Just out: Giulio Pertile shows how early modern poetry about the creation of the world reconceptualized human creation as well. It's an insighful look at the relation between religion and poetics, with particular attention to human's impact on the planet. And it has a fabulous cover!
Just out: Brittany Murray takes on the French 1970s. Against readings of the post-68 moment as one marked by disorientation and a postmodern evasion of its own historicity, Murray shows how writers and filmmakers reimagined history in tackling gender, migration, and other questions of the era.
Just out: a collection of Catherine Malabou's writings from 1986 to 2003, as she develops the concept of plasticity. It's well translated and edited by Tyler Williams and Donald Cross. Adrian Johnston wrote the introduction, Malabou supplied an afterword, and we hit up Magritte for a fabulous cover.
Just out: Simone Stirner grapples with poetry in the wake of the Holocaust. Attentive to contexts well beyond the immediate aftermath, Stirner shows how the embodied experience of poetry, as it's mediated formally, shows us new ways of understading trauma and grief.
Just out: Steven Goldsmith reimagines materialism as a mode of loss. Against today's "affirmative" materialisms, Goldsmith identifies a countertradition premised premised on attrition, from Rembrandt thematizing a portrait's own own decay, to Melville's "gray aesthetics," and beyond.
Just out: Nazlı Konya looks at the Gezi protests in Istanbul as a resource for political theory. Konya's particularly attuned to the ways that moments of refusal that appear to fall outside political realm might in fact be something that can help us reimagine the possibilities of political thought.
Just out: Chris Pye explicates autopoeisis by way of Shakespeare, and vice versa. Against vitalist accounts of worldmaking, Pye wants to show how the world is born in the process of distinguishing self and environment. The readings of Shakespeare's theater (of Velazquez) are simply brilliant.
Not a book I sponsored, but Daniel Tiffany is a wonderful poet. This one's just out.
Just out: Nathan Brown's account of Baudelaire and the way he articulates agency together with its negation. This was originally published in Zagreb alongside the initial edition of his celebrated *Flowers of Evil* translation, but until now was barely available in North America.
We published this wonderful annotated edition of Hart Crane's "The Bridge" about fifteen years ago, though in cloth only for rights reasons. Now that the poem is in the public domain, we've been able to put it in paperback and Larry Kramer has added a new preface for the occasion.
An intriguing book sponsered by a colleague, which may be of interest to some here. Spiro Jabbour was a Syrian Christian deacon writing in the 70s and 80s who sought an encounter between theology and psychoanalysis. Aaron Eldridge translated and edited this book, and Omnia El Shakry blurbed it.
Just out: Michael Allan's wonderful book on a set of short films of the Middle East made for the Lumiere Company in 1896. Through these, Allan gives a fresh reading of what "world cinema" can mean, not just as a matter of presenting the world but as the way film articulates the very idea of worlds.
We only publish a few journals, but I'm proud that Joyce Studies is one of them. Shinjini Chattapadhay, Chris GoGwilt, and Keri Walsh have put together a fine special issue on networks of transnationality.
For those seeking diversion: This is the funniest book I've read in years, a semi-epistolary murder mystery about tax lawyers in Venice and London, narrated (and solved) by an Oxford don of indeterminate gender. Hat tip to Helen Tartar, whose recommendation of it I neglected for more than a decade.
Martine Beugnet has the latest book for our Cutaways series, on how the blurriness of the image can be a feature, not a bug. The book explores a wonderful range of films, from the Ipcress File through Akerman, as well as art theory and cognitive science.
Just out: Jeffrey Sacks thinks settler colonial life philosophically, philologically and politically. An essential book that moves between close readings of Arabic poetry and art and broad questions of living in a world of slaughter.
Just out: Rebecca Oh on the ambivalence of the postcolonial state in the face of environmental catastrophe. Recognizing the state as both corrupt and a potentially funcitonal repository of utopian desires for a better world, Oh, traces the ambivalences of living amid toxicity in the global south.
Just out: John Drabinski reads Black and deconstructive thought together to grapple with the kinds of life that are possible in the face of social death. Don't miss it!
Just out: Natania Meeker on the role of femininity in French materialist philosophy, as it developed in the eighteenth century. A fine account of women writers who weren't, strictly speaking, philosophers but who recentered pleasure in philosophical terms.
Just out: A volume of Geoffrey Hartman's writings on the Holocaust. Though it's now been a decade since Hartman's death, he had assembled the volume himself, at least in principle. My sincere thanks to Kevis Goodman and Brian McGrath for putting it together after it had languished in other hands.
Not a book I sponsored, but it sounds terrific. Robert Rushing thinks sound with Italo Calvino.
The Conversation has a good account of where we are in a scholarly publishing environment increasingly driven by commercial publishers. The culmination: "The scholarly system is overwhelmed by quantity, distorted by profit motives, and is stripped of its purpose of advancing knowledge."
The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing
Academic publishing now shows the same decline that has hit social media and online marketplaces.
theconversation.com
A splendid crop of book prizes. Special congratulations to Adela Pinch, who won the James Russell Lowell Prize, the single biggest book prize in literary studies. Kudos too to Jane and Marshall Brown and to Antonia Szabari. If you're in Toronto for MLA, stop by the booth and get copies of your own.
Just out: Miriam Tola on the return of the commons in the political imaginary. Bringing together feminist, postcolonial, and ecological traditions, Tola gives a fascinating account of urban politics in contemporary Rome in which the commons has returned as a force for political justice.
Just out: Marco Motta's ethnography of people who live in Haiti in the face of law that doesn't actually function. A poignant account of living within disillusionment.
Just out: Amal Eqeiq on South-South solidarity. Through work in Chiapas and Palestine and on narrative texts from both traditions, Eqeiq theorizes affinity as a framework for thinking nonreductive forms of connection and resistance.
Just out: Debarati Sanyal looks migration, displacement, and the arts produced by and around them. A fascinating and urgent account of the relation between politics and aesthetics. Many thanks to Marianne Hirsch and Miriam Ticktin for blurbing it.
I was proud when I heard Liron had won this well deserved award. And I am proud too of her statement in declining it. utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/mla-...
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