Books

Winner of the 2012 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeSelected by Sven Birkerts

The spine of this collection is a series of linked stories about Ruth Stein, a Brooklyn author whose first book has exposed her father’s abuses; while the voice here, speaking across a lifetime, ranges from bittersweet to humorous to lethal. Elsewhere, Bosworth explores the extended family, the bonds of friendship, an apocalyptic Vermont, the rank yet redeemable Gowanus Canal; also rites of passage, race relations, divorce, middle-aged romance, dementia, funerals, alcoholism, and the Jewish religion.

Jorge Nallim chronicles the decline of liberalism in Argentina during the volatile period between two military coups—the 1930 overthrow of Hip—lito Yrigoyen and the deposing of Juan Per—n in 1955. Nallim documents a wide range of locations where liberalism was claimed and ultimately marginalized in the pursuit of individual agendas. He demonstrates how liberalism became a vital and complex factor in the metamorphosis of modern history in Argentina and Latin America as well.

Whirlwind is one woman’s heartfelt, yet mordantly witty, sexy exploration of the breakup of a marriage in poems that keep their linguistic edge while seething with a story they must tell.

A groundbreaking study of the complexities of the Hungarian working class, its relationship to the Communist Party, and its major political role during the foundational period of socialism (1944-1958).

Named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013 by Choice Magazine

Susana Draper uses the phenomenon of the “opening” of prisons to begin a dialog on conceptualizations of democracy and freedom in postdictatorship Latin America. Focusing on the Southern Cone nations of Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, she examines key works in architecture, film, and literature to peel away the veiled continuity of dictatorial power structures in ensuing consumer cultures.

Jeremy Hicks presents a pioneering study of Soviet contributions to the growing public awareness of the horrors of Nazi rule. He recovers much of the major film work in Soviet depictions of the Holocaust and views them within their political context, both locally and internationally.

Winner of the 2013 Vucinich Book Prize from ASEEES

Named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013 by Choice Magazine

Winner of the 2011 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

Selected by Dorianne Laux

This collection examines how the loss of a parent at a young age can color the way that child looks at the world even when the child is no longer a child.

A critical history of experimental writing theory, its aesthetic foundations, and their application to current multimodal writing. Patricia Sullivan sheds new light on both the positive and negative aspects of experimental writing and its attempts to redefine the writing disciplines. She further articulates the ways that multimedia is and isn’t changing composition pedagogies, and provides insights into resolving these tensions.

A fascinating glimpse at the collision of art and politics during the first fifty years of the Soviet period. Ezrahi shows how the producers and performers of Russia’s two major ballet troupes quietly but effectively resisted Soviet cultural hegemony during this period.

Winner of the 2107 Best Book on Dance published in France (French Edition)

This title is distributed in the U.K. by Dance Books, Ltd.

Dore Kiesselbach’s poems reveal the particularity and/or strangeness of the commonplace—but many good poems do that. What strikes me about his, though, are the ways that visual imagery, diction, and cadence are modulated to fit his subjects. Thus in ‘Rake’ the inanimate object speaks (as in an Anglo-Saxon kenning) to describe the way it touches ‘death / that life may be revealed / in green stupidity . . . fluent / as underwater hair.’ In ‘Hickey,’ a diver swimming among stingrays asks, ‘How long does it take us / in water sunlight permeates / to forget needing ever to be told?’; the unusual diction suggests both the speaker’s suspension in water as well as his apprehension of joy. The reader may hear faint echoes of Hopkins or the early Dylan Thomas, but the language is Kiesselbach’s own.

Appetite is a book of poetry that explores identity, particularly masculinity, through the lenses of popular culture, relationships, and place.

A broad survey of the psychological, biological, and philosophical basis of fear in historical and contemporary contexts. Leading figures in clinical psychology, neuroscience, the social sciences, and the humanities consider categories of intentionality, temporality, admixture, spectacle, and politics in evaluating conceptions of fear. The book opens a dialogue between science and the humanities to afford a more complete view of an emotion that has shaped human behavior since time immemorial.

This volume assembles leading experts in policy, history, and activism to address Israel’s continuing environmental transformation from the biblical era through its future aspirations, with a particular focus on the past one hundred and fifty years.

This is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which Weaver analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal poet. In The Government of Nature, Afaa Michael Weaver explores the trauma of his childhood—including sexual abuse—using a “cartography and thematic structure drawn from Chinese spiritualism.” Weaver is a practitioner of Daoism, and this collection deals directly with the abuse in the context of Daoist renderings of nature as metaphor for the human body.

Winner of the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Blowout is both a celebration and mourning of romantic love—the blowout of a party, as well as the sudden rupture of a front tire.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award