New Books in Literary Studies

While many know that Mark Twain created some of the most famous characters in literature—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Jim and Puddn'head Wilson—too few have understood that the Missouri author wasn't only America's greatest humorist, but also one of its most subtle political thinkers. But what was the political philosophy of the elusive and ironic Mark Twain for his new democratic America? To help answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest Ivan Kenneally. A contributor to The New Atlantis and First Things, among other publications, he wrote an essay for The Hedgehog Review on modern reactions to Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), titled: “Mark Twain's Absurd, Noble America,” which we will be discussing today. We also talk about the travels of the two runaways Huck and Jim, along with their many disguises and rouses, how Americans like Tom Sawyer read European literature too dogmatically, the conmen Twain depicts in the Duke and Dauphin, technical versus tacit knowledge in his memoir Life on the Mississippi, contemporary interest in Twain from Ron Chernow and Percival Everett, the nature of irony as well as the poverty of modern comedy, and what philosophers and comedians alike can learn from the Missouri author and philosopher. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison's Notes is the podcast of Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison's Footnotes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Romanticism made Scotland famous. It critically shaped the course of Scottish culture, while impacting on cultures elsewhere and inaugurating the country's still-flourishing and lucrative tourist industry. This book is about Edinburgh's most emblematic architecture over the long 19th century: the castellated and stone built cityscape of national revivalist architecture. It reveals why Scotland had by the 1820s become one of Europe's great centres of Romanticism, due both to the majestic Highlands, and to Edinburgh itself as city of Romanticism. Additionally, Edinburgh developed as the main centre and hub for travellers drawn to Romantic Scotland through the work of James ‘Ossian' Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott: visitors including Schinkel, Mozart, Verne, Turner, Haydn, amongst innumerable others. Edinburgh: City of Romanticism (Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Aonghus MacKechnie also provides a long-overdue counterbalance to the contrastingly much-examined and much-published topic of Enlightenment Edinburgh, showing how this and Romantic Edinburgh have comfortably co-existed. It examines how Edinburgh's Romanticism was similarly driven by intellectuals, amongst whom were Enlightenment figures and artistically talented individuals, and it discusses the legacy of those who contributed to the Romantic cityscape of today; an architecture that provides much of the character of the UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and of the city that countless tourists come daily to see. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Why do people read? In The Love of Books: Attachment to a Changing Cultural Object (Manchester University Press, 2026)  María Angélica Thumala Olave, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh's School of Social and Political Science, explores people's relationship to books and to reading, demonstrating the pleasure and importance books provide in contemporary life. Moving beyond a narrow focus on the social status offered by books and reading, the analysis shows the role of material objects, along with the emotional engagements and social bonds forged by the practices associated with books and reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What if children's literature was never as innocent as we imagine? In Sugarcoated Ethics: Children's Literature and Atlantic Enslavement (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), the relationship between childhood reading and Atlantic slavery is brought into sharp focus. The book argues that children's literature did not merely emerge alongside the plantation economy; it was deeply shaped by it. Sugar, sweetness, moral instruction, and domestic comfort were all tied to systems of enslavement and colonial trade, even as the violence behind them was softened or erased in stories for young readers. The book also examines how ideas of white civility shaped childhood. White children, particularly girls, were cast as symbols of innocence, refinement, and moral feeling, while Black children were excluded from those same protections. Through analyses of persecuted-heroine narratives, missionary education, and colonial schooling, the study reveals how children's literature helped normalise racial hierarchy across the British Empire. Yet the project is equally attentive to resistance and alternative ethical traditions. Afro-Caribbean oral storytelling, including Anansi tales, songs, and folktales, emerges as a powerful counterarchive. These traditions preserved histories of survival, collective memory, and resistance that colonial print culture often attempted to suppress. The discussion of the “Queen Mary” Fireburn song, for instance, highlights how storytelling became a form of ethical education and cultural continuity across generations. One of the book's most striking contributions is its global scope. Children's texts on slavery circulated far beyond Britain and the Caribbean, travelling to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East via missionary and imperial networks. In translation and adaptation, these works sometimes reinforced imperial ideologies, but they could also be reshaped in unexpected ways by ‘local' readers and writers. Sugarcoated Ethics asks readers to reconsider what children's literature teaches us about morality, empathy, and history. It challenges the assumption that childhood stories are politically neutral and invites us to think more critically about the ethical worlds children's books continue to create today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Stefan Collini The study and teaching of English literature is generally regarded as one of the central disciplines in the modern university, yet for much of its history it struggled to gain academic legitimacy and was frequently derided as 'a soft option'. Its early professors responded by emphasizing its scholarly character, foregrounding philology and literary history in ways that marked the syllabus far into the twentieth century. Stefan Collini provides here the first full account of the discipline's development from its late-eighteenth-century beginnings up to the early 1960s. Paying special attention to institutional settings, he challenges numerous assumptions about the character of universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the detailed exploration of syllabuses, exam papers, and other institutional records, the impact of literary criticism is revealed to be later and more partial than is commonly assumed. Rather than seeing the early teaching of English literature as 'a substitute for religion' or 'a means to soften class conflict', Collini emphasizes the role of ideals of learnedness and scholarship, as well as of external factors such as opportunities for employment in the civil service and secondary school-teaching. There are full discussions of the parts played by such figures as John Churton Collins, A.C. Bradley, George Saintsbury, and Walter Raleigh, together with sceptical analyses of the decisive significance usually attributed to Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and F.R. Leavis. Separate chapters are devoted to neglected aspects of the story such as the role of Classics, the importance of the subject for women's higher education, and the connections with English teaching in schools. Drawing on extensive use of institutional archives and records as well as the writings of contemporary participants, the book offers a vivid and wide-ranging history of English-as-discipline and its centrality across academic, literary, cultural, and educational life over the past two year hundred years, as well as a resounding testament to its continued importance and relevance today. Stefan Collini, Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge. Stefan Collini was educated at Cambridge and Yale. Following a Research Fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, he was Lecturer, then Reader, in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex 1974-86; Lecturer, then Reader, then Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge 1986-2014. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and Guardian. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This is Dr. Swati Joshi's inaugural episode on the New Books Network. In this episode, she interviews Dr. Lucy Jeffery about her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process (ibidem Press, 2021). She is also co-editor and author of Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, published by CEU Press and AUP in 2026. She is co-founder of the Replaying Communism project, which received funding from the AHRC SWW-DTP (2023) and the Visegrad Fund (2024). Dr. Jeffery's published research is on Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Magda Szabó. Her monograph—Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process—was published by Ibidem in 2021, and, in 2022, she co-edited a special issue for Green Letters, entitled ‘A New Poetics of Space'.  This episode weaves together Beckett's transdisciplinary creative process with Dr. Jeffery's journey of research, and cogitation over challenges to preserve integrity and creativity of the author's works in the wake of rapidly developing AI tools. Furthermore, the colour blue occupies an integral role in Dr. Jeffery's monograph, so this episode entails analytical segments on pigments used in Beckett's works beyond the black, white, and grey. Dr. Jeffery and I also briefly discuss our ongoing special issue, "A Writer's Palette: Colour in Late Modernist Literature," for Textual Practice. Colleagues interested in sharing their proposal until 12th December, can write to us on latemodernists@gmail.com, for more details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ancient apologetics is usually treated as a literary genre or a branch of early theology. This Element offers a different account. It argues that many Jewish and Christian texts conventionally labeled 'apologetic' are better understood through a bibliographic and archival lens: They produce authority not only by defending doctrines, but by organizing books, constructing corpora, mobilizing archives, and regulating interpretation. Tracing a trajectory from the Letter of Aristeas to Jerome's De viris illustribus, this Element shows how citation, collection, cataloguing, and textual ordering made traditions appear authoritative. Examining Aristeas, Josephus, Tatian, Justin, Origen, Pamphilus, Eusebius, and Jerome, it argues that apologetics is best understood as a form of curatorial power through which ancient communities learned to think with books. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review. Sabrina Inowlocki is a Senior Research Fellow Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry (IRCI) at the Australian Catholic University. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A groundbreaking reassessment of the relationship between Federico García Lorca and American poet Philip Cummings and its impact on the poems in Lorca's landmark collection, Poet in New York.In August 1929, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca left New York City to spend ten days with his friend and lover Philip Cummings at a lakeside cottage in northern Vermont. Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover (High Road Books, 2026) tells the story of two young men with mismatched goals and expectations: Lorca, already well established in his career, who sought a sustained romantic relationship with another man, and Cummings, a new college graduate eight years his junior, who had no interest in long-term commitment or in challenging social conventions. Based on over a decade of research, Lorca in Vermont explores the full course of Lorca's relationship with Cummings, an affair that spanned three years and two continents. Combining unique access to primary sources, extensive original research, and a fresh analysis of published sources, the book describes not only the pair's history as a couple but also the suppression of their relationship by Lorca scholars after the poet's tragic death in 1936. Perhaps most importantly, it reveals previously unrecognized links between the disappointment and loss Lorca experienced in his relationship with Cummings and at least eight of the poems in his landmark collection Poet in New York, a work that has long intrigued and inspired other writers. The book brilliantly blends compelling new findings and an engaging narrative style in a page-turning tale that is a must read for anyone interested in Lorca and his legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Baudelaire's Objects (Bloomsbury, 2026) examines Baudelaire's multifaceted use of natural, domestic, urban, and esthetic objects in his verse and prose poetry, as well as the ways his poems reshape our understanding of objects and how those objects destabilize, yet preserve, the subject-object relation. Charles Baudelaire's representation of objects in the natural world establishes a relation that is neither one of identity between human subject and nature nor a relation of domination; he reveals both the natural world and the human subject to be characterized by an irreducible doubleness and nonidentity to itself. Likewise, everyday domestic objects in his poems overflow their boundaries as simple metaphors; their often uncanny aspect highlights their quasi-agency as they define and shape the subject who interacts with them. Baudelaire's poems-as-objects also take on this kind of agency, acting upon readers in ways that both require and surpass attempts to grasp the poems conceptually as art objects for analysis. This reshaping of subjectivity and objectivity acquires increased intensity in his urban poetry, where city objects are at the intersection of the mythic, the historical, the esthetic, and the commercial. Baudelaire's Objects shows how paying attention to objects differently, as Baudelaire's poems impel readers to do, is to reorient ourselves in the world by giving objects their due, recognizing the mediating qualities both of objects and of the language with which we represent or create them. We can thus reinvent our understanding of the limits and potential of human subjectivity as it is inextricably intertwined with the world around us. Guest Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French and Director of the School of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Vermont. He writes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature with a particular focus on the intersections of literature with philosophy and music. In addition to Baudelaire's Objects, Dr. Acquisto's books include French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music, The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy, Poetry's Knowing Ignorance, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, and Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Dissonance, Subjectivity, Transcendence.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Poetics of Incivility: Satire and Subversion in Modern Arab Culture (Cornell UP, 2026) explores impolite modes of expression—satire, crude humor, and rudeness—as a critical lens for both aesthetic innovation and sociopolitical critique. In the Arab world—from Cairo's Tahrir Square and the thoroughfares of Beirut to war-torn Gaza—political demands have been framed by satirical cartoons and graffiti or in subversive poetry and song. Emily Sibley shows that these forms of resistance are not new to Arab culture but return to mid-nineteenth-century debates over literary propriety. In case studies concerning women's education in 1850s' Beirut, the satirical press in colonial Egypt, colloquial theater in the era of decolonization, street art and graphic novels during and after the 2011 Egyptian protests, Sibley follows the threads of an expressive culture that announces and celebrates its own impropriety. Concluding with analyses of Gaza poetry on the internet as a space where the stakes of incivility are acutely visible, The Poetics of Incivility offers a timely consideration of incivility as an aesthetic resource for authors and artists engaging with some of the most controversial issues of their times—and ours. Emily Sibley is Senior Research Associate at Whitman College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026) is the first book that examines the concept of risk in non-anglophone world literature. Focusing on how risk is produced and reshaped by literary aesthetics, Li argues that risk is a creative rather than negative force in world literature. Instead of disaster narratives, Li approaches risk from the fresh perspective of ludic aesthetics, or playful, gamelike, illusionistic and experimental literary strategies. Comparatively analysing an original selection of texts by modern and contemporary French-Francophone and East Asian writers, each chapter focuses on a particular genre such as the novel, life-writing, poetry, and image-texts. The reimagination of risk in literature is revealed to be closely related to different forms of play such as structured games, masquerade, poetic and intermedial experimentation. Franco-East Asian literatures help us rethink risk in linguistically diverse and cross-cultural contexts, providing a new paradigm for comparative criticism and world literature. Guest Xiaofan Amy Li is Associate Professor in Comparative Cultural Studies at University College London and holds a PhD in French from Queens' College, Cambridge. Her research spans comparisons and exchanges from the 20th-21st centuries between France, China, and East Asia broadly speaking. Her first monograph Comparative Encounters between Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi (Legenda, 2015) re-reads two avant-garde French writers and the imaginative classical Chinese text Zhuangzi through their intertextual, poetic, and conceptual dialogues. Besides her two monographs, she has published extensively on Surrealism, poetry, and literary translation. She is a member of the AILC/ICLA (International Comparative Literature Association) Research Committee on Literary Theory. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and instantly. Countering ubiquitous decline narratives, she offers powerful examples of literary innovation, adaptation, and survival. Among them are Jonathan Lethem and Lauren Oyler's challenges to individualist ideas of authorship, the Twitter fiction of Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman's collaborative writing on Wattpad, conceptual projects like Book from the Ground, and the experimental use of chatbots by authors including Sheila Heti. Through nuanced and illuminating readings, We the Platform shows how platform-based writing has altered cornerstone concepts of authorship, aesthetic form, and craft, delivering a bold new understanding of literature now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

After Caroline Bicks was named the University of Maineʼs inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, she became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writerʼs 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 millions of Kingʼs enthralled and terrified readers (including her) have asked themselves: What makes Stephen King's writing stick in our heads and haunt us long after we've closed the book?Bicks focuses on five of his most iconic early works—The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, ʼSalemʼs Lot, and Night Shift—to reveal how he crafted his language, story lines, and characters to cast his enduring literary spells. While tracking King's margin notes and editorial changes, she discovered scenes and alternative endings that never made it to print but that King is allowing her to publish now. The book also includes interviews Bicks had with King along the way that reveal new insights into his writing process and personal history.Part literary master class, part biography, part memoir and investigation into our deepest anxieties, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth, 2026)—authorized by Stephen King himself—is unlike anything ever published about the master of horror. It chronicles what Bicks found when she set out to unearth how King crafted some of his scariest, most iconic moments. But it's also a story about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them. Caroline Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. Her academic books include Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare's World and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare's England; her popular writing has appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and includes a humorous Bard-themed cocktail book, Shakespeare Not Stirred. She is the co-host of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast. Recommended Books: Ben Lerner, Transcription Libby Edwardson, We Sent Them Down Singing Daniel Mason, Country People Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Lauren Delapenha speaks to Emily Everett about her poems “Supermarketing” and “If You Are Learning English,” which appear in The Common's spring issue. Lauren also discusses her process and revision methods, her time at the Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon, and how balancing both teaching and writing challenges her. Lauren is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master's in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell and Jamaica Poet Laureate's Young Writers Prize for Poetry, a Grindstone International Poetry Prize, and two Pushcart nominations. She currently lives and teaches in Connecticut. ­­Read Lauren's poems in The Common here. Learn more about her work here. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. In 2025 her debut novel All That Life Can Afford was a Reese's Book Club pick, and her work appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column. Previous publications include the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures. Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee'svision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders―including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey―adapted Tuskegee's methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil. Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (Columbia University Press, 2025) is an award-winning monograph earning recognition as a winner of the 2026 S-USIH Annual Book Prize by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2026 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History by the African American Intellectual History Society, and the 2026 ASALH Book Prize by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The young James Joyce (1882–1941) was forged in the smithy of Irish political controversies, and he took into his European exile a depth of political insight unrivalled among his fellow modernists. In this biography of Joyce in his youth and early exile James Joyce: A Political Life (Princeton UP, 2026), acclaimed Irish historian and biographer Frank Callanan reveals a Joyce who is markedly more politically conscious, informed and complex than the Joyce of Richard Ellmann's classic account. Written in a sparkling style and rich with historical insights, Callanan's deeply researched biography is the first sustained account of how Joyce's Irish and European political and cultural context shaped his life, thought, and writings.Joyce was eight years old in 1890 when the O'Shea divorce scandal tore Irish nationalism apart, leading to the split in the Irish Parliamentary Party, the death of nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, and a long, bitter period dominated by the anti-Parnellites. This was the Ireland that Joyce grew up in and rebelled against, and which determined his literary direction. Callanan uncovers a Joyce who was a highly original and dissenting Irish nationalist, who refused to avow or vaunt his nationalism and whose understanding was refined by the experience of living in multicultural Trieste with its fraught ethnic politics and differing models of statehood. Callanan's Joyce is as heroic as Ellmann's defiantly modernistic artist but in a more interesting way—a writer who didn't lack political conviction but whose views didn't yield to the expectations of his time.Energizing, witty, profound, and elegant, James Joyce: A Political Life is a magisterial biography that will transform how readers look at Joyce and his politics. Frank Callanan (1956–2021) was an Irish barrister and historian. His books include The Parnell Split, 1890–91, a narrative of the last year of Parnell's life, and T. M. Healy, a biography of Parnell's principal adversary in the Split. He wrote the entries on Parnell, Healy, John Dillon and Conor Cruise O'Brien for the Dictionary of Irish Biography and edited The Literary and Historical Society 1955–2005, a history of the debating society of University College Dublin, to which James Joyce belonged. He also wrote and produced, with Ruán Magan, the 2022 documentary 100 Years of Ulysses. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author's deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South background from both before 1967 and Barthes's declaration and in its wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishized and also reviled of figures: the author. Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today's guest, Caro Pirri, is the author of Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement (Oxford University Press, 2025). This book explores how early modern colonial travel writing informed the London theater's spatial and placemaking conventions. It suggests that what the stage found most compelling about narratives of colonial settlement was their failure to claim interpretive control over unfamiliar places and people. The book goes on to link colonial misreadings of places and people to theatrical strategies for staging disorientation, which Pirri characterizes as a condition of “unsettlement.” Each chapter focuses on a specific formal device that emerged from colonial misreadings: “uncommonplacing” in Richard Hakluyt's travel compendium; metonymic possession in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine; “seasoning” in Ben Jonson's city comedies; “stagewreck” in Shakespeare's The Tempest; and “stagework” in the Lord Mayor's Shows. By approaching form as an interpretive process that is always engaged in the act of making and being made, Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form offers a model for reading past the seeming impasses of colonial narratives. It shows how narratives of failed settlement served as a productive resources for the formal worldmaking conventions of early modern theater. Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Writer Naomi Kanakia has spent her adult life reading the so-called “great books,” those classic works of literature which are–depending who you ask–either deeply unfashionable, or a time-honored testament to human accomplishment. With What's So Great About the Great Books: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It May Destroy You) (Princeton UP, 2026) Kanakia, a devoted lay reader, unpacks popular anxieties surrounding classic writers like Milton, Tolstoy, and Proust. Using the unpretentious approach she has cultivated on her popular Substack, Woman of Letters, Kanakia addresses common reservations about the great books, questions about why we should bother with literature with dated politics, or books exceedingly difficult to read. For plenty of readers, particularly those who came of age in the last decade, the answers may not be clear. Kanakia offers an intriguing reminder to challenge ourselves, to look beyond the walls of the ideology we have constructed for ourselves. (Just don't ask her about “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes.) “What's So Great about the Great Books” is out now with Princeton University Press. Megan Peck Shub (AKA Galley Hag) is a writer, journalist, and a producer who has won Emmy and Peabody awards for her work on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. She previously worked on Finding Your Roots with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the PBS history docuseries. Megan's eclectic slate runs the gamut from literature to pop culture to politics, with a particular focus where those topics intersect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is an Element which centers the 'Black Pacific' as a generative site for comparative and intersectional methodologies and transnational frameworks for thinking about racial formations, post-national literary forms, and cultural histories. At the end of the nineteenth century, US overseas expansion into the Pacific brought white supremacy and colonial rule into alignment. It also threw into greater relief the contradictions of US citizenship and national identity as legalized segregation and rising anti-Black violence foreclosed Reconstruction's possibilities. Race accrued dynamic new meanings in the age of new imperialism. Focusing on the earliest of African American literary magazines, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1900–09) and its southern rival, the Atlanta-based Voice of the Negro (1904–7), in this Element, Dr. Edlie L. Wong examines the formative role of magazine and periodical writings in the development of early Black transpacific internationalism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Life Writing and the End of Empire: Homecoming in Autobiographical Narratives (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) examines how autobiographical writing reflects the psychological and cultural afterlives of the British Empire. Rather than treating decolonization as a completed historical moment, Emma Parker shows how empire continues to haunt personal memory, identity, and ideas of home. Through close readings of memoirs and autobiographical texts by writers such as Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Janet Frame, the book explores how individuals who grew up in colonial settings experienced their later arrival in Britain as a complex and often disorienting “homecoming.” Many of those writers traveled to Britain in the decades following WWII, during a period of rapid decolonization. Yet when they arrived in London, they often discovered that the imperial “mother country” they had imagined from afar did not match the reality of postwar Britain. Their autobiographies reveal a profound sense of displacement, being both connected to and estranged from the imperial center. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Emma Parker to discuss the relationship between life writing and the end of the British Empire; the disorienting experience of colonial “homecoming;” and what autobiography can reveal about empire that other literary forms may conceal. They also explore colonial childhood and domestic space in the writings of Lively, Ballard, Lessing, and Frame, examining settler identity, displacement, memory, and the material afterlives of colonialism. Emma Parker is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at Keele University, UK. Her research focusses on life writing, contemporary literature and colonialism. She has published articles in Critical Quarterly, Auto/Biography Studies, Life Writing, Wasafiri and Moving Worlds, and is a contributor to Documenting Trauma in Comics (2020). She is also co-editor of the collection British Culture After Empire (2022). Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. He is the translator of Hassan Akram's A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For centuries, many of the world's most influential thinkers relied on helpers who performed tasks such as taking dictation, correcting, indexing, composing, and endless copying. In the Scholar's Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship (Princeton UP, 2026) introduces readers to these unsung scribes, assistants, and collaborators, showing how the scholarly enterprise is rarely as solitary as we tend to think. Dr. Blair traces how the learned have relied on helpers since antiquity, discussing how and when these amanuenses became visible in manuscript and occasionally in print and explaining why they were uniquely positioned to shape the posthumous legacy of their principal. Taking an in-depth look at the later Renaissance, she reconstructs the private lives and academic pursuits of leading figures from the period such as the renowned humanist Erasmus, the reformer Martin Bucer, and Paris professors Adrien Turnèbe and Petrus Ramus. Dr. Blair paints multifaceted portraits of the servants, students, and family members who assisted in their work, drawing on sources ranging from scholarly texts in both draft and published forms to correspondence, annotations, biographical accounts, and household rules. Panoramic in scope, In the Scholar's Workshop challenges conventional views about authorship and attribution while affirming the enduring importance of collaboration in scholarly work today. Guest: Dr. Ann Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her books include Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age and (with Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton) Information: A Short History. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Once Upon A Tome The World She Edited Monsters in the Archives Your Art Will Save Your Life The Artists Joy Becoming The Writer You Already Are The Other Side of the Desk Reflection in Motion Working with Academic Librarians Archival Etiquette The AI Mirror Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Naturalism's Imaginary Museum, French Art, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2024) examines one of the most revered art historical narratives of Western art: the famous turning point for painting and sculpture usually emblematized by the works of Édouard Manet and then the Impressionists. Instead of the usual revaluation of this turning point, Sara Pappas argues for the importance of the failure to find a cohesive story for the art world in the period itself, a difficulty that carries forward to galleries today. In order to demonstrate the importance of incongruity and disorder, Pappas brings together two worlds that may seem incompatible: nineteenth-century literary writers involved in naturalism and the organization of permanent collections of later nineteenth-century French art in today's museums. Drawing on the art novels and art criticism of these writers, the book provides optimal access to the questions that continue to haunt the categorization and display of nineteenth-century art. Guest Sara Pappas is Associate Professor of French and Visual Culture at the University of Richmond. In addition to this volume, she has published articles on topics from 19th century art criticism by literary figures such as Baudelaire and Zola to the Expositions universelles to contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley's influence on French art, as well as co-curating an exhibit of Nineteenth Century French and Russian Art at the Harnett Museum of Art. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Following Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798 campaign in Egypt, new possibilities of travel and improvements in printing technology saw an emergence of publishing ventures in France and Britain dedicated to the production of albums and travel accounts featuring images of Muslim Egypt and Islamic architecture and catering to a growing European fascination with the East. In her debut book, Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (American University in Cairo Press, 2025) Paulina Banas analyzes the context and process of production of these highly illustrated publications, from their conceptualization to the finished product and its afterlife, from marketing to the sales of these books, and from circulation to their reception by nineteenth-century audiences. By tracing the long, arduous, and often risky publishing journeys of the makers of these books, including publishers, writers, and artists, such as the Frenchman Émile Prisse d'Avennes, Banas reveals a complex terrain of changing market demands, collaborations, and conflicting views, and the unsettled authorship of these works, prompting us to think more profoundly about artistic and intellectual exchange in the world of nineteenth-century Orientalist book production. Visualizing Egypt considers nineteenth-century book illustrations on Egypt and the “Orient” not merely as expressions of enduring ideology and colonial propaganda, but as representations shaped by the often-overlooked commercial exigencies of the growing publishing industry and the reckless competition within it. Paulina Banas is an Assistant Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she teaches course on Islamic world arts, 19th century European visual culture, and cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the Middle East. Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in history from James Madison University, where he currently works as an educational staff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Abdelwahab Meddeb's Returns to Marrakesh, co-translated by Claudia Esposito and Laura Reeck and published by Syracuse University Press in 2026, chronicles Meddeb's successive visits to the Red City from 1968 through the 1990s, tracing both his personal journey and Marrakesh's transformation across three pivotal decades. Through his distinctive blend of poetic prose and attentive observation, Meddeb portrays the city as a historical crossroads shaped by Jewish and Muslim communities, different social classes, Sufi mystics, merchants, and travelers—a richly layered urban space in which cultures, histories, and spiritual traditions continually intersect. Presented in a bilingual edition featuring the original French alongside the English translation, the book introduces a wider readership to the work of one of North Africa's most significant literary and intellectual voices. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Esposito and Reeck to discuss Meddeb's distinctive literary and intellectual presence, his movement across languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions, and his intimate portrayal of Marrakesh. They also explore the collaborative process of translating his multilingual, layered prose and consider how translation can extend—and even renew—a writer's literary afterlife. Claudia Esposito is associate professor of French at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is author of The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb.Laura Reeck is an independent translator and scholar. She is the author of Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond and coeditor of Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France. Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. He is the translator of Hassan Akram's A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Mikhail Pelevin about his book Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times (Iran and the Caucasus Monographs, vol. 5, Brill, 2025). Love, Honour and God is a survey of three centuries of Pashto literary and educational writing, from roughly 1530 to 1830, the period Pelevin identifies as classical in the history of Pashto letters. Moving from the earliest, now-lost administrative "Daftar" of Shaykh Mali through the sectarian mystical poetry of Bayazid Ansari's Roshani movement, the Sunni traditionalist manuals of Akhund Darweza, and the towering figures of Khushhal Khan Khatak and ʿAbd al-Rahman Momand (Rahman Baba). This book reconstructs a written tradition that has been persistently marginal to both regional and Western scholarship. Pelevin frames this history through what he calls the dissolution of the Persophonie and the slow emergence of Pashto as a written language in the shadow of, and eventually alongside with the dominant Persian literary cosmopolis. Rather than reading this as a proto-nationalist story imposed retroactively, he traces a much older and more specific discourse of Pashtun self-identity — descent, language, custom, and religion, articulated by the authors themselves, long before any colonial or nationalist framework existed to name it. What makes the book distinctive is its insistence on working from the Pashto texts as primary sources in their own right, rather than as illustrations for arguments made in Persian chronicles, in colonial-era administrative writing, or in the historiography of "Pashtun tribal society" that has tended to treat literary production as peripheral to political and military history. Pelevin is explicit about this reversal: he wants to shift attention from the political to the poetical. Qaseem Ahmadzai holds a master's degree in intellectual history from Södertörn University, Sweden. His research focuses on postcolonial theory, historiography, and non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular attention to Afghanistan and the broader Pashto-Persephone worlds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet. And it was through letters that she shared prose reflections–alternately humorous, provocative, affectionate, and philosophical–with her extensive community. While her letters often contain poems, and some letters consist entirely of a single poem, they also constitute a rich genre all their own. Through her correspondence, Dickinson appears in her many facets as a reader, writer, and thinker; social commentator and comedian; friend, neighbor, sister, and daughter. The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 2024) is the first collected edition of the poet's correspondence since 1958. It presents all 1,304 of her extant letters, along with the small number available from her correspondents. Almost 300 are previously uncollected, including letters published after 1958, letters more recently discovered in manuscript, and more than 200 “letter-poems” that Dickinson sent to correspondents without accompanying prose. This edition also redates much of her correspondence, relying on records of Amherst weather patterns, historical events, and details about flora and fauna to locate the letters more precisely in time. Finally, updated annotations place Dickinson's writing more firmly in relation to national and international events, as well as the rhythms of daily life in her hometown. What emerges is not the reclusive Dickinson of legend but a poet firmly embedded in the political and literary currents of her time. Dickinson's letters shed light on the soaring and capacious mind of a great American poet and her vast world of relationships. This edition presents her correspondence anew, in all its complexity and brilliance. Guest: Dr. Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature, and serves on the advisory board of the Emily Dickinson Archive. Her scholarship on Dickinson includes Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar; Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them; and The Letters of Emily Dickinson, which she co-edited with Domhnall Mitchell. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: The World She Edited: Katharine S White at the New Yorker Once Upon A Tome Your Art Will Save Your Life Wild Everything The Banned Book Becoming The Writer You Already Are Archival Etiquette What To Know Before You Go Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman has a new book out that focuses on the reality of women running for president in the United States, and the fictional representations of this idea that we have seen over the past hundred years. The Fictional Female Presidency in Film, Television, and Literature: Representations from 1932 to 2024 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) takes up a number of different and intriguing examples of this idea, a woman serving as president, and unpacks the various narratives to help us understand what popular culture may be communicating about this concept and what those narratives may be teaching the audience (viewers or readers). Taylor Kollman comes at her research from a variety of perspectives, including Media Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, and American Studies. This makes the research particularly rich – since it explores these ideas from a host of analytical viewpoints, helping the reader to consider different genres (television, film, literature) and different approaches. Undergirding all of this is an interrogation of the idea of women and power, which is a controversial concept for many voters, even if it remains unacknowledged. Taylor Kollman goes through the decades, with a focus on examples of female presidents in a variety of different cultural artifacts. In tracing this concept through almost a hundred years of different narratives, the research highlights some interesting themes, including the accidental way in which women become president within the fictional framework. One of the points Taylor Kollman makes is that, in all the different genres and contexts, there seems to be something wrong with this idea of a woman as president. Often the characters are presented as deceptive, evil, corrupt, illegitimate, or they are seen as incapable of doing the job and are often torn between work and homelife/family life. In tracing these examples, Taylor Kollman also provides the reader with an understanding of the different iterations (waves) of feminism and feminist thought, as well as noting the various backlashes to feminism. The Fictional Female Presidency in Film, Television, and Literature takes the reader through a host of different examples, fleshing out these feminist and backlash imaginary spaces that focus on women and power. Another part of the equation, that is often overlooked in the research on this topic, is that there are fewer female film and television producers, directors, and showrunners, thus often constraining the opportunity to present these ideas of woman and power. This also influences the narratives that come before audiences, since women are not generally “trusted” in the same way that men are to helm major film releases with multi-million dollar budgets. This is another form of reality influencing the imaginary, but in a less expected way. The Fictional Female Presidency in Film, Television, and Literature: Representations from 1932 to 2024 takes the reader from Betty Boop for President to Allison Janney as President Grace Penn in The Diplomat and many other fascinating examples of fictional portrayals of women as president of the United States. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What does it take to turn a self-published book into a traditional publishing deal? Science writer Siri Carpenter — executive director of The Open Notebook and author of The Craft of Science Writing — joins host Sarah Russo on The Publishing Playbook to break down her path from self-publishing to an expanded second edition with University of Chicago Press. Siri shares how she landed an agent after self-publishing, why course adoption became the key to her book's success, and the design decisions that helped it stand out. She also previews her newest project, The Best Science Stories and How They Work (also published by UCP), which features articles and annotations from Mary Roach, Ed Yong, and other leading science journalists. Plus: Siri's take on empathy as a core writing skill, how science writers can combat misinformation, and what she's currently reading, underwater! In this episode: Why Siri self-published The Craft of Science Writing before going the traditional route How course adoption drove sales and caught a publisher's attention The behind-the-scenes story of landing a University of Chicago Press deal What makes The Best Science Stories and How They Work different from a typical writing anthology Why empathy is essential in all good writing If you're a writer, editor, or aspiring author weighing self-publishing vs. traditional publishing, this episode is for you. Subscribe to The Publishing Playbook for new episodes every week. For more information on Siri's work, please visit The Open Notebook Books mentioned in this episode: “The Craft of Science Writing,” edited by Siri Carpenter “The Best Science Stories and How They Work,” edited by Siri Carpenter “A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There,” by Aldo Leopold “Why We Swim,” by Bonnie Tsui “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” by Ada Limón “The Sea Around Us,” by Rachel Carson Key Moments 00:57 — Why Siri Started The Open Notebook

Today's guest, Matthew Ritger, is the author of Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026). This book delves into the archival records of Bridewell, Europe's first house of correction, which was overseen by the humanist reformer Richard Grafton. It makes the case that the Bridewell prison and workhouse were central to the history of humanism in ways that both challenge idealized notions of European humanism and illustrate its commitments to civic and Christian reform. The book explores Bridewell's mission to discipline the poor and the “idle” through hard labor, vocational training, and basic education, while also exposing its coercive and exploitative practices, which included whippings, forced labor, and the infliction of fear. Houses of Correction also explores how Bridewell contributed to a broader humanist culture of correction, which united textual methods with practical forms of knowledge, and which extended to rhetorical and textual forms, as well as literary productions. The book's five chapters connect the history and influence of Bridewell to a range of literary texts, including Thomas More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest, and Milton's Of Educationand Samson Agonistes. Through its interrogation of the logic of carceral humanism, Houses of Correction demonstrates the crucial role that Bridewell played in cultivating a culture of correction that pervaded humanist education, textual practices, and literary representations. Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

From disability metaphors to narratives structured around bodies presented as aberrant, early medieval English thoughtworlds conveyed the promise of resurrection and the hope of salvation through crip and disabled bodies. Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature (U Michigan Press, 2025) argues that early medieval Christian eschatology, as manifested in Old English literary texts, was a crip eschatology: a theology of the afterlife that relied upon disabled bodies and concepts related to disability in order to convey promises of resurrection and salvation. In addition to demonstrating how literature manifested theological approaches to the afterlife, Leah Pope Parker articulates the ways of thinking about bodies and disability that were available to ordinary early medieval people, many of whom experienced their bodies in ways that resonate with what we call disability today, but who rarely appear in the historical record. By analyzing Old English texts, including Alfredian translations, Ælfric's saints' lives, and poetry from the Exeter and Vercelli Books, Parker introduces novel ways of characterizing disability's effects in literature. "Spiritual prosthesis" reveals rhetorical, narrative, and theological reliance upon disability to convey the promise of a Christian afterlife. "Systems of aberrance" emerge as a result, in which bodies marked as deviant--including disabled, monstrous, heroic, saintly, and dead bodies--form a network of embodiments that reinforce the narratives they inhabit and that of Christian salvation history. Locating crip eschatology in early medieval literature, Light of the Everlasting Life rewrites standard histories of disability, of the body, and of medieval Christian eschatology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2026) offers a new cultural history of non-elite spectacle in Heian Japan (794–1185), uncovering how performances on the margins—boisterous dengaku music and dance, daring sangaku acrobatics, and the infectious lyrics of imayō songs—challenged and fascinated the aristocracy. Ashton Lazarus reveals how these unruly arts were documented by the very elites they unsettled, appearing in historical chronicles, diaries, prose, poetry, and illustrated scrolls. More than mere precursors to later forms like noh and kyōgen, these performances formed a dynamic cultural force with real political impact. By tracing their influence through literary studies, performance studies, and historiography, Lazarus rethinks the interplay between politics, class, and culture in Heian Japan. Performing Transgression illuminates how acts of defiance and creative expression resonate across time, offering fresh insights into the ways performance bridges the vanished past and the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Camille's Lakou (Vanderbilt UP, 2025), a novel by Guadeloupean writer and educator Marie Léticée, tells the story of Camille, a young Caribbean girl living with her single‑parent mother in a 1960s urbanized zone at the edge of Pointe‑à‑Pitre, Guadeloupe, following her through her adult life as a Caribbean migrant in Florida. Léticée explores neocolonial culture clash and identity conflict themes that will be familiar to readers of the Francophone Caribbean coming‑of‑age novel and its revisions by women writers such as Capécia, Lacrosil, Manicom, Schwarz‑Bart, Condé, Pineau, and others. Léticée makes it her own by fleshing out a time and place not well‑represented in Guadeloupean literature. While previous bildungsromanefrom the writers mentioned here typically focus on rural peasant or urban bourgeois settings, Camille's Lakoushifts location to an impoverished urban environment. “Lakou” is translated as “courtyard” or, more colloquially, “yard.” The author explores the culture and politics of lakou society while raising the issue of how this social dynamic is transformed through the impact of globalization and dispersal into a diasporic experience outside the island milieu of Camille's childhood.In a collaborative translation effort between the author and Kevin Meehan, Camille's Lakou will bring the realities and joys of Léticée's Guadeloupe to an English audience for the first time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this interview, we speak with Laura B. McGrath, an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and the author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2026). Her writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Atlantic. Middlemen rewrites literary history from the perspective of one of its most important but least visible figures: the literary agent. Chronicling the story of agents in the United States from the 1950s to today, Laura McGrath uncovers their critical role in the making of American literature. From the famed three-martini lunch to the Frankfurt Book Fair, Middlemen takes readers behind the scenes to show how agents influence what we read. Along the way, it explains why many debut novelists never publish another book, why agents champion short story collections even though they sell poorly, how agents advocate for writers of color in a system that values whiteness, and why there are so many New York novels. Weaving together original archival research, data analysis, and interviews with scores of agents and other publishing professionals, Middlemen demonstrates that agents—eighty percent of whom are in fact women—are much more than “middlemen.” As intermediaries between author and publisher, agents act as advocates, matchmakers, negotiators, and tastemakers, and they must balance artistic values with the commercial imperatives of publishing conglomerates. The book describes the decisive role agents have played in celebrated novels—from Jack Kerouac's On the Road to Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist—but also in the creation of entire literary categories like the debut novel, the story collection, postmodernism, multiethnic fiction, and world literature. Featuring profiles of agents past and present such as Sterling Lord, Lynn Nesbit, Candida Donadio, Marie Brown, and Andrew Wylie, along with perspectives from agents at all stages of their careers, Middlemen is an entertaining and eye-opening account of how literary fiction—and the literary canon—is made. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A conversation featuring the editors of the new Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing series Pathika - Studies of South Asian Texts and Traditions (HAS, 2026) Pathika – Sanskrit for "traveler" or "one who follows a path" – is a new series dedicated to the textual traditions of South Asia, engaging with the rich landscape of South Asian literary and religious traditions. The series encompasses critical editions, annotated translations, and in-depth studies of texts spanning the full breadth of South Asian traditions. From inscriptions to previously untranslated manuscripts, Pathika provides a venue to both established scholars and emerging researchers to publish their work on the textual traditions of South Asia. The volumes adhere to rigorous philological standards while making important texts and translations accessible to a wider academic audience. Pathika particularly welcomes interdisciplinary approaches that situate texts within their historical, religious, and cultural contexts. The series fully supports all South Asian scripts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode, the editors and managing editor of Science Fiction Studies offer an inside look at the journal, discussing its place in the field and revisiting notable articles that have contributed to the study of science fiction. Science Fiction Studies is published three times a year by University of California Press. For more information about the journal, including subscription and submission information, please visit online.ucpress.edu/sfs. If you are interested in supporting the work of UC Press and its Journals Program, please consider making a charitable donation to the UC Press Foundation. To learn more about the UC Press Foundation and how to contribute, please visit ucpress.edu/support-us. Articles mentioned: Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.; Antimancer: Cybernetics and Art in Gibson's 'Count Zero.' Science Fiction Studies March 1995; 22 (1): 63-86. Link. John Rieder; On Defining SF, or Not. Science Fiction Studies July 2010; 37 (2): 191-201: Link. Paul Kincaid; Review: H.G. Wells: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Lourdes López-Ropero. Science Fiction Studies March 2026; 53 (1): 190-193: Link. Veronica Hollinger; Introduction: Women in Science Fiction and Other Hopeful Monsters. Science Fiction Studies July 1990; 17 (2): 129-135: Link. Darko Suvin; A, B, and C. The Significant Context of SF: A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Science Fiction Studies March 1973; 1 (1): 44-50: Link. Special Issue on Science Fiction and Postmodernism. Science Fiction Studies Nov. 1991: Link. A complete list of University of California Press journals is available at UC Press Journals Phoenix Alexander is the Jay Kay and Doris Klein Librarian for Science Fiction and Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside, and Book Review Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Stephen Darren Dougherty is Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation at the University of Agder and an Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Colin Milburn is Distinguished Professor and Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities at the University of California, Davis, and an Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Patrick Sharp is Professor of Liberal Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and an Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Elizabeth (Lisa) Swanstrom is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah and an Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Can creative writing become a form of biblical interpretation? That is the provocative question at the heart of my conversation with Sarah Rosenson about her new book, Fan Fiction on the Book of Genesis: A Guide to Close Reading of and Creative Writing on the Bible (Cherry Orchard Books, 2026).  The modern phenomenon of fan fiction involves readers writing creative pieces that answer questions left open in favorite works of literature. This also describes the ancient tradition of midrash, where readers write stories filling in gaps in the Bible. In Fan Fiction on the Book of Genesis Sarah Rosenson discusses the questions left open in the first book of the Bible, and every chapter includes questions for the characters in the stories, which can serve as prompts for conversations or creative writing. Rosenson argues that careful reading reveals narrative gaps: characters whose motivations remain unexplained, conversations that never occur, ethical dilemmas left unresolved, and emotions that are only implied. Drawing on the long tradition of Jewish midrash, she proposes that readers can engage these silences through disciplined creative writing, using imagination not as a substitute for close reading but as an extension of it. In our conversation, we discussed some of Genesis's most familiar stories from unexpected angles. What if Eve's pursuit of knowledge is more complex than simple disobedience? Why does Noah never challenge God's decision to destroy the world? What happens when Hagar's perspective becomes central rather than peripheral? Why does Abraham argue for the people of Sodom but remain silent when Isaac is placed on the altar? And how does the Joseph narrative negotiate the relationship between divine providence and human responsibility? We also explore the broader methodological questions raised by the book. Does describing midrash as "fan fiction" make an ancient interpretive tradition more accessible, or does it risk misunderstanding it? How far can readers imaginatively expand biblical narratives while remaining faithful to the text? And what safeguards distinguish responsible interpretation from speculation? Whether you are interested in biblical studies, literary criticism, Jewish interpretation, or creative writing, our conversation offers a thoughtful discussion of how ancient texts continue to invite new readings. More than providing answers, Rosenson's book encourages readers to ask better questions and, in doing so, to discover that Genesis remains as intellectually and ethically challenging today as it has been for centuries. You can find more about Sarah and her work here. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today's guest, Krzysztof Rowiński, is the author of Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film (Routledge, 2026). This book focuses on the concept of non- redemptive failure, a type of failure that is not part of a larger narrative of success or narrative redemption, with attention to how the concept functions between literature, critical theory, and other fields. Examining literature and film from mid- twentieth- century Poland, Italy, and the United States, it traces productive effects of failure which cannot survive into the future, yet have an important, transformative impact in the moment in which they occur. The book engages with the work of John Williams, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bruno Jasieński, proposing a theory of failure at the intersection of literary study, performance theory, and political thought. In discussing these examples, the book examines the place of failure in the broader context of modern and contemporary US American, Italian, and Polish literary and cultural traditions. Because of its interdisciplinary potential, this study might appeal to readers in art history, philosophy, political theory, and other fields within the humanities and social sciences. Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption offers a framework that could not only spotlight the contribution of literary studies to the topic, in the form of narrative analysis but also become part of the theoretical apparatus for further research in these fields. Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Exemplarity and Allusion in Macrobius' Saturnalia (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new framework for interpreting interactions with classical source material in Macrobius' Saturnalia. It argues that the Saturnalia, an educational dialogue from the fifth century ce, does not view its Greco-Roman models as hegemonic sources of authority but engages with these texts in dynamic and critical ways. In particular, Macrobius responds to both the literary and ethical agendas of his predecessors, a strategy which is termed ethical allusion. The book explores this intertwining of moral, social, and aesthetic commentary in the Saturnalia's allusions to authors such as Aulus Gellius, Cicero, Plato, Plutarch, and Virgil. It also examines Macrobius' ethical allusions alongside the aesthetic practices and moral thought of the late fourth and the fifth centuries, and sheds light on the Saturnalia's role in pioneering a late antique intellectual culture at once less hierarchical and less engaged with civic life. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review. Katherine Krauss is Assistant Teaching Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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.”  Considering Tristan Tzara's performances of Dadaist identity, Sonia Delaunay's simultaneous fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, Silveri offers a new narrative about how the artists of interwar Paris developed experiential life practices that resisted dominant forms of “lifestyle” and normative discourses surrounding gender, ethnicity, and office work. This book argues that ethical questions of “How should I live?” and “How should I relate to others?” were as important to the avant-garde as politics, and that aspirations to change the world played out in daily practices of self-making. Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is the author, most recently, of Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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. This book is a kind of Irish ghost story. In it the ghosts of Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) and eight of her family members and colleagues look back over their lives—and sometimes forward beyond them—to try to make sense of them, their times, and one another. Theirs were all turbulent lives played out on the western edge of Europe at a time of great change.Lady Gregory helped shape that change at a pivotal moment in Ireland's development into a modern nation state. The author's fresh approach questions and complicates the image of her as a prim Victorian workhorse. Setting her in the midst of the personal chatter of her departed family, lovers, friends, and collaborators brings home how the historical Irish moment found her just when it needed her. Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness is published with Peter Lang, as part of their Re-imagining Ireland series Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University and the President of the American Conference for Irish Studies Transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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 Sapphire. And at a time when Amanda is preparing for Torch's 20th Anniversary celebration, “A Gathering of Flames,” she is also celebrating the publication of a new book in her capacity as the 61st Texas Poet Laureate, Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas (Host Publications, 2025), showcasing original praise poems commissioned from poets across the state, and seeking to uplift diverse and intersecting populations across age, gender, and BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, differently-abled, and immigrant communities. You can find Amanda at her website, on Instagram, and on Threads. And check out Torch Literary Arts, Torch Magazine, and follow the organization on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. Want to hear more from Amanda about the journey to Torch's 20th Anniversary? Check out our continued conversation on Substack. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies