New Pages

The cool nights of fall demand a chair by the fire, a pet curled up nearby, and a good read. Four books from English faculty arrive this fall, including poetry, fiction, and scholarly work on topics from medieval to modern. Our annotated list also includes a colorful array of new books by alumnae/i.

Professor Ray Gonzalez
Soul Over Lightning [poetry]
University of Arizona Press, 2014 (out September 25)
From Booklist: "A prolific author of numerous genres, including essays, memoir, and poetry, Gonzalez brings vibrant imagery and aesthetic allusions to his 13th poetry collection, a rekindling of the poet's quest to find home, located somewhere between his birthplace of El Paso and his adopted metropolis of Minneapolis."

Carrie Lorig (MFA 2014) with Nick Sturm
Being Stone / War Between the States [poetry e-chapbook]
Big Lucks, 2014
Regular collaborators Lorig and Sturm are each represented by a poem in a free e-combo pack. Lorig's "Being Stone" is part of a longer poem entitled
Much Affection From the Bold Part / of the River / It's a Crisis / of Movement.

Professor Nabil Matar
British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760
The Atlantic World, Brill, 2014
From the publisher: "[Matar] provides the first study of British captives in the North African Atlantic and Mediterranean, from the reign of Elizabeth I to George II. Based on extensive archival research in the United Kingdom, Nabil Matar furnishes the names of all captives while examining the problems that historians face in determining the numbers of early modern Britons in captivity. Matar also describes the roles which the monarchy, parliament, trading companies, and churches played (or did not play) in ransoming captives. He questions the emphasis on religious polarization in piracy and shows how much financial constraints, royal indifference, and corruption delayed the return of captives."

Rachel Mordecai (PhD 2007)
Citizenship Under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture
University of the West Indies Press, 2014
From Curdella Forbes, Professor of Caribbean Literature, Howard University: "The 1970s were a pivotal decade in Jamaica's political and cultural history. The profound political shifts and the unprecedented flowering of creative cultural production were closely related, and the period remains the most significant historical moment in the consciousness of Jamaicans at home and in diaspora. Until Citizenship under Pressure, I have not seen a comprehensive attempt to analyse the period from a literary-critical perspective. The proposition that black citizenship . . . was the defining issue is lucidly, elegantly and provocatively argued. The work is scholarly without being jargon-cluttered . . . a most enjoyable read."

Scott F. Parker (MFA 2014), editor
Conversations with Ken Kesey
University Press of Mississippi, 2014
From OregonLive.com: "Ken Kesey didn't always like doing interviews, but he definitely liked to talk. A natural storyteller and performer, he could be hard to pin down and harder to keep on topic. He was reflective when the mood struck him but could be combative and impatient when he felt his interviewer didn't understand him or was asking the same old questions. Editor Scott F. Parker did a good job picking through Kesey's many interviews and coming up with a representative selection."

Mary Petrie (MA 1991; PhD 1996)
At the End of Magic [fiction]
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014
From The Star Tribune: "At the End of Magic tackles universal themes of grief and loss through a distraught and angry young mother, Leilani, and a college student, Delphi, forced to accept her psychic gifts as the two women's
lives become further entwined." [Read the Star Tribune story about the novel's
unique path to publication.]

Professor Paula Rabinowitz
American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street
Princeton University Press, 2014 (out October 5)
From Kirkus Reviews: "As Rabinowitz argues in this literary and cultural history, paperbacks became enormously popular from the 1930s to the early '60s, creating a mass readership for titles that ranged from detective stories to acclaimed works by such writers as Henry James and Thomas Hardy. Repackaging included cover illustrations, as well, some with bold depictions of sexuality or violence; others, with modernist art. Rabinowitz makes a persuasive case for the role of pulp in widening the landscape of Americans' experience. . . . An ardent collector of pulp fiction, Rabinowitz brings to this scholarly study a passion for the genre and an authoritative analysis of its meaning in American culture."

Nick Robinette (PhD 2010)
Realism, Form and the Postcolonial Novel
Palgrave, 2014
From Susan Z. Andrade, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh: "Exploring a truly timely topic, Nicholas Robinette's analysis intercedes in a set of conversations about the relation between form and politics in 20th century Anglophone literature, with particular attention to what we now call literatures of the Global South. Scholars of postcolonial studies will greatly benefit from Robinette's insightful and important intervention."

Professor Julie Schumacher
Dear Committee Members [novel]
Doubleday, 2014
From Slate: "A funny and lacerating novel of academia written in the form of letters of recommendation. . . . Dear Committee Members isn't really an academic novel, or even an academic satire. It's a sincere exploration of the depths and breadths of human selfishness, and the contemporary American
academy is simply the backdrop. . . . So in the end, it is exactly Fitger's
selfishness that destructs, rather than his life--and although his semi-redemption
may not redeem the rank carcass of academic culture that continues to fester
around him, it's more than enough to recommend this mischievous novel."

Justin Steinberg (PhD 1999)
Dante and the Limits of the Law
University of Chicago Press, 2012
From Choice: "Combining close textual reading (chiefly of The Divine Comedy) with erudite excursions into legal history . . . Steinberg mounts a persuasive defense of his opening assertion that 'Dante's literary-theoretical framework is simultaneously and manifestly a legal one.' . . . Recommended."

Josh Wallaert (MFA 2007)
A Guide to the Northwest Territory [poetry chapbook]
Miel Books, 2013
From Nick Lantz, author of We Don't Know We Don't Know: "Here, we learn the forgotten definitions of familiar words. Here, instructions and guides
reveal more than they say. Here, we watch, amazed, as poems leap between
subjects. Wallaert's language is graceful and sublime, yes, but what sets these
poems apart is his profound intuition for the startling yet unforeseen connection,
 the unexpected but illuminating turn."

Professor Emeritus George T. Wright
Starting from Staten Island: Memories of Peace and War in the 1930s and 1940s
Wheatmark, 2014
From the author: "My earlier book, The Wrights of Vermont, reported the search
I began about ten years ago for my father's Vermont forebears. This book shows
Dad and Mother starting their family on Staten Island and describes our home,
our neighborhood, the boarding house where we sometimes dined, the schools
we attended, the songs we sang, how we learned to think about money, work,
fun, guilt, and politics, and our experience, especially mine, of illness, solitude,
and books."

Shana Youngdahl (MFA 2006)
Winter/Windows [poetry chapbook]
Miel Books, 2013
From Sarah Suksiri, editor of Alphabet Family Journal: "Shana Youngdahl negotiates the tremulous line between living and dying with the fierceness of a mother who has witnessed the miracle and certain tragedy of bringing life into this world. These are precise, searching poems, aching for answers and relief. Youngdahl's poems exhort daughters and readers to prevail against a life that ends, suspended in cold and behind glass. Here, windows are at once conduits and barriers, and Youngdahl promises that if
'you break through, / you are welcome,'but guarantees neither safety nor success."