The Cambridge Introduction to Queer and Trans Studies
The book provides a detailed analysis of important work in queer and trans studies over the past thirty years. Stretching from early figures (such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Cathy Cohen, Jos矇 Mu簽oz, and Sandy Stone) to the most recent scholarship, it offers a rich account of these fields' major ideas and contributions while indicating how they have evolved. Centering race and empire, the book offers extended discussion of work in Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American studies as well as engaging the Global South. The Introduction further addresses historical considerations of sexuality and gender identity, and queer and trans temporalities, while also providing a robust account of social and political movements that preceded the emergence of queer and trans studies as scholarly fields. Accessible for those unfamiliar with these areas of study, it is also a great resource for those already working in them.
Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear
For the 100th anniversary of the publication of "Winnie-the-Pooh," Gyles Brandreth chronicles the writing of this beloved classic and the life of its creator, A. A. Milne. Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear tells the remarkable story of A A Milne, a playwright, a bestselling crime writer, poet, polemicist, humorist, and the man who created Winnie-the-Pooh. Gyles Brandreth explores "Winnie-the-Pooh," a bear beloved by millions: his genesis, his life across a hundred years, his special philosophy, and the reasons for his worldwide popularity. Brandreth's book is also the intimate biography of three generations of the fascinating and troubled Milne family, which knew fame and fortune, despising both for a time, but a family that ultimately found a profound reason to be grateful for the riches Pooh brought them. With an extraordinary cast list that includes Elizabeth II and Walt Disney, Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear moves from idyllic childhood games in the English countryside to New York in the 1930s and the love affairs, litigation, and heartrending family rifts that touched the life of one of Britain's most brilliant writers and his most famous creation.
The Uncollected Louis Zukofsky
A goldmine of treasures grant access into this twentieth century modernist poet's extraordinary work. Includes unpublished essays, drama, and poetry that enhances Zukofsky's stature within the revolutionary modernist movement. The American poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978) was a master craftsman in a wide range of forms both traditional and invented. He was a crucial bridge between the "high" modernism of Eliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens, Williams, and Moore and various postwar innovative schools. The Uncollected Louis Zukofsky gathers a variety of his works, some long out of print, some never before published, in diverse genres. The centerpieces of this collection are two substantial works--the play Arise, Arise and the pamphlet-length version of First Half of "A"-9--but these texts are complemented by a rich selection of Zukofsky's uncollected poems, translations, and prose works as well as some fascinating musical arrangements of passages from "A." Contextualized by notes and a critical introduction by the editors, The Uncollected Louis Zukofsky is a must-read for anyone interested in twentieth-century poetry and poetics.
Letters for the Ages the Great Musicians
A collection of letters written through the ages from musicians of all genres, from Mozart to Elton John. For tens of thousands of years, across various civilisations, our species has been creating music. But what is behind the human fascination with music? This new volume in the Letters for the Ages series explores that question through the personal correspondence of history's most brilliant musical talent, ranging from Hildegaard of Bingen to Amy Winehouse. Spanning from the 12th to the 21st centuries, the letters assembled in this collection combine to delve into musicians' personal relationship with music and the creative process behind their greatest works of art. Witness your musical idols, warm-hearted and compassionate, arrogant and angry, insecure and egocentric, defeated and morose. The letters give a rare insight into the innermost thoughts of these great musicians who have created some of the most recognisable and beautiful music ever heard. But despite the mass of talent within these pages, these letters also provide the realisation that even the most extraordinary music has been created by normal people with everyday worries and preoccupations.
The Tower and the Ruin
No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his Middle-earth--a world that has felt so real to so many readers that it is almost impossible to imagine that any single person could have simply created it, seemingly out of thin air. In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael D. C. Drout takes us deep into Tolkien's genius, allowing us to glimpse the making of not only The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion but also lesser-known books such as The Fall of Gondolin as well as Tolkien's poetry and innovative scholarship.Drout, who has spent decades reading, studying, and teaching Tolkien, allows us to understand the author's methods and to embrace his works as never before. With great erudition and sparkling prose, Drout shows us how Tolkien invented myths, legends, cultures, languages, histories, and an intricate, multivocal narrative. We come to understand how Tolkien drew upon and modified material he found in Beowulf, the Kalevala, and other medieval literature from northern Europe, using the subtle qualities of those famous works as inspiration for his own. We also see the process by which he created the complex form of sorrow that is the primary emotional effect of his mature works, a sadness "blessed without bitterness," carefully woven through a tapestry of themes that has resonated with generations of readers.Sweeping and hugely perceptive--and enhanced throughout by Drout's personal reflections on how Tolkien has shaped his own life and relationships--The Tower and the Ruin illuminates Tolkien anew and will come to be seen as an essential work for anyone who has journeyed to Middle-earth.
The Book of Women's Friendship
As Marilynne Robinson writes in her 1980 novel, Housekeeping, "Having a sister or friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house." Bringing together work by more than 100 writers, The Book of Women's Friendship explores the rich subject of friendship between women from every angle: its particular intensity and miraculous ease, its tendency to wax and wane, its role not only as a comfort and a privilege, but as vital to our health.Friendship has never been more highly debated, and loneliness more prevalent. Yet women's friendships have repeatedly been neglected or minimized in storytelling, fallen by the wayside of male relationships. In the first major anthology dedicated to women's friendship--and the first serious anthology about friendship published in more than three decades--editor Rachel Cooke looks to art to find the words to capture women's platonic love. Compiling selections from novels, poems, diaries, letters, comics, and graphic novels about women's friendship, she places work from a diverse array of artists in conversation across time and place.With excerpts from Jane Austen to Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, from Dolly Alderton to Sarah Waters, and from Zadie Smith to Meg Wolitzer, The Book of Women's Friendship celebrates and investigates friendship between women, from first encounters to final farewells, from falling out to making up again. This book takes the shape of a human life, beginning with early efforts at friend-making and -breaking in childhood to chance collisions in adulthood. It contemplates (though not for too long) the flip side of friendship, which is not enmity, but loneliness; celebrates solidarity in all its guises; and ends with loss, the moment of goodbye.Warm, clever, and full of some of the most beautiful writing on friendship ever published, The Book of Women's Friendship is also an act of friendship itself, dedicated to Cooke's best friend, in the end becoming a book full of all the lovely, impossible, unsayable things that one friend might be moved to give to another.
Selling Out Santa
Christmas is not just a day or a frame of mind as Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) imparts in Miracle on 34th Street (1947); Christmas is also a vehicle for national mythmaking as an idealising mirror for American cultural and political attitudes of a given moment. Via a case study on Hollywood Christmas films released between 1946 and 1961, A Very Cold War Christmas offers an examination of political pressures on Hollywood in the post-war period and the cultural ramifications of federal involvement in the motion picture industry. As the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened hearings in 1947 and the FBI gathered reports on potential communist subversion in Frank Capra's Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Hollywood executives began to bend to the socially conservative pressures of this post-war moment. Using Christmas films as the core of this investigation to identify and analyse changes within the genre as they relate to and reflect changes in the wider cultural and political moment exposes for film scholars, students, and non-specialists how these federal and external pressures on Hollywood moulded these holiday favourites throughout the 1950s and set the social standard for decades of Christmas releases.
The Slicks
A keen, ardent celebration of unbridled female ambition in the work of Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath In The Slicks, Maggie Nelson positions culture-dominating pop superstar Taylor Swift and feminist cult icon Sylvia Plath as twin hosts of the female urge toward wanting hard, working hard, and pouring forth--and as twinned targets of patriarchy's ancient urge to disparage, trivialize, and discipline creative work by women rooted in autobiography and abundance. A buoyant melding of popular culture and literary criticism, The Slicks is a captivating and unexpected assessment of two iconic female artists by one of the most revered and influential critics of her generation.
Racial Fictions
A powerful critique of the racial myths that shape our world Drawing on a rich tapestry of historical analysis, literary criticism, and cultural theory, Hazel V. Carby interrogates our racial fictions, which have been constructed, maintained, and weaponized across centuries to justify systems of domination and exploitation. Traversing temporalities and global boundaries, Racial Fictions reveals the inter-connectedness of America's domestic racial struggles and international colonial ambitions. Carby challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about the persistence of white supremacy, the violence embedded in historical memory, and the silencing of marginalized voices. The result is a profound exploration of the intricate and enduring legacies of race, imperialism, and violence in the formation of modern identities and nation-states.
Forced by Circumstance
A landmark collection of the work of pioneering Chicana scholar, Norma Alarc籀n. Forced by Circumstance gathers in one volume foundational essays by, and interviews with one of the most highly esteemed intellectuals in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Feminist Studies. Reading Alarc籀n's essays--from her early work on Mexican feminist writer Rosario Castellanos to her recent reflections on the carceral state and the political debacle that our contemporary situation presents--not only offers readers a sense of the intellectual trajectory of one of our most important Chicana feminist thinkers but also brings to a new generation of scholars and readers classic essays in Chicana/o Studies, Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, and Literary Studies.
If I Must Die
"If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale." This rich, elegiac compilation of work from the late Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his marvelous poetry and deeply human writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family. The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. "If I Must Die" is included here, alongside Refaat's other poetry.Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza, one of which, in 2014, killed another of his brothers; and the generosity of Palestinians to each other, fighting, in the face of it all, to be the one paying at the supermarket checkout.Such pieces, some never before published, have been curated here by one of Refaat's closest friends and collaborators. This collection forms a fitting testament to a remarkable writer, educator, and activist, one whose voice will not be silenced by death but will continue to assert the power of learning and humanism in the face of barbarity.
Stranger Than Fiction
One of the Washington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024 "Ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious." --Louis Menand, The New Yorker "Convincing, idiosyncratic and often felicitous." --Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book ReviewA legendary editor's reckoning with the twentieth-century novel and the urgent messages it sends. "How can we live differently?" a young woman urgently demands in Virginia Woolf's novel The Years. It is the 1930s, war and death are in the air, but her question was asked again and again in the course of a century where things changed fast and changed all the time. The century brought world wars, revolutions, automobiles, movies, and the internet, votes for women, death camps. The century brought questions. Novelists in the twentieth century had a question of their own: how can we write a novel as startling and unforeseen as the world we live in? Again and again they did, transforming the novel as the century remade the world. Imagine the history of the twentieth-century novel recounted with the urgency and intimacy of a novel. That's what Edwin Frank, the legendary editor who has run the New York Review Books publishing imprint since its inception, does in Stranger Than Fiction. With penetrating insight and originality, Frank introduces us to books, some famous, some little-known, from the whole course of the century and from around the world. Starting with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground of 1864, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining, and never-satisfied narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates the political vision of H. G. Wells's science fiction, Colette and Andre Gide's subversions of traditional gender roles, and Gertrude Stein's untethering of the American sentence. He describes the monumental ambition of books such as Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain, and The Man Without Qualities to rebuild a world of human possibility upon the ruins of World War I and explores how Japan's Natsume Sōseki and Nigeria's Chinua Achebe broke open European models to reflect their own, distinct histories and experience. Here too are Vasily Grossman, Anna Banti, and Elsa Morante reckoning in specific ways with the traumas of World War II, while later chapters range from Marguerite Yourcenar and V. S. Naipaul to Gabriel Garc穩a M獺rquez and W. G. Sebald. The story as a whole is one of fearless, often reckless exploration, as well as unfathomable desolation. Throughout, we discover the power of the novel to reinvent itself, to find a way for itself, to live differently. Stranger Than Fiction offers a new vision of the history and art of the novel and of a dark and dazzling time in whose light and shadow we still stand.
South Carolina Review:
Volume 46, no. 2 of South Carolina Review is a themed issue on the subject of African American Literature. Angela Naimou and Rhondda Robinson Thomas are guest editors. Contributors include Jennifer L. Barclay, David Borman, Kelly Clasen, Shaila Mehra, Michael Ra-Shon Hall, Kenton Rambsy, Ashley Bourgeois, Maja Milatovic, Akel Ismail Kahera, Susanna Ashton, Meredith McCarroll, Tom Williams, Laura Good, Lenard D. Moore, William Ramsey, Kaneesha Brownlee, Julius Fleming, and Anne Keefe.
Fascist Directive
Fascist Directive reveals changes in Ezra Pound's prose writing resulting from his excitement over Mussolini's use of Italian cultural heritage to build and promote the modern Fascist state. Drawing on unpublished archival material and untranslated periodical contributions, Catherine E. Paul delves into the vexing work of perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, American in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, providing fresh understanding of Fascist deployment of art, architecture, blockbuster exhibitions, music, archaeological projects, urban design, and literature. Pound's prose writings of this period cement a "directive" approach--declaiming his views with an authority that shuts down disagreement. Reading such important prose works as Jefferson and/or Mussolini and Guide to Kulchur, as well as the surprisingly propagandistic aspects of the Pisan Cantos in the context of Pound's profound investment in Italian Fascist cultural nationalism, Fascist Directive reveals the importance of this approach to his larger artistic mission.
Zen in the Art of Writing
Discover the inimitable genius of Ray Bradbury as he explores the art of writing, the power of creativity, and the timeless appeal of storytelling in this collection of essays that are part masterclass, part memoir, featuring a new introduction by Dan Chaon. In Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury's love for his craft shines. With signature wisdom, wit, and verve, Bradbury delves into his prolific writing career, exploring the creation of countless stories, novels, plays, movies, and more that have stood the test of time. Written over a thirty-year period, these inspirational essays insist that there is a "deep well of explosive self-revelation" in all of us waiting to be released through the process of writing. Bradbury's essays illuminate the passion and intellect of one of the most inventive and prolific artists of the 20th century. He reveals how writers can find their own unique path to developing their voice and style. Zen celebrates the art of writing that will delight, impassion, and inspire, but most of all, it celebrates life.
Reading Together
A lively and thoughtful exploration of how book clubs change the way we read. In this engaging and vivacious memoir, college professor Katarzyna Bartoszyńska thinks back on various book clubs she has been a part of. Through brief discussions of a variety of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction works such as Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Marjane Satrapi's Chicken with Plums, and Alma Guillermoprieto's Dancing in Cuba, she considers how the things she has learned in book club discussions differ from what she tries to teach students in her literature classes. As she muses on the various benefits that we imagine reading offers, she describes the unique knowledge that book clubs can provide.
Encounters with Jane Austen
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen, a vibrant anthology of contemporary writing by women. With an introductory overview of Austen's life and work by academic, author and speaker, Professor Jennie Batchelor, over 20 contributors will reveal the impact of Austen's timeless writing on their own journeys.
