New Books: Language & Literature

The American Civil War lives on in our collective imagination like few other events. The story of the war has been retold in countless films, novels, poems, memoirs, plays, sculptures, and monuments. Often remembered as an emancipatory struggle, as an attempt to destroy slavery in America now and forever, it is also memorialized as a fight for Southern independence; as a fratricide that divided the national family; and as a dark, cruel conflict defined by its brutality. What do these stories, myths, and rumors have in common, and what do they teach us about how the Civil War endures in literature and culture?

United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Each of the five geographically organized sections begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets.

Two novels and three nonfiction works by Joan Didion. The novels Democracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) are fast-paced, deftly observed narratives of power, conspiracy, and corruption in American political life. Salvador (1983) is a searing look at terror and Cold War politics in the Central American civil war of the early 1980s. Miami (1987) is a portrait not just of a city but of immigration, exile, the cocaine trade, and political violence. After Henry (1992) is where she reports on Patty Hearst, Nancy Reagan, the case of the Central Park Five, and the Los Angeles she once called home.

Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect and interdisciplinary knowledge in this essay collection that moves effortlessly between stories of her mother, grandmother, and daughter to artistic mothers, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Lousie Bourgeois, to the broader meanings of maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority. This moving, fierce, and often funny book is about the fact that being alive means being in states of constant, dynamic exchange with what is around us, and that the impulse to draw hard and fast conceptual borders where none exist carries serious theoretical and political dangers.

In Read until You Understand, Griffin shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that framed the United States Constitution and that inspired Malcolm X's fervent speeches, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the artistry of Romare Bearden, and many others. Having taught a popular Columbia University survey course of Black literature, she explores themes such as grace, justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, and mercy to help readers grapple with the ongoing project that is American democracy. This book is a powerful testament to the enduring wisdom of Black culture and history.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail in this new biography of an architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement.

How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells's life shape the father of science fiction? From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family and determination to educate himself at any cost to his complicated marriages, love affair with socialism, and the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, H. G. Wells's extraordinary early life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. In this biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other, driven by curiosity and desiring reform, a socialist and a futurist whose new and imaginative worlds continue to inspire today.

One of the most accomplished American poets of his generation, Richard Wilbur was also a prolific translator of French and Russian literature. His verse translations of Molière's plays are especially admired by readers and are still performed today in theaters around the world. Wilbur, the critic John Simon once wrote, makes Molière into as great an English verse playwright as he was a French one. Now, for the first time, all ten of Wilbur's unsurpassed translations of Molière's plays are brought together in a two-volume edition, fulfilling the poet's vision for the translations.

Crystal Wilkinson walks us back down the road she first walked as a girl, wanders us through the trees that lined the road where she grew up, where her sensibilities as a woman and a writer were first laid bare. Perfect Black is a book of poems and legends about ancestry, culture, and the terrain of a Black girl becoming. It is a narrow and spacious terrain that enters the bloodstream of this black writing girl's body early. It is a country that she never truly exits even though different zip codes continue to fly through her wild, wondrous, winding life. We read and we hold on too.

Re-Enchanted provides a timely analysis and alternative genealogy for children's fantasy literature, its medieval predecessors, and pop cultural afterlives. With a focus on works by authors including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley Holland, J.K. Rowling, Junot Díaz, and George R.R. Martin, Maria Sachiko Cecire engages with key debates around what constitutes "high" and "low" culture in the face of current and historical crises in the humanities, political and affective uses of childhood and the mythological past, the anxieties of modernity, and the social impact of racially charged origin stories.