehistory to the underlying question of the relationship between data, life, and narrative. Rodrigues contextualizes the application of data collection to human selfhood in order to uncover a modernist aesthetic of data that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic pervading our sense of data's revelatory potential. Examining the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rodrigues asks how each of these authors draw from their work in sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to formulate a critical data aesthetic as they attempt to answer questions of identity around race, gender, and nation both in their research and their life writing. These data-driven modernists not only tell different life stories with data, they tell life stories differently because of data. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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 concepts of Puram and Akam in classical Tamil poetics, Moliere’s comedies, Plato’s Symposium, the Hebrew Bible, Sappho’s poetry, the story of Shakuntala, and The Aeneid. Manasvin is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Davis , where he writes about questions of identity and world building in Early Modern French and Tamil literature. Image: An eighteenth century representation of the Dhanasri Ragini held by The Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain artwork. Music used in promotional material: “The Flute in a Barrel” by Sandro Marinoni and Stefano Roncarolo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This intricate, yearning work from award-winning poet Alison Calder asks us to think about the way we perceive and the ways in which we seek to know ourselves and others. In Synaptic (University of Regina Press, 2022) each section explores key themes in science, neurology, and perception. The first, Connectomics, riffs on scientific language to work with and against that language’s intentions. Attempting to map the brain’s neural connections, it raises fundamental questions about interiority and the self. The lyric considerations in these poems are juxtaposed against the scientific-like footnotes which, in turn, invoke questions undermining authority and power. The second section, Other Disasters, explores ways of seeing or and being seen, from considerations of folklore to modern art to daily life. Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When first published in 1926, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises changed American literature forever. Hemingway follows a disillusioned group of expats in post-World War I Europe whose relationships unravel as they travel from Paris to the bullfights in Spain. Unsettling, provocative, and inspiring to this day, this legendary novel about loyalty, love, and betrayal challenges readers to discover what it takes to be true to oneself. Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay put it well: “[w]hen Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, he shot a fist in the face of the false romantic-realists and said: ‘You can’t fake about life like that.’” And Ralph Waldo Ellison, author of Invisible Man (podcast), said: “Because Hemingway loved the American language and the joy of writing…he was in many ways the true father-as-artist of so many of us who came to writing during the late thirties.” I spoke with Professor Linda Patterson Miller to understand why the novel had such an impact, what the book meant for the “lost generation” after World War I, how to read Hemingway from a feminist perspective, and how best to address parts of the novel that strike us as offensive today. Inspired by this conversation, I wrote an essay on the conspicuous use of the n-word in The Sun Also Rises for a new edition of the novel published by Warbler Press that charts a path beyond the cancel-or-defend-at-all-cost positions in today’s culture wars. Professor Miller teaches at Pennsylvania State University’s campus in Abington, Pennsylvania, has written seminal essays on Hemingway and other authors, and is the editor of Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends (2002). Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s book Testimony. In his discussion of witnessing with respect to our present political moment, he talks about the murder of George Floyd and the following global reckoning. Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography, and writes frequently about photography, art, literature, and other subjects. A graduate of Harvard and Yale, he has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowship. Image: Detail from ‘Girl with a Yellow Bird’ by Hale Woodruff. Music used in promotional material: “Leaving for Chicago” by Rest You Sleeping Giant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform (MIT Press, 2022) is the first book-length analysis of Amazon's Kindle explores the platform's technological, bibliographical, and social impact on publishing. Dr. Simon Peter Rowberry recounts how Amazon built the infrastructure for a new generation of digital publications, then considers the consequences of having a single company control the direction of the publishing industry. Exploring the platform from the perspectives of technology, texts, and uses, he shows how the Kindle challenges traditional notions of platforms as discrete entities. Dr. Rowberry argues that Amazon's influence extends beyond “disruptive technology” to embed itself in all aspects of the publishing trade; yet despite industry pushback, he says, the Kindle has had a positive influence on publishing. Dr. Rowberry documents the first decade of the Kindle with case studies of Kindle Popular Highlights, an account of the digitization of books published after 1922, and a discussion of how Amazon's patent filings reflect a shift in priorities. Rowberry argues that while it was initially convenient for the book trade to outsource ebook development to Amazon, doing so has had adverse consequences for publishers in the mid- and long term, limiting opportunities for developing an inclusive and forward-thinking digital platform. While it has forced publishers to embrace digital forms, the Kindle has also empowered some previously marginalized readerships. Although it is still too early to judge the long-term impact of ebooks compared with that of the older technologies of clay tablets, the printing press, and offset printing, the shockwaves of the Kindle continue to shape publishing. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Nathan Jordan Poole speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Idlewild,” which appears in The Common’s new spring issue. In this conversation, Nathan talks about doing seasonal work at Christmas tree farms, the workers from all walks of life he met there, and how those experiences and those people helped to inspire this story. He also discusses his writing and revision process, his story collections and future projects, and why he chooses to write unromantically about rural life. Nathan Jordan Poole is the author of two books of fiction: Father Brother Keeper, a collection of stories selected by Edith Pearlman for the Mary McCarthy Prize, and Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost, selected by Benjamin Percy as the winner of the Quarterly West Novella Contest. He is a recipient of the Narrative Prize, a Milton Fellowship at Seattle Pacific University, a Joan Beebe Fellowship at Warren Wilson College, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship at Sewanee School of Letters, and a North Carolina Artist Fellowship. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Blue Ridge, South Carolina. Read Nathan’s story “Idlewild” in The Common at thecommononline.org/idlewild. In this conversation, Nathan recommends The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter, available here from Graywolf Press. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The collapse of the Soviet Union forced Russia to engage in a process of nation building. This involved a reassessment of the past, both historical and cultural, and how it should be remembered. The publication of previously barely known underground and émigré literary works presented an opportunity to reappraise "official" Soviet literature and re-evaluate twentieth-century Russian literature as a whole. Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith's book Canonicity, Twentieth-Century Poetry and Russian National Identity After 1991 (Peter Lang, 2020) explores changes to the poetry canon – an instrument for maintaining individual and collective memory – to show how cultural memory has informed the evolution of post-Soviet Russian identity. It examines how concerns over identity are shaping the canon, and in which directions, and analyses the interrelationship between national identity (whether ethnic, imperial, or civic) and attempts to revise the canon. Canonicity, Twentieth-Century Poetry and Russian National Identity After 1991 situates the discussion of national identity within the cultural field and in the context of canon formation as a complex expression of aesthetic, political, and institutional factors. It encompasses a period of far-reaching upheaval in Russia and reveals the tension between a desire for change and a longing for stability that was expressed by attempts to reshape the literary canon and, by doing so, to create a new twentieth-century past and the foundations of a new identity for the nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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 Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. If you want a list of more 9/11 family novels, feel free to ask. A special shoutout to Sarah Wasserman’s The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel for ideas about the state of print culture. Jay is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he is writing his dissertation about 9/11 and the family. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Critic, ASAP/J, and elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @jshelat1. Image: photo taken by Ben Hider at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Music used in promotional material: Adagio (mother nature’s sleep) by Dee Yan-Kay Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (Duke University Press, 2022), Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationships among print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the British colonial Custom House. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water. These practices, echoing other colonial imaginaries of the ocean as a space for erasing incriminating evidence of the violence of empire, informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa. By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Hofmeyr shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters. Set in the environmental context of the colonial port city, Dockside Reading explores how imperialism colonizes water. Hofmeyr examines this theme through the concept of hydrocolonialism, which puts together land and sea, empire and environment. Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She received her PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand. She is author of The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History (2004) and Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (2013). Along with Antoinette Burton, she co-edited Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons. Her articles have been published in the American Historical Review, Social Dynamics, PMLA, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and the Journal of African History, to name a few. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of the New Books in Latin America podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Lorena Cuya Gavilano about her interesting new book Fictions of Migration: Narratives of Displacement in Peru and Bolivia published in 2021 by the Ohio State University Press. This book analyses the impact of political and economic trends on migration narratives and films in Peru and Bolivia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a critical exploration of the affects and epistemologies of migration in Peru and Bolivia through cultural productions such as films, novels, and short stories in the context of regional neoliberal re-arrangements. Dr. Cuya Gavilano is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Cultures at Arizona State University. Her areas of specialization are migration studies, film analysis, contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, and Human Geography. Kenneth Sánchez is a Peruvian journalist that works as a freelance journalist and as a multi-platform content curator for the Peruvian media outlet Comité de Lectura. He is a host of the New Books in Latin American Studies podcast and the movies & entertainment podcast Segundo Plano. He holds a master’s degree in Latin American Politics from University College London (UCL), is a Centre for Investigative Journalism masterclass alumni and is part of the 6th generation of Young Journalists of #LaRedLatam of Distintas Latitudes. He has won several awards including the prestigious Amnesty Media Award given out by Amnesty International UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

An interview with novelist Grant Ginder. In his latest dramady of familial disfunction, Let’s Not Do That Again (Henry Holt, 2022), Grant starts with political intrigue that bridges New York and Paris, mixes it with a wealthy and connected family in freefall, and ties it together with a transnational criminal coverup. The result is one of the most engrossing novels of the year. Grant’s work reminds us why the novel form can be both beautiful and ribald, literary and popular. I had such a wonderful time talking to Grant about how families inevitably disappoint, and how great writers can show how they manage to love each other despite themselves. Grant Recommends: Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind Jennifer Close, Marrying the Ketchups Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Saronik talks to Tuhin Chakrabarty about the creative processes of Artificial Intelligence, what we can expect from it, and how to keep the results fair. (Saronik messes up the word GPT-3 twice!) Reading List: GPT3 Creativity When AI Falls in Love, GPT-3 Creative Fiction, Are You Ready for NaNoWriMo? Papers/Posts on Computational Creativity Generating Similes Like a Pro, Content Planning for Neural Story Generation, Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation , The Comedian is in the Machine Music and Art Google Magenta Creating Image from Text Dall-E, Creative Text Generation Bias in Language Models Stereoset measures Racism, Sexism, and other Forms of Bias in AI Language Models, Towards Controllable Biases in Language Generation, The Woman worked as a Babysitter, Timnit Gebru’s thread about Google firing her, RealToxicityPrompts, Measuring and Reducing Gendered Correlations in Pre-trained Models Bias in Poetry Investigating Societal Biases in a Poetry Composition System AI Poetry Google’s New AI Helps You Write Poetry like Poe, Generating Topical Poetry Academic Venues Computational Creativity, Machine Learning for Creativity and Design Image: created using Dall-E Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode, co-translators Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan discuss their Korean-to-English translation of Glory Hole by Kim Hyun (Seagull Books, 2022). Released as part of The Pride List from The University of Chicago Press, Glory Hole is a fantastical collection of queer poems that are uncomfortable, bodily, fluid-filled, and delightfully puzzling to read. Across fifty-one bewildering poems, Kim both engages and confuses readers with puns, distorted retellings of American popular culture, dystopian landscapes, robots, and more, all to a relentlessly queer backdrop of longing and sexual desire. Tune in to hear Suhyun and Archana read some of their favorite translations from this collection, talk about their own journeys to translation and translating Glory Hole, and share the challenges and joys of bringing this work into the English language: the Korean wordplay that they reimagine in English; their collaborative process of making sense of these poems in both Korean and English; some favorite (and most frustrating) parts of the translation process, and more! Suhyun J. Ahn is a Korean-English translator who is pursuing a PhD in East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Archana Madhavan is a Korean-English translator who works a day job in tech. Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and data analyst based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Kim talks with Chad Hegelmeyer about the institutional turn in literary studies. Chad references Jeremy Rosen’s article “The Institutional Turn” from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. We also talk about: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (Harper Collins, 1963), D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (U California Press, 1989), Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2006), Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Harvard UP, 2011), and Janice Radway’s books, Reading the Romance (UNC Press, 1984) and A Feeling for Books (UNC Press, 1997). Chad quotes several texts referenced by Rosen: Franco Moretti’s Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (Verso, 2005) Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell UP, 1982) Mark McGurl. “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present.” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 329–349. In the longer version of our conversation, Chad gave several other examples of the “institutional turn” including: James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard UP, 2005); Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Palgrave, 2007); John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Polity, 2010); Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (U Chicago Press, 2008); Jim Collins Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2010). Chad is a friend of the pod! He writes about fact checking and literature, and he’s a postdoc in the English Department at NYU. Today’s image is a photograph of the “Staircase of the National Museum of Slovenia” taken by Petar Milošević, posted under a creative commons attribution share-alike license on Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Rajiv Mohabir is a dazzling poet of linguistics crossovers, who works in English, Bhojpuri, Hindi and more. He is as prolific as he is polyglot (three books in 2021!) and has undertaken a remarkable array of projects includes the prizewinning resurrection of a forgotten century-old memoir about mass involuntary migration. He joined John and first-time host Ulka Anjaria (English prof, Bollywood expert and Director of the Brandeis Mandel Center for the Humanities) in the old purple RtB studio. During the conversation, Rajiv read and in one case sang poems from his wonderful recent books, Cutlish and Antiman. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: How the Common got started What is involved in running a literary journal Why grants and institutional support matter so much in the literary arts The importance of finding mentors and building a network How the Common creates community Our guest is: Jennifer Acker , who is the founder and editor in chief of The Common, and author of the debut novel The Limits of the World, a fiction honoree for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her memoir “Fatigue” is a #1 Amazon bestseller, and her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in Oprah Daily, Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, and The Yale Review, among other places. Acker has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches writing and editing at Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband. Our guest is: Elizabeth Witte, who is a writer and editor based in western Massachusetts. She is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council's Artist Fellowships in Poetry and author of the chapbook, Dry Eye (Dancing Girl Press); her work appears in a variety of journals, including Prelude, Word For/ Word, and Denver Quarterly. She is Associate Editor of The Common and directs the journal's education program The Common in the Classroom. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator and co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in: Fatigue, by Jennifer Acker Amherst College The Bennington Writing Seminars https://www.bennington.edu/writing-seminars The Common More about the Common in the Classroom can be found here The Common in the Classroom, The Common Young Writers Program A podcast from The Common magazine on The New Books Network “This is the Place” Amherst College LitFest The Whiting Literary Magazine Prize Learn more about The Alternative Press conversation with co-founder Ken Mikolowski (courtesy of Centre For Print Research, UWE Bristol); and the Press’s Multiple Originals project The Poetry Foundation You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Afropolitan Encounters: Literature and Activism in London and Berlin (Peter Lang, 2022), the first book in the new series “Imagining Black Europe,” explores what Afropolitanism does. Mobile people of African descent use this term to address their own lived realities creatively, which often includes countering stereotypical notions of being African. Afropolitan practices are enormously heterogeneous and malleable, which constitutes its strengths and, at the same time, creates tensions. Anna von Rath traces the theoretical beginnings of Afropolitanism and moves on to explore Afropolitan practices in London and Berlin. Afropolitanism can take different forms, such as that of an identity, a political and ethical stance, a dead–end road, networks, a collective self–care practice or a strategic label. While not a unitary project, the vast variety of Afropolitan practices provide approaches to contemporary political problems in Europe and beyond. In this book, Afropolitan practices are read against the specific context of German and British colonial histories and structures of racism, the histories of Black Europeans, and contemporary right–wing resurgence in Germany and England, respectively. Nicole Coleman is Assistant Professor of German at Wayne State University. She tweets @drnicoleman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity (Oxford University Press, 2021), Cambridge professor Stanley Bill offers a profoundly original, fine-grained, and rich interpretation of the poetic œuvre of Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. The book presents Miłosz’s poetic philosophy of the body as an original defense of religious faith, transcendence, and the value of the human individual against what he viewed as dangerous modern forms of materialism. The Polish poet saw the reductive “biologization” of human life as a root cause of the historical tragedies he had witnessed under Nazi German and Soviet regimes in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. Stanley Bill argues that Miłosz’s response was not merely to reconstitute spiritual or ideal forms of human identity, which no longer seemed plausible. Instead, he aimed to revalidate the flesh, elaborating his own non-reductive understandings of the self on the basis of the body's deeper meanings. For Miłosz, the double nature of poetic meaning reflects the fused duality of the human self. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence (UP of Mississippi, 2021) explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls’ book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls’ book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls’ book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls. Drawing on forgotten bestsellers in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur), Transforming Girls offers insightful readings that call scholars to reexamine the history of the girls’ book. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them. Julie Pfeiffer is a professor of English at Hollins University. She is editor of Children’s Literature, the annual of Children’s Literature Association. Renee Garris is a professor of Humanities in Virginia. She teaches the Humanities as a discipline as well as hosts authors on this network as well as the Performing Arts channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Marta Puxan-Oliva’s Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel (Routledge, 2021), engages with the intertwined relationship between narrative studies – centering on narrative reliability – racial conflicts and ideologies. Puxan-Oliva argues that the problem of narrative reliability in fiction, often mirrors and makes use of narrative reliability of historical discourse, and therefore urges literary critics to examine the historical context of a work of fiction to “comprehend technical modulations of narrative reliability.” Her book offers a crucial contribution to narrative theory by insisting on a need to historicize the field itself to understand how historical discourses give rise to specific cultural and political discourses. In order to illustrate her methodology, Puxan-Oliva analyzes Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Albert Camus’s L’étranger, and Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo. In each chapter, Puxan-Oliva grapples with a specific issue on the problem of reliability in connection to historical contexts of each literary work. For example, she discusses in depth the role that the voice of persuasion has in Conrad’s Lord Jim, and the implications this has within the larger discourse of British imperialism. When focusing her keen analysis on Faulkner, Puxan-Oliva considers the degrees of reliability in the narrative, and the way the problem of reliability reflects historical discourses in the New South. In her chapter on Camus, she observes how Meursault’s ‘estranging narrative’ makes use of underreporting, which is an “ideological strategy common in colonial discourse”, thereby connecting narrative voice within a broader condition of discordant reliability within French colonial Algeria. To sum up, each chapter in Puxan-Oliva’s book consists of a necessary intervention in narratology, arguing that the field of narrative studies needs to release narrative from its exclusive engagement with the text, divorced from other forces that exert pressure on its formation; instead, Puxan-Oliva is interested in the interconnectedness of texts with political and historical discourses, and their rootedness within broader patterns of cultural production, which, ultimately, is an argument for a cultural narratology that is interested in the “construction of form” and in the very “politics of form”. Ultimately, this book is an important intervention not only within narrative studies and racial conflicts and ideology, but it has crucial implications during a time when various discourses around the globe pose a major challenge to the nature of truth, and how the latter is affected by narrative, narrative form, and how these are shaped by historical and political discourse. Marta Puxan-Oliva a is Ramón y Cajal senior researcher at the Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain. Eralda L. Lameborshi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at the Texas A&M University – Commerce where she teaches world literature and cinema. Her areas of research are World Literature, the historical novel on the Ottoman Empire, world cinema, postcolonial theory, and film theory. She is the recipient of various fellowships and awards like the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, and the Elizabeth Greenwade Qualls ’89 Endowed Fellowship. She is currently working on her book manuscript titled The Islamic Empire and Southeastern European Literature, and articles on the global novel and literatures of migration, immigration, and exile. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Saronik talks with Manish Melwani about outdated visions of the future and stale science fiction ideas that just won’t die. Manish is a Singaporean writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 2014, and then completed a master’s thesis at NYU entitled Starports, Portals and Port Cities: Science Fiction and Fantasy in Empire’s Wake. (That’s where he met Saronik.) Manish has published several short stories, with several more—and a novel—on the way. They talk about science fiction’s imperialist heritage and how going to Mars is just a distraction from the imaginative (and literal) dead end our civilization faces. They also throw shade on Cecil Rhodes and certain tech moguls who have completely missed the point of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. Manish’s perspective has been shaped by many other writers and theorists including: John Rieder’s work on Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, Samuel R. Delany’s seminal essays, Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding, a group biography of John W. Campbell and other figures from the Golden Age of science fiction, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent climate sci-fi oeuvre. Further reading includes Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide, Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle, Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers edited by Sarena Ulibarri, and Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. Image created by Saronik Bosu using open source vectors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Gregory M. Clines' book Jain Rāmāyaṇa Narratives: Moral Vision and Literary Innovation (Routledge, 2022) traces how and why Jain authors at different points in history rewrote the story of Rāma and situates these texts within larger frameworks of South Asian religious history and literature. Clines' book is a valuable contribution to the fields of Jain studies and religion and literature in premodern South Asia. It is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English—the language of Beowulf—defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of Britain more than a thousand years ago, it is rich with words that haven’t changed (like word), others that are unrecognizable (such as neorxnawang, or paradise), and some that are mystifying even in translation (gafol-fisc, or tax-fish). In this delightful book, Hana Videen gathers a glorious trove of these gems and uses them to illuminate the lives of the earliest English speakers. We discover a world where choking on a bit of bread might prove your guilt, where fiend-ship was as likely as friendship, and where you might grow up to be a laughter-smith. The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English (Princeton UP, 2022) takes readers on a journey through Old English words and customs related to practical daily activities (eating, drinking, learning, working); relationships and entertainment; health and the body, mind, and soul; the natural world (animals, plants, and weather); locations and travel (the source of some of the most evocative words in Old English); mortality, religion, and fate; and the imagination and storytelling. Each chapter ends with its own “wordhord”—a list of its Old English terms, with definitions and pronunciations. Entertaining and enlightening, The Wordhord reveals the magical roots of the language you’re reading right now: you’ll never look at—or speak—English in the same way again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Underdevelopment and African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Sarah Brouillette tackles the print culture and literature in English in South and East Africa. Starting from the period of the 1970s to the contemporary times. She analyses literary texts as well as textbooks and books written for the learners of the English language. She puts forth how piracy, short-fictions app, apps and so on form an intricate part of this diverse field. Sarah Brouillette is a professor at Carleton University in Canada. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Kim talks with Sonya Posmentier about hurricanes. Sonya writes about hurricanes and diaspora in her book, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. In the episode she references Kamau Brathwaite’s essay “The History of the Voice” and Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence, Harvard University Press, 2011. She also talks about a genre of Jamaican dancehall music that grew in the wake of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. To hear some of that music and learn more about the musical resonances of hurricanes, you can read her “Hurricane Season Playlist” on the Johns Hopkins University Press blog. Sonya teaches African American literature in the English Department at New York University (where she is an excellent dissertation advisor for literary scholars and future podcasters). This week’s image of a spiral evoking hurricane wind patterns was borrowed from Wikimedia Commons. Creative commons license, CC By Share Alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness (Duke University Press, 2022) by Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how it constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Demonstrating that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy, he also shows how it constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender. Dr. Marlon B. Ross is professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 2001. Before that, he was professor of English and African American & African Studies at the University of Michigan. His interests include a variety of fields related to race, gender, sexuality, and culture. He is also the author of Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era and The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

An interview with Fernanda Melchor, finalist for the International Booker Prize, and author most recently of Paradais (New Directions, 2022). And Sophie Hughes, the English translator of Fernanda’s two novels, and winner of the Pen Translates Award. In a wide-ranging discussion, we touch upon the ways in which translation is akin to friendship, and how a translation can be the greatest interpretation of your work. Fernanda discusses her understanding of violence as inseparable from the story of humanity, and how she sees her style as that which persists after she has let go of the text, while Sophie addresses the question of the translator’s invisibility and the lexicons required for each new writer's work that she takes on. This episode features a bilingual reading from Paradais by Fernanda Melchor. It is not to be missed. Books Recommended in this episode: Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo José Agustín, De Perfil Nona Fernandez, The Twilight Zone Marianna Enriquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed Alia Trabucco Zerán, The Remainder Andrea Abreu, Dogs of Summer Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

On this episode of New Books in Performing Arts, we talk with Andy Bragen about two plays of his published in a new volume by Northwestern University Press: This is My Office and Notes on My Mother's Decline. Both plays center on grief: Bragen's process of grieving his father in This is My Office and the slow, painful process of his mother's death in Notes on My Mother's Decline. Both plays are bravely emotionally bare yet unsentimental. They situate death and dying in a long continuum that both predates and antedates the individual person. In this way, both plays are as much about family, history, and family history as much as they are about the moment of death. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality. First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes—heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies—into a sensitive portrait of one young woman’s quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader’s own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation brings Chi’s hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go. Chi Ta-wei is a renowned writer and scholar from Taiwan. Chi’s scholarly work focuses on LGBT studies, disability studies, and Sinophone literary history, while his award-winning creative writing ranges from science fiction to queer short stories. He is an associate professor of Taiwanese literature at the National Chengchi University. Ari Larissa Heinrich is a professor of Chinese literature and media at the Australian National University. They are the author of Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (2018) and other books, and the translator of Qiu Miaojin’s novel Last Words from Montmartre (2014). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“Finally, the first of Norton’s long-awaited treatments of Ernest Hemingway, the American who, more than anyone, changed the look and sound of modern American prose. Academic rigor and impeccable attention to detail are the hallmarks of the Norton Critical Edition, and this volume on The Sun Also Rises is no exception. In addition to the usual suspects of contemporary reviews and early criticism, this volume draws on an exceptional pool of resources and ancillary material to tell this novel’s story: biographical excerpts from the likes of Sylvia Beach and Harold Loeb, original expurgated text, epistolary exchanges with Max Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and hefty segments on expatriation, the bullfights, and Hemingway’s own literary influences. Add to this a generous sampling of new, exceptional criticism that speaks to a modern audience about issues of gender and sexuality and about race, and a wonderful, spirited introduction, and this critical edition edited by Michael Thurston becomes the definitive edition of Hemingway’s star-making novel and a necessary comprehensive guide for both teachers and students.” --Marc Dudley, North Carolina State University. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Rania Karoula's The Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) offers a readable and engaging summary of an important chapter in American theatre history. Now safe from the 30s-era anti-Communist backlash that led Hallie Flanagan and others to downplay the influence of Communist avant gardes on the FTP, Karoula reveals the intellectual and artistic dialogue between artists affiliated with the FTP and left-wing theatre artists including Meyerhold, Piscator, and Brecht. Karoula tracks how the FTP tried to incorporate these aesthetic innovations into the American stage but was ultimately unable to ward off HUAC persecution. This book will be of interest both to scholars of theatre history and historians of the New Deal more generally. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this rebroadcast, John and Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (an occasional host and perennial friend of Recall this Book) speak with Madeline Miller, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Circe. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Translation of Contemporary Taiwan Literature in a Cross-Cultural Context (Routledge, 2021) explores the social, cultural, and linguistic implications of translation of Taiwan literature for transnational cultural exchange. It demonstrates principally how asymmetrical cultural relationships, mediation processes, and ideologies of the translation players constitute the culture-specific translation activity as a highly contested site, where translation can reconstruct and rewrite the literature and the culture it represents. Four main theoretical themes are explored in relation to such translation activity: sociological studies, cultural and rewriting studies, English as a lingua franca, and social and performative linguistics. These offer insightful perspectives on the translation as an interpretive encounter between not only two languages, two cultural systems and assumptions taking place, but also among various translation mediators. This book will be useful to scholars and students working on translation and cultural studies, China/Taiwan literature studies, and literature studies in cross-cultural contexts. Szu-Wen Kung (Dr.) is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Program in Translation and Interpretation, National Taiwan University, Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Written in straightforward, jargon-free language, Nancy Pedri's A Concise Dictionary of Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) guides students, researchers, readers, and educators of all ages and at all levels of comics expertise. It provides them with a dictionary that doubles as a compendium of comics scholarship. A Concise Dictionary of Comics provides clear and informative definitions for each term. It includes twenty-five witty illustrations and pairs most defined terms with references to books, articles, book chapters, and other relevant critical sources. All references are dated and listed in an extensive, up-to-date bibliography of comics scholarship. Each term is also categorized according to type in an index of thematic groupings. This organization serves as a pedagogical aid for teachers and students learning about a specific facet of comics studies and as a research tool for scholars who are unfamiliar with a particular term but know what category it falls into. These features make A Concise Dictionary of Comics especially useful for critics, students, teachers, and researchers, and a vital reference to anyone else who wants to learn more about comics. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

An interview with Natasha Brown, winner of the London Writers Award, and author of Assembly (Little Brown, 2021), the story of a young black British woman, marked by success in education and work, who asks a fundamental question: does my country care whether or I live or die? At a mere one hundred and two pages, Assembly manages to evoke more feeling, more sensorial reality than many novels twice its length. Natasha has gone to the novel’s primary function—its vision into the inner life of a character—and she has brought it to bear on the precariousness of black life. The result is a work of literary fiction that is profoundly beautiful, with passages of poetic form and lyrical description of a world that her narrator experiences as ultimately negating. Negating of her agency, her accumulated wealth and status, her education, her citizenship, and ultimately of her bare life. Suffused with its contemporary moment, with references to the police killing of Philando Castille and the white nationalist resurgence in Britain, Assembly is fundamentally a reminder that the sun has yet to set on the imperial mindset, and that the black body and the black intellect still do not register within that logic. Natasha Recommends: Meena Kandasamy, Exquisite Cadavers Rachel Long, My Darling from the Lions Hannah Sullivan, Three Poems Roland Barthes, Mythologies bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness” Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his health and joie de vivre. From there he begins a series of adventures that include Auguste Rodin, a romance with an English aristocrat, a new lover, a session with Sigmund Freud, and an heroic death. I spoke with novelist Ardythe Ashley about her meticulously researched historical novel that breathes new life into a writer who continues to charm and fascinate readers and audiences to this day. Ardythe Ashley is the author of The Return of the Century: The Death and Further Adventures of Oscar Wilde. While doing research for the novel, she found herself in the Library of the British Museum reading the letters Oscar Wilde wrote in his dank cell in Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), later published as De Profundis. “I’m sorry, Madam,” came the firm-but-not-unkind voice of a white-gloved librarian, “but it is not permitted to weep upon the manuscripts.” In addition to being a writer, Ashley is a retired psychoanalyst. A retired psychoanalyst, Ashley is also the author of the novels The Christ of the Butterflies and In The Country of the Great King. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email [email protected]; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies