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) Michael B. Cosmopoulos, "The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Greek Epic Poetry" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Epic poetry, notably the Iliad and the Odyssey, stands as one of the most enduring legacies of ancient Greece. Although the impact of these epics on Western civilization is widely recognized, their or...Show More
5) Arnab Roy and Paul Ugor eds., "The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions" (U Alberta Press, 2025)
Offering a fresh comparative lens, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions (U Alberta Press, 2025) demonstrates how postcolonial writ...Show More
6) Kathryn Robson, "Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
In Kathryn Robson's Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film (Liverpool UP, 2025), happiness (and the question of how to define, measure and facilit...Show More
7) Megan Walsh, "The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters" (Columbia Global Reports, 2022)
What does contemporary China’s diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters (Columbia G...Show More
8) Carl Rollyson, "The Making of Sylvia Plath (UP Mississippi, 2024)
Since her death, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking po...Show More
9) Elliott Rabin, "The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility and Fallibility" (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)
Today I talked to Elliott Rabin about his book The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility and Fallibility (Jewish Publication Society, 2020). Approaching the Bible in an original way—comparing biblical ...Show More
10) Bill V. Mullen, "James Baldwin: Living in Fire" (Pluto Press, 2019)
In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press, 2019), Bill V. Mullen celebrates the personal and political life of the great African-America...Show More