Laura Lee’s Oscar’s Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy (Amberley Publishing, 2017) offers a detailed investigation of a conflict involving the writer and his two friends with whom he maintained sexual relations,

Slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world for centuries. Scholars have examined various aspects of the visual culture that was slavery, including its painting, sculpture,

A deft and searching exploration of genre theory through science fiction, and science fiction through genre theory, John Rieder‘s Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (Wesleyan University Press,

Adam Gaiser‘s majestic new book Shurat Legends, Ibadi Identities: Martyrdom, Asceticism and the Making of an Early Islamic Community (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), treats readers to a dazzling analysis of a wide range of Shurat/Kharijite t...

“How can the modern individual maintain control over his or her self-representation when the whole world seems to be watching?” This is the question that prompts Julia Fawcett‘s new book, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy,

Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, he’s created a non-stop torrent of news, so much so that members of the media regularly claim that he’s effectively trashed the traditional news cycle. Whether that’s true or not,

How does a book come into being? In Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton University Press, 2017), Clayton Childress, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at The University of Toronto,

Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he served as Dean of Social Sciences from 2009-2016. In his book The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others (Cambridge University Press, 2015),

In Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919-1933 (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Rachel Seelig, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto,

Mykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of the oeuvre of one of the Ukrainian writers whose dramatic literary career offers insights not only into...

In The Latina/o Midwest Reader (University of Illinois Press, 2017) editors Omar Valerio-Jimenez, Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, and Claire F. Fox bring together an exceptional cadre of scholars to dispel the notion that Latinas/os are newcomers to the Midw...

In Denying Her Voice: The Figure of Miriam in Ancient Jewish Literature (Vandenhock and Ruprecht, 2016) Hanna Tervanotko first analyzes the treatment and development of Miriam as a literary character in ancient Jewish texts,

There is a long tradition of the study of Sikhism in Western academia. However, historiographical accounts still lack a clear vision of the early formation of the tradition. Rahuldeep Singh Gill, Associate Professor of Religion at California Lutheran U...

As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have been about seven.

Philosophers have long tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. But voices resonate among bodies and texts; they are singular, as unique as fingerprints,

Michael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the disciplinary framework of world literature levels the di...

In Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic phenomena.

Patrick S. Tomlinson is a stand-up comic, political commentator, and the author of the Children of a Dead Earth series. In this interview, we discuss the first two books in the series, The Ark: Children of a Dead Earth (Book One) and Trident’s Forge: C...

In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium’s...

In his book, Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017), Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia,

In Balzac, Literary Sociologist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Allan H. Pasco explores the talents of the writer whose reputation has been primarily based on his extraordinary gift to compose captivating stories. In his meticulously conducted research,

In her book, The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred (Sydney University Press, 2017), Lyn McCredden, Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin University, explores the sacred and secular themes in the writings of Western Australian author Tim Winto...

In Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle D. Commander examines the (im)possibility of literal and figurative returns to Africa of African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora.

One often hears stories of World War II and Korean War veterans who came back from the war and refused to talk about what they had experienced in combat. They neither wanted folks at home to know what had happened nor did they want to relive it themsel...

Michael Muhammed Knight writes this book from a first-person perspective, as a piece of creative non-fiction. The book includes a liberal amount of swearing and sexual references, and Knight’s writing style is raw, sometimes jarring,