If you’ve ever wondered how your favorite writers go about crafting their written works, or if you’ve ever been interested in writing a book yourself, chances are you’ve wandered into a bookstore or a library,

In his new book Thieves: Stealing in Literature, Philosophy, and Myth (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016)—in German: Diebe: Die heimliche Aneignung als Ursprungserzahlung in Literatur, Philosophie und Mythos—Andreas Gehrlach,

J. Samaine Lockwood, Associate Professor in the English Department at George Mason University, specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and gender and sexuality studies. In an hour-long conversation,

Language is one of the complex systems facilitating communication; language is a system producing the inside and the outside of the individual’s awareness of self and other. However, language is also a tool for and of ideological battles,

Candace Ward’s Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation (University of Virginia Press, 2017) foregrounds an understudied group of writers: white creole novelists in Britain’s Caribbean colonies....

Often, poetry and punk rock are seen as distinct activities that occur in different locations with separate audiences. Many would also ascribe to them varying levels of cultural and political capital. Daniel Kane, the author of Do You Have a Band?

Regine Jean-Charles’ Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) foregrounds black women as speaking subjects in narrating and protesting sexual violence.

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...