Best known for his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau is often considered a recluse who emerged from solitude only occasionally to take a stand on the issues of his day. In Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal, Shannon L. Mariotti explores Thoreau’s nature writings to offer a new way of understanding the unique politics of the so-called hermit of Walden Pond. Drawing imaginatively from the twentieth-century German social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, she shows how withdrawal from the public sphere can paradoxically be a valuable part of democratic politics.
    Separated by time, space, and context, Thoreau and Adorno share a common belief that critical inquiry is essential to democracy but threatened by modern society. While walking, huckleberrying, and picking wild apples, Thoreau tries to recover the capacities for independent perception and thought that are blunted by “Main Street,” conventional society, and the rapidly industrializing world that surrounded him. Adorno’s thoughts on particularity and the microscopic gaze he employs to work against the alienated experience of modernity help us better understand the value of Thoreau’s excursions into nature. Reading Thoreau with Adorno, we see how periodic withdrawals from public spaces are not necessarily apolitical or apathetic but can revitalize our capacity for the critical thought that truly defines democracy.
    In graceful, readable prose, Mariotti reintroduces us to a celebrated American thinker, offers new insights on Adorno, and highlights the striking common ground they share. Their provocative and challenging ideas, she shows, still hold lessons on how we can be responsible citizens in a society that often discourages original, critical analysis of public issues.

Taken as a whole, these essays present a chorus on the rapid evolution of modern Arabic artistic achievement and how that art relates to the traditions and histories of both the Arab and Western worlds.

Transatlantic Correspondence: Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898–1992 by José Luis Venegas explores how influential Spanish and Spanish American writers used letters in their literary works to formulate distinctive visions of modernity. Bringing into the discussion authors such as Rubén Darío, Miguel de Unamuno, Carmen Martín Gaite, and Gabriel García Márquez, Venegas reveals unsuspected connections between the authors’ literary use of epistolary writing and their opinions about the place of Hispanic culture and civilization within a global context. Transatlantic Correspondence contributes to broader debates on literary transnationalism and the contradictory nature of modernity.
 
Each chapter frames literary works by authors from both sides of the Atlantic within key historical events spanning the loss of Spain’s overseas possessions in 1898 to the commemoration of Columbus’s quincentennial in 1992. This broad range of historical reference is counterpointed by the nuanced examination of a single formal feature in a wide variety of canonical and non-canonical texts. Drawing on insights from postcolonial studies, the book addresses the link between historical transformations that traverse decades and continents and specific stylistic choices in order to foster an understanding of Hispanic literary and cultural studies that is not limited by categories such as “movement,” “generation,” and “national literature.”

This book, available for the first time in English, is an exhilarating journey through Turkey’s history and a perceptive look at the interactions between secularism, religion, and multiethnic identity.

Without a guide and driven only by his own curiosity, Klaus Reichert travels to Anatolia, Istanbul, and the Aegean coast. He explores the strip of land where Adam and Eve are said to have settled after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and where Moses struck water from stone. While following in the footsteps of the brilliant architect Mimar Sinan and investigating the mysteries of his mosques, Reichert speaks to an old stonemason and a young teacher, visits one of the last remaining colonies of a rare breed of ibis, and walks the wide expanses surrounding the archaeological sites of western Turkey. Finally, he draws parallels between Kilim weaving, minimal music, and modernity as a whole. Under Reichert’s gaze, what is seen and learned becomes a colorful and provocative collection of images and patterns.

A one-of-a-kind travelogue that touches on Turkey’s traditions, natural history, and political divisions, Turkey Rediscovered shows us a new side to a land we thought we already knew.