New Books in Literary Studies

Book bans and book challenges are both on the rise. And they are increasing at unprecedented rates. But why is this happening? Dr. Christine Emeran of the National Coalition Against Censorship joins us to explore what’s driving censorship movements nationwide. In today’s episode, she takes us through politically organized efforts to ban books, and shares the statistics of book challenges and bans. She explores the new strategies used by groups to challenge books (strategies which differ from the past), and talks about groups fighting back to keep books on shelves.Our guest is: Dr. Christine Emeran, who is the Youth Free Expression Program Director at the NCAC (National Coalition Against Censorship). In previous roles, she served as a research consultant at UNESCO and UNESCO-International Institute for Education Planning in Paris, France, including initiatives on knowledge societies, primary education decentralization policies, youth program on climate change, and lifelong learning. Dr. Emeran is the author of the book New Generation Political Activism in Ukraine 2000–2014 and contributed the book chapter “The March for Our Lives Movement in the USA: Generational Change and the Personalization of Protest,” to When Students Protest: Secondary and High Schools. In her academic career, Dr. Emeran taught sociology and political science courses, both in the US and abroad. Dr. Emeran is glad to be contributing her knowledge to support students’ rights to free expression.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

We debut a new feature: Recall This Story, in which a contemporary writer picks out a bygone story to read and to analyze. Surely there is no better novelist to begin with than RTB' shouse sage, Steve McCauley.And not just because he's got the pipes to power through a whole fantabulous John Cheever story. "The Five-Forty-Eight" (published in The New Yorker 70 years ago) is about sordidness uncovered, a train, and a face in the dirt. It ticks almost every Cheever box, evoking an infinitude of lives unled elsewhere while ostensibly documenting nothing more than the time to takes to down a couple of drinks, scuttle feverishly through some midtown streets, and take a lumbering commuter train out of the city.Steve feels that in our own century, things have changed for the American short story and there's no going back to Cheever's mode. After Raymond Carver, it would be hard to embrace the proliferation (sometimes dizzying, sometimes delightful) of solid details that Cheever deploys. The two try out a final comparison to E M Forster who also quasi-fit into this society, but, Steve opines, could project himself into his female characters in a way that Cheever cannot or will not.John Cheever works mentioned: "The Swimmer" (also a Gregory Peck movie) "The Jewels of the Cabots" "Oh Youth and Beauty" and other stories that nest multiple lives within a single frame, like "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well" Works by others: Sloane Wilson's 1955 novel, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (and the 1956 film) Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" ("she would have been a good woman if there had been someone there to shoot her every day of her life.") Anton Chekov, "Lady with the Lapdog" Richard Yates and mid-century office nihilism (eg his 1961 Revolutionary Road) Jean Stafford's novels (The Mountain Lion, Boston Adventure) do get reprinted and re-read, Steve points out. Raymond Carver, only partially minimalist, but reduced still further by Gordon Lish in e.g. the story "Mr Copy and Mr fix-it" Listen to and read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Brandon Taylor practices moral worldbuilding in his fiction—that means an essential piece of these worlds is the “real possibility that someone could get punched in the face.” Brandon, author of the novels Real Life and The Late Americans, joins Stephanie Insley Hershinow for a wide-ranging, engrossing, and often hilarious conversation about the stakes of the novel today. They discuss Brandon’s “Hot Freud Summer,” during which he read all of Sigmund Freud’s essential works, as an example of an intellectual journey that engages with what Brandon calls the PDFs of criticism: the histories of ideas that he wishes to track back to their origins. Along the way, Brandon reveals what he has taken away from the Romance genre (“everything”), his conviction that The House of Mirth is the prototypical social media novel, and how he tries to avoid writing characters that are just “three spritzes of a personality standing in a room.” Brandon, Stephanie, and Chris close things out with their answers to the signature question about the first books they loved, and the answers are…revealing.Mentioned in this episodeBy Brandon Taylor: Real Life Filthy Animals The Late Americans Also mentioned: The House of Mirth The Liberal Imagination Georg Lukács Frederick Jameson Germinal Debbie Macomber Julianne MacLean Johanna Lindsey Liz Carlyle, Beauty Like the Night Beverly Jenkins A is for Apple, W is for Witch Guinness Book of World Records Gremlins: The Novelization of the Film Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How do games represent history, and how do we make sense of the history of games? The industry regularly uses history to sell products, while processes of creation and of promotion leave behind markers of a game’s history.The access to this history is often granted by so-called paratexts, which are accompanying elements orbiting texts. Exploring this fully, case studies in (Not) In the Game: History, Paratexts, and Games (de Gruyter, 2023) move the focus of debate from the games themselves to wider, ancillary materials and ask how history is used in, and how we can use history to study games.Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Rakugo is a live performance art that has penetrated the borders of Japan and continues to gain popularity overseas. The rakugo stage once dominated by Japanese raconteurs now features foreign storytellers, as well as Japanese performers, both amateur and professional, who endeavor to entertain us in English. The only requirements for rakugo storytelling are a folding fan, a hand towel, and your imagination!In Talking About Rakugo 1: The Japanese Art of Storytelling (2022), learn what distinguishes rakugo from Japan's other traditional performing arts, become acquainted with its greatest contributors, enjoy some of rakugo's most popular classical stories, and meet the performers of today.In this episode, the rakugo storyteller Kanariya Eiraku also gives an audio demonstration of a classic rakugo story that has been adapted to a modern-day audience. English translations for other classic rakugo stories can be found in his other book, Eiraku's 100 English Rakugo Scripts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Edited by Matteo Pangallo and Emily Todd, Teaching the History of the Book (University of Massachusetts Press 2023) is the first collection of its kind dedicated to book history pedagogy. With original contributions from a diverse range of teachers, scholars, and practitioners in literary studies, history, book arts, library science, language studies, and archives, this volume presents a variety of methods for teaching book history both as its own subject and as an approach to other material. Each chapter describes lessons, courses, and programs centered on the latest and best ways of teaching undergraduate and graduate students.Expansive and instructive, this volume introduces ways of helping students consider how texts were produced, circulated, and received, with chapters that cover effective ways to organize courses devoted to book history, classroom activities that draw on this subject in other courses, and an overview of selected print and digital tools. Contributors, many of whom are leading figures in the field, utilize their own classroom experiences to bring to life some of the rich possibilities for teaching book history in the twenty-first century.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Inspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian “voice” of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree’s shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections. The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora’s profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca.The Tears and Smiles of Things: Stories, Sketches, Meditations (Academic Studies Press, 2024) has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program. The book was translated by Roman Ivashkiv and Sabrina Jassi.Garima Garg is a New Delhi based journalist and author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1935, two Soviet satirists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, undertook a 10,000-mile American road trip from New York to Hollywood and back. They immortalised their journey in a popular travelogue entitled One-storied America (published as Little Golden America in the US), a suite of newspaper articles, and a series of photographs. In Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip (Cambridge UP, 2024), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum reconstructs this epic journey, exploring Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with a vast range of characters, from famous authors, artists, poets and filmmakers to unemployed hitchhikers and revolutionaries. Using the authors’ notes, archival material in both Russia and the US, and even FBI files, she reveals the role played by ordinary individuals in shaping foreign relations as Ilf, Petrov and the immigrants, communists, and fellow travellers who served as their hosts, guides, and translators became creative actors in cultural exchange between the two countries.Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is Professor of History at West Chester University. In addition to her latest book Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip (2024), she is the author of Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (Routledge Falmer, 2000); The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge University Press 2015).Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century—including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath—finally gets her due in this colorful biography of legendary editor Judith Jones. When Judith Jones began working at Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, the twenty-five-year-old spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile until one caught her eye. She read the book in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing it. A year later, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller. It was the start of a culture defining career in publishing. Over more than half a century as an editor at Knopf, Jones became a legend, nurturing future literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. At the forefront of the cookbook revolution, she published the who’s who of food writing: Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child. Jones celebrated culinary diversity, forever changing the way Americans think about food. Her work spanned the decades of America’s most dramatic cultural change. From the end of World War II through the Cold War; from the civil rights movement to the fight for women’s equality, Jones’s work questioned convention, using books as a tool of quiet resistance. Now, her astonishing and career is explored for the first time. Based on exclusive interviews, never-before-seen personal papers, and years of research, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America (Atria, 2024) tells the riveting behind-the scenes-narrative of how stories are made, finally bringing to light the audacious life of one of our most influential tastemakers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

If you are familiar with traditional Chinese literature, you have likely come across the figure of the “shrew,” a morally threatening woman who is either transgressive and polluting, promiscuous, or violent (or perhaps a combination of all three). Scholars of literature typically write about how this archetype faded out after 1911, while the figure of the more ‘modern’ “new woman” came to dominate. In Untamed Shrews: Negotiating New Womanhood in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2023), Shu Yang shows how the shrew persisted and actually served as the basis for the celebrated “new woman,” thus revealing an entirely different relationship between the shrew and the new woman and a new origin story for symbols of female empowerment in modern China. In Untamed Shrews, Yang charts how the figure of the shrew was used to depict early Chinese suffragettes, pulled into discussions of female jealousy, reworked in reconsiderations of female promiscuity and henpecked husbands, and repackaged in Communist reconfigurations of how reasonable revolutionary wives ought to behave. Throughout, Yang provides careful and detailed readings of a wide range of sources, scrutinizing the historical context and wider meaning of the shrew as she appeared in newspaper accounts, fiction, and theater. Untamed Shrews is sure to be of interest to anyone who works on modern Chinese literature, Republican history, global 'new women,' and print culture, as well as those fascinated by literary repackagings and depictions of the shrew -- both in tamed and untamed forms.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies