Resources By Department: New Books: Language &amp; Literature

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell
The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood was born the heir to a crumbling estate, and died an icon of gay liberation. Every step of the journey served his writing; a great diarist, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of his restless, penetrating, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations toward self-understanding and happiness.
Ruin and Resilience by Daniel Spoth
In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the US South curve inevitably toward tragic plotlines. Studying over a dozen works of postbellum southern literature and cinema, Spoth's analysis winds from John Muir's walking journey across the war-torn South, through the troubling of southern environmentalism's modernity by Faulkner and Hurston, past the accounts of its acceleration in Welty and O'Connor, and finally into the present, uncovering how the tragic eco-narrative is transformed by contemporary southern food studies, climate fiction, and speculative fiction.
Left-Handed by Jonathan Galassi
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.
Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver
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.
Carson McCullers by Mary V. Dearborn
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.

Glad to the Brink of Fear by James Marcus
Ralph Waldo Emerson's reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness. This Emerson is a rebel. He is also a lover, a friend, a husband, and a father. Drawing on telling episodes from Emerson's life alongside landmark essays, this book reveals how Emerson shares our preoccupations with fate and freedom, race and inequality, love and grief.
The Sisterhood by Courtney Thorsson
On February 6, 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan's Brooklyn apartment. Naming itself 'The Sisterhood,' the group would meet over the next two years to discuss the future of Black literary feminism, how to promote and publicize their work, and the everyday pressures and challenges of being a Black woman writer. Drawing on meeting notes, interviews with participants, their writings, and correspondence, Thorsson's history of 'The Sisterhood' recounts the personal, political, and professional bonds and motivations that shaped the group's history and its dissolution.
Orwell's Ghosts by Laura Beers
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.
The Black Box by Henry Louis Gates
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 Language Puzzle by Steven Mithen
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.

New Books: Language & Literature

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