The 3 Best New Books in Literary Studies Podcast Episodes
1) Anaïs Maurer, "The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists" (Duke UP, 2023)
Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear...Show More
2) Elizabeth DeLoughrey, "Allegories of the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019)
While the mainstream discourses on global warming characterize it as an unprecedented catastrophe that unites the globe in a common challenge, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that this apparently cosmopol...Show More
3) Helen Sword, "Writing with Pleasure" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Listen to this interview of Helen Sword, professor emerita in the School of Humanities and the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at the University of Auckland, founder of WriteSPACE, an intern...Show More
4) Brian Duff, "Restaurant" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
In the last few decades, restaurants and food culture have achieved extraordinary cultural presence. Chefs are heroes and thought leaders, well-executed entrées go viral, dining out has become theater...Show More
5) Bénédicte Meillon, "Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth (Bloomsbury, 2022) tackles the reenchantment process at work in a part of contemporary ecoliterature that is marked by the ...Show More
6) Leon J. Hilton, "Counter-Cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
What if we embraced neurodivergent ways of being not as deviations to be corrected but as vital ways of inhabiting the world? What new realities might emerge? Bringing a much-needed humanistic perspec...Show More
7) Flannery Burke, "Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region" (U Washington Press, 2025)
Just as easterners imagined the American West, westerners imagined the American East, reshaping American culture. Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region (University of Washington Press, 2025) by ...Show More
8) Susana M. Morris, "Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler" (Amistad Press, 2025)
A magnificent cultural biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad, 2025) charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical...Show More
9) Aliyah Khan, "Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
Muslims have lived in the Caribbean for centuries. Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2020) examines the archive of autobiography, literature, music and public...Show More
10) Ḥannā Diyāb, "The Book of Travels" (NYU Press, 2022): A Conversation with Johannes Stephan
The Book of Travels Ḥannā Diyāb: A Conversation with Johannes StephanThe Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account of his travels as a young man from his hometown of Aleppo to t...Show More