"In recent weeks, science fiction has been called upon with ...
Bibliographies
We invite visiting authors and scholars to submit a "Bibliography," with or without annotation, of books in some way related to their own book or work. Check each post for details on related events!
February 20th, 2020
As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these similar-looking books and become what we now call "literature." Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt’s theories to James Watt’s inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female. For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers’ hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers....
December 18th, 2019
How things are divided up or pieced together matters. Half a bridge is of no use at all. Conversely, many things would do more good if they could be divided up differently: Perhaps you would prefer a job that involves a third less work and a third less pay or a car that materializes only when needed and is priced accordingly? Difficulties in "slicing" and "lumping" shape nearly every facet of how we live and work--and a great deal of law and policy as well.
In Slices and Lumps, Lee Anne Fennell explores how both types of challenges...
In Slices and Lumps, Lee Anne Fennell explores how both types of challenges...
August 13th, 2019
If a rolling stone gathers no moss, the poems in Devin Johnston's Mosses and Lichens attend to what accretes over time, as well as to what erodes. They often take place in the middle of life's journey, at the edge of the woods, at the boundary between human community and wild spaces. Following Ovid, they are poems of subtle transformation and transfer. They draw on early blues and rivers, on ironies and uncertainties, guided by enigmatic signals: "an orange blaze that marks no trail." From image to image, they render fleeting experiences with etched precision. As Ange Mlinko has observed of Johnston's work, "Each poem holds in balance a lapidary concision and utter lushness of vowel-work," forming a distinctive music. Devin Johnston will read from Mosses and Lichens, with poet Susan Kinsolving, ...
March 15th, 2019
In Women Warriors, historian Pamela Toler examines the stories of historical women for whom battle was not a metaphor: using both well known and obscure examples, drawn from the ancient world through the twentieth century and from Asia and Africa as well as from the West. Looking at specific examples of historical women warriors, she considers why they went to war, how those reasons related to their roles as mothers, daughters, wives, or widows, peacemakers, poets or queens—and what happened when women stepped outside their accepted roles to take on other identities. She considers the ways in which their presence on the ramparts or the battlefield has been erased from history and looks at the patterns and parallels that emerge when we look at similar stories across historical periods and geographical boundaries. She looks at ordinary women who did extraordinary things...
January 21st, 2019
We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to transgressive artworks, man of the images in our media culture might strike us as unsuitable for viewing. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible?
With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media environment, in which viewers encounter difficult content on...
January 5th, 2019
The American Revolution was not only a revolution for liberty and freedom, it was also a revolution of ethics, reshaping what colonial Americans understood as "honor" and "virtue." As Craig Bruce Smith demonstrates, these concepts were crucial aspects of Revolutionary Americans' ideological break from Europe and shared by all ranks of society. Focusing his study primarily on prominent Americans who came of age before and during the Revolution--notably John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington--Smith shows how a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating an ethical ideology that still remains.
By also interweaving individuals and groups that have historically been excluded from the discussion of honor--such as female thinkers, women patriots, slaves, and free...
November 20th, 2018
Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet’s long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. The passage of nine days, which is how long a drop of water typically stays in Earth’s atmosphere, is something we can easily grasp. But spans of hundreds of years—the time a molecule of carbon dioxide resides in the atmosphere—approach the limits of our comprehension. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by...
November 19th, 2018
By both its supporters and detractors, neoliberalism is usually considered an economic policy agenda. Neoliberalism's Demons argues that it is much more than that: a complete worldview, neoliberalism presents the competitive marketplace as the model for true human flourishing. And it has enjoyed great success: from the struggle for "global competitiveness" on the world stage down to our individual practices of self-branding and social networking, neoliberalism has transformed every aspect of our shared social life. The book explores the sources of neoliberalism's remarkable success and the roots of its current decline. Neoliberalism's appeal is its promise of freedom in the form of unfettered free choice. But that freedom is a trap: we have just enough freedom to be accountable for...
November 6th, 2018
On November 13th, 2018, at 57th Street Books, Leading fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes will contextualize a wide variety of spirited tales from the past as translated and/or collected in two new books, Workers' Tales ...
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