New Books in Literary Studies

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited Taiwanese Queer author, Kevin Chen, to talk about his LGBTQ novel, Ghost Town (Europa Editions, 2022) 鬼地方 and its fever worldwide. In our conversation, Kevin shared with us how he first “come out” as a gay writer in Taiwan in the 90s, and how his writings was influenced by key Taiwanese LGBTQ authors and continue to be shaped by his migratory experiences in Berlin. He also told us how he thinks translation and the transability of a literary work can be useful in terms of authors’ impacts on society. If you’re a fan of Kevin’s writing, you certainly can’t miss this episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Firsthand: How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis While Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things (U Michigan Press, 2024) is an exploration—both suspenseful and comic—of the creative process in research writing. The book takes the reader through the ins and outs of a specific research journey, from combing through libraries and archives to the intellectual challenges involved with processing information that contradicts established ideas. More fundamentally, it addresses the somewhat mysterious portion of the intellectual process: the creative and serendipitous aspects involved in arriving at a fruitful research question in the first place. Keith Gandal is Professor of English with a Joint Appointment in American Studies and Creative Writing at The City College of New York. Keith combines this scholarly detective story with a comic personal narrative about how a midlife crisis accidentally sent him on a journey to write a research monograph that many in his profession—including at times himself—were dubious about. While researching how Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner faced their forgotten crises of masculinity, Gandal discovers that his own crisis is instrumental to his creative process. Incorporating stories from Gandal’s comic romp through the hyper-competitive world of middle-aged men’s tennis, adopting pitbulls, and discussing Michel Foucault, Firsthand gives readers an inside look at how to acquire accurate knowledge—about the world, about history, and about oneself. Order Firsthand at the University of Michigan Press website using the discount code HOLIDAY24 to get 50% off for the rest of 2024. This interview was conducted by Shreya Urvashi, a doctoral researcher of sociology and education based in Toronto, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Karen Lystra is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. These laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay connected to those they loved. This book displays the personal expression of factory hands, manual laborers, peddlers, coopers, carpenters, lumbermen, miners, tanners, haulers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, domestics, sharecroppers, independent farmers, and common soldiers and their wives. Entering the “anonymous corners” of these people's lives through letters, we can see their humor, grit, hope, heartache, and endurance, and grasp what they believed and felt about themselves, their kinfolk, and their friends. As much as possible, these working-class Americans living in the nineteenth century speak to contemporary readers in their own words. Often armed with only a third or fourth grade education, they could read but had limited instruction in writing. Yet they sat down to compose a letter, often spurred by a range of experience including the Gold Rush, westward expansion, slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, and what was arguably the most important event in nineteenth-century America, the Civil War. During the war, poor, undereducated soldiers and their families wrote letters in a quantity never before seen in American history. Using letters written to parents, siblings, husbands, wives, friends, and potential mates between 1830 and 1880, Dr. Lystra identifies the shared conceptions of love and practices of courtship and marriage within a racially diverse population of free working-class people born in America. Readers can listen to their voices as they flirt, act as intermediaries in hometown courtships, express non-romantic love to their mates, tease each other, and voice their hopes for the future. Through these personal letters, poor, minimally schooled Americans show us how they felt about love and how they created meaningful attachments in their uncertain lives. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

An understanding of Dante the theologian as distinct from Dante the poet has been neglected in an appreciation of Dante's work as a whole. That is the starting-point of Dante the Theologian (Cambridge UP, 2022). In giving theology fresh centrality, the author argues that theologians themselves should find, when they turn to Dante Alighieri, a compelling resource: whether they do so as historians of fourteenth-century Christian thought, or as interpreters of the religious issues of our own times. Expertly guiding his readers through the structure and content of the Commedia, Denys Turner reveals – in pacy and muscular prose – how Dante's aim for his masterpiece is to effect what it signifies. It is this quasi-sacramental character that renders it above all a theological treatise: whose meaning is intelligible only through poetry. Turner's Dante 'knows that both poetry and theology are necessary to the essential task and that each without the other is deficient.' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sam Sax is a queer, jewish, writer and educator. They're the author of Yr Dead (McSweeney's Books, 2024), longlisted for The National Book Award and PIG named one of the best books of 2023 by New York Magazine and Electric Lit. They're also the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and Bury It winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They're the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Granta and elsewhere. Sam's received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Lit, MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Between 1911 and 1912, Prague was home to Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka, two of the twentieth-century’s most influential minds. During this brief but remarkable period, their lives intertwined in surprising ways, driven by a shared intellectual restlessness and a desire to confront life’s most profound questions. Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe (Bloomsbury, 2024) brings to life the overlapping journeys of these two men, exploring how their intellectual pursuits, one rooted in science and the other in literature, unfolded against Prague’s backdrop. Through a careful examination of Einstein’s letters, lectures, papers from the period, and Kafka’s meticulous diary entries, Ken Krimstein vividly traces Einstein’s year in the city marked by frustration and failure. Ultimately, with the help of Kafka, Einstein is led to groundbreaking insight that reshapes our understanding of the universe. This “lost year” becomes a bridge between months of struggle and the moment of breakthrough many consider “the greatest scientific discovery of all time.” Ken Krimstein is an award-winning cartoonist, author, and educator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Chicago Tribune. He teaches at DePaul University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America (University of Georgia Press, 2021) Dr. Liliana Naydan analyses representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves not only implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens but also threatened by it, while simultaneously attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality. Dr. Naydan walks us through these complex relationships, revealing how authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, these authors complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, creating accessible, literary road maps to our digital future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500 (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Leila Norako asks why medieval romances reimagining the crusades ending in a Christian victory circulated in England with such abundance after the 1291 Muslim reconquest of Acre, the last of the Latin crusader states in the Holy Land, and what these texts reveal about the cultural anxieties of late medieval England. Dr. Norako highlights the impact that the Ottoman victory and subsequent massacre of Christian prisoners at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 had on intensifying the popularity of what she calls recovery romance. These two episodes inspired a sense of urgency over the fate of the Holy Land and of Latin Christendom itself, resulting in the proliferation of romances in which crusading English kings like Richard I and anachronistic legends like King Arthur not only reconquered Jerusalem but committed genocidal violence against the Muslims. These romances, which—as Norako argues—also influenced Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, conjure fantasies of an ascendant global Christendom by rehearsing acts of conquest and cultural annihilation that were impossible to realize in the late Middle Ages. Emphasizing the tension in these texts between nostalgia and anticipation that fuels their narrative momentum, Monstrous Fantasies also explores how the cultural desires for European and Christian hegemony that recovery romances versified were revived in the wake of the so-called wars on terror in the twenty-first century in such films as Kingdom of Heaven and American Sniper. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Little is known about the boy detective in Japanese detective fiction despite his popularity. Who is he, and what mysteries does he unveil about cultural understandings of youth in Japanese society? Manga, Murder and Mystery: The Boy Detectives of Japan’s Lost Generation (Bloomsbury, 2023) answers these questions by exploring the figure of the shonen (boy) detective in commercially successful manga series such as Detective Conan, The Case Files of Young Kindaichi, Death Note and Moriarty the Patriot. The book explores how these popular works tackle the crisis of young adult culture within the socioeconomic climate of Japan's 'lost decade' and Heisei era, broadly speaking. Mimi Okabe shows how detective manga materialized in a nation undergoing a state of crisis and how the boy detective emerged as a site of national trauma to address perceived youth problems but in thematically different ways. Mimi Okabe is an assistant professor of Japanese Language, Literature and Culture at Baruch College. Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation (2023), is out now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Although fascists insist that tomorrow belongs to them, they have always been and will continue to be contested by antifascist fans willing to fight for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’ War on Terror on television, and then visit your family in the very places that the U.S. army invaded and occupied. These experiences shape the work of novelist Jamil Jan Kochai, author of 99 Nights in Logar and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, which was a finalist for The National Book Award. Jamil joins Northwestern prof. Kalyan Nadiminti and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about narrative form and the cycles of war. We begin by discussing the second person, a technique Jamil uses throughout Hajji Hotak. He describes it as the most “dangerous perspective” for a fiction writer to take because it brings readers to the edge of the immersive world fiction is supposed to create. The second person in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, from which Jamil reads, forces readers to grapple with our own complicity in the surveillance of Afghan families in the United States and to consider the paradoxical affection that develops between people on opposing sides of war. From there, Jamil, Kalyan, and Aarthi discuss the relationship between video games as mass media and the novel as literary form. Jamil is a huge fan of Final Fantasy 7 (who isn’t?) and talks about how games like Call of Duty (a game he played more ambivalently) perform a recruitment function for the U.S. army. He rewrites that vision of war in more complex terms in his own story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain." Kalyan reflects on how the category of the post-9/11 writer intersects with the War on Terror, and the three of us consider the symbolic function of 9/11 in contemporary fiction written from inside and outside the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Darwin called the Galápagos archipelago “a little world within itself,” unaffected by humans and set on its own evolutionary path – strange, diverse, and unique. Islands are repositories of unique cultures and ways of living, seed banks built up in relative isolation. Island is an archipelago of ideas, drawing from research and first-hand experience living, working, and travelling to islands as far afield as Madeira and Cape Verde, Orkney and Svalbard, the Aran Islands and the Gulf Islands, Hong Kong and Manhattan. Islands have long been viewed as both paradise and prison – we project onto them our deepest desires for freedom and escape, but also our greatest fears of forced isolation. This book asks: what can islands teach us about living sustainably, being alone or coexisting with others, coping with uncertainty, and making do? Island (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Julian Hanna, part of the Object Lessons series, explores these and other questions and ideas, but is constructed above all from the stories and experiences gathered during a lifetime of island hopping. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

In Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance (Knopf, 2024) by Dr. Ramie Targoff, discover the lives and work of four ambitious Renaissance women who, against all odds, made themselves heard-and read-in the time of Shakespeare In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Dr. Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-16th century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry, which offered a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman, about the plight of the Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist, who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England's most infamous inheritance battles. These women had husbands and children to care for and little support for their art, yet against all odds they defined themselves as writers, finding rooms of their own where doors had been shut for centuries. Dr. Targoff flings them open to uncover the treasures left by these extraordinary women; in the process, she helps us see the Renaissance in a fresh light, creating a richer understanding of history and offering a much-needed female perspective on life in Shakespeare's day. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

In both modern fiction and the biblical texts of 1 Samuel 13-2 Samuel 1, the character of Jonathan serves as a key literary and theological figure. Throughout In Search of Jonathan: Jonathan Between the Bible and Modern Fiction (Oxford UP, 2023), Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer interprets Jonathan's portrayal in traditional biblical literature and modern fiction. Each chapter provides first an analysis of Jonathan's characterization in 1-2 Samuel, followed by an examination of the depictions of Jonathan in modern fiction. Together, biblical and modern literature demonstrate how fictional retellings deepen and challenge the ways that scholars interpret Jonathan's character. Throughout the volume, Tiemeyer offers an interpretation of Jonathan as a plausible and psychologically consistent character while grappling with questions posed by his actions in the text. Tiemeyer asks, what kind of man is Jonathan who shows initiative and daring leadership ability, but who is also willing to lay down his crown before the usurper David's feet in humble submission? What kind of son is Jonathan who rebels against his father and takes David's part in the conflict between him and Saul, yet remains loyal to Saul until the bitter end on Mount Gilboa? To answer these questions, Tiemeyer considers depictions of Jonathan in modern fiction. Modern approaches, as Tiemeyer discusses, illuminate dormant yet integral aspects of the biblical texts. These modern retellings highlight, transform, and subvert the biblical portrayal of Jonathan. Posing these questions to the reader and other biblical scholars, Tiemeyer challenges the ways that scholars perceive Jonathan and his portrayals across biblical and modern literature. 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 Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian through Her Letters (Harvard University Press, October 2024), Deborah Parker chronicles the making and empowerment of a female connoisseur, curator, and library director in a world where such positions were held by men. Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian (1908–1913) and the first Director of the Morgan Library (1924–1948). She was also the daughter of two mixed-race parents and passed for white. In the nearly six hundred letters that Greene sent to art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), Parker identifies Greene’s energetic pursuit of exceptional opportunities, illuminating the artistry and imaginative features of Greene’s writing—her self-invention, her vibrant responses to books and art, and her pathbreaking work as a librarian. As Greene transformed a private library into a magnificent public institution, she also transformed herself: hers was a life both lived and writ large. Deborah Parker is Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia, and her books include Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance, Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet, and Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing. Her writings also appear in the exhibition catalog for the Morgan Library & Museum’s centenary exhibition, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. 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 Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanisation of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harboured profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyse these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions. Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analysing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals—Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye Spivak—Dr. Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, the German-Yiddish encounter and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art—highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizing and writing Hindi literary history. He responds to recent developments in quantitative and qualitative approaches to book history - including tools developed within the digital humanities - by applying new as well as traditional techniques of paleography, codicology, and bibliography to handwritten copies of romances, epics, songbooks, treatises, and scriptures. To make the book more accessible and enjoyable for cross-disciplinary readers, Williams bookends (so to speak) each chapter with the story of a specific artifact - an ascetic's notebook, a Mughal general's storybook, a pandit's textbook, or a guru's copy of a sacred scripture - in order to pose and then apply the questions about writing, textuality, and performance that the chapter addresses. By combining distant and close reading that is mindful of the materiality of these manuscripts, Tyler reveals literary, intellectual, and religious practices that we would otherwise be unable to see. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Vaughn Scribner joins Jana Byars on the occasion of the paperback edition of Merpeople: A Human History (Reaktion, 2024) People have been fascinated by merpeople and merfolk since ancient times. From the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and the film Splash, myths, stories, and legends of half-human, half-fish creatures abound. In modern times “mermaiding” has gained popularity among cosplayers throughout the world. In Merpeople: A Human History, Vaughn Scribner traces the long history of mermaids and mermen, taking in a wide variety of sources and using 117 striking images. From film to philosophy, church halls to coffee houses, ancient myth to modern science, Scribner shows that mermaids and tritons are—and always have been—everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Redreaming the Renaissance: Essays on History and Literature in Honor Guido Ruggiero (University of Delaware Press, 2024) seeks to remedy the dearth of conversations between scholars of history and literary studies by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines, using the textual world of the Italian Renaissance as proving ground. In this volume, these disciplines blur, as they did for early moderns, who did not always distinguish between the historical and literary significance of the texts they read and produced. Literature here is broadly conceived to include not only belles lettres, but also other forms of artful writing that flourished in the period, including philosophical writings on dreams and prophecy; life-writing; religious debates; menu descriptions and other food writing; diaries, news reports, ballads, and protest songs; and scientific discussions. The twelve essays in this collection examine the role that the volume’s dedicatee has played in bringing the disciplines of history and literary studies into provocative conversation, as well as the methodology needed to sustain and enrich this conversation. 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 Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Manuscript of Peru's lower Andean regions. The rebellious tone of both epics illuminates a heretofore overlooked aspect in Latin American Indigenous colonial writing: the sense of political injustice and spiritual sedition directed equally at European-imposed religious practice and at aspects of Indigenous belief. The link between spirituality and political upheaval in Native colonial writing has not been sufficiently explored until this work. Sharonah Esther Fredrick applies a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes history, literature, archaeology, and anthropology in equal measure to situate the Mayan and Andean narratives within the paradigms of their developing civilizations. An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods decolonizes readers' perspective by setting Mayan and Andean authorship center stage and illustrates the schisms and shifts in Native civilizations and literatures of Latin America in a way that other literary studies, which relegate Native literature as a prelude to Spanish-language literature, have not yet done. By demonstrating the power of Native American philosophy within the context of the conquest of Latin America, Fredrick illuminates the profound spiritual dissension and radically conflicting ideologies of the Mesoamerican and Andean worlds before and after the Spanish Conquest. Books mentioned: Breaking the Maya Code by Michael Coe The Huarochiri Manuscript translated by Frank Salomon Popol Vuh translated by Dennis Tedlock Sharonah Esther Fredrick teaches in the College of Charleston's Department of Hispanic Studies. She is the Colonial Americas editor for Routledge Resources Online--The Renaissance World. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books 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 this episode of High Theory, Esther Gabara talks with us about Non-Literary Fiction, that is, works of fiction that belong to the world of contemporary art, rather than the world of contemporary literature. She focuses on literary and narrative strategies used by Latin American and Indigenous American artists to make “non-objective” forms of visual art under the pressures of neoliberalism. To learn more, check out her book, Non-Literary Fiction: Art of the Americas under Neoliberalism (Chicago University Press, 2022). In our conversation, Esther gave us a theoretical bibliography of thinkers from Latin America who have shaped her work on non-literary fiction. Prominent among these figures are Ferreira Gullar in Brazil and Juan Acha in Mexico, who were the founding thinkers of the term “Non-Objectualism”-- a term that informs the fiction making practices Esther studies. We found this cool piece on Juan Acha that might be worth reading. She also named the philosopher Rodolfo Kusch and his work with indigenous storytellers. Kusch’s book on Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América was translated into English and published by Duke in 2010. And finally she named the indigenous artist and activist Manuel Quintín Lame, who collaborated with the Columbia artist Antonio Caro. Each of these figures features in her book as a theorist in their own right, in a context where art is a critical practice. Esther Gabara is a professor of Romance Studies at Duke University, where she works with modern and contemporary art, literature, and critical theory from the Americas. Her teaching in the departments of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University covers visual studies, modernism, photography, Pop Art and popular culture, feminism, public art, and coloniality in contemporary art. Her prior publications include the bilingual exhibition catalogue, Pop América, 1965-1975 (Nasher Museum of Art/Duke University Press, 2018), for an exhibition she curated at the Nasher Museum of Art, and Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

I spoke with Hannah Gabel, Literary Director of the Texas Book Festival. The Festival first began in 1995, and has since donated over $3.5 million to Texas public libraries and hundreds of thousands of books to students across the state. This year, more than 250 authors will speak and 40,000 people are expected to attend. The festival takes place in downtown Austin, Texas on November 16th and 17th this year and is free and open to all who wish to attend. I’m excited today to speak with Hannah about what people can expect from this incredible event. Books mentioned in this intervew: Bone of the Bone by Sarah Smarsh Trippy by Ernesto Londoño We Are Home by Ray Suarez Our Hidden Conversations by Michele Norris The God of the Woods by Liz Moore Real Americans by Rachel Khong Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey Hannah Gabel is the Literary Director of Texas Book Festival. She also runs the book blog, Bookmarkparty. Caleb Zakarin is Editor of the New Books 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

The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater (Open Book, 2024) presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recreated in India. Moreover, it is argued that the techniques for adapting epic into theater could have been Greco-Roman influences in India, and that some of the elements adapted within the literary motifs (specifically the motifs of the embassy, the ambush, and the ogre) could have been Greco-Roman borrowings by Sanskrit authors. This book draws on a wide variety of sources, including Iliad, Phoenix, Rhesus and Cyclops (Greco-Roman) as well as Mahābhārata, The Embassy, The Five Nights and The Middle One (Sanskrit). The result is a well-supported argument which presents us with the possibility of cultural exchange between the Greco-Roman world and India – a possibility which, though hypothetical, is worth acknowledging. This book is available open access 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

On Revival: Hebrew Literature Between Life and Death (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is a critique of one of the most important tenets of Zionist thinking: "Hebrew revival," or the idea that Hebrew--a largely unspoken language before the twentieth century--was revitalized as part of a broader national "revival" which ultimately led to the establishment of the Israeli nation-state. This story of language revival has been commemorated in Israeli popular memory and in Jewish historiography as a triumphant transformation narrative that marks the success of the Zionist revolution. But a closer look at the work of early twentieth-century Hebrew writers reveals different sentiments. Roni Henig explores the loaded, figurative discourse of revival in the work of Hebrew authors and thinkers working roughly between 1890 and 1920. For these authors, the language once known as "the holy tongue" became a vernacular in the making. Rather than embracing "revival" as a neutral, descriptive term, Henig takes a critical approach, employing close readings of canonical texts to analyze the primary tropes used to articulate this aesthetic and political project of "reviving" Hebrew. She shows that for many writers, the national mission of language revival was entwined with a sense of mourning and loss. These writers perceived--and simultaneously produced--the language as neither dead nor fully alive. Henig argues that it is this figure of the living-dead that lies at the heart of the revival discourse and which is constitutive of Jewish nationalism. On Revival contributes to current debates in comparative literary studies by addressing the limitations of the national language paradigm and thinking beyond concepts of origin, nativity, and possession in language. Informed by critical literary theory, including feminist and postcolonial critiques, the book challenges Zionism's monolingual lens and the auto-Orientalism involved in the project of revival, questioning charged ideological concepts such as "native speaker" and "mother tongue." 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 happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War. Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann’s physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos. Thomas Bernhard, later 20th century Austrian experimental novelist Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhass” Romantic-era German writer Italo Calvino,If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler OULIPO Home of French literary experimentalists like Perec and Raymond Queneau Georges Perec’s most famous experiment is Life: A User’s Manual (although John is devoted to “W: or the Memory of Childhood”) Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! (ignore John calling the author Dr Scarry, which was a scary mistake.,..) Marcel Proust: was he a worldbuilder and fantasist, as Nabokov says or, as Doris Lessing claims, principally an anatomist of French social structures, a second Zola? Franz Kafka is unafraid of turning his character into a bug in a story’s first sentence. Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: how different are they? Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene) The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat 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 fourteenth-century Italy, literacy became accessible to a significantly larger portion of the lay population (allegedly between 60 and 80 percent in Florence) and provided a crucial means for the vernacularization and secularization of learning, and for the democratization of citizenship. In Dante's Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2024), Filippo Gianferrari demonstrate that Dante Alighieri's education and oeuvre sit squarely at the heart of this historical and cultural transition and provide an ideal case study for investigating the impact of Latin education on the consolidation of autonomous vernacular literature in the Middle Ages, a fascinating and still largely unexamined phenomenon. On the basis of manuscript and archival evidence, Gianferrari reconstructs the contents, practice, and readings of Latin instruction in the urban schools of fourteenth-century Florence. It also shows Dante's continuous engagement with this culture of teaching in his poetics, thus revealing his contribution to the expansion of vernacular literacy and education. The book argues that to achieve his unprecedented position of authority as a vernacular intellectual, Dante conceived his poetic works as an alternative educational program for laypeople, who could read and write in the vernacular but had little or no proficiency in Latin. By reconstructing the culture of literacy shared by Dante and his lay readers, Dante's Education shifts critical attention from his legacy as Italy's national poet, and a "great books" author in the Western canon, to his experience as a marginal intellectual engaged in advancing a marginal culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A note about content: This episode involves discussion of suicide, specifically in the contexts of slavery, colonization and empire. Please use your discretion and take care if you decide to listen. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, you are not alone. You can reach out to the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. Thank you for taking care of yourself. This episode is a conversation with Dr. Doyle Calhoun, University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He is key academic staff in the Film and Screen Studies Program and a Fellow of Peterhouse. A scholar of African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas, particularly in Senegal, Dr. Calhoun’s first book, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire was published in October 2024 by Duke University Press. “There is no good way to talk about suicide,” Calhoun says in the opening line of his book. He repeats it early on in our conversation. Studying a topic that is personally and emotionally fraught – no less in history than in the present – and is often left unaddressed in traditional archives and explored by scholars is no easy feat. And yet Calhoun does this with care and caution and respect. The Suicide Archive is a study of suicidal resistance to slavery, colonialism, and empire in the French Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds via an array of aesthetic works (novels, plays, poems, films, photography) that consider the absence of archives as an opportunity to produce new and alternative forms of historical knowledge. In doing so, Doyle provides a nuanced and compelling analysis of the aesthetic treatment of historic suicides that take us from Guadeloupe to Senegal, from Paris to Algeria and Morocco. A methodologically innovative work, the book models how we might explore the historical potential “of reading aesthetic forms as archives,” as he puts it while recognizing the importance of suicide as a form of resistance to the violence and oppression of sub-alternity. 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 Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Weaver examines the mediaeval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorised as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy. Instead, Weaver promotes interpolation as the signature form of mediaeval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory, arguing that some of the most novel concepts of time in mediaeval historiography can be found in these altered narratives of the past. For Weaver, historiographical interpolation constitutes the traces of active experimentation with how best to write history, particularly the history of Britain. Historians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain recognized the difficulty of enfolding complex events into a linear chronology and embraced innovative textual methods of creating history. Focusing on the Brut tradition but also analysing the long history of interpolated historiography, including the Bayeux Embroidery, Experimental Histories offers a new interpretation of generic remixing in mediaeval writing about the past. Drawing on both manuscript studies and the new formalism, it shows that the practice of inserting materials from romance and hagiography allowed creative revisers to explore how lived events relate to passing time. By embracing interpolation, Weaver provides lively insights into the ways that time becomes history and human actors experience time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

The “uncut” penis is viewed by some as attractive or erotic, and by others as ugly or undesirable. Secular parents of male infants worry about whether or not the foreskin should be removed so their little boy can grow up to “look like dad” or to avoid imagined bullying in the locker room. Medical experts and public health organisations argue back and forth about whether circumcision is medically necessary, while “intactivists” advocate that removing an infant’s foreskin without their consent is mutilation. Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin (University of Regina Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Allen takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the foreskin and its contentious position in contemporary Anglo-American culture. From language to art, from religion to medicine and public health, Uncut is a provocative book that asks us to ask ourselves what we know and don’t know about this seemingly small piece of skin. Drawing on all these threads, Dr.. Allan leads us through the history and cultural construction of the foreskin—from Michelangelo’s David to parenting manuals, from nineteenth-century panic over masturbation to foreskin restoration—to ultimately ask: what is the future of the foreskin? This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in the second of our series on Thinking Machines we consider Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (1920). Čapek’s play invented the word “robot” and pioneered the genre of the AI uprising. The play - a clear influence on works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica – is a deep rumination on the boundary between the natural and artificial, the mechanical and the ineffable, and the sacred and the profane. We react to this seminal work in popular thinking about artificial intelligence, written more than a century ago yet retaining deep resonance today. Music by Aiva. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

High Theory returns with a series of haunting concepts, places, and figures from our former guests. We asked folks to call in with something spookworthy (neologism!) from their fields – real or imagined specters, scary ideas, anything that could haunt, disorient, unsettle, horrify. And we got a full seance worth of ghosts. Listen if you dare! This episode features (in order of appearance) Abhishek Avtans on the Churail. He kindly gave us a transcript (we hope to have more transcripts soon!). You can hear more from Abhishek in his episode on Apabhraṃśa. Angelina Eimannsberger on the Reader. You can hear more from Angelina in her episode on JVN. Travis Chi Wing Lau on Mad Studies. You can hear more from Travis in his episode on Experimental Life. Mackenzie Cooley on the Scientific Revolution. You can hear more from Mackenzie in her episode on the Animal. Farah Bakaari on the Nation State. You can hear more from Farah in her episode on the Trace. Emma Heany on Communism and Empire. You can hear more from Emma in her episode on Sexual Difference. Sheila Liming on Nowhere and Forever. Sheila reads an excerpt from her article in progress on the contemporary gothic, under the working title, "Out of Time: Anti-Immediacy in Mark Jenkin's Enys Men.” You can hear more from Sheila in her episode on the Party. Sritama Chatterjee on Nature and Wilderness. You can hear more from Sritama in her episode on Off-Shore Aesthetics. John Linstrom on Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Haunted Houses. You can hear more from John in his episodes on Nature Study and Ecosphere. The image for this episode features creepy red creatures on a dark green field. It was made by Saronik Bosu. Boo! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Georgia Henley considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages. Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature (Routledge, 2024) is a provocative meditation on emotion, mood, history, and futurism in the critique of queer texts created for younger audiences. Given critical demands to distance queer youth culture from narratives of violence, sadness, and hurt that have haunted the queer imagination, this volume considers how post-2000s YA literature and media negotiate their hopeful purview with a broader—and ongoing—history of queer oppression and violence. It not only considers the tactics that authors use in bridging a supposedly “bad” queer past with a “better” queer present, but also offers strategies on how readers can approach YA reparatively given the field’s attachments to normative, capitalist, and neoliberal frameworks. Central to Matos’ argument are the use of historical hurt to spark healing and transformation, the implementation of disruptive imagery and narrative structures to challenge normative understandings of time and feeling, and the impact of intersectional thinking in reparative readings of queer youth texts. The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature shows how YA cultural productions are akin to the broader queer imagination in their ability to move and affect audiences, and how these texts encapsulate a significant and enduring change in terms of how queerness is—or can be—read, structured, represented, and felt. The Open Access version of this book, available here, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Alistaire Tallent joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France (University of Delaware Press, 2024). Out of the libertine literary tradition of eighteenth-century France emerged over a dozen memoir novels of female libertines who eagerly take up sex work as a means of escape from the patriarchal control of fathers and husbands to pursue pleasure, wealth, and personal independence outside the private, domestic sphere. In these anonymously published novels, the heroines proudly declare themselves prostitutes, or putains, and use the desire they arouse, the professional skills they develop, and the network of female friends they create to exploit, humiliate, and financially ruin wealthy and powerful men. In pursuing their desires, the putains challenge contemporary notions of womanhood and expose the injustices of ancien-régime France. Until the French Revolution spelled the end of the genre, these novels proposed not only an appealing libertine utopia in which libertine women enjoy the same benefits as their male counterparts but also entirely new ways of looking at systems of power, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. In Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It (Duke UP, 2024), Lennard J. Davis labels this genre “poornography”: distorted narratives of poverty written by and for the middle and upper classes. Davis shows how poornography creates harmful and dangerous stereotypes that build barriers to social justice and change. To remedy this, Davis argues, poor people should write realistic depictions of themselves, but because of representational inequality they cannot. Given the obstacles to the poor accessing the means of publication, Davis suggests that the work should, at least for now, be done by “transclass” writers who were once poor and who can accurately represent poverty without relying on stereotypes and clichés. Only then can the lived experience of poverty be more fully realized. 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 often assumed that classical Sanskrit poetry and drama lack a concern with the tragic. However, as Bihani Sarkar makes clear in Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India (I. B. Tauris, 2021), this is far from the case. In the first study of tragedy in classical Sanskrit literature, Sarkar draws on a wide range of Sanskrit dramas, poems and treatises - much of them translated for the first time into English - to provide a complete history of the tragic in Indian literature from the second to the fourth centuries. Looking at Kalidasa, the most celebrated writer of Sanskrit poetry and drama (kavya), this book argues that constructions of absence and grief are central to Kalidasa's compositions and that these 'tragic middles' are much more sophisticated than previously understood. For Kalidasa, tragic middles are modes of thinking, in which he confronts theological and philosophical issues. Through a close literary analysis of the tragic middle in five of his works, the Abhijñanasakuntala, the Raghuva?sa, the Kumarasambhava, the Vikramorvasiya and the Meghaduta, Sarkar demonstrates the importance of tragedy for classical Indian poetry and drama in the early centuries of the common era. These depictions from the Indian literary sphere, by their particular function and interest in the phenomenology of grief, challenge and reshape in a wholly new way our received understanding of tragedy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific. In Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Columbia UP, 2024), Sarah Dimick links these accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via literature. She documents how the unseasonable reverberates through environmentally privileged and environmentally precarious communities. In chapters ranging from Henry David Thoreau’s journals to Alexis Wright’s depiction of Australia’s catastrophic bushfires, from classical Tamil poetry to repeat photography, Dimick illustrates how seasonal rhythms determine what flourishes and what perishes. She contends that climate injustice is an increasingly temporal issue, unfolding not only along the axes of who and where but also in relation to when. Amid misaligned and broken rhythms, attending to the shared but disparate experience of the unseasonable can realign or sharpen solidarities within the climate crisis. Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Kristopher grew up in Lincroft, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels, OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES (Ecco/2024) WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY (Viking/2016) and THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, (Viking/2013). His book of essays on the creative process is REVISIONARIES: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE LOST, UNFINISHED, AND JUST PLAIN BAD WORK OF GREAT WRITERS. And Kristopher is the director of the creative program and SUNY New Paltz. Recommended Books: E. Lily Yu Break Blow Burn and Make Kate Hamilton, Mad Wife 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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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

Dr. Dennis Wuerthner’s Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo (U Hawaii Press, 2024) is the first complete English translation of one of the oldest extant Korean source materials. The scholar, Yi Illo (1152–1220), filled this collection with poetry by himself and diverse writers, ranging from Chinese master poets and Koryŏ-era kings, to long-forgotten lower-level officials and rural scholars. The verse compositions are embedded in short narratives by Yi that provide context for the poems, a combination called sihwa. The book contains a comprehensive introduction that explores the lives of Yi Illo and his contemporaries, and the political landscape at the time this collection came into being. The translation itself is richly annotated to provide context to the allusions and to explore possible meanings. The publication is an excellent resource for readers interested in the political and social environment of the Koryŏ Dynasty (918–1392) and for anyone with a love for poetry and prose. Dr. Dennis Wuerthner is assistant professor of East Asian literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures, at Boston University. He holds a PhD from Ruhr University in Bochum and his main field of research is Korean literature, history and culture in a broader East Asian context. Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University and lives in Seoul, South Korea. You can follow her activities at https://twitter.com/AJuseyo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation (U Minnesota Press, 2024) offers new and insightful readings of African American women's writings in the 1930s-1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women's satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar examines the writings of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks to show how these women explored self-fulfillment over normative and sanctioned models of national belonging. Paying close attention to literary moments of disruption, miscommunication, or confusion rather than ease, assimilation, or mutual understanding around race and gender, Dunbar tracks these writers' dissatisfaction with American race relations. She shows how Petry, West, Childress, and Brooks redeploy the idea of monstrous work to offer potential modalities for registering Black women's capacity to locate satisfaction within the domestic and interpersonal. While racial integration may satisfy the national idea of equality and inclusion, it has not met the long-term needs of Black people's quest for equity. Dunbar responds, demonstrating how these mid-century women offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women's completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion. 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 unforgettable horse gallops through the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s best-selling novel Martyr! (2024), but it is a figurative hastening toward failure and the limitations of language that Akbar discusses with critic Pardis Dabashi. In their conversation, Kaveh considers writing both as an escape from the confines of the self and as a vehicle for expressing its contradictions. Together they explore which forms might best capture the ambivalence and polyphony of the human mind, the contours of Iranian American identity, and the spiritual beauty of everyday existence. Whether discussing neurolinguistics or the affordances of poetry, Kaveh contemplates the limits of language: how can we write what we think, when we struggle to know what—or how—we think? This conversation goes deep into the psyche in order to reach far beyond it. Even Kaveh’s deeply personal response to the signature question demonstrates that the places farthest away from us may also be found within. Mentioned in this episode By Kaveh Akbar: Martyr! The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (editor) Calling a Wolf a Wolf Also mentioned: My Uncle Napoleon To the Lighthouse Ars Poetica Ferdowsi The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts The Tempest 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 The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (U Chicago Press, 2024) Seth Kimmel explores the material history of libraries to challenge debates about the practice and politics of information management in early modern Europe. Ancient bibliographers and medieval scholastics, Kimmel reminds us, imagined the library as a microcosm of the world, but for early modern scholars, the world was likewise a projection of the library. This notion, at first glance, may seem counterintuitive, especially as reports from late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers in the New World slowly refined-but also destabilized-the Old World's cosmographic and historical consensus. Yet the mapping and ethnographic projects commissioned by early modern rulers, like Spain's Charles V and Philip I, anxious to comprehend and inventory their far-flung territorial possessions in the Americas, nevertheless relied heavily on methods of information management honed in the library. Kimmel focuses on the period that marked the birth of both print and transatlantic exploration. Through close readings of a wide array of materials-library catalogues, marginal glosses, book indexes, biblical commentaries, dictionaries and thesauruses, natural histories, and maps-Kimmel shows how the book-lover's dream of total knowledge in an era of "too much information" helped to shape the early modern period's expanded sense of the world itself. The book should find its audience among scholars of early modern European history, specialists in the early modern cultures of the Mediterranean and Iberia, and a range of students interested in the history of the book and of maps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel (U Nebraska Press, 2024) offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it’s typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. Bergholtz considers a selection of massive and meandering novels that crisscross from London and Lusaka to Kingston, Kabul, and Kashmir and that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection on the effects of globalization. Each chapter takes up a maximalist novel that simultaneously maps and formally mimics a cornerstone of globalization, such as the postcolonial culture industry (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children), the rebirth of fundamentalism (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth), the transnational commodification of violence (Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings), the obstruction of knowledge by narrative (Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know), and globalization’s gendered, asymmetrical growth (Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift). By reframing analysis of maximalism around globalization, Swallowing a World not only reimagines one of the most perplexing genres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also sheds light on some of the most perplexing political problems of our precarious present. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French (Liverpool UP, 2023) is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted. Maureen G. Shanahan, J.D., PhD is Professor of Art History, School of Art, Design & Art History, James Madison University Machine Modernisms, Masculinity, and the Trauma of War: The Art of Fernand Léger (Penn State University Press, May 2024). Colonial Wounds / Postcolonial Repair, exhibition catalog (University of Virginia 2019) Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon (University Press of Florida 2016) LINKED IN. 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 going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching in a present-day schoolroom? Rather than regarding such anachronisms as errors, Samurai with Telephones: Anachronism in Japanese Literature (U Michigan Press, 2024) develops a theory of how texts can use different types of anachronisms to challenge or rewrite history, play with history, or open history up to new possibilities. By applying this theoretical framework of anachronism to several Japanese literary and cultural works, author Christopher Smith demonstrates how different texts can use anachronism to open up history for a wide variety of different textual projects. From the modern period, this volume examines literature by Mori Ōgai and Ōe Kenzaburō, manga by Tezuka Osamu, art by Murakami Takashi, and a variety of other pop cultural works. Turning to the Early Modern period (Edo period, 1600–1868), which produced a literature rich with playful anachronism, he also examines several Kabuki and Bunraku plays, kibyōshi comic books, and gōkan illustrated novels. In analyzing these works, he draws a distinction between anachronisms that attempt to hide their work on history and convincingly rewrite it and those conspicuous anachronisms that highlight and disrupt the construction of historical narratives. 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 the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker's midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse. The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024) brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words. White's biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker--Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more. She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now classic stories and essays. She propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer's work but also their life. Based on years of scrupulous research, acclaimed author Amy Reading creates a rare and deeply intimate portrait of a prolific editor--through both her incredible tenure at The New Yorker, and her famous marriage to E.B. White--and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community. Amy Reading is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library. She is the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, A Cunning Revenge, and A Small History of the Big Con. She lives in upstate New York, where she has served on the executive board of Buffalo Street Books, an indie cooperative bookstore, since 2018. Recommended Books: Catherine Lacey, Biography of X Clara Bingham, The Movement Maggie Dougherty, The Equivalents 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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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

Beth Blum, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the “neo-stoical” self-help gurus of today, who preach male and female versions of “stop apologizing!” You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll either help yourself or learn how to stop caring. Mentioned Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) Rachel Hollis, Girl, Stop Apologizing (2019) Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k (2016) Richard Carlson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…. (1997) Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (2012) New Thought (philosophy? religious movement?) Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859) Orison Swett Marden, How to Succeed (1896) David Riesman et al. The Lonely Crowd (1950) Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1945) Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All (1982) Micki McGee, Self-Help Inc. (2007; concept of”self-belabourment”) Tiffany Dufu, Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019) Sarah Knight, The Life-Changing Magic Art of Not Giving a Fuck (2015) Recallable books Epictetus, Handbook (125 C.E.) Sheil Heti, How Should a Person Be (2012) Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Joseph Conrad Nostromo (1904) Read Here: 38 Beth Blum on Self-Help from Carnegie to Today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A wordsmith, an extempore poet and a satirist, Kāḷamēkam (also known as Kāḷamēka Pulavar; fifteenth century) is widely known for his taṉippāṭals or 'self-contained verses', on a panoply of topics. These splendid but notoriously provocative verses were composed during a transitional phase of Tamil literature, by now in deep conversation with Sanskrit poetics and poetic language, thereby yielding an incredibly rich and innovative poetry. Kāḷamēkam sings of courtesans, fellow humans, of gods, of animals, praises them, derides them, and insults them, using sarcasm, dry wit, and criticism, combined with śleṣas and yamakas, samasyās and nindāstutis. The Monsoon Cloud: Poet Kāḷamēkam and His Irreverent Poetry (Primus, 2024) seeks to introduce this brilliant poet and his timeless and influential poetry, while analysing his humour, worldview, personal values, and devotion. 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 podcast describes a short history of a man who did something we’ve lost in America. That man was James Baldwin who insisted on telling the truth. He confronted the harsh realities of racism, believing that exposing its ugliness was necessary for progress. He rejected simplistic solutions, arguing that racism was deeply rooted in American consciousness and imagination, beyond just political and economic inequalities. Instead, Baldwin called for a fundamental transformation of American society and identity. He critiqued white America, urging white Americans to confront their own behavior and complicity in racist systems. Controversially, Baldwin advocated for Black Americans to approach white countrymen with love, while still insisting on unconditional freedom, seeing this as necessary for true transformation. He ultimately wanted to build a nation that moved beyond racial categorization, focusing instead on individual humanity. Baldwin viewed racism as stemming from a deeper spiritual problem in America, where individuals and the nation lacked a true sense of identity. While he did not offer simple solutions to racism, Baldwin's penetrating analysis and powerful writing exposed the complexities of racism in our country, challenged both white and Black Americans to confront difficult truths, and provided a framework for understanding racism beyond just political reforms. His work continues to influence discussions on race in America today, aiming not to ameliorate racism in a superficial sense, but to push for a profound reckoning with and transformation of American society and identity in relation to race. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is a powerful novel that explores the complexities of race, sexuality, and identity in America through the life of its protagonist, Leo Proud/hammer. As the story begins, Leo, a successful African-American actor, suffers from a heart attack. As he recovers he reflects on his life and relationships. It is also of interest to note how James Baldwin’s novel relates to Dr. Matin Luther King Jr.’s non-fiction book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Both books are discussed in terms of the major contributions they made to racism in America as well as how they illustrate psychoanalytic mechanism of defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

P. Djèlí Clark is the author of acclaimed and award-winning speculative fiction, including the much-loved Dead Djinn universe books, Ring Shout, and his most recent, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. We speak with him about why he writes, how he sees speculative fiction as a genre, whether we can expect to see more Dead Djinn books, the origins of his acclaimed novella Ring Shout, his new book The Dead Cat Tail Assassins (Tordotcom, 2024), and much more. For our conversation about the author’s academic work in history, see our previous episode: “Dexter Gabriel: Slavery and Film, Creativity and Academia, and Is Slavery a Good Metaphor for AI?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies