New Books: Language & Literature

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison--these writers used words to create a livable world--a "home"--for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society.

The emergence of language began with the apelike calls of our earliest ancestors. Today, the world is home to thousands of complex languages. Yet exactly how, when, and why this evolution occurred has been one of the most enduring questions in science. In The Language Puzzle, Steven Mithen details a step-by-step explanation of how our human ancestors transitioned from apelike calls to words, and from words to language as we use it today. He explores how language shaped our cognition and vice versa; how metaphor advanced Homo sapiens' ability to formulate abstract concepts, develop agriculture, and--ultimately--shape the world.

Composing songs of love and war in medieval Western and Southern Europe, troubadours spanned the social spectrum from kings and nobles to penniless minstrels. This book tells the story of the lives and art of these remarkable poet-musicians, famed for their brilliant, innovative use of words and music, and the emotional power of their compositions. The troubadours' songs explored new ideas of love as well as medieval perceptions of gender, class, war, chivalry, religion and the Crusades. Linda M. Paterson examines the troubadours' music and performance, as well as their legacy, balancing insightful quotations in English translation with the original texts to highlight the forms and sounds of the poetry.

African American literature has changed in startling ways since the end of the Black Arts Era. The last five decades have generated new paradigms of racial formation and novel patterns of cultural production, circulation, and reception. This volume takes up the challenge of mapping the varied and changing field of contemporary African American writing. Balancing the demands of historical and political context with attention to aesthetic innovation, it considers the history, practice, and future directions of the field.

This biography explores the life of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), one of the first African American writers to garner international attention and praise in the wake of emancipation. Before his early death he published fourteen books of poetry, four collections of short stories, and four novels, and also collaborated on theatrical productions. Jarrett traces Dunbar's life in the context of the historical currents that shaped his development to tell 'the full story of an African American who privately wrestled with the constraints of America in the Gilded Age, but who also sought to express or mitigate this strife through the written and spoken word.'

Tennessee Williams said, "The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson." Her first novel--The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter--was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time. While McCullers's literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood the heart and longing of the outcast.

Poems are made of words, not ideas. Those words are rhythmic and, when chosen and composed properly, are capable of entering a reader's or listener's body and resonating. This book explains the historical connections between word, image, and sound to empower you to create work that is dynamic, vital, and musical-to create poems that live in the air. It walks readers through three steps: Learning to Listen, Learning to Observe, and Learning to Speak. The Rhythm Method equips you to forge your own unique voice and your own style of performance.

DiYanni provides a practical guide that shows how we can increase the benefits and pleasures of literature by becoming more skillful and engaged readers. He suggests that we attend first to what authors say and the way in which they say it, rather than rushing to decide what they mean. He considers the various forms of literature, demonstrating rewarding approaches to each in sample readings of classic works. Through a series of illuminating oppositions, he explores the paradoxical pleasures of reading: solitary versus social reading, submitting to or resisting the author, reading inwardly or outwardly, and more.

George Orwell was a prolific author, and his two masterpieces, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are regularly invoked to explain the political complexities of a world he may be said to have foreseen. Taylor draws on new sources to show how the way we look at Orwell and his canon has changed over the course of the last two decades. The result is a comprehensive re-evaluation of Orwell's career, status, and relevance to the world of today-- as well as a fresh and relevant biography seen through a post-millennial prism.

The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, Summer once again intersperses short vividly descriptive essays with emotionally-raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard's newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family's life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects--mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, to name just a few--he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion.