February New American Literature books

• Literary Fantasy in Contemporary Chinese Diasporic Women's Literature: Imagining Home
  
  Literary Fantasy in Contemporary Chinese Diasporic Women's Literature: Imagining Home: PS153.C45 T363 2020
  Author(s): Fang Tang
  Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books [2020]
  
  This book explores the use of literary fantasy in the construction of identity and ‘home’ in contemporary diasporic Chinese women’s literature. It argues that the use of fantasy acts as a way of undermining the power of patriarchy and unsettling fixed notions of home. The idea of home explored in this book relates to complicated struggles to gain a sense of belonging, as experienced by marginalized subjects in constructing their diasporic identities — which can best be understood as unstable, shifting, and shaped by historical conditions and power relations. Fantasy is seen to operate in the corpus of this book as a literary mode, as defined by Rosemary Jackson. Literary fantasy offers a way to rework ancient myths, fairy tales, ghost stories and legends; it also subverts conventional narratives and challenges the power of patriarchy and other dominant ideologies. Through a critical reading of four diasporic Chinese women authors, namely, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adeline Yen Mah, Ying Chen and Larissa Lai, this book aims to offer critical insights into how their works re-imagine a ‘home’ through literary fantasy which leads beyond nationalist and Orientalist stereotypes; and how essentialist conceptions of diasporic culture are challenged by global geopolitics and cultural interactions.
  
  
• The Latinx Urban Condition: Trauma, Memory, and Desire in Latinx Urban Literature and Culture
  
  The Latinx Urban Condition: Trauma, Memory, and Desire in Latinx Urban Literature and Culture: PS153.H56 L67 2020
  Author(s): Crescencio Lopez-Gonzalez
  Lanham : Lexington Books 2020.
  
  The Latinx Urban Condition brings interdisciplinary cultural theory and U.S. Latinx urban literature into conversation, focusing on the realities and urban experiences of Latinx living in major cities in the United States from the 1960’s to the present. As a cultural studies analyst of U.S. Latinx urban literature and culture, the book focuses on analyzing the works of Latinx authors who write about the cities in which they were raised and how growing up in these environments shaped their lives, their communities, and their future. Their fictional work helps us understand how the human and cultural tapestry of the Latinx community is inextricably connected to the spatial transformations taking place in many cities across the country, most notably within the cities in which the narratives take place. The main purpose is to analyze the symbolic realities lived by the characters in order to understand how Latino families and communities are experiencing displacement under instituted neoliberal policies, a process known as development and progress or gentrification. These processes are experienced through aspects of privatization, deregulation, homelessness, residential segregation, inequality, unemployment, and poverty.
  
  
• Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: Writing Diasporic Relations
  
  Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: Writing Diasporic Relations: PS153.N5 A27 2019
  Author(s): Gigi Adair
  Liverpool : Liverpool University Press 2019.
  
  This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines insights from postcolonial studies, queer theory and black Atlantic diaspora studies in novel ways to examine the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the legacy of anthropological discourses of kinship, interrogate the connections between kinship and historiography, and imagine new forms of diasporic relationality and subjectivity. The novels considered here offer sustained meditations on the meaning of kinship and its role in diasporic cultures and communities; they represent diasporic kinship in the context and crosscurrents of both historical and contemporary forces, such as slavery, colonialism, migration, political struggles and artistic creation. They show how displacement and migration require and generate new forms and understandings of kinship, and how kinship may be used as an instrument of both political oppression and resistance. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of literature in imagining possibilities for alternative forms of relationality and in finding a language to express the meaning of those relations. This book thus suggests that an analysis of discourses and practices of kinship is essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.
  
  
• The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  
  The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: PS169.P34 S46 2020
  Author(s): Jonathan Senchyne
  Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press [2020]
  
  The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.
  
  
• Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature
  
  Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature: PS169.R43 R43 2020
  Author(s): Lindsay V. Reckson
  New York : New York University Press [2020]
  
  Explores the intersection and history of American literary realism and the performance of spiritual and racial embodiment. Recovering a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism, Realist Ecstasy travels from camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals to explore realism’s relationship to spiritual experience. In her approach to realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practices—including literature, photography, audio recording, and early film—Lindsay V. Reckson argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped construct and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance: its production of new and immanent forms of being beside. Across her readings of Stephen Crane, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen, among others, Reckson triangulates secularism, realism, and racial formation in the post-Reconstruction moment. Realist Ecstasy shows how post-Reconstruction realist texts mobilized gestures—especially the gestures associated with religious ecstasy—to racialize secularism itself. Reckson offers us a distinctly new vision of American realism as a performative practice, a sustained account of how performance lives in and through literary archives, and a rich sense of how closely secularization and racialization were linked in Jim Crow America.
  
  
• New Orleans: A Literary History
  
  New Orleans: A Literary History: PS267.N49 N49 2019
  Author(s): T. R. Johnson
  Cambridge, United Kingdom ; Cambridge University Press 2019.
  
  New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. This book provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives.
  
  
• Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir : with the Lost Photographs of David Attie
  
  Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir : with the Lost Photographs of David Attie: PS3505.A59 Z469 2015
  Author(s): Truman Capote
  New York : The Little Bookroom [2015]
  
  "In 2001, The Little Bookroom published Truman Capote's long-out-of-print homage to Brooklyn, A House in the Heights. In 2014, more than fifty years after they were taken, the original photographs commissioned to illustrate the piece have been discovered by the photographer's son. Also found among the negatives were portraits of Capote taken on that same day; none of the photos have ever been published. Now, in a new edition with a new title, Brooklyn : A Personal Memoir, with the lost photographs of David Attie, the words and images will be united for the first time. The images of Brooklyn provide a stunning and atmospheric visual portrait of the city in 1959--its building, shops, street life, lost moments-- a Brooklyn at once strangely familiar yet largely vanished: horse-drawn wagons delivering produce to housewives, kids swimming in the East River and getting into mischief on the docks, dimly-lit bars, vintage signs, little girls jumping rope, bricklayers, barbers, neighborhood characters, all set against a backdrop of period architecture, that spectacular bridge, and the skyline of Manhattan. The essay itself brings to life the landscape that was for the author a world of grand homes and dimly recalled gentility, of mysterious warehouses and menacing street thugs, a garden overhung with wisteria, and the famous Promenade and waterfront--all rendered in his deft and stylish prose. Originally commissioned for Holiday magazine by John Knowles (later the author of A Separate Peace), the piece remained one of his favorites--especially its surprise ending. At the time, George Plimpton wrote that in the essay, Capote's 'love of history, gossip, character, and a skill at putting all this to words...brings Brooklyn Heights to life as vividly as any landscape Truman ever undertook to survey.' David Attie's photos enhance that landscape in a breathtaking way"--
  
  
• Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1940s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations
  
  Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1940s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations: PS351 .L66 2018
  Author(s): Felicia Hardison Londré
  London, UK : Bloomsbury Methuen Drama an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2018.
  
  The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their works to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: * Eugene O'Neill: The Iceman Cometh (1946), A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947), Long Day's Journey Into Night (written 1941, produced 1956), and A Touch of the Poet (written 1942, produced 1958); * Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948); * Arthur Miller: All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), and The Crucible (1953); * Thornton Wilder: Our Town (1938), The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and The Alcestiad (written 1940s).
  
  
• Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond
  
  Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond: PS3511.A86 Z7837 2020
  Author(s): Phillip Gordon
  Jackson : University Press of Mississippi [2020]
  
  The life and works of William Faulkner have generated numerous biographical studies exploring how Faulkner understood southern history, race, his relationship to art, and his place in the canons of American and world literature. However, some details on Faulkner’s life collected by his early biographers never made it into published form or, when they did, appeared in marginalized stories and cryptic references. The biographical record of William Faulkner’s life has yet to come to terms with the life-long friendships he maintained with gay men, the extent to which he immersed himself into gay communities in Greenwich Village and New Orleans, and how profoundly this part of his life influenced his “apocryphal” creation of Yoknapatawpha County. Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond explores the intimate friendships Faulkner maintained with gay men, among them Ben Wasson, William Spratling, and Hubert Creekmore, and places his fiction into established canons of LGBTQ literature, including World War I literature and representations of homosexuality from the Cold War. The book offers a full consideration of his relationship to gay history and identity in the twentieth century, giving rise to a new understanding of this most important of American authors.
  
  
• William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity
  
  William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity: PS3511.A86 Z98538 2019
  Author(s): Jay Watson
  Oxford ; Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  William Faulkner has enjoyed a secure reputation as American modernism's foremost fiction writer, and as a landmark figure in international literary modernism, for well over half a century. Less secure, however, has been any scholarly consensus about what those modernist credentials actually entail. Over recent decades, there have been lively debates in modernist studies over the who, what, where, when, and how of the surprisingly elusive phenomena of modernism and modernity. This book broadens and deepens an understanding of Faulkner's oeuvre by following some of the guiding questions and insights of new modernism studies scholarship into understudied aspects of Faulkner's literary modernism and his cultural modernity. William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity explores Faulkner's rural Mississippians as modernizing subjects in their own right rather than mere objects of modernization; traces the new speed gradients, media formations, and intensifications of sensory and affective experience that the twentieth century brought to the cities and countryside of the US South; maps the fault lines in whiteness as a racial modernity under construction and contestation during the Jim Crow period; resituates Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County within the transnational counter-modernities of the Black Atlantic; and follows the author's imaginative engagement with modern biopolitics through his late work A Fable, a novel Faulkner hoped to make his 'magnum o.' By returning to the utterly uncontroversial fact of Faulkner's modernism with a critical sensibility sharpened by new modernism studies, William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity aims to spark further reappraisal of a distinguished and quite dazzling body of fiction. Perhaps even make it new.
  
  
• The First Book of Lankhmar
  
  The First Book of Lankhmar: PS3523.E4583 F57 2001
  Author(s): Fritz Leiber
  London : Gollancz 2001.
  
  From the moment when they first met, in the commission of the same, audacious theft, Fafhrd, the giant barbarian warrior from the Cold Waste, and the Gray Mouser, master thief, novice wizard and expert swordsman, felt no ordinary affinity. Forged over the gleam of sharpened steel as, back to back, they faced their foes, theirs was a friendship that would take them from adventure to misadventure across all of Nehwon, from the caves of the inner earth to the waves of the outer sea. But it was in the dark alleys and noisome back streets of the great fog-shrouded city of Lankhmar that they became legends. THE FIRST BOOK OF LANKHMAR includes the first four volumes of the hugely enjoyable Swords series.
  
  
• Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism
  
  Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism: PS3537.T323 Z5887 2020
  Author(s): Amy Feinstein
  Gainesville : University Press of Florida [2020]
  
  Challenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein's constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career. Amy Feinstein argues that Judaism was central to Stein's ideas about modernity, showing how Stein connects the modernist era to the Jewish experience. Combing through Stein's scholastic writings, drafting notebooks, and literary works, Feinstein analyzes references to Judaism that have puzzled scholars. She reveals the never-before-discussed influence of Matthew Arnold as well as a hidden Jewish framework in Stein's epic novel The Making of Americans. In Stein's experimental 'voices' poems, Feinstein identifies an explicitly Jewish vocabulary that expresses themes of marriage, nationalism, and Zionism. She also shows how Wars I Have Seen, written in Vichy France during World War II, compare the experience of wartime occupation with the historic persecution of Jews.Affirming the importance of Jewish identity and modernist style to Gertrude Stein's legacy as a writer, this book radically changes the way we read and appreciate Stein's work.
  
  
• New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race
  
  New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race: PS3545.E6 N49 2020
  Author(s): Harriet Pollack
  Jackson : University Press of Mississippi [2020]
  
  Contributions by Jacob Agner, Susan V. Donaldson, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Jean C. Griffith, Ebony Lumumba, Rebecca Mark, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Adrienne Akins Warfield The year 2013 saw the publication of Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race, a collection in which twelve critics changed the conversation on Welty’s fiction and photography by mining and deciphering the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South. The thirteen diverse voices in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty’s uses of African American signifying in her short stories and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. Contributors discuss her adaptations of gothic plots, haunted houses, Civil War stories, and film noir. And they frame Welty’s work with such subjects as Bob Dylan’s songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in America, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to other works by such contemporary writers as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Discussions of race and class here also bring her masterwork The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, underrepresented in earlier conversations, into new focus. Moreover, as a group these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, busily altering literary form with her frequent, pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres.
  
  
• Giovanni's Room
  
  Giovanni's Room: PS3552.A45 G5 2016
  Author(s): James Baldwin
  New York : Alfred A Knopf 2016.
  
  'Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils...' Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
  
  
• Words Written Against the Walls of the City: Poems
  
  Words Written Against the Walls of the City: Poems: PS3552.O5943 W67 2019
  Author(s): Bruce Bond
  Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press [2019]
  
  Bruce Bond’s new collection, Words Written Against the Walls of the City, confronts problems of collectivity and individual freedom in ways that bring the historical into conjunction with the personal details of everyday lives. This luminous work approaches cities, real and symbolic, as both metaphors for and embodiments of the social self, inescapably embedded in a contemporary world and yet removed, summoned by the same technical connectivity that conspires to pull us further apart, one from another. In the end, Bond’s assured verse reveals how a sense of some communal whole inspires its share of indebtedness and awe in an individual’s efforts to navigate the environments that enfold us.
  
  
• This is Pleasure
  
  This is Pleasure: PS3557.A36 T45 2019
  Author(s): Mary Gaitskill
  London : Serpent's Tail 2019.
  
  'I don't know why I behaved the way I did, and I kept doing it; he kept doing it. And though I might once have easily brushed it away, suddenly I could not. Nor could I confront him. The conversation moved too quickly.' This is Pleasure is an extraordinary work by one of the world's finest writers, and achieves more in 15,000 words than most full-length novels. Following the unravelling of the life of a male publisher undone by allegations of sexual impropriety and harassment, and the female friend who tries to understand, and explain, his actions, it looks unflinchingly at our present moment and rejects moral certainties to show us that there are many sides to every story. Mary Gaitskill has spent her whole career mining the complexity of human relationships on both an individual and societal scale with wisdom and grace. Here her insights are more piercing and timely than ever.
  
  
• City of Girls: A Novel
  
  City of Girls: A Novel: PS3557.I3415 C58 2019
  Author(s): Elizabeth Gilbert
  New York : Riverhead Books an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 2019.
  
  From the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and The Signature of All Things, a delicious novel of glamour, sex, and adventure, about a young woman discovering that you don't have to be a good girl to be a good person. Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by Oprah.com, Real Simple, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, GoodReads, PureWow, Vulture, The Millions and more. "Life is both fleeting and dangerous, and there is no point in denying yourself pleasure, or being anything other than what you are." Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater called the Lily Playhouse. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters, from the fun-chasing showgirls to a sexy male actor, a grand-dame actress, a lady-killer writer, and no-nonsense stage manager. But when Vivian makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Ultimately, though, it leads her to a new understanding of the kind of life she craves - and the kind of freedom it takes to pursue it. It will also lead to the love of her life, a love that stands out from all the rest. Now eighty-nine years old and telling her story at last, Vivian recalls how the events of those years altered the course of her life - and the gusto and autonomy with which she approached it. "At some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time," she muses. "After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is." Written with a powerful wisdom about human desire and connection, City of Girls is a love story like no other.
  
  
• Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000-2018
  
  Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000-2018: PS3558.A28 A6 2019
  Author(s): Marilyn Hacker
  Manchester : Carcanet 2019.
  
  A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Special Commendation. This generous volume collects new work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English. Hacker writes pantoums, sonnets, canzones, ghazals and tanka; she is witty, angry, traditional, experimental. Her poetry is in open dialogue with its sources, which include W. H. Auden, Hayden Carruth, Adrienne Rich, and latterly a host of contemporary French, Francophone and Arab poets. Hacker's engagement with Arabic, almost a second language in Paris, where she lives, has led to her exchanges and engagement with Arabic-speaking immigrants and refugees in France, whose own stories and memories deepen and broaden her already polyglot oeuvre. Her poetry has been celebrated for its fusion of precise form and demotic language; with this, her latest volume, Hacker ranges further, answering Whitman's call for 'an internationality of languages'.
  
  
• Poems for Camilla
  
  Poems for Camilla: PS3558.A3116 P64 2018
  Author(s): Rachel Hadas
  Evansville, Indiana : Measure Press [2018]
  
  A new collection of original poems by Rachel Hadas.
  
  
• Wild Persistence: Poems
  
  Wild Persistence: Poems: PS3558.O59 W55 2019
  Author(s): Patricia Hooper
  Tampa : University of Tampa Press [2019]
  
  The poems in Wild Persistence often involve moments when the human and natural worlds intersect: a Sandhill Crane dancing at the window of a grieving woman, a copperhead snake confronting a gardener, a billboard photo of a missing child slowly being eroded by weather and the passage of time. Although these poems mourn numerous losses, they celebrate the world in which such losses take place, turning for perspective to nature with its cyclical renewals and to the resilience of the human spirit.
  
  
• Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
  
  Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: PS3558.O927 A6 2019
  Author(s): Bette Howland
  Brooklyn, NY : A Public Space Books 2019.
  
  "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage restores to the literary canon an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent in the 1980s before all but disappearing from public view for decades ... With direct and powerful language in the tradition of Lucia Berlin, Kathleen Collins, and Grace Paley, Howland chronicles the tensions of her generation"--Dust jacket flap.
  
  
• The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact: A Novel
  
  The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact: A Novel: PS3561.R252 B78 2020
  Author(s): Larry Kramer
  New York : Farrar Straus and Giroux 2020.
  
  In The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact, Larry Kramer completes his radical reimagining of his country’s history. Ranging from the brothels of 1950s Washington, D.C., to the activism of the 1980s and beyond, Kramer offers an elaborate phantasmagoria of bigoted conspiracists in the halls of power and ordinary individuals suffering their consequences. With wit and bite, Kramer explores (among other things) the sex lives of every recent president; the complicated behavior of America’s two greatest spies, J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton; the rise of Sexopolis, the country’s favorite magazine; and the genocidal activities of every branch of our health-care and drug-delivery systems. The American People: Volume 2 is narrated by (among others) the writer Fred Lemish and his two friends—Dr. Daniel Jerusalem, who works for America’s preeminent health-care institution, and his twin brother, David Jerusalem, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who was abused by many powerful men. Together they track a terrible plague that intensifies as the government ignores it and depict the bold and imaginative activists who set out to shock the nation’s conscience. In Kramer’s telling, the United States is dedicated to the proposition that very few men are created equal, and those who love other men may be destined for death. Here is a historical novel like no other—satiric and impassioned and driven by an uncompromising moral and literary vision.
  
  
• John Updike: Novels 1968-1975 (LOA #326): Couples / Rabbit Redux / a Month of Sundays
  
  John Updike: Novels 1968-1975 (LOA #326): Couples / Rabbit Redux / a Month of Sundays: PS3571.P4 A6 2020
  Author(s): John Updike
  New York : The Library of America [2020]
  
  Library of America's definitive Updike edition continues with three masterful novels on the joys and the discontents of the sexual revolution Here for the first time in one volume are three of John Updike's most essential novels--the scandalous Couples, the brilliant sequel Rabbit Redux, and the uproarious A Month of Sundays--which together form an unforgettable triptych of the social turbulence that roiled America from the Kennedy to the Nixon years. Written with the grace, verve, and style of one of literature's most sophisticated entertainers, these books not only reveal Updike's genius in characterization and his formal versatility as a novelist but also delve into the complexities of sex and marriage, social class and personal morality, and the difficult quandaries of the flesh and the spirit. As a special feature the volume also presents two short pieces that shed light on the novels and the tale "Couples: A Short Story," the origin of the novel of the same name, written in 1963 but deemed unsuitable for publication by The New Yorker.
  
  
• Verge: Stories
  
  Verge: Stories: PS3575.U35 V47 2020
  Author(s): Lidia Yuknavitch
  New York : Riverhead Books 2020.
  
  Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year by Vogue, Buzzfeed, Hello Giggles, and more. A fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis, from one of the most galvanizing voices in American fiction. I tell you, do not go near that place. Do not go near it. Graywolves guard the ground there. Girls are growing from guts, enough for a body and language all the way out of this world. An eight-year-old trauma victim is enlisted as an underground courier, rushing frozen organs through the alleys of Eastern Europe. A young janitor transforms discarded objects into a fantastical, sprawling miniature city until a shocking discovery forces him to rethink his creation. A brazen child tells off a pack of schoolyard tormentors with the spirited invention of an eleventh commandment. A wounded man drives eastward, through tears and grief, toward an unexpected transcendence. Lidia Yuknavitch's bestselling novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, and her groundbreaking memoir The Chronology of Water, have established her as one of our most urgent contemporary voices: a writer with a rare gift for tracing the jagged boundaries between art and trauma, sex and violence, destruction and survival. In Verge, her first collection of short fiction, she turns her eye to life on the margins, in all its beauty and brutality. A book of heroic grace and empathy, Verge is a viscerally powerful and moving survey of our modern heartache life.
  
  
• All This Could Be Yours
  
  All This Could Be Yours: PS3601.T784 A795 2019
  Author(s): Jami Attenberg
  Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt [2019]
  
  From critically acclaimed New York Times best-selling author Jami Attenberg comes a novel of family secrets: think the drama of Big Little Lies set in the heat of a New Orleans summer “If I know why they are the way they are, then maybe I can learn why I am the way I am,” says Alex Tuchman of her parents. Now that her father is on his deathbed, Alex—a strong-headed lawyer, devoted mother, and loving sister--feels she can finally unearth the secrets of who Victor is and what he did over the course of his life and career. (A power-hungry real estate developer, he is, by all accounts, a bad man.) She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tightlipped mother, Barbra. As Barbra fends off Alex’s unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous life with Victor. Meanwhile Gary, Alex’s brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary’s wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, buying up all the lipstick in drug stores around New Orleans and bursting into crying fits. Dysfunction is at its peak. As each family member grapples with Victor’s history, they must figure out a way to move forward—with one another, for themselves, and for the sake of their children. ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS is a timely, piercing exploration of what it means to be caught in the web of a toxic man who abused his power; it shows how those webs can tangle a family for generations and what it takes to—maybe, hopefully—break free. With her signature “sparkling prose” (Marie Claire) and incisive wit, Jami Attenberg deftly explores one of the most important subjects of our age.
  
  
• Instant Love: Fiction
  
  Instant Love: Fiction: PS3601.T784 I57 2007
  Author(s): Jami Attenberg
  New York : Three River Press ©2007.
  
  Explores the meaning of being in love and the meaning of loneliness through the romantic lives of three young woman--precocious Holly, a woman with adventurous sexual appeetites; her settled but sometimes discontented sister Maggie; and Sarah Lee, a shy, wandering artist who has abandoned her search for love. A first novel. Original. 20,000 first printing.
  
  
• The Melting Season
  
  The Melting Season: PS3601.T784 M45 2010
  Author(s): Jami Attenberg
  New York : Riverhead Books 2010.
  
  Fleeing her hometown with a suitcase of stolen money after being abandoned by her husband, Catherine Madison hopes to escape her painful past and self-doubt by starting over in Las Vegas, where unexpected friendships encourage her to accept difficult truths.
  
  
• Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar
  
  Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar: PS3601.U86354 A6 2019
  Author(s): Ron A. Austin
  Cape Girardeau, MO : Southeast Missouri State University Press 2019.
  
  "Austin's semi-autobiographical, linked story collection follows the misadventures of Avery Colt as he struggles to survive in North St. Louis alongside his family. Learning the best way to slaughter a goat, rebuilding his family's corner market, and reckoning the weight of a revolver are a few of the challenges Avery faces. As he matures through each page, Avery takes control of his circumstances and attempts dangerous feats of alchemy. By confronting his own fears and limitations, he seeks to transform cruelty into compassion, rind into fruit, despair into hope. Charged with urgency and emotion, Austin's prose faithfully renders a community determined to overcome crisis with strength, dark humor, and plenty of heart" --
  
  
• Thirteenth Balloon
  
  Thirteenth Balloon: PS3602.I23 A6 2020
  Author(s): Mark Bibbins
  Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press [2020]
  
  Bibbins turns his eye to the American AIDS crisis with quiet consideration and dark wit, questioning personal loss amongst intolerance.
  
  
• Woods and Clouds Interchangeable
  
  Woods and Clouds Interchangeable: PS3603.R3553 A6 2019
  Author(s): Michael Earl Craig
  Seattle : Wave Books [2019]
  
  Humorous and wildly inventive poems from a master of absurdist poetic theater.
  
  
• Parker Looks Up: An Extraordinary Moment
  
  Parker Looks Up: An Extraordinary Moment: PS3603.U779 P3 2019
  Author(s): Parker Curry, Jessica Curry
  New York : Aladdin 2019.
  
  A New York Times bestseller! A visit to Washington, DC’s National Portrait Gallery forever alters Parker Curry’s young life when she views First Lady Michelle Obama’s portrait. When Parker Curry came face-to-face with Amy Sherald’s transcendent portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery, she didn’t just see the First Lady of the United States. She saw a queen—one with dynamic self-assurance, regality, beauty, and truth who captured this young girl’s imagination. When a nearby museum-goer snapped a photo of a mesmerized Parker, it became an internet sensation. Inspired by this visit, Parker, and her mother, Jessica Curry, tell the story of a young girl and her family, whose trip to a museum becomes an extraordinary moment, in a moving picture book. Parker Looks Up follows Parker, along with her baby sister and her mother, and her best friend Gia and Gia’s mother, as they walk the halls of a museum, seeing paintings of everyone and everything from George Washington Carver to Frida Kahlo, exotic flowers to graceful ballerinas. Then, Parker walks by Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama…and almost passes it. But she stops...and looks up! Parker saw the possibility and promise, the hopes and dreams of herself in this powerful painting of Michelle Obama. An everyday moment became an extraordinary one…that continues to resonate its power, inspiration, and indelible impact. Because, as Jessica Curry said, “anything is possible regardless of race, class, or gender.” **FOREWORD BY ARTIST AMY SHERALD**
  
  
• The Hard Tomorrow
  
  The Hard Tomorrow: PS3604.A95693 H37 2019
  Author(s): Eleanor Davis
  [Montréal, Québec] : Drawn & Quarterly 2019.
  
  The gorgeous and empathetic story of one couple’s search for hope and a peaceful future Hannah is a thirty-something wife, home-health worker, and antiwar activist. Her husband, Johnny, is a stay-at-home pothead working—or "working"—on building them a house before the winter chill sets in. They're currently living and screwing in the back of a truck, hoping for a pregnancy, which seems like it will never come. Legs in the air, for a better chance at conception, Hannah scans fertility Reddits while Johnny dreams about propagating plants—kale, tomatoes—to ensure they have sufficient sustenance should the end times come, which, given their fragile democracy strained under the weight of a carceral state and the risk of horrible war, doesn’t seem so far off. Helping Hannah in her fight for the future is her best friend Gabby, a queer naturalist she idolizes and who adores her. Helping Johnny build the house is Tyler, an off-the-grid conspiracy theorist driven sick by his own cloudy notions of reality. Told with tenderness and care in an undefined near future, Eleanor Davis's The Hard Tomorrow blazes unrestrained, as moments of human connection are doused in fear and threats. Her astute projections probe at current anxieties in a cautionary tale that begs the question: What will happen after tomorrow?
  
  
• The Captain and the Glory: An Entertainment
  
  The Captain and the Glory: An Entertainment: PS3605.G48 C37 2019
  Author(s): Dave Eggers
  New York : Alfred A Knopf [2019]
  
  A savage satire of the United States in the throes of insanity, this blisteringly funny novel tells the story of a noble ship, the Glory, and the loud, clownish, and foul Captain who steers it to the brink of disaster. When the decorated Captain of a great ship descends the gangplank for the final time, a new leader, a man with a yellow feather in his hair, vows to step forward. Though he has no experience, no knowledge of nautical navigation or maritime law, and though he has often remarked he doesn't much like boats, he solemnly swears to shake things up. Together with his band of petty thieves and confidence men known as the Upskirt Boys, the Captain thrills his passengers, writing his dreams and notions on the cafeteria wipe-away board, boasting of his exemplary anatomy, devouring cheeseburgers, and tossing overboard anyone who displeases him. Until one day a famous pirate, long feared by passengers of the Glory but revered by the Captain for how phenomenally masculine he looked without a shirt while riding a horse, appears on the horizon . . . Absurd, hilarious, and all too recognizable, The Captain and the Glory is a wicked farce of contemporary America only Dave Eggers could dream up.
  
  
• Story
  
  Story: PS3606.I73 S76 2019
  Author(s): Jennifer Firestone
  Brooklyn, New York : Ugly Duckling Presse 2019.
  
  Poetry. There is a STORY at a beach. There is a couple evolving and devolving inside a new fangled form of the couplet. There is the landscape: the ocean, sand, and sun that language flails in trying to recreate. "The beach reached for them but slipped. / The beach shells and sound. / The beach the one syllable until soft." STORY is a cryptic film, an old photograph, a mystery, where narrative, memory, truth, and trauma are interrogated, where credibility slips much like the language that is storytelling. Where, "what is the truth but what we say." "A massively ambitious and disciplined work that utilizes cinematic and novelistic technique, sometimes reminding me of Nouvelle Vague--and at other times, a rich and textured grammar of the interpersonal."--Erica Hunt
  
  
• Cleanness
  
  Cleanness: PS3607.R4686 C58 2020
  Author(s): Garth Greenwell
  New York : Farrar Straus and Giroux 2020.
  
  In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell expands his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song. In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student’s confession recalls his own first love, a stranger’s seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves. Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell’s beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared “an instant classic” by The New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.
  
  
• Utopia Pipe Dream Memory
  
  Utopia Pipe Dream Memory: PS3607.U786 U86 2019
  Author(s): Anna Gurton-Wachter
  Brooklyn, New York : Ugly Duckling Presse 2019.
  
  Poetry. Women's Studies. UTOPIA PIPE DREAM MEMORY builds upon impossible imagined intimacies, relishing the pleasure of slow, attentive learning. In an unfolding of rhythms, repetitions, and distended narratives it envisions a space of play and ecstatic influence, drawing characters such as Gertrude Stein, Bernadette Mayer and Maya Deren into dialogues and visions that articulate the tension between embodiment and voice, identification and materiality. These narratives push towards a unified dispersal, a complex act of exultant feminine chaos, letting slip the boundaries between what is animal, what is describable, and what can be made to appear. "UTOPIA PIPE DREAM MEMORY is a plethora of wonder and exuberance. Anna Gurton-Wachter, 'in her woman treasure form,' has conjured a lush and evocative new wave of feminist thinking where subject and object are erotic enablers and the spell cast by narration is our ecological surround redoubled, brimming with potent and unbounded fascination. She rethinks from inside the juggernaut what a sociology of the imagination can look like. I adore the perverse transparency of mesmerizing similitudes and divergences that tug at each other, at perception and at the reader's third eye, fixated on desire's embodied visions. Anna's capacity for a theatrics of iconoclastic reverie is in a league of its own."--Brenda Iijima
  
  
• The Vampire Gideon's Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls
  
  The Vampire Gideon's Suicide Hotline and Halfway House for Orphaned Girls: PS3611.A7888 V35 2018
  Author(s): Andrew Katz
  Philadelphia, PA : Lanternfish Press [2018]
  
  A vampire who runs a suicide hotline tries to do what he can to help humans who don't want to live any longer and, in the process, accidentally adopts a teenage girl. This dark comedy follows the vampire Gideon as he tries to help the contemporary "children" he meets over the hotline-even as he avoids finding ways to help himself.
  
  
• Long Bright River: A Novel
  
  Long Bright River: A Novel: PS3613.O5644 L66 2019
  Author(s): Liz Moore
  New York : Riverhead Books 2020.
  
  AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK "[Moore’s] careful balance of the hard-bitten with the heartfelt is what elevates Long Bright River from entertaining page-turner to a book that makes you want to call someone you love.” – The New York Times Book Review "This is police procedural and a thriller par excellence, one in which the city of Philadelphia itself is a character (think Boston and Mystic River). But it’s also a literary tale narrated by a strong woman with a richly drawn personal life – powerful and genre-defying.” – People "A thoughtful, powerful novel by a writer who displays enormous compassion for her characters. Long Bright River is an outstanding crime novel… I absolutely loved it." —Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Girl on the Train Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn't be more different. Then one of them goes missing. In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling. Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit--and her sister--before it's too late. Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.
  
  
• Jack and the Ghost
  
  Jack and the Ghost: PS3616.O56738 J33 2019
  Author(s): Chan Poling
  Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press [2019]
  
  "From two beloved Minnesota musicians, a unique and moody collaboration in the form of a picture book for adults. Jack and the Ghost is a gothic, lyrical evocation of a shipwreck, ghosts, and living through grief in a seaside town"--
  
  
• Echoes from the Ashes: Holocaust Poems of Life, Death and Re-Birth
  
  Echoes from the Ashes: Holocaust Poems of Life, Death and Re-Birth: PS3618.A735 E35 2019
  Author(s): Simcha Paull Raphael
  Boulder, Colorado : Albion Andalus 2019.
  
  "Echoes From the Ashes is a moving testament to the power of pilgrimage, even to the sites of some of the world's most horrific crimes. While Raphael does not mince words in vividly describing the evil he and his young students encountered on the March of the Living, the book does not, ultimately, evoke cynicism or unyielding despair in the mind of the reader. On virtually every page of this deeply touching work, Raphael implores us to remember the rich Jewish life that existed in Poland for millennia and to rededicate ourselves to preserving the legacy, values and deep devotion of our holy ancestors. He also reminds us that our response to these unimaginable crimes is to never be silent, to stand up against injustice, and to bring more light into the world, after encountering such infinite darkness. When one turns the final page of this book, we understand that regardless of the seemingly endless travails of the Jewish people, to be Jewish means to never give up hope-in God, ourselves or in humanity. In our troubled times, Simcha Raphael's powerful message is certainly one worth heeding."- Eli Rubenstein, National Director of March of the Living Canada
  
  
• The Way of Kings
  
  The Way of Kings: PS3619.A533 W375 2010
  Author(s): Brandon Sanderson
  New York : A Tor Book [2010]
  
  A new epic series by the best-selling writer of Robert Jordan's final Wheel of Time® novels introduces the world of Roshar through the experiences of a war-weary royal compelled by visions, a highborn youth condemned to military slavery and a woman who would save her impoverished house. Reprint. A best-selling novel.
  
  
• Words of Radiance: Book Two of the Stormlight Archive
  
  Words of Radiance: Book Two of the Stormlight Archive: PS3619.A533 W67 2014
  Author(s): Brandon Sanderson
  New York : Tor 2014.
  
  From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance, Book Two of the Stormlight Archive, continues the immersive fantasy epic that The Way of Kings began. Expected by his enemies to die the miserable death of a military slave, Kaladin survived to be given command of the royal bodyguards, a controversial first for a low-status "darkeyes." Now he must protect the king and Dalinar from every common peril as well as the distinctly uncommon threat of the Assassin, all while secretly struggling to master remarkable new powers that are somehow linked to his honorspren, Syl. The Assassin, Szeth, is active again, murdering rulers all over the world of Roshar, using his baffling powers to thwart every bodyguard and elude all pursuers. Among his prime targets is Highprince Dalinar, widely considered the power behind the Alethi throne. His leading role in the war would seem reason enough, but the Assassin's master has much deeper motives. Brilliant but troubled Shallan strives along a parallel path. Despite being broken in ways she refuses to acknowledge, she bears a terrible burden: to somehow prevent the return of the legendary Voidbringers and the civilization-ending Desolation that will follow. The secrets she needs can be found at the Shattered Plains, but just arriving there proves more difficult than she could have imagined. Meanwhile, at the heart of the Shattered Plains, the Parshendi are making an epochal decision. Hard pressed by years of Alethi attacks, their numbers ever shrinking, they are convinced by their war leader, Eshonai, to risk everything on a desperate gamble with the very supernatural forces they once fled. The possible consequences for Parshendi and humans alike, indeed, for Roshar itself, are as dangerous as they are incalculable. Other Tor books by Brandon Sanderson The Cosmere The Stormlight Archive The Way of Kings Words of Radiance Edgedancer (Novella) Oathbringer (forthcoming) The Mistborn trilogy Mistborn: The Final Empire The Well of Ascension The Hero of Ages Mistborn: The Wax and Wayne series Alloy of Law Shadows of Self Bands of Mourning Collection Arcanum Unbounded Other Cosmere novels Elantris Warbreaker The Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians series Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians The Scrivener's Bones The Knights of Crystallia The Shattered Lens The Dark Talent The Rithmatist series The Rithmatist Other books by Brandon Sanderson The Reckoners Steelheart Firefight Calamity At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
  
  
• It's Not Magic
  
  It's Not Magic: PS3619.A56553 A6 2019
  Author(s): Jon Sands
  Boston : Beacon Press [2019]
  
  Snapshots of youth, displayed with verve and sparkling clarity, in a new collection of poems that "dazzles with its linguistic sleight of hand" (Richard Blanco). From jaunts through New York subways, to a Cincinnati Waffle House, to a chance encounter with one's future life partner, Sands writes in turns autobiographically and imaginatively, drawing on voices from his private world and the public sphere to create an urgent portrait of youth that is almost rebellious in its sheer, persistent joy. Nostalgic and vivid, this collection of poems is written reverie. Selected by Richard Blanco, Jon Sands is the winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series.
  
  
• Dear Martin
  
  Dear Martin: PS3619.T663 D43 2017
  Author(s): Nic Stone
  New York : Crown [2017]
  
  "Powerful, wrenching.” –JOHN GREEN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Turtles All the Way Down "Raw and gripping." –JASON REYNOLDS, New York Times bestselling coauthor of All American Boys "A must-read!” –ANGIE THOMAS, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Hate U Give Raw, captivating, and undeniably real, Nic Stone joins industry giants Jason Reynolds and Walter Dean Myers as she boldly tackles American race relations in this stunning New York Times bestselling debut, a William C. Morris Award Finalist. Justyce McAllister is a good kid, an honor student, and always there to help a friend—but none of that matters to the police officer who just put him in handcuffs. Despite leaving his rough neighborhood behind, he can't escape the scorn of his former peers or the ridicule of his new classmates. Justyce looks to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for answers. But do they hold up anymore? He starts a journal to Dr. King to find out. Then comes the day Justyce goes driving with his best friend, Manny, windows rolled down, music turned up—way up, sparking the fury of a white off-duty cop beside them. Words fly. Shots are fired. Justyce and Manny are caught in the crosshairs. In the media fallout, it's Justyce who is under attack. "Vivid and powerful." -Booklist, Starred Review "A visceral portrait of a young man reckoning with the ugly, persistent violence of social injustice." -Publishers Weekly
  
  
• The Far Field
  
  The Far Field: PS3622.I492 F37 2018
  Author(s): Madhuri Vijay
  New York : Grove Press 2019.
  
  WINNER OF THE 2019 JCB PRIZE IN LITERATURE “The Far Field is remarkable, a novel at once politically timely and morally timeless. Madhuri Vijay traces the fault lines of history, love, and obligation running through a fractured family and country. Few novels generate enough power to transform their characters, fewer still their readers. The Far Field does both.”—Anthony Marra, author of The Tzar of Love and Techno Gorgeously tactile and sweeping in historical and socio-political scope, Pushcart Prize-winner Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field follows a complicated flaneuse across the Indian subcontinent as she reckons with her past, her desires, and the tumultuous present. In the wake of her mother’s death, Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir’s politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love. With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt, and the limits of compassion.
  
  
• Edges & Fray: on language, presence, and (invisible) animal architectures
  
  Edges & Fray: on language, presence, and (invisible) animal architectures: PS3622.O345 E34 2020
  Author(s): Danielle Vogel
  Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press [2020]
  
  not the format on the page writing is the retrieval of material —— to produce a desired , shape as open : archiving the word architecture build within the space of this thought . sound , shaped into series becomes sentence and series Edges & Fray is an embodied meditation that cultivates receptivity and deep listening to the ways we inhabit language and its ethereal resilience. Combining close observation of birds' nests and the writing process, Danielle Vogel brings the reader into communion with language as a mode of presence. Experimental and deeply grounded, its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.
  
  
• In West Mills
  
  In West Mills: PS3623.I66425 I5 2019
  Author(s): De'Shawn Charles Winslow
  New York : Bloomsbury Publishing 2019.
  
  "A bighearted novel about family, migration, and the unbearable difficulties of love. Here's a cast of characters you won't soon forget." Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie "Winslow's impressive debut novel introduces readers to both a flawed, fascinating character in fiction and a wonderful new voice in literature." Real Simple, Best Books of 2019 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Named a Most Anticipated Novel by TIME MAGAZINE * USA TODAY * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * NYLON * SOUTHERN LIVING * THE LOS ANGELES TIMES * ESSENCE * THE MILLIONS * REAL SIMPLE* HUFFINGTON POST * BUZZFEED Azalea "Knot" Centre is determined to live life as she pleases. Let the people of West Mills say what they will; the neighbors' gossip won't keep Knot from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, Knot is starting to learn that her freedom comes at a high price. Alone in her one-room shack, ostracized from her relatives and cut off from her hometown, Knot turns to her neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some semblance of family and home. Otis Lee is eager to help. A lifelong fixer, Otis Lee is determined to steer his friends and family away from decisions that will cause them heartache and ridicule. After his failed attempt as a teenager to help his older sister, Otis Lee discovers a possible path to redemption in the chaos Knot brings to his doorstep. But while he's busy trying to fix Knot's life, Otis Lee finds himself powerless to repair the many troubles within his own family, as the long-buried secrets of his troubled past begin to come to light. Set in an African American community in rural North Carolina from 1941 to 1987, In West Mills is a magnificent, big-hearted small-town story about family, friendship, storytelling, and the redemptive power of love.
  
  
• Coming of Age in a Hardscrabble World: A Memoir Anthology
  
  Coming of Age in a Hardscrabble World: A Memoir Anthology: PS508.W73 C76 2019
  Author(s): Nancy C. Atwood, Roger Atwood
  Athens : The University of Georgia Press [2019]
  
  Nonfiction storytelling is at its best in this anthology of excerpts from memoirs by thirty authors--some eminent, some less well known--who grew up tough and talented in working-class America. Their stories, selected from literary memoirs published between 1982 and 2014, cover episodes from childhood to young adulthood within a spectrum of life-changing experiences. Although diverse ethnically, racially, geographically, and in sexual orientation, these writers share a youthful precocity and determination to find opportunity where little appeared to exist. All of these perspectives are explored within the larger context of economic insecurity--a needed perspective in this time of growing inequality. These memoirists grew up in families that led "hardscrabble" lives in which struggle and strenuous effort were the norm. Their stories offer insight on the realities of class in America, as well as inspiration and hope.
  
  
• A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers
  
  A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers: PS648.F86 P46 2019
  Author(s): Charlie Jane Anders, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Charles Yu
  New York : One World [2019]
  
  A glittering landscape of twenty-five speculative stories that challenge oppression and envision new futures for America—from N. K. Jemisin, Charles Yu, Jamie Ford, G. Willow Wilson, Charlie Jane Anders, Hugh Howey, and more. In these tumultuous times, in our deeply divided country, many people are angry, frightened, and hurting. Knowing that imagining a brighter tomorrow has always been an act of resistance, editors Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams invited an extraordinarily talented group of writers to share stories that explore new forms of freedom, love, and justice. They asked for narratives that would challenge oppressive American myths, release us from the chokehold of our history, and give us new futures to believe in. They also asked that the stories be badass. The result is this spectacular collection of twenty-five tales that blend the dark and the light, the dystopian and the utopian. These tales are vivid with struggle and hardship—whether it’s the othered and the terrorized, or dragonriders and covert commandos—but these characters don’t flee, they fight. Thrilling, inspiring, and a sheer joy to read, A People’s Future of the United States is a gift for anyone who believes in our power to dream a just world. Featuring stories by Violet Allen • Charlie Jane Anders • Lesley Nneka Arimah • Ashok K. Banker • Tobias S. Buckell • Tananarive Due • Omar El Akkad • Jamie Ford • Maria Dahvana Headley • Hugh Howey • Lizz Huerta • Justina Ireland • N. K. Jemisin • Alice Sola Kim • Seanan McGuire • Sam J. Miller • Daniel José Older • Malka Older • Gabby Rivera • A. Merc Rustad • Kai Cheng Thom • Catherynne M. Valente • Daniel H. Wilson • G. Willow Wilson • Charles Yu
  
  

Other new American Literature books

• Girl at War : A Novel / Nović, Sara, 1987-: PS3614.O929 G57 2016