Books

An international group of writers explore conceptualizations of what defined “East” and “West” in Eastern Europe, imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union. The contributors analyze the effects of transnational interactions on ideology, politics, and cultural production.

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony’s residents followed Antonio Conselheiro, who promoted a communal existence free from taxes and oppression. Estimates of the death toll range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand. Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this event. In her study, Johnson views the process of nation building and the silencing of “other” voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sert›es, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been “sentenced” to history by this work.

A historical guidebook for topics ranging from the networked city to the global internet that illuminates the political, economic, and technological forces shaping the infrastructure of modern life.

A Comprehensive History of Pittsburgh’s Black Population from Colonial Times to the 1930s

These multidisciplinary essays explore the cultural mediation of relationships between people and urban spaces in Latin/o America, and how these mediations shape the identities of cities and their residents.

Miller defines college English studies as literacy studies and examines how it has evolved in tandem with broader developments in literacy and the literate. He maps out “four corners” of English departments: literature, language studies, teacher education, and writing studies. Miller identifies their development with broader changes in the technologies and economies of literacy that have redefined what students write and read, which careers they enter, and how literature represents their experiences and aspirations.

Winner of the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

This book offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception.

Queloides catalogs an art exhibit on the persistence of racism and racial discrimination in contemporary Cuba. Despite the social transformations implemented by the Cuban revolutionary government since the early 1960s, racism continues to be a deep wound in Cuban society, one that generates countless social and cultural scars. The twelve artists who participate in Queloides insist on the need to acknowledge and debate this social problem. Bilingual in English and Spanish, the book includes several essays that analyze the work of these visual artists in the context of changes experienced by Cuban society since the 1990s, including the resurgence of racist attitudes and behaviors.

The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy.

Bringing the Shovel Down is a re-imagination of the violent mythologies of state and power.

“These poems speak out of a global consciousness as well as an individual wisdom that is bright with pity, terror, and rage, and which asks the reader to realize that she is not alone—that the grief he carries is not just his own. Gay is a poet of conscience, who echoes Tomas Transtromer’s ‘We do not surrender. But want peace.'”—Jean Valentine

Edited and with a foreword by Robert Philen

“Clay, red clay in particular, recurs several times throughout the collection as a motif of earth. It is the substance of creation, but always of impermanent things, whether heroes or Babylonian statues with feet of clay, or of things durable but fragile, such as the cuneiform tablets of ‘A Parking Lot Just Outside the Ruins of Babylon.'”—Robert Philen, from the Foreword

Youngner examines the transformation of the depiction of industry in 19th century Pittsburgh from environmental nuisance to an idealized glorification of industrial might, in both fine art and illustration.

World Tree is in many respects, David Wojahn’s most ambitious collection to date; especially notable is a 25-poem sequence of ekphrastic poems, “Ochre,” which is accompanied by a haunting series of drawings and photographs of Neolithic Art and anonymous turn of the last century snapshot.

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Winner, 2012 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets

Co-winner of the 2013 Nicholas Roerich Museum Poets’ Prize

Explores conceptualizations of regional identity and a distinct population group known as nordestinos in northeastern Brazil during a crucial historical period. Beginning with the abolition of slavery and ending with the demise of the Estado Novo under Getœlio Vargas, Stanley E. Blake offers original perspectives on the paradoxical concept of the nordestino and the importance of these debates to the process of state and nation building.

The first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, Zarecor opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.