New Books in Literary Studies

Interviews with Scholars of Literature about their New Books

Arts
2151
Janelle Adsit, "Toward an Inclusive Creative Wr...
What do students who enter creative-writing classrooms encounter as these young men and women hope to discover who they are and can be as writers?
51 min
2152
M. Evans, S. Moore, and H. Johnstone, "Detectin...
How can detective fiction explain the social world?
38 min
2153
Nicholas J. Moore, "Repetition in Hebrews: Plur...
s repetition always bad? The Letter to the Hebrews lies at the heart of a tradition that views repetition always negative...
23 min
2154
Omid Safi, “Radical Love: Teachings from the Is...
Its often touted that Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the United States...
74 min
2155
Alan Jacobs, "The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christ...
Drawing on interventions made at the height of global war by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Simone Weil and Jacques Maritain, Jacobs shows how leading intellectuals worried about a world in crisis and how they imagined it might be set right...
47 min
2156
Andrew S. Curran, "Diderot and the Art of Think...
Denis Diderot has long been regarded as one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment...
62 min
2157
Victoria Brownlee, "Biblical Readings and Liter...
Victoria Brownlee is the author of an exciting new contribution to discussions of early modern religion and literature...
35 min
2158
James Baldwin, "Little Man, Little Man: A Story...
This 2018 reprint of Little Man, Little Man exemplifies communal and collaborative textual production.
36 min
2159
Ana Paulina Lee, "Mandarin Brazil: Race, Repres...
In her new book, Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford University Press, 2018), Ana Paulina Lee (Columbia University) analyzes representations of the Chinese in Brazilian culture...
68 min
2160
James R. Rush, "Hamka's Great Story: A Master W...
From Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 up until today, the relationship between Indonesian nationalism, Islam, and modernity has been a key subject of debate...
42 min
2161
Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith, "A...
As scholars and readers, we often view literary history in rigid, simplistic terms. We imagine that nineteenth-century aesthetic and thematic preoccupations withered away as 1899 became 1900, only to be replaced immediately by a new literature of the twentieth century...
50 min
2162
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One ...
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention...
61 min
2163
Alec Nevala-Lee, "Astounding" (Dey Street Books...
41 min
2164
Eric D. Weitz, “Weimar Germany: Promise and Tra...
What can the Weimar Republic teach us about how democracies fail? How could the same vibrancy that gave us cultural touchstones spawn Nazism? In his new book Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eric D.
61 min
2165
Steven Shaviro, “Discognition” (Repeater Books,...
Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it like to be a bat, or a dog, a robot, a tree,
66 min
2166
Peter Zinoman, “Vietnamese Colonial Republican:...
Over the course of the 1930s, Vietnamese author Vũ Trọng Phụng published eight novels, hundreds of works of narrative nonfiction, stories, plays, essays and articles. He was a best-selling writer in his own day who sharpened his acute literary talents,...
43 min
2167
Alisha Gaines, “Black for a Day: White Fantasie...
How does one show empathy towards someone across racial lines?  In her new book Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Dr. Alisha Gaines analyzes the history of sympathetic whites “becoming” temp...
56 min
2168
Mark Polizzotti, “Sympathy for the Traitor: A T...
The success of a translator may seem to lie in going unnoticed: the translator ducks out of the spotlight so that the original author may shine. Mark Polizzotti challenges that idea in a provocative treatise on his craft,
38 min
2169
J.R. Osborn, “Letters of Light: Arabic Script i...
Arabic script is astounding!  Not only because it represents one of the most commonly spoken languages today –that is, the Arabic language– but because it has represented dozens of other languages over the course of human history from the Middle East t...
84 min
2170
Anindita Banerjee, “Russian Science Fiction Lit...
Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (Academic Studies Press, 2018) offers a compelling investigation of the genre whose development was significantly reshaped in the second half of the 20th century.
41 min
2171
Nathan Kravis, “On the Couch: A Repressed Histo...
Sometimes, a couch is a only a couch, but not in Dr. Nathan Kravis’s new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). In a live interview conducted in connection with the Manhattan Institute for P...
56 min
2172
Philip Lutgendorf, “The Epic of Ram” (Harvard U...
Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcaritmānas written by the sixteenth-century North Indian...
62 min
2173
Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, “Cents an...
The vast chasm between classical economics and the humanities is widely known and accepted. They are profoundly different disciplines with little to say to one another. Such is the accepted wisdom. Fortunately,
47 min
2174
Naomi Seidman, “The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews...
In The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell In Love With Love, And With Literature (Stanford University Press, 2016), Naomi Seidman, Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts at the University of Toronto, considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage ...
38 min
2175
Jonathan Shandell, “The American Negro Theatre ...
The role of the artist in the cause of Black freedom has been a hotly debated topic for generations now. Dr. Jonathan Shandell’s The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era (University of Iowa Press,
52 min