Books

What is it like living today in the chaos of a city that is at once brutal and beautiful, heir to immigrant ancestors “who supposed their children’s children would be rich and free?” What is it to live in the chaos of a world driven by “intolerable, unquenchable human desire?” How do we cope with all the wars? In the midst of the dark matter and dark energy of the universe, do we know what train we’re on? In this cornucopia of a book, Ostriker finds herself immersed in phenomena ranging from a first snowfall in New York City to the Tibetan diaspora, asking questions that have no reply, writing poems in which “the arrow may be blown off course by storm and returned by miracle.”

In Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, Beatty travels the turns and collisions of over twenty years of work. She moves from first-person narratives to poems that straddle the page in fragments, to lines that sprawl with long lines of train tracks. Always landing in meaning, we are inside the body—not in a confessional voice, not autobiography—but arriving through the expanded, exploded image of many stories and genders.

Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section.

Cuban Studies 45 features two special dossiers: the first discusses the history and workings of the the Cuban constitution and the need to revisit it along with civil and political rights; the second offers new perspectives on the history of health, medicine, and disease in Cuba, and views race as a factor in both infant mortality and tuberculosis from the early-to-mid twentieth century.

Additional essays discuss culture through poetry, higher education reform, the narratives of Lordes Casal, and filmmaker Jesœs Diaz as an ‘unintentional deviationst.’ History is discussed vis-a-vis the radio politics of young Eddy Chibas, the slave abolitionist rhetoric of the Countess of Merlin, and the creole appropriation of Afro-Cuban dance and music to create sabor during the late nineteenth century.

Winner of the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

This is a collection of unconventionally linked stories, each about a different young woman whose husband dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Ranging from traditional stories to lists, a quiz, a YouTube link, and even a lecture about creative writing, the stories grasp to put into words the ways in which we all cope with unspeakable loss.

The Johnstown Girls is a heartrending tale of twin sisters separated by the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Kathleen George masterfully blends a factual history of the flood into her story of two sisters, whose search for each other over the course of one hundred years unfolds after their lives were sent careening down different paths.

This volume presents new perspectives on how comics on and from Latin America both view and express memory formation on major historical events and processes. The contributors, from a variety of disciplines including literary theory, cultural studies, and history, explore topics including national identity construction, narratives of resistance to colonialism and imperialism, the construction of revolutionary traditions, and the legacies of authoritarianism and political violence.

The John and Vivian Hewitt Collection of African-American Art represents works that celebrate the expression and passion of twenty artists, including Romare Bearden, Margaret Burroughs, Jonathan Green, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Ann Tanksley, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. This book contains all fifty-eight works from the collection, exquisitely reproduced in full color. Grace C. Stanislaus provides a text on the significance of the collection that is supplemented by interviews with Vivian Hewitt, David Taylor of the Gantt Center, art collectors Harmon and Harriett Kelley, and Nancy Washington.

Bread upon the Waters chronicles how the unparalleled effort put into the building of a wide infrastructure to support the provisioning of the newly created but physically isolated city of St. Petersburg profoundly affected all of Russia’s economic life and, ultimately, the historical trajectory of the Russian Empire as a whole.

Teaching Queer looks closely at student writing, transcripts of class discussions, and teaching practices in first-year writing courses to articulate queer theories of literacy and writing instruction, while also considering the embodied actuality of being a queer teacher.

Don Bialostosky aims to teach the reading of poetry and to advance an intellectual argument that brings the sociological poetics of the Bakhtin School to an introduction to reading poetry.

The Coeur d’Alenes, a twenty-five by ten mile portion of the Idaho Panhandle, is home to one of the most productive mining districts in world history. Its legacy also includes environmental pollution on an epic scale. Living with Lead untangles the costs and benefits of a century of mining, milling, and smelting in a small western city and the region that surrounds it.

Anti-Literature articulates a rethinking of what is meant today by “literature.” Examining key Latin American forms of experimental writing from the 1920s to the present, Shellhorse reveals literature’s power as a site for radical reflection and reaction to contemporary political and cultural conditions.

March 2015 should have been a time of celebration for Brazil, as it marked thirty years of democracy, a newfound global prominence, over a decade of rising economic prosperity, and stable party politics under the rule of the widely admired PT (Workers’ Party). Instead, the country descended into protest, economic crisis, impeachment, and deep political division. This volume offers a comprehensive and nuanced portrayal of long-standing problems that contributed to the emergence of crisis and offers insights into the ways Brazilian democracy has performed well despite crisis.

Making Citizens in Argentina charts the evolving meanings of citizenship in Argentina from the 1880s to the 1980s. Against the backdrop of immigration, science, race, sport, populist rule, and dictatorship, the contributors analyze the power of the Argentine state and other social actors to set the boundaries of citizenship.

Angel Rama (1926-1983) is a major figure in Latin American literary and cultural studies, but little has been published on his critical work. Gonzalez focuses on Rama’s response to and appropriation of European critics like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukacs. He argues that Rama realized the inapplicability of many of their theories and descriptions of cultural modernization to Latin America, and reworked them to produce his own discourse that challenged prevailing notions of social and cultural modernization.