front cover of Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics
Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics
Eve Rabinoff
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Perception in Aristotle's Ethics seeks to demonstrate that living an ethical life requires a mode of perception that is best called ethical perception. Specifically, drawing primarily on Aristotle’s accounts of perception and ethics in De anima and Nicomachean Ethics, Eve Rabinoff argues that the faculty of perception (aisthesis), which is often thought to be an entirely physical phenomenon, is informed by intellect and has an ethical dimension insofar as it involves the perception of particulars in their ethical significance, as things that are good or bad in themselves and as occasions to act. Further, she contends, virtuous action requires this ethical perception, according to Aristotle, and ethical development consists in the achievement of the harmony of the intellectual and perceptual, rational and nonrational, parts of the soul.

Rabinoff's project is philosophically motivated both by the details of Aristotle’s thought and more generally by an increasing philosophical awareness that the ethical agent is an embodied, situated individual, rather than primarily a disembodied, abstract rational will. 
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Finished from the Start and Other Plays
Juan Radrigan
Northwestern University Press, 2007

This collection of plays comes from one of Chile’s finest voices of the voiceless: Juan Radrigán. A history marked by personal and political hardship has equipped Radrigán to tell the stories of those his nation left behind. Seven years old when his father abandoned his family, he was forced to work from an early age. As an adult, he worked as a manual laborer during a very dark time for Chile: the demise of Salvador Allende and the rise of General Augusto Pinochet. In a time of torture, exile, and political “disappearances,” his plays stood as quietly powerful anti-regime statements that mourned the country’s loss. Translator Ana Elena Puga’s introduction places Radrigán’s work in its historical and cultural context and provides ample background for the six pieces.

The first work, Testimonies to the Deaths of Sabina, features a fruit seller who may lose her livelihood after she is accused of some mysterious infraction; but she doesn’t know what she has done—if she has truly done anything. The Beasts tells the story of three sisters living in the wilderness who, fearing they have been completely abandoned, devise a means of ultimate escape. Funeral Drums for Lambs and Wolves comes in three parts: Isabel Banished in Isabel, a monologue of a woman left to go mad alone; Without Apparent Motive, a monologue by a murderer who laments the spread of violence; and the dialogue The Guest, a confrontational piece that speaks directly to the spectators, implicating them in their silent, passive tolerance of Pinochet. The title play, Radrigán’s 1981 masterpiece, speaks directly to the specter of the many “disappeared” victims of the military regime.

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Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire
A Play
Heather Raffo
Northwestern University Press, 2006
Winner, 2007 Chicago Book Clinic Crystal Book Award for Excellence in Design

As topical as today's newspaper headlines, these rich monologues bring to life nine distinct Iraqi women whose very different stories convey the complex and harrowing reality of being female in modern-day Iraq. Their monologues quickly become a series of overlapping conversations leading to a breakdown in communication as the chaos of Iraq intensifies. Layal is a sexy and impulsive painter favored by Saddam's regime, breezily bohemian one minute and defensive the next; another woman mourns the death of her family in a 1991 bunker, and another--a blond American of Iraqi descent--painfully recalls a telephone conversation with Baghdad relatives on the eve of the U. S. invasion. Other characters decry the savagery of Saddam Hussein in terrifying detail and express an ambivalent relief at the American presence; still others--like a Bedouin woman searching for love--transcend politics.

The title comes from the teachings of the seventh-century imam Ali ibn Abu Talib: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one part to men." Heather Raffo's monologues weave these nine parts into a finely textured, brilliantly colorful tapestry of feminine longing in dire times. This compassionate and heart-breaking work will forever change your view of Iraqi women and the people of the Middle East.
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Dissensual Subjects
Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay
Andrew C. Rajca
Northwestern University Press, 2018
In Dissensual Subjects, Andrew C. Rajca combines cultural studies and critical theory to explore how the aftereffects of dictatorship have been used to formulate dominant notions of human rights in the present. In so doing, he critiques the exclusionary nature of these processes and highlights who and what count (and do not count) as subjects of human rights as a result.

Through an engaging exploration of the concept of “never again” (nunca más/nunca mais) and close analysis of photography exhibits, audiovisual installations, and other art forms in spaces of cultural memory, the book explores how aesthetic interventions can suggest alternative ways of framing human rights subjectivity beyond the rhetoric of liberal humanitarianism. The book visits sites of memory, two of which functioned as detention and torture centers during dictatorships, to highlight the tensions between the testimonial tenor of permanent exhibits and the aesthetic interventions of temporary installations there. Rajca thus introduces perspectives that both undo common understandings of authoritarian violence and its effects as well as reconfigure who or what are made visible as subjects of memory and human rights in postdictatorship countries.

Dissensual Subjects offers much to those concerned with numerous interlocking fields: memory, human rights, political subjectivity, aesthetics, cultural studies, visual culture, Southern Cone studies, postdictatorship studies, and sites of memory.
 
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The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz
Manuel Ramos
Northwestern University Press, 2003
This debut novel in the acclaimed Luis Montez series introduced a hero unique in detective fiction: a world-weary middle-aged lawyer steeped in the politics, history, and culture of the golden age of Chicano activism.

Twenty years ago, a gang attacked four Chicano student activists and shot down their leader, Rocky Ruiz. Now the survivors, Montez's former compatriots in the movement, are in danger. One is killed, another beaten, and a third driven into hiding. Enter Teresa Fuentes, a beautiful young lawyer determined to solve the mystery and just as determined to avoid becoming involved with Montez. To save his friends, Montez must reexamine the central event of their shared past-the murder of Rocky Ruiz. Just as difficult, he finds, may be to untangle his feelings for Teresa Fuentes.
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The Ballad of Gato Guerrero
Manuel Ramos
Northwestern University Press, 2003
Luis Montez—Denver attorney and part-time detective—has been getting his career and his life together. So how did he end up in a ditch, his car twisted and smoking nearby, a gun-wielding giant in a cowboy hat coming toward him?

The answer: his friend, Felix "Gato" Guerrero.

Trouble has always followed the larger-than-life Felix the Cat. Now it has jumped all over him. His girlfriend is the wife of a ruthless local crime lord and in spite of bullets and hit men he won't give her up. His former father-in-law blames him for a family tragedy and is bent on revenge. Worst of all, Felix is determined to remain unaware of the dangers. It's up to Montez-and not for the first time-to step in and save him.

As in his Edgar-nominated The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, Manuel Ramos immerses readers not only in a thrilling mystery but also in the fascinating Chicano culture of the West. Fast-paced and richly textured, The Ballad of Gato Guerrero is an entertaining addition to the acclaimed Luis Montez mystery series.
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Blues for the Buffalo
Manuel Ramos
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Winner, 2013 3rd Annual Latino Books Into Movies Award for Suspensee/Mystery
 
The sun, the sand, a young beauty named Rachel in a white bikini—there's no better way to recover from the aches and pains of your latest case. At least that's what attorney and part-time detective Luis Montez thinks until the woman gives him the manuscript of her novel and vanishes.

Montez just wants to rebuild his Denåver practice, but an aggressive young P.I. with an emotional attachment to Rachel draws him in. With the woman's powerful adopted family on one side and unexplained death of a writer friend on the other, Montez digs up a series of long-told lies and long-hidden ugly truths. He also finds himself confronting one of the great unsolved mysteries of recent Chicano history. What happened to Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, the iconic activist-writer presumed dead since 1974? More to the point, what made Rachel insist the legendary Brown Buffalo was alive-and that he was her real father?
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front cover of The Last Client of Luis Montez
The Last Client of Luis Montez
Manuel Ramos
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Hard-luck attorney Luis Montez has hit the big-time at last. He's successfully defended Jimmy Esch, the good-for-nothing son of a powerful Denver family. No small bonus, Jimmy's attractive sister Lisa is, as the saying goes, appreciative. It's enough to make a man quit moping about a lost love.

What a difference a day makes. Inside of twenty-four hours, a cop rumored to have received bribes from Montez takes a header off a mountain, Jimmy Esch is found butchered, and the cops consider the attorney their top suspect. Lisa—Montez's alibi—has conveniently disappeared. As if all that wasn't enough, Montez must also cope with the news his father is in the hospital.

Distracted by family strife and a media circus, Montez broods on the latest wrong turns in his life. Then he decides to act. Jumping bail, he heads across the Rockies to the barrios of San Diego. It's not easy to unravel the perfect set-up when you're down to your last cent. But Montez pursues the truths that will clear his name, and ultimately confronts the powerful force that is Family.
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Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea
Sergio Ramírez
Northwestern University Press, 2008
León, Nicaragua, 1907. During a tribute he delivers during his triumphal return to his native city, Rubén Darío writes on the fan of a little girl one of his most famous poems, "Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea."

In 1956 in a cafe in León, a group of literati gather, dedicated, among other things, to the rigorous reconstruction of the legend surrounding Darío—but also to conspire. There will be an attempt against dictator Somoza's life, and that little girl with the fan a half-century before will not be a disinterested party.

In Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, Sergio Ramírez encompasses, in a complete metaphor of reality and legend, the entire history of his country. The narrative moves along paths fifty years apart, which inevitably converge. The story becomes a fascinating exercise on the power of memory, on the influence of the past, fictitious or not, in the finality of reality.

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front cover of Billboard in the Clouds
Billboard in the Clouds
Suzanne S. Rancourt
Northwestern University Press, 2003

In this remarkable debut book of poems, winner of the Native Writers First Book Award, Suzanne S. Rancourt, presents her experience as a mixed-raced person seeking understanding through relationship with the natural world and dominant culture. Her family portraits are reminiscent of E. A. Robinson; her sensuous nature poems are imbued with love of earth as a "blessing."

Dance

my legs are explosions
expressions
of lustful wind
i converse through cracks in the walls
slipping in my true intention like a snow drift
on the inside
side of a door i pound
your chest
has become my wailing wall
i crave your tongue dusted
with words and implications
i have something you need

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front cover of Risking a Somersault in the Air
Risking a Somersault in the Air
Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers
Margaret Randall
Northwestern University Press, 1995
On July 19, 1979 the Nicaraguan people, under the banner of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, overthrew the 40-year-long Somoza family tyranny. Amongst those playing major roles in this popular revolution were many of the nation's leading poets and writers. Today, these men and women are focusing their creativity on the tasks of constructing a new nation and a new Nicaraguan culture. Through these interviews with 14 of Nicaragua's most important writers/revolutionaries we come to learn that Nicaragua's revolution, like its poetry, is an expression of great love, imagination and liberation.
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Farewell to Matyora
Valentin Rasputin
Northwestern University Press, 1995
A fine example of Village Prose from the post-Stalin era, Farewell to Matyora decries the loss of the Russian peasant culture to the impersonal, soulless march of progress.

It is the final summer of the peasant village of Matyora. A dam will be completed in the fall, destroying the village. Although their departure is inevitable, the characters over when, and even whether, they should leave. A haunting story with a heartfelt theme, Farewell to Matyora is a passionate plea for humanity and an eloquent cry for a return to an organic life.
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front cover of Live and Remember
Live and Remember
Valentin Rasputin
Northwestern University Press, 1992
First published in Russian in 1974, Live and Remember was immediately hailed by Soviet critics as a superb if atypical example of war literature and a moving depiction of the degradation and ultimate damnation of a frontline deserter. The novel tells the story of a Siberian peasant who makes a tragic miscalculation by deserting in the last year of the war, and of the loyal wife who embraces his fate as her own.
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Siberia, Siberia
Valentin Rasputin
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Valentin Rasputin—one of the most gifted and influential Russian prose writers of the past thirty years—offers a sweeping account of and penetrating reflection on the Russians' four hundred years of experience in Siberia. Beginning with Yermak, whose Cossacks crossed into Siberia in the 1580s, through the rapid Russian exploration, conquest, and colonialization, to today, Rasputin reveals the peculiarities of the Siberians, studying the gap between dreams and reality that has plagued Russians in Siberia for centuries.
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Postcolonial Disaster
Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century
Pallavi Rastogi
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Postcolonial Disaster studies literary fiction about crises of epic proportions in contemporary South Asia and Southern Africa: the oceanic disaster in Sri Lanka, the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, the medical disaster in South Africa and Botswana, and the geopolitical disaster in India and Pakistan. Pallavi Rastogi argues that postcolonial fiction about catastrophe is underpinned by a Disaster Unconscious, a buried but mobile agenda that forces disastrous events to narrate themselves. She writes that in disaster fiction, a literary Story and its real-life Event are in constant dialectic tension. In recent disasters, Story and Event are tied together as the urgency to circulate information and rebuild in the aftermath of the disaster dictates the flow of the narrative. As the Story acquires temporal distance from the Event, such as the seventy-three years since the partition of India in 1947, it plays more with form and theme, to expand beyond a tale about an all-consuming tragedy. Story and Event are in a constant dance with each other, and the Disaster Unconscious plays the tune to which they move.
 
Rastogi creates a narratology for postcolonial disaster fiction and brings concepts from Disaster Studies into the realm of literary analysis.
 
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Loss, A Love Story
Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters
Sophie Ratcliffe
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A journey with the novels that shape our emotions, our romances, and ourselves

Part memoir, part imagined history, this unique personal essay depicts the intimate experience of childhood bereavement, lost love affairs, and the complicated realities of motherhood and marriage. Framed by an extended train journey, author Sophie Ratcliffe turns to the novels, novelists, and heroines who have shaped her emotional and romantic landscapes. She transports us with her to survey the messiness of everyday life, all while reflecting on steam propulsion and pop songs, handbags and honeymoons, Anna Karenina and Anthony Trollope, former lovers and forgotten muses. Frank, funny, tender, and transporting, Loss, A Love Story asks why we fall in, and out, of love—and how we might understand doing so amid the ongoing upheavals and unwritten futures of the twenty-first century.   
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Long Shadows
The Second World War in British Fiction and Film
Petra Rau
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Few countries attribute as much importance to the Second World War and its memory as Britain; arguably nowhere else has this conflict developed such longevity in cultural memory and retained such presence in contemporary culture. Long Shadows is about how literature and film have helped shape this process in Britain. More precisely, the essays collected here suggest that this is a continuous work in progress, subject to transgenerational revisions, political expediencies, commercial considerations, and the vicissitudes of popular taste. It would indeed be more accurate to speak of the meanings (plural) that the war has been given at various moments in British cultural life. These semantic variations and fluctuations in cultural import are rooted in the specificity of the British war experience, in the political aftermath of the war in Europe, and in its significance for Britain’s postwar position on the global stage. In other words, the books and films discussed in these essays respond to how the war has been interpreted and remembered; what is at stake is the way in which the war has been emplotted as a hegemonic cultural narrative about Britain.
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Behold an Animal
Four Exorbitant Readings
Thangam Ravindranathan
Northwestern University Press, 2020

As animals recede from our world, what tale is being told by literature’s creatures? Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings examines incongruous animals in the works of four major contemporary French writers: an airborne horse in a novel by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, extinct orangutans in Éric Chevillard, stray dogs in Marie NDiaye, vanishing (bits of) hedgehogs in Marie Darrieussecq. Resisting naturalist assumptions that an animal in a story is simply—literally or metaphorically—an animal, Thangam Ravindranathan understands it rather as the location of something missing. The animal is a lure: an unfinished figure fleeing the frame, crossing bounds of period, genre, even medium and language. Its flight traces an exorbitant (self-)portrait in which thinking admits to its commerce with life and flesh. It is in its animals, at the same time unbearably real and exquisitely unreal, that literature may today be closest to philosophy. 

This book’s primary focus is the contemporary French novel and continental philosophy. In addition to Toussaint, Chevillard, NDiaye, and Darrieussecq, it engages the work of Jean de La Fontaine, Eadweard Muybridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett, and Francis Ponge. 

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Genius
A Novel
Thomas Rayfiel
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Kara Bell spent her youth plotting escape from Witch’s Falls, Arkansas. Relentless focus and the spurning of all emotional attachment led to the doctoral program in philosophy at Columbia University. But Kara’s careful plans are upended by cancer, and suddenly she is home again, where she finds herself subject to her mother’s suffocating care, her brother’s puzzling love life, the local doctor’s meddling, and the strong gravitational pull of her old friend and obsession, Christy Lee. Will Kara find health and sanity? Will she learn what really happened to her father? Can she escape Witch’s Falls a second time, or will she succumb to the slow poison of local kindness and Snickers Salad?

In Genius, Thomas Rayfiel finds both poignancy and dark humor in deathly illness, family secrets, organized religion, parenting, abortion, gossip, senility, and the mysterious rhythms of small-town life.

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In Pinelight
A Novel
Thomas Rayfiel
Northwestern University Press, 2013

As the elderly hero of Thomas Rayfiel’s daring new novel, In Pinelight, sits in an old folks home responding to the questions of an unseen interrogator, the fragments he supplies form the portrait of a man’s life in upstate New York. Losses, loves, destructive family relationships, sexual entanglements, and moments of mystical awareness filter through the seeming minutiae of small-town gossip to confront the reader with their cumulative power.

In Pinelight stirs the emotions both by its formal virtuosity and by the precision with which the narrator is able to reveal human psychology. Rayfiel seeks to capture the essence of historical forces and to illuminate the inescapable truths we would rather not see.

 
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Anton Chekhov
A Life
Donald Rayfield
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Anton Chekhov's life was short, intense, and dominated by battles, both with his dependents and with the tuberculosis that killed him at age forty-four. The traditional image of Chekhov is that of the restrained artist torn between medicine and literature. But Donald Rayfield's biography reveals the life long hidden behind the noble facade. Here is a man capable of both great generosity toward needy peasants and harsh callousness toward lovers and family, a man who craved with equal passion the company of others and the solitude necessary to create his art. Based on information from Chekhov archives throughout Russia, Rayfield's work has been hailed as a groundbreaking examination of the life of a literary master.A new biography of the great author and playwright.
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front cover of Islamic Africa 3.2
Islamic Africa 3.2
Scott Reese
Northwestern University Press, 2012
Islamic Africa is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, academic journal published by Northwestern University Press in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), based at Northwestern University, Evanston. The journal incorporates Sudanic Africa, retaining its focus on historical sources, bibliographies, and methodologies.

Islamic Africa promotes interaction between scholars of Islam and Africa across all continents and across historical periods. We welcome papers on any aspect of Islam and Muslim life pertaining to Africa and/or Africans from the humanities and the social sciences, especially those originating from the African continent.
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front cover of Islamic Africa 4.1
Islamic Africa 4.1
Scott Reese
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Islamic Africa is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, academic journal published by Northwestern University Press in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), based at Northwestern University, Evanston. The journal incorporates Sudanic Africa, retaining its focus on historical sources, bibliographies, and methodologies.

Islamic Africa promotes interaction between scholars of Islam and Africa across all continents and across historical periods. We welcome papers on any aspect of Islam and Muslim life pertaining to Africa and/or Africans from the humanities and the social sciences, especially those originating from the African continent.

Islamic Africa Electronic Journal
Volume 4, Issue 1 Spring 2013
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front cover of Islamic Africa 4.2
Islamic Africa 4.2
Scott Reese
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Islamic Africa is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, academic journal published by Northwestern University Press in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), based at Northwestern University, Evanston. The journal incorporates Sudanic Africa, retaining its focus on historical sources, bibliographies, and methodologies.

Islamic Africa promotes interaction between scholars of Islam and Africa across all continents and across historical periods. We welcome papers on any aspect of Islam and Muslim life pertaining to Africa and/or Africans from the humanities and the social sciences, especially those originating from the African continent.
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front cover of Islamic Africa 5.1
Islamic Africa 5.1
Scott Reese
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Islamic Africa is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, academic journal published by Northwestern University Press in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), based at Northwestern University, Evanston. The journal incorporates Sudanic Africa, retaining its focus on historical sources, bibliographies, and methodologies.

Islamic Africa promotes interaction between scholars of Islam and Africa across all continents and across historical periods. We welcome papers on any aspect of Islam and Muslim life pertaining to Africa and/or Africans from the humanities and the social sciences, especially those originating from the African continent.
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front cover of Islamic Africa 5.2
Islamic Africa 5.2
Scott Reese
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Islamic Africa is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, academic journal published by Northwestern University Press in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), based at Northwestern University, Evanston. The journal incorporates Sudanic Africa, retaining its focus on historical sources, bibliographies, and methodologies.

Islamic Africa promotes interaction between scholars of Islam and Africa across all continents and across historical periods. We welcome papers on any aspect of Islam and Muslim life pertaining to Africa and/or Africans from the humanities and the social sciences, especially those originating from the African continent.
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A Small Apocalypse
Stories
Laura Chow Reeve
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A gorgeously wrought exploration of what it means to exist in the in-between.

In her debut short-story collection A Small Apocalypse, Laura Chow Reeve examines cultural inheritance, hybridity, queerness, and the stickiness of home with an eye for both the uncanny and the realistic: human bodies become reptilian, queer ghosts haunt their friends, a young woman learns to pickle memories, and a theater floods during an apocalyptic movie marathon. The characters in A Small Apocalypse weave in and out of its fourteen stories, confronting their sense of otherness and struggling to find new ways of being and belonging. Heavily steeped in the swampy, feral heat of Florida, these stories venture beyond the problems of constructing an identity to the frontier of characters living their truth in a world that doesn’t yet have a place for them.
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Prisoner of Her Past
A Son's Memoir
Howard Reich
Northwestern University Press, 2011

Until February 15, 2001, Howard Reich’s mother, Sonia, had managed to keep almost everything about her experience of the Holocaust from her son. That night, she packed some clothes and fled her house in Skokie, Illinois, convinced that someone was trying to kill her. This was the first indication that she was suffering from late-onset post traumatic stress disorder, a little-known condition that can emerge decades after the initial trauma. For Howard, it was also the opening of a window onto his mother’s past. 

In Prisoner of Her Past, Howard Reich has written a moving memoir about growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors and finding refuge from silence and fear in the world of jazz. It is only when Sonia’s memories overwhelm her and Howard begins to piece together her story that he comes to understand how his parents’ lives shaped his own. The paperback edition includes an epilogue by the author that relates developments since the publication of the cloth edition.

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Let Freedom Swing
Collected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Gospel
Howard Reich
Northwestern University Press, 2010
A swing note is, to the listener of the rhythm, an unexpected note, and it is the spark of life in jazz and its relatives. Whether playing the standards or the most experimental piece, it is how a musician handles these notes—fearlessly or safely—that determines the fate of the performance. Howard Reich’s critical writing is similarly unexpected and fearless, and Let Freedom Swing is a collection of the articles from the past three decades that best capture this spirit.

Each section of Let Freedom Swing composes a suite, focusing on either a person, place, or scene. Reich gives new life to the standards with his profiles and elegies for such giants as Gershwin, Ellington, and Sinatra. A profile of Louis Armstrong brings out the often angry side of Satchmo but also reveals a more remarkable musician and human being.

His open-mindedness makes Reich a particularly astute observer of the experimental and new, from Ornette Coleman to Chicago experimentalist Ken Vandermark. And his observations about street music open our ears to the songs of everyday life. Reich’s fearlessness is evident in his writing about daunting subjects, such as the New Orleans music scene after Katrina, the lost legacy of jazz in Panama, and the complicated legacy of "race music" in America.

Howard Reich combines a deep enthusiasm for music, a breadth of knowledge, and an ability to share his world with his readers, and Let Freedom Swing is essential reading for anyone interested in the continuing vitality of jazz, gospel, blues, and American music in general.
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Being Here Is Glorious
On Rilke, Poetry, and Philosophy
James D. Reid
Northwestern University Press, 2015

With a new translation of the Duino Elegies

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’/orders?” Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies opens with one of the most powerful poetic expressions of the search for meaning in the modern world. Published in 1923, the Elegies would influence important philosophers on the Continent, including Heidegger. But with a few exceptions, Rilke’s poetry has not had an impact on philosophy in the Anglo-American world. In Being Here Is Glorious, James D. Reid offers a fresh translation of the Elegies, which hews to the form of the original and provides his own meditation on the place of poetry in philosophy. Reid makes a convincing case that poetry and philosophy can address the problem of finding things significant and worth affirming in light of various reasons to doubt the value of the world in which we find ourselves cast.

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Concepts of the World
The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910–1940
Effie Rentzou
Northwestern University Press, 2022
How did the avant-garde imagine its interconnected world? And how does this legacy affect our understanding of the global today?

The writers and artists of the French avant-garde aspired to reach a global audience that would be wholly transformed by their work. In this study, Effie Rentzou delves deep into their depictions of the interwar world as an international and modern landscape, one marked by a varied cosmopolitanism. The avant-garde’s conceptualization of the world paralleled, rejected, or expanded prevailing notions of the global sphere.

The historical avant garde—which encompassed movements like futurism, Dada, and surrealism—was self-consciously international, operating across global networks and developed with the whole world as its horizon and its public. In the heady period between the end of the Belle Époque and the tumult of World War II, both individual artists (including Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Francis Picabia, Louis Aragon, Leonora Carrington, and Nicolas Calas) and collective endeavors (such as surrealist magazines and exhibitions) grappled with contemporary anxieties about economic growth, imperialism, and colonialism, as well as various universalist, cosmopolitan, and internationalist visions. By probing these works, Concepts of the World offers an alternative narrative of globalization, one that integrates the avant-garde’s enthusiasm for, as well as resistance to, the process. Rentzou identifies within the avant-garde a powerful political language that expressed the ambivalence of living and creating in an increasingly globalized world—a language that profoundly shaped the way the world has been conceptualized and is experienced today.
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The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure
Race, Affect, Environment
Kelly M. Rich
Northwestern University Press, 2023

A critical reading of the unstable structures that organize biological and social life

This timely and radically interdisciplinary volume uncovers the aesthetics and politics of infrastructure. From roads and bridges to harbors and canals, infrastructure is conventionally understood as the public works that allow for the circulation of capital. Yet this naturalized concept of infrastructure, driven by capital’s restless expansion, is haunted by imperial tendencies to occupy territory, extract resources, and organize life. Infrastructure thus undergirds the living nexus of modernity in an ongoing project of racialization, affective embodiment, and environmental praxis. Rather than merely making visible infrastructure’s modes of power, however, The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure brings literary methods to bear on the interpretive terrain, reading infrastructural space and temporalities to show that their aesthetic and sensorial experience cannot be understood apart from histories of production and political economies.

Building on critical infrastructure studies in anthropology, geography, and media studies, this collection demonstrates the field’s vitality to scholars working across the humanities, including in literary, visual, and cultural studies. By querying the presumed invisibility of infrastructure’s hidden life, the volume’s contributors revitalize ongoing literary debates about reading surface and depth. How, they ask, might infrastructure and aesthetics then function as epistemic tools for rethinking each other? And what urgency do they acquire in light of current crises that bear on death, whether biological, social, or planetary?

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Husserl
An Analysis of His Phenomenology
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 1967
Paul Ricoeur was one of the foremost interpreters and translators of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. These nine essays present Ricoeur's interpretation of the most important of Husserl's writings, with emphasis on his philosophy of consciousness rather than his work in logic. In Ricoeur's philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism came of age and these essays provide an introduction to the Husserlian elements which most heavily influenced his own philosophical position.
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front cover of From Text to Action
From Text to Action
Essays in Hermeneutics, II
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 1991
With his writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ideology, and religion, Paul Ricoeur has single-handedly redefined and revitalized the hermeneutic tradition. From Text to Action is an essential companion to the now classic The Conflict of Interpretations. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its own philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K.O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own theorization of ideology to their version of ideology critique.
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Husserl
An Analysis of His Phenomenology
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Paul Ricoeur was one of the foremost interpreters and translators of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. These nine essays present Ricoeur's interpretation of the most important of Husserl's writings, with emphasis on his philosophy of consciousness rather than his work in logic. In Ricoeur's philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism came of age and these essays provide an introduction to the Husserlian elements which most heavily influenced his own philosophical position.
[more]

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The Conflict of Interpretations
Essays in Hermeneutics
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 2007
This collection brings together twenty-two essays by Paul Ricoeur under the topics of structuralism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and religion. In dramatic conciseness, the essays illuminate the work of one of the leading philosophers of the day. Those interested in Ricoeur's development of the philosophy of language will find rich and suggestive reading. But the diversity of essays also speaks beyond the confines of philosophy to linguists, theologians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts.
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The Conflict of Interpretations
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 1974
This collection brings together twenty-two essays by Paul Ricoeur under the topics of structuralism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and religion. In dramatic conciseness, the essays illuminate the work of one of the leading philosophers of the day. Those interested in Ricoeur's development of the philosophy of language will find rich and suggestive reading. But the diversity of essays also speaks beyond the confines of philosophy to linguists, theologians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts.
[more]

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Freedom and Nature
The Voluntary and the Involuntary
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 2007
This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world.
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From Text to Action
Essays in Hermeneutics, II
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Incredible originality of thought in areas as vast as phenomenology, religion, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity, language, Marxism, and structuralism has made Paul Ricoeur one of the philosophical giants of the twentieth century. The way in which Ricoeur approaches these themes makes his works relevant to the reader today: he writes with honesty and depth of insight into the core of a problem, and his ability to mark for future thought the very path of philosophical inquiry is nearly unmatched. 

From Text to Action is an essential companion to the classic The Conflict of Interpretations. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K. O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own theorization of ideology to their critique of ideology. 

This new edition includes a foreword by Richard Kearney. It and other new editions of Ricoeur's texts published by Northwestern University Press have joined the canon of contemporary continental philosophy and continue to contribute to emergent discussions in the twenty-first century. 
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History and Truth
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 1965
In this volume, Paul Ricoeur investigates the antinomy between history and truth, or between historicity and meaning. He argues that history has meaning insofar as it approaches universality and system, but has no meaning insofar as this universality violates the singularity of individuals' lives. Imposing unity upon truth, or unifying the diversity of knowledge and opinion, creates a singular and universal history but destroys historicity and subjectivity. Allowing for singularities in history promotes a multiplicity of truths over a single, unique truth, and thereby annhilates system.
[more]

front cover of Freedom and Nature
Freedom and Nature
The Voluntary and the Involuntary
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 1966
This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world.
[more]

front cover of History and Truth
History and Truth
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 2007
In this volume, Paul Ricoeur investigates the antinomy between history and truth, or between historicity and meaning. He argues that history has meaning insofar as it approaches universality and system, but has no meaning insofar as this universality violates the singularity of individuals' lives. Imposing unity upon truth, or unifying the diversity of knowledge and opinion, creates a singular and universal history but destroys historicity and subjectivity. Allowing for singularities in history promotes a multiplicity of truths over a single, unique truth, and thereby annihilates system
[more]

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The Sergeant in the Snow
Mario Rigoni Stern
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Mario Rigoni Stern was barely twenty-one and already a battle veteran at the time of the World War II disaster he describes in The Sergeant in the Snow. In July 1942 three divisions of Italian Alpini troops, specially trained for winter warfare, began retreating--entirely on foot, with no supplies, at temperatures of 30-40 degrees below zero. By the end of the march, 90,000 men were missing or dead and 45,000 frostbitten and wounded.
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The Story of Tonle
Mario Rigoni Stern
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Tönle Bintarn's story takes place in the Veneto region, which once bordered the Austro-Hungarian Empire and where smuggling provided a means of subsistence to the peasants. Having run afoul of revenue agents, Tönle must seek refuge beyond the frontier in Central Europe, where year after year he survives by doing odd jobs and working as an itinerant print peddler, a horse trainer, and a gardener. When he is pardoned he returns home for good to find his children are grown and nothing remains for him but to tend his sheep, while around him Europe spins toward the catastrophe of the Great War--the conflict that will destroy Veneto's unique way of life.
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New Poems
A Bilingual Edition
Rainer Maria Rilke
Northwestern University Press, 1998
New Poems (1907–1908) represented a departure for Rilke from the traditional German lyric poetry of which he was then considered a master. Apparent in the poems is the influence of Rodin--for whom Rilke had worked—as well as other visual artists, including Hokusai, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso. Rilke forced language to extremes of subtlety and refinement that only now, in Stephen Cohn's translations, is being captured properly in English.
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Duino Elegies
A Bilingual Edition
Rainer Maria Rilke
Northwestern University Press, 1998
The Duino Elegies are the culmination of the development of Rilke's poetry. A summary of his spiritual troubles, perhaps no volume of poems in a European language has made so dramatic and sustained an impact on English-speaking readers in this century.
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The Book of Hours
Prayers to a Lowly God
Rainer Maria Rilke
Northwestern University Press, 2001
This is the first complete translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch) in more than forty years. This bilingual edition provides English-speaking readers with access to a critical work in the development of the most significant figure in twentieth-century German poetry. Kidder's delicately nuanced translation preserves Rilke's uncomplicated and melodic flow, his rhythm, and, where possible, his rhyme while remaining true to content.

Rilke penned The Book of Hours between 1899 and 1903 in three parts. Readers and experts alike consider the collection among Rilke's most important and enduring works.
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Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman
Rainer Maria Rilke
Northwestern University Press, 2012

For Rainer Maria Rilke, letter writing was a discipline and art unto itself. Some seven thousand of his letters have survived, among them works of profound beauty and insight to rival his poems and fiction. For the first time, this volume makes available to an English-speaking audience two of the earliest collections of Rilke letters published after his death, each with a nuanced introduction and notes by Annemarie S. Kidder.

The thematic collection Letters on God contains two letters by Rilke, the first an actual letter written during World War I, in 1915 in Munich, the second a fictional one composed after the war, in 1922 at Muzot in Switzerland. In these letters, Rilke builds on the mystical view of God conceived in The Book of Hours, but he moves beyond it, demonstrating a unique vision of God and Christ, the church and religious experience, friendship and death.

Like his famous Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Woman presents an intimate series of letters written to a young admirer. The nine letters collected here were written to Lisa Heise over the course of five years, from 1919 to 1924. Though Rilke and Heise never met, the poet emerges in these letters as a compassionate listener and patient teacher who with levelheaded sensitivity affirms and guides the movements of another person’s soul.

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Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War
Emmanuel Ringelblum
Northwestern University Press, 1992
A man of towering intellectual accomplishment and extraordinary tenacity, Emmanuel Ringelblum devoted his life to recording the fate of his people at the hands of the Germans. Convinced that he must remain in the Warsaw Ghetto to complete his work, and rejecting an invitation to flee to refuge on the Aryan side, Ringelbaum, his wife, and their son were eventually betrayed to the Germans and killed.

This book represents Ringelbaum's attempt to answer the questions he knew history would ask about the Polish people: what did the Poles do while millions of Jews were being led to the stake? What did the Polish underground do? What did the Government-in-Exile do? Was it inevitable that the Jews, looking their last on this world, should have to see indifference or even gladness on the faces of their neighbors? These questions have haunted Polish-Jewish relations for the last fifty years. Behind them are forces that have haunted Polish-Jewish relations for a thousand years.
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New Digital Worlds
Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy
Roopika Risam
Northwestern University Press, 2019
The emergence of digital humanities has been heralded for its commitment to openness, access, and the democratizing of knowledge, but it raises a number of questions about omissions with respect to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation. Postcolonial digital humanities is one approach to uncovering and remedying inequalities in digital knowledge production, which is implicated in an information-age politics of knowledge. 

New Digital Worlds traces the formation of postcolonial studies and digital humanities as fields, identifying how they can intervene in knowledge production in the digital age. Roopika Risam examines the role of colonial violence in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives for resisting this violence. Offering a reading of the colonialist dimensions of global organizations for digital humanities research, she explores efforts to decenter these institutions by emphasizing the local practices that subtend global formations and pedagogical approaches that support this decentering. Last, Risam attends to human futures in new digital worlds, evaluating both how algorithms and natural language processing software used in digital humanities projects produce universalist notions of the "human" and also how to resist this phenomenon. 
 
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front cover of Abolition and the Press
Abolition and the Press
The Moral Struggle Against Slavery
Ford Risley
Northwestern University Press, 2008

This examination of nineteenth-century journalism explores the specific actions and practices of the publications that provided a true picture of slavery to the general public. From Boston's strident <i>Liberator</i> to Frederick Douglass' <i>North Star</i>, the decades before the Civil War saw more than forty newspapers founded with the specific aim of promoting emancipation. Not only did these sheets provide a platform for discourse, but they also gave slavery a face for a wider audience. The reach of the abolitionist press only grew as the fiery publications became objects of controversy and targets of violence in both South and North. These works kept the issue of slavery in the public eye even as mainstream publications took up the call for emancipation, as the nation went to war, up to the end of slavery. Their legacy has endured, as dedicated reform writers and editors continue to view the press as a vital tool in the fight for equality.

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No One Will See Me Cry
Cristina Rivera-Garza
Northwestern University Press, 2003

Winner of the Mexico National Novel Prize, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and IMPACT Prize

Joaquín Buitrago, a photographer in the Castaneda Insane Asylum, believes a patient is a prostitute he knew years earlier. His obsession in confirming Matilde's identity leads him to explore the clinics records, and her tragic history. Joaquín and Matilda begin to tell each other fragmented stories about a past they almost shared, and a future in which they do not believe. Set in 1920s Mexico, this novel is at once an overview of one of the most turbulent times in Mexican history, a love story, and a meditation on the ways in which medical and popular language define insanity. No One Will See Me Cry is a lyrical and startling visitation with the so-called losers of an era as they try to plumb the meaning of their lives. 

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The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England
Elizabeth Rivlin
Northwestern University Press, 2011

In The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England, Elizabeth Rivlin explores the ways in which servant-master relationships reshaped literature. The early modern servant is enjoined to obey his or her master out of dutiful love, but the servant's duty actually amounts to standing in for the master, a move that opens the possibility of becoming master. Rivlin shows that service is fundamentally a representational practice, in which the servant who acts for a master merges with the servant who acts as a master. 

Rivlin argues that in the early modern period, servants found new positions as subjects and authors found new forms of literature. Representations of servants and masters became a site of contact between pressing material concerns and evolving aesthetic ones. Offering readings of dramas by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Thomas Dekker and prose fictions by Thomas Deloney and Thomas Nashe, Rivlin suggests that these authors discovered their own exciting and unstable projects in the servants they created.

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Of Forgotten Times
Marisela Rizik
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Of Forgotten Times is at once about romance, about mothers and daughters, and about a dictatorship. Set in a fictional Caribbean island, it begins at the time of the conquistadors and ends in relatively modern times. The novel focuses on the stories of the women of two different families whose only point in common is the dictator who rules their island nation. One set of women, the Parduz family, is descendant of green-eyed slaves who practice voodoo-like rituals even through modern times in a village so distant from the major cities that ancient practices continue to have relevance in the present. The other set of women, the Valverde family, is a mother and daughter who seek to find a way out of the endemic conditions of poverty. Of Forgotten Times describes life in a country ruled by a ruthless, power-hungry, machista tyrant who is married to Herminia Parduz and whose lover, among others, is Mercedes Valverde.
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For a New Novel
Essays on Fiction
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Northwestern University Press, 1989
Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the leaders of the new French literary movement of the sixties, has long been regarded as the outstanding writer of the nouveau roman, as well as its major spokesman. For a New Novel reevaluates the techniques, ethos, and limits of contemporary fiction. This is a work of immense importance for any discussions of the history of the novel and for contemporary thinking about the future of fiction.
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Snapshots
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Alain Robbe-Grillet has long been regarded as the chief spokesman for the controversial nouveau roman. This collection of brilliant short pieces introduces the reader to those techniques employed by Robbe-Grillet in his longer works. These intriguing, gemlike stories represent his most accessible fiction.
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Closest Pronunciation
Poems
Ed Roberson
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Northwestern University Press is honored to inaugurate the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize series with Ed Roberson’s Closest Pronunciation. Here is a teacher of poets studying his own assignments, questioning and seeking the generative capacity in looking at and seeing things that ends in the realization of a poem. In a line from the brief poem "Night Writing," from which the chapbook draws its title, he writes, "The word closest in pronunciation / To an ambulance’s siren is ‘wrong.’" The collection as a whole gives voice, often quiet but always profound, to many things overlooked and neglected in culture, nature, and everyday life.

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After Jena
New Essays on Fichte's Later Philosophy
Tom Rockmore
Northwestern University Press, 2008

The career of J. G. Fichte, a central figure in German idealism and in the history of philosophy, divides into two distinct phases: the first period, in which he occupied the chair of critical philosophy at the University of Jena (1794-1799); and the following period, after he left Jena for Berlin. Due in part to the inaccessibility of the German texts, Fichte scholarship in the English-speaking world has tended to focus on the Jena period, neglecting the development of this major thinker's mature development. The essays collected in this book begin to correct this imbalance. Concerned in a variety of ways with Fichte's post-Jena philosophy, these essays by distinguished and emerging scholars demonstrate the depth and breadth of Fichte scholarship being done in English.

With an introduction that locates the essays in philosophical and historical terms, the book divides into three related categories: Fichte’s development, his view of religion, and other aspects of his "popular" (or not-so-popular) philosophy. From a wide range of perspectives, the essays show how Fichte’s later development reflects the philosophical concerns of his time, the specific debates in which he engaged, and the complex events of his philosophical career.

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Borrowed Bones
New Poems from the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles
Luis J. Rodriguez
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Foreword by Martín Espada

This chapbook collection offers new poems from the prolific career of a community leader, activist, and healer. Luis J. Rodríguez’s work asks profound questions of us as readers and fellow humans, such as, "If society cooperates, can we nurture the full / and healthy development of everyone?" In his introductory remarks, Martín Espada describes the poet as a man engaged in people and places: "Luis Rodríguez is a poet of many tongues, befitting a city of many tongues. He speaks English, Spanish, ‘Hip Hop,’ ‘the Blues,’ and ‘cool jazz.’ He speaks in ‘mad solos.’ He speaks in ‘People’s Sonnets.’ He speaks in the language of protest. He speaks in the language of praise."

 

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The Day's Hard Edge
Poems
José Antonio Rodríguez
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A radically open interrogation of queer Chicano identity
 
In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day's Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker’s world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker’s initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.
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América Is Her Name
Luis J. Rodríguez
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Set in the Pilsen barrio of Chicago, this children's picture book gives a heartwarming message of hope. The heroine, América, is a primary school student who is unhappy in school until a poet visits the class and inspires the students to express themselves creatively-in Spanish or English. América Is Her Name emphasizes the power of individual creativity in overcoming a difficult environment and establishing self-worth and identity through the young girl América's desire and determination to be a writer. This story deals realistically with the problems in urban neighborhoods and has an upbeat theme: you can succeed in spite of the odds against you. Carlos Vázquez's inspired four-color illustrations give a vivid sense of the barrio, as well as the beauty and strength of the young girl América.
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The Concrete River
Poems
Luis J. Rodríguez
Northwestern University Press, 1991
1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence

The Concrete River
is a collection of poems by poet laureate of Los Angeles Luis Rodríguez. They illuminate the gritty idiosyncrasies of immigrant life in urban barrios spanning Los Angeles to Chicago to Harlem. Rodríguez lends powerful voices to those struggling to keep the gas on, to find work, and to keep love.  Populated by a vibrant cast of characters, ranging from the drugged, to the eccentric, to the heartbroken, Rodríguez’s poems protest capitalism, violence, and exploitation while reveling in the potential of compassion.
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My Nature Is Hunger
New and Selected Poems, 1989 2004
Luis J. Rodríguez
Northwestern University Press, 2005
    Award-winning Latino author Luis J. Rodríguez stuns with My Nature is Hunger. The collection features 26 new poems that reflect Rodríguez’s increasingly global view, his hard-won spirituality, and his movement toward reconciliation with his family and his past, as well as selections from his previous books, Poems Across the Pavement, The Concrete River, and Trochemoche.
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Trochemoche
Poems
Luis J. Rodríguez
Northwestern University Press, 1998
TROCHEMOCHE means helter-skelter in Spanish, and this book expresses the turmoil of the barrio and the various themes that drive Luis J. Rodríguez's poetry. Drawing on more than ten years of poems, Rodríguez writes powerfully and passionately about urban youth, family, and the plight of neglected communities, while exploring the rich cultural roots of his Chicano ancestry.
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Sing, I
A Novel
Ethel Rohan
Northwestern University Press, 2024
One woman's path to rediscovering herself through music, romance, and a little vigilantism

Inside Half Moon Bay, a sparkling California coastal town, Ester Prynn is dulled and diminished by struggles with work, money, marriage, her senile father, a troubled teenage son, and old guilt she can’t assuage. When a masked gunman robs the convenience store where Ester works, he upends her fraught life and propels her toward passions buried, like singing; desires discovered, like a same-sex infatuation; and wrongs righted, like bringing the violent assailant to justice. But as the armed robber commits new crimes and continues to evade capture, the trauma from the holdup climbs, threatening Ester’s newfound delights and longings and forcing her to contend with her burning regrets and what-ifs. In the reckoning between Ester and these growing, molten upsets, she’s faced with enormous choices and must determine what and who can bring her to her best life.
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Prosaic Conditions
Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature
Na'ama Rokem
Northwestern University Press, 2013
In her penetrating new study, Na’ama Rokem observes that prose writing—more than poetry, drama, or other genres—came to signify a historic rift that resulted in loss and disenchantment. In Prosaic Conditions, Rokem treats prose as a signifying practice—that is, a practice that creates meaning. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, prose emerges in competition with other existing practices, specifically, the practice of performance. Using Zionist literature as a test case, Rokem examines the ways in which Zionist authors put prose to use, both as a concept and as a literary mode. Writing prose enables these authors to grapple with historical, political, and spatial transformations and to understand the interrelatedness of all of these changes.
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The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal
Stories
Brian Ascalon Roley
Northwestern University Press, 2016
The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal is a collection of stories that focuses on multigenerational tales of intertwined Filipino families. Set in the huge yet relatively overlooked and misunderstood Filipino diaspora in the United States, this book follows characters who live in the shadow of the histories of the United States and its former colony in Asia, the Philippines. The impact of immigration and separation filters through the stories as a way of communing with or creating distance between individuals and family, country, or history.

Roley’s work has been praised by everyone from New York Times literary critics to APIA author Helen Zia for his bare, poetic style and raw emotionalism. In the collection’s title story, a woman living with her daughter and her daughter’s American husband fears the loss of Filipino tradition, especially Catholicism, as she tries to secretly permeate her granddaughter’s existence with elements of her ancestry. In "New Relations," an American-born son introduces his mother to his Caucasian bride and her family, only to experience his first marital discord around issues of politesse, the perception of culture, and post-colonial legacies. Roley’s delicately nuanced collection often leaves the audience with the awkwardness that comes from things lost in translation or entangled in generational divides.

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The Logic of Opposites
Alane Rollings
Northwestern University Press, 1998
In her fourth collection of poetry, Alane Rollings grapples with the power and potency of philosophical and psychological opposites. Written by a poet who has suffered from bipolar illness, these paired poems represent opposites in both mood and perspective: they are confessional without being autobiographical; intimate while maintaining a curious detachment; utterly serious, yet often seductively casual in tone.
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To Be in This Number
Alane Rollings
Northwestern University Press, 2005
With her fifth book of poetry, Alane Rollings continues to demonstrate her originality and her own poetic style. To Be In This Number shapes personal and national events in 20th Century--America into a narrative which begins before the Depression and ends after 9/11. The historical sweep includes the birth of Jazz, World War II (and antisemitism), the rise of rock music, the civil rights movement, and the expanding women's consciousness. Always keeping in mind the roles of both a national consciousness and the individual, Rollings examines a variety of themes surrounding family, race, and gender relationships to see how they have (or have not) progressed. True to Rollings' courageous style, each poem is part of an unusual journey through poetic narrative, profound emotion, and intimate language.
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At the Heart of Reason
Claude Romano
Northwestern University Press, 2015
In At the Heart of Reason, Claude Romano boldly calls for a reformulation of the phenomenological project. He contends that the main concern of phenomenology, and its originality with respect to other philosophical movements of the last century, such as logical empiricism, the grammatical philosophy of Wittgenstein, and varieties of neo-Kantianism, was to provide a "new image of Reason."

Against the common view, which restricts the range of reason to logic and truth-theory alone, Romano advocates "big-hearted rationality," including in it what is only ostensibly its opposite, that is, sensibility, and locating in sensibility itself the roots of the categorical forms of thought. Contrary to what was claimed by the "linguistic turn," language is not a self-enclosed domain; it cannot be conceived in its specificity unless it is led back to its origin in the pre-predicative or pre-linguistic structure of experience itself.
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Theatermachine
Tadeusz Kantor in Context
Magda Romanska
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context is an in-depth, multidisciplinary compendium of essays that examine Kantor’s work through the prism of postmemory and trauma theory and in relation to Polish literature, Jewish culture, and Yiddish theater as well as the Japanese, German, French, Polish, and American avant-garde. Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic theater and contemporary developments in critical theory—particularly Bill Brown’s thing theory, Bruno Latour’s actor network theory, and posthumanism—provide a previously unavailable vocabulary for discussion of Kantor’s theater.
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In the Beginning Was the Ghetto
Notebooks from Lodz
Oskar Rosenfeld
Northwestern University Press, 2002
From February 1942 to July 1944, Oskar Rosenfeld served in the statistics department of the Lodz ghetto. A playwright and journalist, he kept his own notes on life and conditions in the ghetto for a fictionalized account he hoped to write one day. Though Rosenfeld eventually perished at Auschwitz, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto projects his voice at last to the wider world.
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King of Odessa
A Novel of Isaac Babel
Robert A. Rosenstone
Northwestern University Press, 2007
An offbeat and brilliant imagining of a "lost novel" by Isaac Babel

A celebrated writer returns to his hometown of Odessa, pondering a deal with the secret police, pining for a daughter living abroad, and hoping to pen one last homage to his own past. Isaac Babel, the world famous spinner of tales about Cossacks and gangsters, arrives in Odessa to be treated for asthma-and perhaps help a condemned prisoner to escape. Or is it Babel who intends to escape?

For six decades our only record of Babel's visit has been the contents of letters and postcards sent abroad to his mother and sister. In King of Odessa, Robert A. Rosenstone imagines a version of this visit and the novel Babel wrote during those weeks. Babel himself is concerned with more than literary plots as he considers an escape just as he starts an affair with an actress who may be a police spy. He also ruminates on his past-his childhood as a sickly Jewish boy, the horrifying 1905 pogrom, the famous rides with the Cossacks that inspired Red Calvary, and above all his complicated relationships with women. Throughout the novel Rosenstone captures Babel's lively wit, his exhaustion with fame and the Soviet system, and his infectious charm.

This would prove to be Babel's last visit to Odessa. Three years later, he was arrested as a spy and executed. Rosenstone, the acclaimed biographer of writer and activist John Reed, mixes historical facts and fiction with the talent of a gifted storyteller. The result is a captivating exploration of a great writer surrounded by history and on the brink of falling out of it forever.
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Subjects of Affection
Rights of Resistance on the Early Modern French Stage
Anna Rosensweig
Northwestern University Press, 2021
Subjects of Affection offers an alternative to the modern model of human rights in an unexpected archive: the monarchist tragedies that shaped Louis XIV’s absolutist France. Pairing political theory with performance studies, Anna Rosensweig argues that the right of resistance, largely thought to have disappeared from French political thought in the aftermath of the religious wars of the sixteenth century, actually endured throughout the seventeenth century as a conceptual framework embedded and embodied in tragic drama.

Contemporary scholars have critiqued the modern rights paradigm for its failure to acknowledge the ways in which individual rights depend upon state protection and national belonging. Through a reappraisal of early modern French tragedy, Rosensweig provides a corrective to accounts of human rights that begin with the French Revolution, exploring previously unrecognized models for collective action that had emerged during the religious wars. Subjects of Affection reveals how French tragedy sustained these models of collective action by binding together individuals and groups through affect. Rosensweig places sixteenth-century political treatises in dialogue with dramas by Robert Garnier, Jean Rotrou, Pierre Corneille, and Jean Racine that were performed and published between 1550 and 1700. In so doing, she demonstrates how these tragedies, through their poetics and performance potential, stage a subject of rights whose collective constitution differs from the individualism of our modern rights framework. Through fresh insights and incisive readings, Subjects of Affection explores a form of political subjectivity that locates political power in connection to others—from staged characters and choruses to unseen collectives.
 
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The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation
Paul A. Roth
Northwestern University Press, 2020

In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. Roth situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework and develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. The book includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.

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Queer Velocities
Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage
Jennifer Eun-Jung Row
Northwestern University Press, 2022
Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage explores how seventeenth-century French theater represents queer desire. In this book, the first queer theoretical treatment of canonical French theater, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row proposes that these velocities, moments of unseemly haste or strategic delay, sparked new kinds of attachments, intimacies, and erotics. Rather than rely on fixed identities or analog categories, we might turn to these affectively saturated moments of temporal sensation to analyze queerness in the premodern world.

The twin innovations of precise, portable timepieces and the development of the theater as a state institution together ignited new types of embodiments, orderly and disorderly pleasures, and normative and wayward rhythms of life. Row leverages a painstakingly formalist and rhetorical analysis of tragedies by Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille to show how the staging of delay or haste can critically interrupt the normative temporalities of marriage, motherhood, mourning, or sovereignty—the quotidian rhythms and paradigms so necessary for the biopolitical management of life. Row’s approach builds on the queer turn to temporality and Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of the chronobiopolitical to wager that queerness can also be fostered by the sensations of disruptive speed and slowness. Ultimately, Row suggests that the theater not only contributed to the glitter of Louis XIV’s absolutist spectacle but also ignited new forms of knowing and feeling time, as well as new modes of loving, living, and being together.
 
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Michael Haneke
The Intermedial Void
Christopher Rowe
Northwestern University Press, 2017
The two primary goals of this ambitious study are to provide a new framework in which to interpret the films of Michael Haneke, including Funny Games, Caché, and others, and to show how the concept of intermediality can be used to expand the possibilities of film and media studies, tying the two more closely together. Christopher Rowe argues that Haneke’s practice of introducing nonfilmic media into his films is not simply an aspect of his interest in society’s oversaturation in various forms of media. Instead, the use of video, television, photography, literary voice, and other media must be understood as modes of expression that fundamentally oppose the film medium itself. The “intermedial void” is a product of the absolute incommensurability of these media forms as perceptual and affective phenomena. Close analysis of specific films shows how their relationship to noncinematic media transforms the nature of the film image, and of film spectatorship.
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For Badiou
Idealism without Idealism
Frank Ruda
Northwestern University Press, 2015

For Badiou serves both as an introduction to the influential French philosopher Alain Badiou’s thought and as an in-depth examination of his work. Ruda begins with a thorough and clear outline of the sometimes difficult main tenets of Badiou’s philosophy. He then traces the philosophers throughout Western thought who have influenced Badiou’s project—especially Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx—and on whose work Badiou has developed his provocative philosophy. Ruda draws from Badiou’s oeuvre a series of directives with regard to renewing philosophy for the twenty-first century. For Badiou continues the interrogations of its subject and raises new materialistic and dialectical questions for the next generation of engaged philosophers.

 
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The Book of Samuel
Essays on Poetry and Imagination
Mark Rudman
Northwestern University Press, 2009
Crisis, breakdown, rejuvenation: this is the territory of poetry that Rudman takes readers into with this set of essays. Constructed as a series of character studies, the essays are rooted in autobiographical material with biographical counterpoints, tying the poets distinctly to places. Even as they are placed, however, they are displaced: Rudman's subjects, from D.H. Lawrence to Czeslaw Milosz to T. S. Eliot, are almost all exiles, either geographically or within themselves. This exile spins anger into energy, transmuting emotion into imagination the same way that Passaic Falls, known to William Carlos Williams, turns water into power.

The mosaic style of the essays touches on nerve after nerve, avoiding the snags of academic jargon to ease towards an illuminating truth about the artists' shifting work and worlds. Some of the Samuels—Beckett and Fuller—were able to navigate these shifts, while others--Coleridge and Johnson--are shown to be less able to transmute their energy into motion.
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Reimagining A Raisin in the Sun
Four New Plays
Rebecca Ann Rugg
Northwestern University Press, 2012

Winner, 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Winner, 2012 Tony Award for Best Play
Winner, 1974 National Book Award for Philosophy and Religion


In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun energized the conversation about how Americans live together across lines of race and difference. In Reimagining “A Raisin in the Sun,” Rebecca Ann Rugg and Harvey Young bring together four contemporary plays—including 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner Clybourne Park—that, in their engagement with Hansberry’s play, illuminate the tensions and anxieties that still surround neighborhood integration.

Although the plays—Robert O’Hara’s Etiquette of Vigilance, Gloria Bond Clunie’s Living Green, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park—are distinct from one another in terms of style and perspective on their predecessor, they commonly feature characters who are forced to closely examine, and sometimes revise or abandon, their ideas concerning race and their notions of social and economic justice. Above all, the plays use the lenses of neighborliness, privacy, and community to engage the large question of America’s common purpose. Each play is accompanied by an interview with the playwright about the influence of Hansberry’s landmark work. The afterword includes an interview with George C. Wolfe, whose play The Colored Museum laid the groundwork for the titles in this collection.

The conversation around A Raisin in the Sun has continued unabated since its premiere fifty years ago. Rugg and Young’s book will serve as a valuable resource to fans, scholars, and students alike.

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Out of Silence
Selected Poems
Muriel Rukeyser
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Out of Silence is a poetry book encompassing the contradictions of twentieth-century America. 
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Applied Factor Analysis
Rudolf J. Rummel
Northwestern University Press, 1970
Applied Factor Analysis was written to help others apply factor analysis throughout the sciences with the conviction that factor analysis is a calculus of the social sciences. The book developed from research undertaken to do a 236-variable cross-national analysis. 
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Archaeologies of Modernity
Avant-Garde Bildung
Rainer Rumold
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Archaeologies of Modernity explores the shift from the powerful tradition of literary forms of Bildung—the education of the individual as the self—to the visual forms of “Bildung” (from Bild) that characterize German modernism and the European avant-garde. Interrelated chapters examine the work of Franz Kafka, Jean/Hans Arp, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein, and of artists such as Oskar Kokoschka or Kurt Schwitters, in the light of the surge of an autoformation (Bildung) of verbal and visual images at the core of expressionist and surrealist aesthetics and the art that followed. In this first scholarly focus on modernist avant-garde Bildung in its entwinement of conceptual modernity with forms of the archaic, Rumold resituates the significance of the poet and art theorist Einstein and his work on the language of primitivism and the visual imagination. Archaeologies of Modernity is a major reconsideration of the conception of the modernist project and will be of interest to scholars across the disciplines.

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The Janus Face of the German Avant-Garde
From Expressionism Toward Postmodernism
Rainer Rumold
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Among the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, the German movement remains one of the least understood in the current avant-garde and modernism debates. Rainer Rumold fills this gap with the first large-scale reassessment of the heyday and afterlife of German expressionist and Dada productions as a prolonged crisis of literary culture.
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Subject to Delusions
Narcissism, Modernism, Gender
Caroline Rupprecht
Northwestern University Press, 2006
A figure of reflexivity, narcissism describes a relation between self and other mediated through the mirror or reflection. As such, the concept might help us to consider how what we come to know as the other, or the object, is always the result of a process of image-making. It is in this suggestive sense that narcissism interests Caroline Rupprecht in Subject to Delusions.

Because "the other," or the object, is constructed, Rupprecht finds in narcissism the possibility of rewriting notions of identity. She then pursues this possibility through modern literary texts in which narcissism acts as a structuring principle—works by the expressionist poet Henriette Hardenberg, the American avant-garde novelist Djuna Barnes, and the surrealist writer Unica Zürn—reading each within the critical framework of the evolution of the idea of narcissism in psychoanalytic theory. All written by women, these works also raise questions of gender and sexuality. Moreover, because each of these authors belonged to or was influenced by a particular literary movement, Rupprecht's analysis advances our understanding of the poetics of these movements and of the movement of modernism itself. Underlying all is a deep engagement with psychoanalytic theory. Drawing on Freud, his contemporaries and rivals, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and many other theorists, Rupprecht interrogates preconceived notions of identity and subjectivity through her readings of the "transgressive potential" of narcissism as it is enacted in the texts under study. Bringing the works of literary modernism and psychoanalysis together in an innovative and provocative way, her book succeeds in enhancing our sense of both, and in clarifying the complex role of narcissism in our cultural narrative.
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Womb Fantasies
Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema, and Art
Caroline Rupprecht
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Womb Fantasies examines the womb, an invisible and mysterious space invested with allegorical significance, as a metaphorical space in postwar cinematic and literary texts grappling with the trauma of post-holocaust, postmodern existence. In addition, it examines the representation of visible spaces in the texts in terms of their attribution with womb-like qualities.  The framing of the study historically within the postwar era begins with a discussion of Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair in the context of the Cold War’s need for safety in light of the threat of nuclear destruction, and ranges over films such as Marguerite Duras’ and Alan Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour and Duras’ novel The Vice-Consul, exploring the ways that such cultural texts fantasize the womb as a response to trauma, defined as the compulsive need to return to the site of loss, a place envisioned as both a secure space and a prison. The womb fantasy is linked to the desire to recreate an identity that is new and original but ahistorical.
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Printed Writings by George W. Russell
A Bibliography
George W. Russell
Northwestern University Press, 2019
This bibliography lists the books, paintings, and portraits of the mystic Irish poet George William Russell, best known by his pseudonym, “AE.” Russell was a late nineteenth-and early twentieth century Irish poet and essayist whose first book of poems, Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894), established him in what was known as the Irish Literary Revival.
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Infinite Phenomenology
The Lessons of Hegel's Science of Experience
John Russon
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Infinite Phenomenology builds on John Russon’s earlier book, Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, to offer a second reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Here again, Russon writes in a lucid, engaging style and, through careful attention to the text and a subtle attunement to the existential questions that haunt human life, he demonstrates how powerfully Hegel’s philosophy can speak to the basic questions of philosophy. In addition to original studies of all the major sections of the Phenomenology, Russon discusses complementary texts by Hegel, namely, the Philosophy of Spirit, the Philosophy of Right, and the Science of Logic. He concludes with an appendix that discusses the reception and appropriation of Hegel’s Phenomenology in twentieth-century French philosophy. As with Russon’s earlier work, Infinite Phenomenology will remain essential reading for those looking to engage Hegel’s essential, yet difficult, text.

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Reexamining Socrates in the Apology
John Russon
Northwestern University Press, 2009

An oracle was reported to have said, "No one is wiser than Socrates." And in fact it was Socrates’ life’s work to interpret these words, which demanded and defined the practice of philosophy. Each of these original essays attends carefully to the specifics of the Apology, looking to its dramatic details, its philosophic teaching, and its complexity as a work of writing to bring into focus the "Socrates" of the Apology.

Overall, the contributors, distinguished scholars of ancient philosophy, share a belief in the unity of the letter and the spirit of Platonic philosophy: the conviction that the Platonic text cannot be reached except through reading and cannot be read except through thinking. In this way, the readings in this volume mirror Socrates’ own hermeneutical practice of uniting the demands of the mind and the demands of the text—the Socratic "examination." The result, true to the Socratic injunction that the unexamined life is not worth living, continues that practice of examination, here offering a reexamination of Socrates in the Apology.

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Retracing the Platonic Text
John Russon
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Written from a Continental perspective, Retracing the Platonic Text reveals dimensions of the dialogues that are not addressed by traditional philosophy. These essays by prominent scholars focus on the texts' literary elements, in particular challenges to contemporary interpretations of the Platonic dialogue as a whole. The result illustrates the depth of Platonic thought and the debt of all philosophy to it. Retracing the Platonic Text is a pioneering effort in demonstrating how Continental philosophy both reflects and expands upon Greek philosophy.
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The Body in Mystery
The Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature of Reformation England
Jennifer R. Rust
Northwestern University Press, 2013
In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust engages the political concept of the mystical body of the commonwealth, the corpus mysticum of the medieval church. Rust argues that the communitarian ideal of sacramental sociality had a far longer afterlife than has been previously assumed. Reviving a critical discussion of the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Rust brings to bear the latest scholarship. Her book expands the representation of the corpus mysticum through a range of literary genres as well as religious polemics and political discourses. Rust reclaims the concept as an essential category of social value and historical understanding for the imaginative life of literature from Reformation England. The Body in Mystery provides new ways of appreciating the always rich and sometimes difficult continuities between the secular and sacred in early modern England, and between the premodern and early modern periods.
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Unattainable Bride Russia
Gendering Nation, State, and Intelligentsia in Russian Intellectual Culture
Ellen Rutten
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Throughout the twentieth century and continuing today, personifications of Russia as a bride occur in a wide range of Russian texts and visual representations, from literature and political and philosophical treatises to cartoons and tattoos. Invariably, this metaphor functions in the context of a political gender allegory, which represents the relationships between Russia, the intelligentsia, and the Russian state, as a competition of two male suitors for the former’s love.

In Unattainable Bride Russia, Ellen Rutten focuses on the metaphorical role the intelligentsia plays as Russia’s rejected or ineffectual suitor. Rutten finds that this metaphor, which she covers from its prehistory in folklore to present-day pop culture references to Vladimir Putin, is still powerful, but has generated scarce scholarly consideration. Unattainable Bride Russia locates the cultural thread and places the political metaphor in a broad contemporary and social context, thus paying it the attention to which it is entitled as one of Russia’s modern cultural myths.

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The Comity and Grace of Method
Essays in Honor of Edmund F. Perry
Thomas Ryba
Northwestern University Press, 2004
A work that at once celebrates and extends the formidable contributions of the late Edmund Perry to the study of religions, this comprehensive collection brings together three generations of distinguished scholars to consider the history, theory, and applications of the comparative method in religious study. Both the title and the content of this volume reflect Perry's conviction that the comparative religionist is morally bound to contribute to a comity of religions-the voluntary and courteous recognition of the dignity and truth present in all religions. Following the general framework advocated by Perry for this pursuit, the volume reveals the strengths of such a framework-and of Perry's lifelong interest in theory and method--for religious understanding,

The essays in the first section—"Theory and Method in the History and Study of Religion"—clarify the role of scientific, phenomenological, and comparative approaches within the history of the study of religion; collectively, they represent a multifaceted statement about recurring and subtle problems in the field. In the second section—"Theories and Methods in Application"—the authors move from overarching theoretical concerns to the application of these methods in specific religious traditions, Western and Eastern. The third section demonstrates the effectiveness of these theories and methods as guidelines for promoting global inter-religious comity.

More than a fitting tribute to a revered and highly influential scholar, this book gives even those who knew nothing of Perry and his work much to learn from and ponder about the study of religion.
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We Bed Down into Water
Poems
John Rybicki
Northwestern University Press, 2008

John Rybicki offers up an unafraid set of poems in this charged book of verse. We Bed Down Into Water is rich with imagery of family, love, illness, death, and, indeed, water, which seeps in throughout the pages: rivers, pools, rain, and tears. His moving stories, in both prose and verse, struggle to hang on to a vision of the world that can still allow benevolence, luck, and laughter. In this, the collection embodies a contradiction: it is a tender book of fury, a book of bleak hopefulness.

Rybicki’s work is steeped in challenge: the biological and spiritual challenge posed by his beloved’s recurrent cancer or the daily challenges of an adopted child who could be, all too easily, lost. He spins these phenomenal struggles into a lyrical book that offers hope and awakens the reader into a new way of seeing.

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