New Books: Language & Literature

In his third poetry collection, noted translator, editor, and literary publisher Galassi charts a difficult, deeply personal topography of life-changing events, from the dissolution of his long marriage through an unexpected sexual reorientation and the new, fulfilling love it brings. Galassi's meticulous prosody and unadorned diction parallel the spare classicism characteristic of ancient Greek masters, channeling complex emotions without compromising their integrity. Naked and raw, lyrical yet formally inventive, rich with the melancholy wisdom of age, this is a work of resonant and shimmering beauty.

Mary Oliver has become America's foremost poetic voice on our experience of the physical world. This collection presents forty-seven new poems, and each exhibiting the power and grace that have become the hallmarks of Oliver's work. The volume includes poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, greeting the morning, watching the deer and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in our lives and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to marvel.

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 dedicated his career to exposing social injustice and political duplicity, urging his readers to face hard truths about Western society and politics. Laura Beers considers Orwell's full body of work--his six novels, three nonfiction works, and essays--to examine what 'Orwellian' truly means and reveal the misconstrued thinker in all his complexity. She explores how Orwell's writing on free speech addresses the proliferation of 'fake news' and the emergence of cancel culture, highlights his vivid critiques of capitalism and the oppressive nature of the British Empire, and, in contrast, analyzes his failure to understand feminism.

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.