New Books In Literary Studies

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of "going to the countryside" a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of "down to the villages" movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What then was the special significance of "going to the countryside" before that era? Yu Zhang explores the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys, the revolutionary "going down to the people" as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, the act of going to the countryside entailed new ways of

Bradley Gorski, a literary and culture scholar, examines the breakneck commercialization of Russian book publishing and of Russian literature more broadly – in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, thousands of new publishers emerged, up from a mere two hundred at the Soviet Union’s end. The notion of the “bestseller” quickly came to dominate the new market, fueling he rise of immensely popular genres such as detective novels, including its zhenskii variety (detective novels written by women and featuring female sleuths. Gorski artfully weaves together the evolution of the book market - from the chaos of the early post-Communist years to the near-monopoly in the 2000s - with literary analysis of some of the most prominent post-Soviet authors. At early stages, post-Soviet literature often reflected a degree of optimism about the Western ideal of personal liberty and embraced what sociologist Boris Dubin called a Russian version of the “American success story”. In recent years, howev

Do you know the legends of the giants who ruled England before the first human kings? What about the demon dog Black Shuck who terrorized sixteenth-century Norfolk? Or the many times the Devil has tried to get his way before being outwitted by everyday people? England’s historic counties are overflowing with folklore, and this collection of 39 stories from the hit podcast Three Ravens reimagines dozens of classic tales in surprising, spooky, and often hilarious ways. Filled with tales of ghosts, mermaids, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends and more, The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New tellings of half-forgotten stories from England's 39 Historic Counties (The History Press, 2025) by Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux spans centuries, styles, tones and narrators, making it perfect for bedtimes, reading by torchlight, or curling up on the sofa to enjoy with a mug of something hot. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty neg

RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won’t be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting a beloved book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these columns. Find it as your local bookstore, or Columbia University Press, or Bookshop, (or even Amazon). Like our podcast, B-Side Books focuses on those moments when books topple off their shelves, open up, and start bellowing at you. The one that enthralled Merve Emre (Wesleyan professor and author ofsuch terrific works as The Personality Brokers) was a novella by the luminous midcentury Italian pessimist, Natalia Ginzburg. And if you think you know precisely why a mid-century Italian writer would have a dark and bitter view of the world (already thinking of the Nazi shadows in work by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani) Ginzburg’s The

Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) by Dr. Dominic Davies & Dr. Candida Rifkind is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas. Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced to bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Beyond simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as

Taking recent spectacular progress in AI fully into account, Mark Seligman's AI and Ada: Artificial Translation and Creation of Literature (Anthem Press, 2025) explores prospects for artificial literary translation and composition, with frequent reference to the hyperconscious literary art of Vladimir Nabokov. The exploration balances reader-friendly explanation (“What are transformers?”) and original insights (“What is intelligence? What is language?”) with personal and playful notes, and culminates in an assortment of striking demos The book’s Preface places the current AI explosion in the context of other technological cataclysms and recounts the author’s personal (and not always deadly serious) AI journey. Chapter One (“Extracting the Essence”) assesses the potential of machine translation of literature, exploiting Nabokov’s hyperconscious literary art as a reference point. Chapter Two (“Toward an Artificial Nabokov”) goes on to speculate on possibilities for actual artificial creation of literature. Cha

Slow motion is everywhere in contemporary film and media, but it wasn't always so ubiquitous. How did slow motion ascend to the dubious honor of becoming our culture's least "special" effect? And what does slow motion — a trick secured paradoxically through the camera's ever-racing speeds of capture — tell us about the temporalities and trajectories of modernity?  Mark Goble, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, takes up these questions in his latest book Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion (Columbia UP, 2025), out now from Columbia University Press. In this conversation with Alix Beeston, Mark shares from his fascinating account of slow motion across film, art, and literature in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. For Mark, slow motion is a key index of a period of capitalist, ecological, political, and cultural crisis that we're still enduring — but that we hope will one day, however slowly, come to an end.  Tracking bodies and things as they move fast and slo

Lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war fought between two states in the twentieth century. It marked a period that began just after a revolutionary government in Iran became an Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein consolidated power in Iraq. It ended with both wartime governments still in power, borders unchanged, yet hundreds of thousands of people dead. Neither side emerged as a clear victor, but both sides would eventually claim victory in some form. Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War (Stanford UP, 2025) considers how Iraqi and Iranian writers have wrestled with representing the Iran-Iraq War and its legacy, from wartime to the present. It demonstrates how writers from both countries have transformed once militarized, officially sanctioned war literatures into literatures of mourning, and eventually, into vehicles of protest that presented powerful counternarratives to the official state narratives. In writing the first

Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll see thrown about in op-eds and analysis pieces all over the net and the press. Dystopia is doing some kind of work in our political vocabulary that goes beyond a reference to those iconic dystopian novels or their sort of contemporary successors. … Sometimes politics seems to be so absorbed in the train of fantasy and the imaginary that it becomes worrying. But like it or not, or like specific expressions of the political imagination or not, the political arena is an arena of the imagination. Habermas once said that people don't fight for abstractions, but they do battle with images.                                                                                                                    – Matthew Benjamin Cole, NBN interview 2025 After centuries of contemplating utopias, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers began to warn of dystopian fut

Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style (Fordham UP, 2025) analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law’s colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common lawsuits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine. Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeri

Demilitarizing the Future (Anthem Press, 2025) draws from art, anthropology, and activism to investigate the entrenchment of militarism in everyday lives and consider novel imaginaries of its dissolution--of peacemaking, community, and shared equitable futures. This book will be published in October of 2025. In this episode, Rebecca Kastleman, Darcie DeAngelo, Joshua Reno, and Leah Zani join Elena Sobrino to talk about their collaboration editing this anthology. They discuss the ways ecology and infrastructure are central to understanding demilitarization, the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, and the value of creative methods for this work.  "To demilitarize the future, then, requires a radical shift in what we believe is possible. It requires a turning away from the logics of dominance, extraction, and surveillance. It requires recovering forms of life and relations that have long been buried under the ruins of empire, as well as honoring forms of life, arduously crafting different modes of mat

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) pushed the boundaries of storytelling. While the writer is most recognized for the genre-bending work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), in Understanding Hunter S. Thompson (University of South Carolina Press, 2025), Kevin J. Hayes provides a broad and nuanced analysis of Thompson's multifaceted career and unique literary voice. Following a biographical introduction, Hayes examines the different roles Thompson played throughout his literary career, resulting in a view of his work unlike any previously published biographical or critical study. The ensuing chapters analyze Thompson's work in his capacities as a foreign correspondent, literary critic, New Journalist, gonzo journalist, campaign writer, anthologist, letter writer, and novelist. Hayes draws on previously unrecorded articles, correspondence, and interviews to inform his insightful analysis. Written in an engaging and propulsive style, Understanding Hunter S. Thompson is essential reading for scholars and fans. Kev

In the last few decades, restaurants and food culture have achieved extraordinary cultural presence. Chefs are heroes and thought leaders, well-executed entrées go viral, dining out has become theater, plating has become art and ubiquitous Instagram content. But in recent years restaurants have faced crisis upon crisis.  Restaurant (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Brian Duff, part of the Object Lessons series, takes a deep dive into the drives, desires, and anxieties we bring to dining out at this time of uncertainty. It explores the meaning we find in good food and warm hospitality. It shows why the restaurant offers unique opportunities to change the quality of our engagement with others and to create shared meaning across the table. 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 inter

Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth (Bloomsbury, 2022) tackles the reenchantment process at work in a part of contemporary ecoliterature that is marked by the resurfacing of the song of the earth topos and of Gaia images. Focusing on the postmodernist braiding of various indigenous and ecofeminist ontologies, close readings of the animistic and totemic dimensions of the stories at hand lead to the theorizing of liminal realism—a mode that shares much with magical realism but that is approached through an ecopoetic lens, specifically working an interspecies kind of magic, situating readers in-between human and other-than-human worlds. This book promotes a worldview based on relationships of reciprocity and symbiosis. It restores our capacity for wonder together with our sensitive intelligence. Liminal realism adopts a stance in-between scientific, mythical, and poetic worldviews as it calls attention to the soundscapes, odorscapes, feelscapes, and landscapes of the worl

What if we embraced neurodivergent ways of being not as deviations to be corrected but as vital ways of inhabiting the world? What new realities might emerge? Bringing a much-needed humanistic perspective to the study of autism and other forms of neurodivergence, Counter-Cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (U Minnesota Press, 2025) offers a bold reimagining of neurological difference, moving beyond rigid diagnostic frameworks to uncover more expansive, generative modes of existence. Engaging the work of Fernand Deligny to trace how modern taxonomies of neurodivergence have hardened over time, Leon J. Hilton questions how these categories might instead serve as tools for remapping the world with neurodivergence at its center. At the heart of Counter-Cartographies is an exploration of performance and performativity that reveals how the norm of neurotypical reality is continually reinforced through acts of doing, redoing, and undoing. Charting the historical shift away from “mi

Just as easterners imagined the American West, westerners imagined the American East, reshaping American culture. Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region (University of Washington Press, 2025) by Dr. Flannery Burke flips the script of American regional narratives.In novels, travel narratives, popular histories, and dude ranch brochures, twentieth-century western US writers saw the East through the lens of their experiences and ambitions. Farmers following the railroad saw capitalists exploiting their labor, while cowboys viewed urban easterners as soft and effete. Westerners of different racial backgrounds, including African Americans and Asian Americans, projected their hopes and critiques onto an East that embodied urbanity, power, and opportunity.This interplay between “Out West” and “Back East” influenced income inequality, land use, cultural identities, and national government. It fueled myths that reshaped public lands, higher education, and the publishing industry. The cultural exchange was not one

Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public celebrations in Guyana and Trinidad, offering an analysis of the ways Islam became integral to the Caribbean, and the ways the Caribbean shaped Islamic practices. Aliyah Khan recovers stories that have been there all along, though they have received little scholarly attention. The interdisciplinary approach takes on big questions about creolization, gender, politics and cultural change, but it does so with precision and attention to detail. Aliyah Khan is an assistant professor of English and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 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 magnificent cultural biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad, 2025) charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work. As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion. In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Ri

The Book of Travels Ḥannā Diyāb: A Conversation with Johannes StephanThe Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account of his travels as a young man from his hometown of Aleppo to the court of Versailles and back again, which forever linked him to one of the most popular pieces of world literature, the Thousand and One Nights.Diyāb, a Maronite Christian, served as a guide and interpreter for the French naturalist and antiquarian Paul Lucas. Between 1706 and 1716, Diyāb and Lucas traveled through Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, Tripolitania, Tunis, Italy, and France. In Paris, Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, who added to his wildly popular translation of the Thousand and One Nights several tales related by Diyāb, including “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” When Lucas failed to make good on his promise of a position for Diyāb at Louis XIV’s Royal Library, Diyāb returned to Aleppo. In his old age, he wrote this engaging account of his youthful adventures, from capture by pirates in the Me

Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books. A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This is the extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, between the wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves together their stories to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-war Paris. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad ch