New Books in Literary Studies

With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life, an ambition long regarded as foundational to the European historical avant-gardes. She reveals how many early twentieth-century artists saw their own everyday lives—their bodies, identities, and relationships—as a type of creative material and a central component to their avant-garde practice. These artists abandoned traditional forms of artmaking and venues of art viewing, instead aspiring to integrate art with everyday life, creating an “art of living.”...

Kevin P. Reilly is President Emeritus and Regent Professor with the University of Wisconsin System, having served as President from 2004-13. Kevin grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx, and went on to earn his B.A. at the University of Notre Dame, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, all in English. He has published on higher education policy and accreditation, autobiography and biography, and in Irish Studies.

In this interview he discusses his most recent book, Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness (Peter Lang, 2026), a creative non-fiction intervention into Irish literary studies.

T...

In 2006 poet Amanda Johnston went in search of community and, when she didn’t find what she was looking for, Amanda built her own. Today, Torch Literary Arts is a resource and a destination for Black women writers and readers across the diaspora. Fueled by wisdom and writings from poets, novelists, and screenwriters, the organization’s exceptional programming and award-winning magazine amplify Black women’s voices, and has featured work from poets like Patricia Smith, Yona Harvey, and Toi Derricotte, screenwriters and playwrights like Jonterri Gadson, Charla Lauriston, and Lisa B. Thompson, and novelists like Tayari Jones, Crystal Wilkinson, and Sa...

Monday, June 22—William Kennedy is to Albany what Joyce is to Dublin and Faulkner to Mississippi, a fictional alchemist who transforms his native place into novels at once deeply evocative of their setting and movingly universal in their human resonances. In The Albany Trilogy, just out from Library of America, three of Kennedy’s masterpieces—including his beloved novel Ironweed—take readers from the gutter to the statehouse in narratives of brokenness, resilience, and unexpected grace set against the backdrop of one of America’s most storied underdog cities.

Join Kennedy himself, one of only a handful of living au...

The American Dream at its best is an ethical ideal and a moral compass. If respected and sustained, it can guide the United States through Trump 2.0. Anchored in the US Constitution, Saving the American Dream: Meditations for Dark Times (Wipf and Stock, 2026) features meditations for dark times. Meditations are intentional acts of focused attention.Its fundamental premise is that individuals moved to communal action by warned awareness and committed resistance are indispensable to meet challenges that grow by the day. Guidance from reliable American writers—philosophers, historians, novelists, poets, essayists, religious thinkers—maps the way.

Learn...

Great books don't happen by accident. Sarah Crichton, one of publishing's most respected voices and the founder of Sarah Crichton Books at FSG, joins host Sarah Russo for an unfiltered conversation about what it takes to acquire, edit, and launch books that last. They cover everything: crashing books in secret, fighting for the right jacket design, discovering A Long Way Gone by child soldier, Ismeal Beah, the differences between being a publisher and an editor, what to understand about hiring a developmental editor, and more. Whether you're an author, aspiring editor, or publishing professional, this episode is a masterclass.

Just how difficult is a career as a writer? In Work of Fiction: Making a Living from Writing in the UK (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) Christina Williams, a Lecturer in Media Communications at Bath Spa University examines contemporary writing as a paradoxical and precarious occupation. Foregrounding the experiences of a range of different writers, the book shows the range of work writers actually do to sustain their lives, along with the ideas and ideologies that help them to cope with the complexity and contradictions of their vocation. Rich with narratives of the love, luck and magic associated with the contemporary publishing industry, t...

Mark Twain’s Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self‑aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn Black fathers in American fiction. Haunted by the family he has left behind, Jim acts as father figure to Huck, the white boy who is his companion as they raft the Mississippi toward freedom. Jim is also a highly polarizing figure: he is viewed as an emblem both of Twain’s alleged racism and of his opposition to racism; a diminished character inflected by minstrelsy and a powerful challenge to minstrel stereotypes; a reason for...

Fans of Batman are used to seeing the Caped Crusader associate with the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman, but what if one were to put the Dark Knight into the company of figures such as Beowulf, Robin Hood, Oedipus, and Sun Tzu, among others? Batman and the Classics: Echoes of Mythology, Literature and Philosophy in the Comics and Films (McFarland, 2026) is the first book to compare famous Batman graphic novels, story arcs, and films to classic texts of literature and philosophy from around the world. Through this comparison we can see, for instance, how the epic warrior archetype of...

RTB's sister podcast, Novel Dialogue, spoke recently with Aaron Gwyn. He is the author of four novels: The World Beneath, Wynne’s War, and, most recently, two wonderfully linked historical novels, All God’s Children, which won the Oklahoma Book award, and The Cannibal Owl. In his conversation with Sean McCann of Wesleyan (A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government and Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism), we learn that Robert Lemmons is a real historical figure and so is Levi English.

One way to grasp Gwyn’s achievement is to c...

The first book-length study on mythology reception in video games, Characters and Characterization in Mythological Video Games (Bloomsbury, 2026) examines how video games characterize mythological characters from the perspectives of classical reception and game studies. Characters are vital to most stories, and many video games. They allow us to enter the fiction of a game, and facilitate our embodiment in the game world. Over time, what are initially blank slates transform into fictional existents with well-developed personalities and goals. In this context, narratology uses the term 'characterization' to refer to how character traits are ascribed to the entities we call 'ch...

Chaim Grade was born in 1910 in Vilna, Poland. In his youth, Grade was a student of the Novaredok Musar Yeshiva and of Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz. He was also a founding member of the Yung-Vilne literary group, known for its leftist politics, secular Jewish thinking, and literary influence. After losing both his mother and wife during the Holocaust, he emerged as one of the most prolific and defining Yiddish voices in post-war literature. Besides publishing several volumes of poetry, he is best known for his two acclaimed novels, The Agunah and The Yeshiva.

In early 2023, YIVO and the Nat...

Teaching Shakespeare's Theatre of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2025) engages with one of Shakespeare's greatest thought-experiments: How does one navigate the 'theatre of the world'?

It invites students to examine how Shakespeare challenges this metaphor's vertical hierarchies in response to shifting understandings of cosmological order.

Teachers will find rich contextual frameworks for exploring how Shakespeare envisions 'worlds' as emerging from dynamic variables, raising urgent questions about how identity and justice are environmentally constructed.

Focal plays include A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello.

Eac...

What does it mean for theory to be considered as a species of not just literature but world literature? Theory as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), edited by Jeffrey De Leo, offers a wide range of accounts of how the “worlding” of literature both problematizes the national categorizing of theory (e.g., French theory), and brings new meanings and challenges to the coming together of theory and literature. In sum, it presents theory as world literature as a viable alternative to more commonplace approaches to theory.
Under such an approach to theory, what it means to be an African, American, or Asian “...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Oludamini Oguannaike, Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia.

Tazin and Oludamini talk about his work into how languages, such as English, express concepts that originate from onto-epistemic perspectives that are not historically associated with the English language. They discuss his 2019 article “Islam in English,” which he co-authored with Dr. Mohammed Rustom and how this research is expressed in the literary genre in his book of poetry called The Book of Clouds.

The conversation consider...

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While t...

Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive narratology, questions related to the criticism of post-humanity, and, more broadly, contemporary French and Francophone literature. It examines the fictional minds of characters and their conceptions of resistance to the anticipated worlds they inhabit, particularly in novels by Pierre Bordage, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Houellebecq, Amin Maalouf, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Antoine Volodine, and Élisabeth Vonarburg. It also e...

Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do - and fail to do - about actually getting them? In The Life You Want Adam Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to show that we are obsessed by the idea of our lives being ones we want and enjoy rather than merely endure, tolerate or make the most of. Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the difficulties we have around the whole idea of enjoying - and fashioning - our lives in cultures that insistently promote enjoyment while making it very...

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter...

A Praxis of Persistence: Central American Feminist Testimony and Sustainable Activism (SUNY Press, 2026) by Dr. Kenna Neitch establishes persistence as a framework for understanding methods of feminist activism in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Blending literary and ethnographic approaches, Dr. Neitch analyzes texts produced by activist movements from the 1980s to 2020—from collective testimonio to institutional publications (encuentros) to social media—and connects them to the movements' cultural impact and organizing practices, such as generative conflict, horizontal cross-border networks, and what she terms strategic adaptability. What these texts and practices have in common, Dr. Neitch argues, is feminist persi...

In The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black (Temple University Press, 2026), Michael E. Sawyer presents a bold work of speculative theory and philosophy that explores how Black people bring the future into being—and what existence in that future looks like. He considers what people of African descent face and the proper response to the situation. He introduces the idea of Being-As-Black as a response and questions the overarching ethos that will be the guide to a beneficial resolution.

Using critical theory and philosophy, Sawyer decouples Black identity and Black philosophy from White and Western frames by building on...

How is the tool of Artificial Intelligence shaping the writing of fiction? Is AI emerging as more than just a potentially handy aid to an author—and, ominously, more like an actual author? I discuss these ripe questions and others with the literary critic Mark McGurl, professor of English at Stanford. He is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2009) and Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Verso, 2021). As our conversation shows, McGurl is a nuanced, reasoned voice on an emotive subject that all too readil...

In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know—and mourn—the kin he was never able to meet.
webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the rela...

A serene beach. The classroom of an elite private school. The still nights in an upscale residential neighborhood. An acclaimed poet with a quiet, dignified mode of address. The sonic etiquette and experience of quiet is integral to each of these scenes. The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance (Rutgers UP, 2026) examines what the emergence of quiet as an elite aesthetic, privilege, and entitlement means for minoritized people who are often narrated as loud, disruptive, and disturbing, sonically, visually, and otherwise. Taking the Caribbean and its diasporas as its key sites of study, the book e...

In The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America (Temple University Press, 2021), Timothy K. August centers Southeast Asian American writers and artists to develop a theory of refugee aesthetics as a way of considering how aesthetic forms are created and contested by refugees, nonrefugees, and institutions alike.

On this episode of New Books in Asian American Studies, Timothy K. August discusses the contradictions in how refugee stories are read as arising from exceptional circumstances even as the ever-increasing number of refugees renders refugeeness a remarkably everyday experience; the importance of aesthetics as a means by which refugees are ab...

A guide for today’s classrooms, this collection from leading Joyce scholars explores innovative pedagogical approaches to the works of this often-challenging writer

Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century (UP of Florida, 2025) presents examples of bold, innovative pedagogical techniques instructors have used to adapt the study of Joyce’s work for the contemporary classroom. Leading Joyce scholars share approaches that go beyond the traditional university lecture hall to include experiences teaching high school students, senior citizens, art students, book club members, and people in prisons.

The strategies in this inspirational volume range from class discus...

For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfield, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer.

Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches.

Liz is in and of and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration?

Mentioned in the episode:

Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Liverpool UP, 2026) is about the way the Romantic National Tale exercises power and defines the boundaries of citizenship through the categories of health, illness, and disability. When we see these categories at work in these novels, we understand how socio-political belonging is premised on the conception of the healthy body, to the exclusion of bodies deemed otherwise. Employing the medical humanities and, especially, the social determinants of health, this book shows that the National Tale achieves its consolidation of the nation through its enforcement of a rigorous pol...

“I am haunted by history: the history of dictatorship, the history of empire, history as a whole,” declares the Iraqi novelist, poet, scholar, and literary translator Sinan Antoon near the start of this conversation about his most recent novel, Of Loss and Lavender. Sinan, speaking with Magalí and critic Michael Allan, goes on to say that “the novel allows for a more wholesome, in-depth confrontation with history.” That confrontation, in turn, requires narrative forms that are complex, sometimes fractured, and often non-linear in order to braid together a range of different perspectives on a particular moment or event.

As Sinan ob...

Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Marissa Nicosia asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.

Dr. Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapte...

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers’, looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose’s scientific experiments, his resea...

Our bodies and brains are radically transformable, mutable and plastic. From the neuroplasticity of the brain to the epigenetic malleability of our bodies and of all organic life, the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou invites us to consider our plasticity as both a creative resource and an ethical challenge.

Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity (Edinburgh UP, 2026) brings Malabou's philosophy into dialogue with contemporary literature and film. It reads conceptions of plasticity and neuroplasticity in Malabou through the mutant bodies of Leos Carax's films; the shape-shifting bodies of Marie Darrieussecq's no...

In Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present (U Iowa Press, 2022) David Eisler looks at how American literary fiction about war has changed as the nature of civil-military relations has changed. For much of the 20th century the people who wrote novels about war were men who went to war. And for some authors and critics, being a war veteran was a requirement for being authorized to write about war. But Eisler shows that after the end of conscription there was a "dispersal of authority" to write about wars which made room for more authors to wr...

Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel (Oxford UP, 2026) is the first comprehensive study dedicated to the literary tradition surrounding Yeshe Tsogyel, revered as the foremost matron saint of Tibetan Buddhism. It traces the emergence and development of a rich body of narratives about Yeshe Tsogyel during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing on the Tibetan Nyingma Buddhist tradition. Through careful textual analysis, the book constructs an emic (insider) Tibetan Buddhist theory of gender and female religious eminence, examining how Yeshe Tsogyel's multifaceted identities--as a devoted disciple, tantric consort, sky-goer (dakini), an...

My guest is Caroline Bicks, whose new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth, 2026) became a bestseller shortly after release. After she was named the University of Maine's inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, Caroline Bicks became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writer's creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by one question: What makes Stephen King’s writing s...

Despite being a major figure of Haitian literature, Jean-Claude Charles (1949-2008) has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader's Guide (Liverpool UP, 2022) seeks to serve as an introduction to the work and universe of this unique and capital writer to an English-language readership. The essays in the collection are organized along three major axes: contextual articles, placing Charles' work within the larger Haitian literary landscape, punctual articles, addressing specific themes in a selection of Charles' books, and author testimonials, attesting to Charles' work's importance both to his contemporaries and to a new generation of writers. With...

The 1960s in Japan have long been understood as a period of radical political engagement. But as political movements from Old Left Communism to New Left revolts appeared to fail in their efforts to revolutionize Japanese society, artists and intellectuals came to reject the ideals of postwar politics. Instead, they advocated withdrawing from political participation and making self-transformation the grounds for social change.
This provocative book uncovers a paradox at the heart of the 1960s: how political disillusionment became the basis for a new form of politics—a politics of the self. Examining aesthetic criticism, popular literature, avant-garde ar...

In this episode of the Vault, we revisit the Italian writer Italo Calvino’s James Lecture, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on March 30, 1983.

Italo Calvino was one of the most inventive and widely read Italian authors of the twentieth century. Born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy, he began his literary career as a journalist and fiction writer after World War II, publishing his debut novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, in 1947. He went on to write some of the most formally original works in postwar literature, including Ou...

How to write about place is a question that cuts across the career of the South African Ivan Vladislavić. The questions of place and space are pressing ones in the context of South Africa, where the transition to democracy in 1994 included a redrawing of the national map, and the last three decades have seen the large-scale transformation of urban centers such as Johannesburg. What defines Johannesburg a literary city? asks the critic Jeanne-Marie Jackson. From this unfurls a series of reflections about the writer’s relationship to place and the various ways in which narrative form can be bent to ca...

Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-siècle France (U Toronto Press, 2025) presents a master narrative of the inventor in fin-de-siècle French literature by analyzing the works of Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Émile Zola, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Their writings challenge the role of science in shaping French national identity and aim to transform contemporary understandings of science and technology. The book reveals how Verne, Robida, Zola, and de l’Isle-Adam reimagine the figure of the inventor, reshaping the literary standards of their time. Universally male in these narratives, the inventor serves as a flawed exemplar of national...