The words most commonly associated with the environmental movement—save, recycle, reuse, protect, regulate, restore—describe what we can do to help the environment, but few suggest how we might transform ourselves to better navigate the sudden turns of the late Anthropocene. Which words can help us to veer conceptually along with drastic environmental flux? Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert asked thirty brilliant thinkers to each propose one verb that stresses the forceful potential of inquiry, weather, biomes, apprehensions, and desires to swerve and sheer. Each term is accompanied by a concise essay contextualizing its meaning in times of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and global climate change.

Some verbs are closely tied to natural processes: compost, saturate, seep, rain, shade, sediment, vegetate, environ. Many are vaguely unsettling: drown, unmoor, obsolesce, power down, haunt. Others are enigmatic or counterintuitive: curl, globalize, commodify, ape, whirl. And while several verbs pertain to human affect and action—love, represent, behold, wait, try, attune, play, remember, decorate, tend, hope—a primary goal of Veer Ecology is to decenter the human. Indeed, each of the essays speaks to a heightened sense of possibility, awakening our imaginations and inviting us to think the world anew from radically different perspectives. A groundbreaking guide for the twenty-first century, Veer Ecology foregrounds the risks and potentialities of living on—and with—an alarmingly dynamic planet.

Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Texas at Arlington; Joseph Campana, Rice U; Holly Dugan, George Washington U; Lara Farina, West Virginia U; Cheryll Glotfelty, U of Nevada, Reno; Anne F. Harris, DePauw U; Tim Ingold, U of Aberdeen; Serenella Iovino, U of Turin; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Scott Maisano, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Tobias Menely, U of California, Davis; Steve Mentz, St. John’s U; J. Allan Mitchell, U of Victoria; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Vin Nardizzi, U of British Columbia; Laura Ogden, Dartmouth College; Serpil Opperman, Hacettepe U, Ankara; Daniel C. Remein, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Margaret Ronda, U of California, Davis; Nicholas Royle, U of Sussex; Catriona Sandilands, York U; Christopher Schaberg, Loyola U; Rebecca R. Scott, U of Missouri; Theresa Shewry, U of California, Santa Barbara; Mick Smith, Queen’s U; Jesse Oak Taylor, U of Washington; Brian Thill, Golden West College; Coll Thrush, U of British Columbia, Vancouver; Cord J. Whitaker, Wellesley College; Julian Yates, U of Delaware.

The subject of renewed interest among literary and cultural scholars, Vernon Lee wrote more than forty books, in a broad range of genres, including fiction, history, aesthetics, and travel literature. Early on, Lee established her reputation as a public critic whose unconventional viewpoints stood out among those of her contemporaries.

To feminist and cultural critics, she is a fascinating model of the independent female intellectual who, as Desmond MacCarthy once put it, provides a rare combination of intellectual curiosity and imaginative sensibility.

A startlingly original critical study, Vernon Lee adds new dimensions to the legacy of this woman of letters whose career spans the transition from the late Victorian to the modernist period. Zorn draws on archival materials to discuss Lee’s work in terms of British aestheticism and in the context of the Western European history of ideas.

Zorn contends that Lee’s fiction and nonfiction represent a literary position that bridges and surpasses both the Victorian sage and the modernist aesthetic critic.

Through Professor Zorn’s approach, which combines theoretical framings of texts in terms of recent feminist and cultural criticism with passages of close reading, Vernon Lee emerges as an influential figure in late-nineteenth-century British and continental European thinking on history, art, culture, and gender.

During his twenty-year tenure as a columnist for Việt Nam News, Hà Nội’s English-language newspaper, Hữu Ngọc charmed and invigorated an international readership hungry for straightforward but elegant entrees into understanding Vietnamese culture. The essays were originally collected in the massive Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. With Viet Nam: Tradition and Change, Ohio University Press presents a selection from these many treasures, which are perfectly suited to students of Vietnamese culture and travelers seeking an introduction to the country’s rich history, culture, and daily life.

With extraordinary linguistic ability and a prodigious memory, Hữu Ngọc is among Việt Nam’s keenest observers of and writers about traditional Vietnamese culture and recent history. The author’s central theme—that all tradition is change through acculturation—twines through each of the book’s ten sections, which contain Hữu Ngọc’s ideas on Vietnamese religion, literature, history, exemplary figures, and more. Taken on its own, each brief essay is an engaging discussion of key elements of Vietnamese culture and the history of an issue confronting Việt Nam today.

The essays in Virgin Microbe foreground thematic issues and advance recent theoretical agendas, such as the study of identity construction and the relationship between the avant-garde and mass culture, rather than focusing on biographies of individual Dadaists or centers of Dada activity. The authors represent a wider spectrum of disciplines and a broader international perspective than other recent collections on Dada. Ambitious in terms of contemporary academic interests, Virgin Microbe draws on a rich spectrum of intellectual traditions and contexts, prioritizing Dada’s metaphysical enquiries and its complicated connection to modernity.

Peter Balakian is a renowned poet, scholar, and memoirist; but his work as an essayist often prefigures and illuminates all three. "I think of vise and shadow as two dimensions of the lyric (literary and visual) imagination," he writes in the preface to this collection, which brings together essayistic writings produced over the course of twenty-five years. Vise, "as in grabbing and holding with pressure," but also in the sense of the vise-grip of the imagination, which can yield both clarity and knowledge. Consider the vise-grip of some of the poems of our best lyric poets, how language might be put under pressure "as carbon might be put under pressure to create a diamond." And shadow, the second half of the title: both as noun, "the shaded or darker portion of the picture or view or perspective," "partial illumination and partial darkness"; and as verb, to shadow, "to trail secretly as an inseparable companion" or a "force that follows something with fidelity; to cast a dark light on something—a person, an event, an object, a form in nature."

Vise and Shadow draws into conversation such disparate figures as W. B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Joan Didion, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, and Arshile Gorky, revealing how the lyric imagination of these artists grips experience, "shadows history," and "casts its own type of illumination," creating one of the deepest kinds of human knowledge and sober truth. In these elegantly written essays, Balakian offers a fresh way to think about the power of poetry, art, and the lyrical imagination as well as history, trauma, and memory.

In her writings, Terry Tempest Williams repeatedly invites us as readers into engagement and conversation with both her and her subject matter, whether it is nature or society, environment or art. From her evocation, in Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape, of an eroticism of place that defines erotic as "in relation," to the spiritual connectivity and familial bonds she explores in Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place and the political engagement she urges in The Open Space of Democracy, much of her work is about relationship, connection, and community. Like much good writing, her books invite readers into thoughtful dialogue with the text. Frequently in demand for workshops, lectures, and other speaking venues and well known as an environmental activist, Williams has a public persona and voice almost indistinguishable from her written ones.

Thus, the interviews she has often granted--in print, on the radio, on the Web--seamlessly elaborate the ideas and extend the explorations of her written texts. They also tell us much about the genesis, context, and intent of her books. With her distinctive, impassioned voice and familiar felicity of language, she talks about wilderness and wildlife, place and eroticism, art and literature, democracy and politics, family and heritage, Mormonism and religion, writing and creativity, and other subjects that engage her agile mind. The set of interviews gathered and introduced by Michael Austin in A Voice in the Wilderness represent the span of Terry Tempest Williams's career as a naturalist, author, and activist.

Bringing together a group of original essays concerning major writers of science fiction whose careers had begun by the end of World War II, this volume covers Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, C. L. Moore, Clifford D. Simak, Olaf Stapledon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack Williamson.

This volume includes studies of major writers of fantasy as well as of science fiction, a facet which in itself may say something about the development of the field. Authors covered are Gene Wolfe, Damon Knight, Cordwainer Smith, Mervyn Peake, Frederik Pohl, C. S. Lewis, Samuel Delaney, and Thomas Disch.

This is a story that few know, but those who do are its disciples. The story, of the highest and driest of all American deserts, the Great Basin, has no finer voice than that of William Fox. Fox’s book is divided into the three sections of the title. In “The Void,” he leads us through the Great Basin landscape, investigating our visual response to it—a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale of such magnitude and emptiness and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired. “The Grid” leads us on a journey through the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Frémont to the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history. “The Sign” wends us through the metaphors and language we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a palimpsest where, for example, the neon boulevards of Las Vegas interplay with ancient petroglyphs. In this one-of-a-kind travel book that allows us to travel within our own neurophysiological processes as well as out into the arresting void of the Great Basin, Fox has created a dazzling new standard at the frontier of writing about the American West. His stunning and broad insight draws from the fields of natural history, cognitive psychology, art history, western history, archaeology, and anthropology, and will be of value to scholars and readers in all these subjects.

Writing in a succinct and lively
  manner, leading historians and political scientists trace the history of American
  voting from the colonial period to the present incorporating the latest scholarship
  on suffrage reform, woman suffrage, black voting rights, and electoral participation.
  They explain how voting practices changed over time as the result of broad historical
  forces such as economic growth, demographic shifts, the results of war, and
  the rise of political reform movements.