The chapbook as one of the most intriguing, if overlooked, formats for critical-creative writing. Juliana Spahr's SPIDERWASP OR LITERARY CRITICISM (Spectacular Books, 1998), signed copy 19 of 100. www.typepunchmatrix.com/pages/books/...

SPIDERWASP OR LITERARY CRITICISM by Juliana Spahr on Type Punch Matrix

New York : Spectacular Books, 1998 . First edition. Signed limited edition chapbook from this acclaimed, Pulitzer-winning poet, published by Katy Lederer's small press. Near fine. Item #56078 ISBN: 09...

typepunchmatrix.com

Another year of exciting IHUM reading groups, convened and curated by graduate students across the humanities @princeton.edu. Find one or two you're interested in, and e-mail the conveners directly to attend the first session. ihum.princeton.edu/reading-grou...

Scholars’ Workshop in Early African American Print, led by Dr. Tara Bynum and hosted at @amantiquarian.bsky.social in Worcester, MA. 5-day, in-person workshop w/ accommodations in January 2027. Graduate students and early career scholars apply 👉 www.americanantiquarian.org/programs-eve...

Now open at Princeton University's Firestone Library, "The Art of Japanese Publishing: A Selection of Japanese Illustrated Books from the Marquand Library Collection 1660-1960".

The Art of Japanese Publishing

Marquand Library celebrates the art of Japanese publishing in this exhibition with selections from our collection of rare Japanese illustrated books.

library.princeton.edu

With writing by Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Jacqueline Goldsby, Brenna Greer, Kinohi Nishikawa (@kinohi.bsky.social), Norman Teague, and Daniel Schulman

Next Mon, Sep 14, join us for the first Princeton English-hosted event of the fall, Günter Leypoldt in conversation with Juliana Spahr, English's Bain-Swiggett Visiting Professor (fall 2026), to discuss his latest book, Literature’s Social Lives tinyurl.com/gunter-juliana

Intersections Working Group: 'Literary Value and Institutional Ethnography'

Join Günter Leypoldt, in conversation with Juliana Spahr, to discuss his latest book, Literature’s Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value (Oxford UP, 2025).Literature’s Social L...

english.princeton.edu

BLACK DESIGNERS IN CHICAGO is now out from @uchicagopress.bsky.social The book features a catalog of 100 full-color images, a historical chronicle of designers in twentieth-century Black Chicago, and critical essays by scholars and practitioners. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Black Designers in Chicago

A richly illustrated book focused on Black designers, how they shaped the history of modern design, and how their designs in turn influenced modern Black life.   In twentieth-century Chicago, generati...

press.uchicago.edu

The impact of AI book piracy on Black and other minority authors: a sharp, if chilling, investigation by EBONY magazine. www.ebony.com/next-favorit...

AI Threatens Black Authors & Physical Books Destruction

AI firms destroy physical books for training while Black authors face AI plagiarism claims. This article explores industry biases, the loss of authentic voices, and the urgent need to protect Black li...

ebony.com

"The challenges of our algorithmic age are real, but it has always been true that good teachers need to be exemplary students to help others learn." I agree with the author that it really is a matter of getting back to basics for the humanities. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/o...

Opinion | I Let My Students Watch Me Struggle With a Masterpiece. It Changed Everything. (Gift Article)

Teachers need to model the passion they want to see.

nytimes.com

That was... fast? As though the Times was waiting to publish this the second the semifinal ended. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/o...

Opinion | England Lost the World Cup. It Was Always Going to Lose.

The football team, like Britain itself, is burdened by the dead weight of impossible expectations.

nytimes.com

What a great collection from Type Punch Matrix: 10 reading copies of classic Black literature from the library of Barbara Smith. Not for nothing are these published in a now extinct format: the mass-market paperback. www.typepunchmatrix.com/pages/books/...

Collection of 10 Mass Market Paperbacks from the Library of Barbara Smith by Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Mary Helen Washington, Nella on Type Punch Matrix

various, but primarily New York : Signet / Grove / Anchor / Collier / Pocket et al. , 1964-1974. Small group of reading copies of works by Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansbe...

typepunchmatrix.com

Born in Depression-era Oklahoma to itinerant farmers, dropped out of high school to become a telegraph operator, and read Melville while he was bedridden from tuberculosis: higher education not as entitlement but as equipment for living. RIP Hershel Parker. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/b...

Hershel Parker, Melville Scholar of Ahab-Like Obsessiveness, Dies at 90

The author of an exhaustive two-volume biography, he was “fanatical about his approach to scholarship and infatuated with Melville,” a colleague said.

nytimes.com

Society for Novel Studies 2027: "Novel Geographies" at University of British Columbia, May 13-16. Join me and Kimberly Bain (UBC) for a seminar on BLAKE; OR, THE HUTS OF AMERICA, Martin R. Delany's transatlantic Black nationalist serial narrative. snsnovelgeographies.arts.ubc.ca/novel-peripa...

Novel & Peripatetic Seminars - Society for Novel Studies Conference

Novel Seminars are intended to return us to the pleasures of classroom discussion. Participants will read the novel in advance, and then gather to discuss it, led by two people who know the novel well...

snsnovelgeographies.arts.ubc.ca

A life well lived, and pursuits worth taking on because they reminded him of his fundamental humanity. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/a...

John Basinger, Who Memorized All 12 Books of ‘Paradise Lost,’ Dies at 92

nytimes.com

Keywords for Textual Studies at the Society for Textual Scholarship's annual meeting: a roundtable featuring Ph.D. candidates whose research offer new paths for research in material texts. Co-sponsored by the @bibsocamer.bsky.social.

On the idea of Latin America and how France played an essential role in constructing the figure of the "Latino" exile and diasporic subject www.publicbooks.org/paris-latino...

“Paris Latino”: How Latin America Migrated to Europe - Public Books

“Paris est la capitale de l’Amérique latine,” said Mexican essayist Carlos Fuentes

publicbooks.org

Best part about Saint Rita’s Amazing Traveling Bookstore Textual Apothecary is that it reaches places that can't sustain or no longer have brick-and-mortar bookstores of diverse fare. Love that one of the stops on this story is at a brewery in northwest Alabama www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/b...

This Bookstore Gets Good Mileage

nytimes.com

"I’m not a rare book collector; I’m not a first-editions collector. I am a collector of books that influenced me, that I admire." Amor Towles on the pleasure of collecting books that inspire him, that connect him to a "chain of human creative endeavor." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/b...

Amor Towles Shares Insights on His Own Rare Book Collection

nytimes.com

RIP Koji Suzuki, author of the RING series, which became the wildly popular Japan & US RING franchises. "I managed to write a good horror story because I don’t actually like horror. If I liked it and was always reading it, I would have written typical horror.” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/b...

Koji Suzuki, Sometimes Called the Stephen King of Japan, Dies at 68

nytimes.com

Pleased to have reviewed Shelley Fisher Fishkin's book JIM: THE LIFE AND AFTERLIVES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN'S COMRADE (2025) for RECEPTION. There's a useful comparison to be made between this book and Percival Everett's JAMES, I argue. scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/recepti...

Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade

The satirical kernel of Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novel James (2024) is contained in its title. We are used to referring to the eponymous hero as Jim, as he wa...

scholarlypublishingcollective.org

Director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton, @margulisa.bsky.social talks about how music can transport us to an entirely new place. 🎶

From Taylor Swift to Bad Bunny, the Science Behind How Music Transports Us (Exclusive)

Author and Director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University Elizabeth Margulis breaks down how music can take us somewhere else entirely in an exclusive piece for PEOPLE in advance of her n...

people.com

On Harriet Jacobs and how she self-published INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE (1861), paying for half of the cost of printing upfront and paying off the rest from sales of the book, which she did herself. avidly.org/2019/11/18/h...

Harriet Jacobs, Publisher and Activist

Many know the story of how Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was nearly lost to history as twentieth-century scholars misattributed its authorship to Jacobs’s white edit…

avidly.org

Terrific lecture-performance at @princeton.edu Special Collections: WHEN PAGES BREATHE: PUBLIC DOMAIN INSIGHT, IN MIND, featuring readings by Chesney Snow and original art by A.K. Lovelace, inspired by Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, and others. Curated by Dr. Jennifer Garcon.

As close to utopia as we're gonna get here on Earth: gainful employment, stereotype-defying caring roles, free time to pursue a hobby or passion, cycle-of-life dialogue and interaction. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/w...

Japan’s New Care Workers: Bodybuilders, Wrestlers and M.M.A. Fighters

nytimes.com

Tomorrow and Saturday, May 1-2: Black Queer and Trans Studies, the 2026 graduate conference hosted by Princeton's Department of African American Studies. A terrific lineup of speakers advancing the field in brave and innovative ways aas.princeton.edu/events/2026/...

2026 Black Queer & Trans Studies Graduate Conference

The conference will be a space for inter- and cross-disciplinary dialogue amongst graduate and early-career scholars of Black queer/trans life and politics, capaciously defined.

aas.princeton.edu

At @nytimes.com, Princeton's Yiyun Li (@appletwigli.bsky.social) explores 3️⃣ childhood stories that shape how we understand the world, and why you should revisit them as an adult. 📚

3 Fairy Tales Worth Remembering as an Adult

Childhood stories that shape how we understand the world.

nytimes.com

Curator Es-pranza Humphrey on ACT BLACK at Poster House: because so many films from the era are lost, "advertising posters often provide the only remaining evidence of the most important productions featuring Black performers between the 1870s and the 1940s" posterhouse.org/exhibition/a...

Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen | Poster House

Starting in the 1880s, Black performers and those invested in telling stories centering Black people attempted to counter the dehumanizing and harmful stereotypes used to portray Black characters.

posterhouse.org

C. Luke Soucy ‘19, award-winning scholar and translator of Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES, closes out a fantastic year of @princeton.edu’s Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows. Graduating seniors heard him speak about the winding path that led him from teenage love sonnets to classical epic poetry.

A balm for all of us in these times. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/u...

Will Sister Mary Kay Turn Out the Lights?

nytimes.com

Tomorrow (4/14): Edward Jones-Imhotep of @utoronto.ca in conversation with Dr. Adriana Green on "The Black Androids: Writing the Technological Underground," about race and robots in C19 New York City. Free and open to the public, 4:30pm EST. 👉 english.princeton.edu/events/black...

The Black Androids: Writing the Technological Underground

Join Edward Jones-Imhotep, in conversation with Adriana Green, to discuss his newest book project, “The Black Androids,” and its adaptation into a graphic novel.Currently in development with MIT Press...

english.princeton.edu