An unexpected and valuable critique of community that points out its complicity with capitalism

Community is almost always invoked as an unequivocal good, an indicator of a high quality of life, caring, selflessness, belonging. Into this common portrayal, Against the Romance of Community introduces an uncommon note of caution, a penetrating, sorely needed sense of what, precisely, we are doing when we call upon this ideal.

The dangerous lover has haunted our culture for over two hundred years; English, American, and European literature is permeated with his erotic presence. The Dangerous Lover takes seriously the ubiquity of the brooding romantic hero—his dark past, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. Deborah Lutz traces the recent history of this figure, through the melancholy iconoclasm of the Romantics, the lost soul redeemed by love of the Brontës, and the tormented individualism of twentieth-century love narratives. Arguing for this character’s central influence not only in literature but also in the history of ideas, this book places the dangerous lover firmly within the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the Modernism of Georg Lukács, and Roland Barthes’s theories on love and longing. Working with canonical authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, and also with non-canonical texts such as contemporary romance, The Dangerous Lover combines a lyrical, essayistic style with a depth of inquiry that raises questions about the mysteries of desire, death, and eroticism.

The Dangerous Lover is the first book-length study of this pervasive literary hero; it also challenges the tendency of sophisticated philosophical readings of popular narratives and culture to focus on male-coded genres. In its conjunction of high and low literary forms, this volume explores new historical and cultural framings for female-coded popular narratives.

In romances—Renaissance England’s version of the fantasy novel—characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insights into their readers’ selves. The Immaterial Book examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Tempest, Wroth’s Urania, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It offers a response to “material book studies” by calling for a new focus on imaginary or “immaterial” books and argues that early modern romance authors, rather than replicating contemporary reading practices within their texts, are reviving ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they use to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind.

A Finalist for the 2026 Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel, this is a tale of one man's road toward fulfillment that plays out in stages of encounters and abandonment instead of one glorious "last stand" expected in a Western romance. Williamson's story weaves the best elements of several genres and with masterful dialogue he illustrates the landscape of a heart cultivated and ravaged by the challenges that emerge in his path. The majestic setting of the rugged west and its horses is not the main aesthetical context, however. "For [us] women were the whole world and the promise of it, men being hardly more than rivals in love to be challenged and defeated."  The Last Westerner is an ode to human happiness embodied in women, and "the kind that comes from a sense of the wholeness, the absolute rightness, of it all." Williamson seems to mean that without women (and horses) no such answers will ever be found. "People without hope don't write books, they say. Neither do men who love women––one woman in particular––lack hope."

            Jeb Stuart Ryder, at 51 a retired range detective from Wyoming, meets Jody James, a handsome widowed cowgirl at a horse show in Moab, Utah, where she is exhibiting her prize horse. They begin an idyllic life together until this horse is stolen, and he pledges to pursue the thieves and bring him back to her. Along the way he meets a 16-year-old Navajo boy, John-Wayne Bilagody, who joins the search but with the intention of offering this horse to his own woman. Jeb takes it upon himself to instruct John-Wayne in the proper chivalric attitude a man owes a woman. When they come to the camp of brigada who now possesses the horse, Jeb's world strains to accommodate the existence of Carmen, the beautiful and aristocratic woman who is preparing to lead those men back into Mexico. She has his horse, but his pledge to return it to Jody holds fast. His promise had been a sign of hope, but Jeb at long last arrives at a pass that he knows is the real path to his sunset.

A woman meets a man and falls in love. She is sixty, a writer and lifelong New Yorker raised by garmentos. She thought this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again. He is English, so who knows what he thinks. He is fifty-six, a professor now living in Arizona, the son of a bespoke tailor. As the first of Laurie Stone’s linked stories begins, the writer contemplates what life would be like in the desert with the professor. As we learn how she became the person she is, we also come to know the artists and politics of the downtown scene of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, a cultural milieu that remains alive in her. In sharply etched prose, Stone presents a woman constantly seduced by strangers, language, the streets— even a wildlife trail. Her characters realize that they feel at home in dislocation—in always living in two places at the same time: east and west, past and present, the bed and the grave (or copper urn). Love may not last, the writer knows. Then again, when has anything you thought about the future turned out right?
 

The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karajich is a lyrical, deeply moving story of love and the pain of emancipation, set in the now vanished world of rural East European Jewish village life. Hanna is the most beautiful girl in all Polona, a Hasidic community in the remote province of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Involvement in the exciting new movement of Zionism takes her away to a commune in a nearby town. But there she meets and falls in love with the strangely named Ivo Karajich: a Jew, yet not a Jew. The agonizing drama that follows, plants into her beautiful almond-shaped eyes the hard grain of sorrow that her children, too, will inherit.

Olbracht's novella is both a great love story and a marvellous portrait of a world that modernity threatened and Hitler destroyed.

The nineteenth-century Southern novel that transformed romance, virtue, and redemption into literary legend.

St. Elmo was the most famed and beloved novel by Augusta Jane Evans, a June 2015 inductee into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. First published in 1866, Evans’s rich tale of the relationship between the dashing and worldly St. Elmo and Edna Earl, an exemplar of virtuous Southern womanhood, sold over a million copies in four months and became one of the nineteenth century’s most influential novels.

This edition includes an introduction by Evans scholar Diane Roberts about the enduring relevance and legacy of St. Elmo as a work of literature as well as a reflection of gender roles and the seismic societal changes taking place in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War.
 

A doomed love story unfolds alongside the production of Psycho in 1950s Bakersfield, California

Muñoz’s debut novel tells the story of Teresa, an aspiring singer too far away from Los Angeles to share the city’s glamour. In Dan Watson, the most desirable man in town, she believes she has found someone to help her realize those dreams. But when a famous actress arrives from Hollywood with a legendary director in tow, local gossip about Teresa and Dan turns to speculation about the celebrity visitors there to work on what will become an iconic, groundbreaking film of madness and murder at a roadside motel: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Framed by a foreword from film critic Charles Taylor, Muñoz’s haunting tale reflects “the slow winding down of everything that once seemed certain.”

Editorial Advisory Board: Sarah Park Dahlen, Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Marianne Martens, Associate Professor, School of Information, Kent State University; Amy Pattee, Associate Professor and Co-coordinator of Dual-Degree MS LIS/MA Children’s Literature, School of Library and Information Science, Children’s Literature, Simmons University
 

“Comprehensive and substantial … a highly recommended resource," raved VOYA about the third edition. Now, to keep pace with changes in the field of publishing and realign itself to the newest generation of young adults, Cart returns with a sweeping update of his classic text.  Relied upon by educators, LIS instructors and students, and practitioners for its insight and thoroughness, his book

• surveys the landscape of YA lit both past and present, sketching out its origins and showing how it has evolved to deal with subjects every bit as complex as its audience;
• closely examines teen demographics, literacy, audiobooks, the future of print, the role of literary criticism, and other key topics;
• provides updated coverage of perennially popular genre fiction, including horror, sci fi, and dystopian fiction;
• delves deeply into multicultural and LGBTQIA+ literature, substantially updated in this edition;
• features expansive interviews with best-selling authors like Eric Shanower, Jackie Woodson, and Bill Konigsberg as well as several publishers and leaders in the field;
• discusses the impact of the Printz Award, ALAN’s Walden Award, the National Book Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Award, and other honors; and
• features abundant bibliographic material to aid in readers' advisory and collection development.