New Books: Language & Literature

In A Darker Wilderness, a constellation of luminary writers reflect on the significance of nature in their lived experience and on the role of nature in the lives of Black folks in the United States. Each of these essays engages with a single archival object, whether directly or obliquely, exploring stories spanning hundreds of years and thousands of miles, traveling from roots to space and finding rich Blackness everywhere. This collection unearths evidence of the ways Black people's relationship to the natural world has persevered through colonialism, slavery, state-sponsored violence, and structurally racist policies like Jim Crow and redlining.

This biography charts Sam Shepard's long and complicated journey from a small town in southern California to his standing as an internationally known playwright and movie star. The son of an alcoholic father, Shepard crafted a public persona as an authentic American archetype: the loner, the cowboy, the drifter, a stranger in a strange land. While exploring his relationships with Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange across the long arc of his brilliant career, Greenfield makes the case for Shepard not just as a great American writer but a unique figure who first brought the sensibility of rock 'n' roll to serious theater.

The story of Willa Cather is defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some authors show their full powers early, yet Cather was the opposite--she took her time and transformed herself by stages. Combining intricate analysis with an empathetic, lyrical voice, Benjamin Taylor uncovers the reality of Cather's artistic development, from modest beginnings to the triumphs of her mature years. His book is simultaneously an homage to her character, a warm consideration of her work, and a case being made to read Cather with renewed vigor.

After being kept from the public for more than fifty years, the letters between T.S. Eliot and his long-time love and muse Emily Hale were unsealed in 2020. Robert Crawford uses them to tell the story of the mature Eliot during his years as a writer and intellectual, including his complex interior life. He shows how Eliot's years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London helped inspire Eliot's later masterpieces. Crawford presents Eliot as husband, lover, and widower; as banker, editor, playwright, and publisher. Most of all, he shows Eliot as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art amid personal disasters.

Post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. Since 1945 the fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. Bellamy illuminates the political unconscious of American post-apocalyptic writing by drawing on a range of disciplinary fields: science fiction studies, American studies, energy humanities research, and critical race theory.

As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, many are asking: how is Shakespeare still relevant? If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in famous plays from Antony and Cleopatra to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard asks us neither to idealize nor bury Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society.

Two novels, 44 brilliant short stories, nearly 200 poems, and both the published and manuscript versions of the landmark story "The Yellow Wall-Paper." The short fiction presented here showcases Gilman's mastery of ghost stories, allegorical fantasy, and social realism. The utopian novels "Herland" and "With Her in Ourland" -- about an isolated society of women -- are pioneering works of speculative fiction and incisive commentaries on the politics of gender. And this volume brings together her poetry, with many poems written in support of suffrage and other causes.

Appalachia has long been seen as homogenous and tradition-bound. Allison E. Carey helps to remedy this misunderstanding, arguing that it has led to LGBTQ Appalachian authors being doubly erased—routinely overlooked both within United States literature because they are Appalachian and within the Appalachian literary tradition because they are queer. In exploring motifs of visibility, silence, storytelling, home, food, and more, Carey brings the full significance and range of LGBTQ Appalachian literature into relief. Carey also looks back to the region's literary "elders," thoughtfully mapping the place of sexuality in their lives and works.

Perhaps you're reading a book and stop to puzzle over absurd spelling rules, or you hear someone talking and get stuck on an expression. Suddenly you ask yourself, 'Wait, why is the English language this way?' You think about it, try to explain it, and keep running into walls. It doesn't conform to logic. It doesn't work the way you'd expect it to. There doesn't seem to be any rule at all. In Highly Irregular, Arika Okrent helps explain the whats and whys of the English language. Along the way she tells the story of the many influences--from invading French armies to stubborn Flemish printers--that made our language the way it is today.

A superbly crafted study of Hunter S. Thompson's literary formation, achievement, and continuing relevance. During the 1960s, Thompson rode with the Hell's Angels, explored the San Francisco counterculture, and met talented editors who shared his dissatisfaction with mainstream journalism. Peter Richardson traces Thompson's transition during this time from New Journalist to cofounder of Gonzo journalism. He also endorses Thompson's later claim that he was one of the best writers using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon. Thompson was not only a gifted journalist and satirist, but also a distinct American voice.