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Widely acclaimed as the greatest Western ever made, Lonesome Dove has become a true American epic. Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel was a New York Times best seller, with more than 2.5 million copies currently in print. The Lonesome Dove miniseries has drawn millions of viewers and won numerous awards, including seven Emmys.

A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove takes you on a fascinating behind-the-scenes journey into the creation of the book, the miniseries, and the world of Lonesome Dove. Writer John Spong talks to forty of the key people involved, including author Larry McMurtry; actors Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Anjelica Huston, Diane Lane, Danny Glover, Ricky Schroder, D. B. Sweeney, Frederic Forrest, and Chris Cooper; executive producer and screenwriter Bill Wittliff; executive producer Suzanne de Passe; and director Simon Wincer. They and a host of others tell lively stories about McMurtry’s writing of the epic novel and the process of turning it into the miniseries Lonesome Dove. Accompanying their recollections are photographs of iconic props, costumes, set designs, and shooting scripts. Rounding out the book are continuity Polaroids used during filming and photographs taken on the set by Bill Wittliff, which place you behind the scenes in the middle of the action.

Designed as a companion for A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove, Wittliff’s magnificent fine art volume, A Book on the Making of Lonesome Dove is a must-have for every fan of this American epic.

A timely reexamination of Joseph Wright’s captivating “candlelight” paintings, featuring the recently rediscovered Two Boys with a Bladder.

The dramatic “candlelight” paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) cast a spell, enthralling viewers with striking scenes that portray human curiosity, the quiet intensity of domestic life, and the excitement of scientific discovery. With a variety of brushstrokes—dabbed here, whiskered there, and dragged elsewhere—Wright pushed boundaries with the transformative power of light. In 2020, the Getty Museum acquired the newly rediscovered Two Boys with a Bladder (1767), a luminous study of innovation, intimacy, and artistic brilliance that challenged established assumptions about Wright and sparked renewed interest in his experiments with light.

A Light in the Dark presents new research to uncover the origins of Two Boys and expand our understanding of Wright's early candlelights, tracing the invention and initial development of his distinctive style. Whereas recent scholarship has maintained an outward approach that ties the artist’s oeuvre to places that he visited, this volume returns the focus to Wright himself—his biography, technique, and hometown of Derby—in a much-needed reexamination. Complete with fresh historical and technical evidence, this is a fascinating look into the inspirations, aspirations, and experiments behind some of the most remarkable paintings in the history of British art.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from November 24, 2026, to March 14, 2027.

“I remember // once, turning to leave, a black purse over her shoulder. . .” Oneiric and surreal as always, Allison Benis White attempts to mediate, if not make sense of, inconceivable bereavement in her fifth collection of poetry. “A black purse, / over her living shoulder, Love said    nothing to me.”  
 
Ethereal, airy, and spare at once, A Magnificent Loneliness is a dialogue with ghosts. White, whose previous work won the Rilke Prize and the Four Way Books Levis Prize judged by Claudia Rankine, assembles these pages as an ekphrastic and epistolary record of her solitary journey through loss. These poems relate to artwork, the history of artistic practice, and inherited lore to broker an oblique and piecewise conversation concerning pain too vast to articulate all at once. “I don’t know how to love    the world but to love / her leaving.” These lyrical iterations represent White’s attempts to comprehend the individual suffering of being alive, and to metabolize the grief of women’s epidemic disappearance, literal and spiritual, through sickness and despair. Through those efforts, she illuminates a magnificent loneliness—the privilege of being alive to our anguish, of missing someone dearly because someone dear existed—and a reason for not yet departing that struggle. “How to leave / the world but to turn to leave her— / but to turn my head back / to see her.” 
 

Engaging the poetic to expand our imagination of Maghrebi literature in French

Poetry, as the Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi describes it, is a form of dissymmetry that exposes readers to the unexpected, and to the possibility of a transformative encounter with the text. Drawing on literary, philosophical, theoretical, and theological texts in multiple languages and scripts, as well as on the visual arts, Thomas C. Connolly delves into the poetic works of Khatibi and six other major Maghrebi authors—Jean Amrouche, Tahar Djaout, Nabile Farès, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Jean Sénac—as well as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, to think anew about the origins and legacy of Francophone poetry in the Maghreb. Instead of turning away from the poetic when it becomes indecipherable, A Poetic Genealogy of North African Literature engages poetic texts on their own terms, allowing them to dictate the search for meaning, thereby expanding our understanding of what Maghrebi literature in French was, is, and might become.

A lyrical journey through memory, place, and resilience in the heart of Alabama

A Psalm for Cottondale is a lyrical meditation on memory, place, and survival in the American South. Through a sequence of interconnected free-verse poems, Sharony Green reflects on life in Cottondale, Alabama, where change unfolds in ways that can be both poignant and unexpected. Rooted in the histories, landscapes, and cultural currents of an Alabama college town, the collection explores how one place can evoke the memory of many others, inviting readers to consider broader questions of identity, belonging, and endurance.

Written in a clear, steady voice, these poems balance intimacy with historical awareness, allowing inherited stories, silences, and everyday moments to emerge with quiet power. Green’s careful craftsmanship and emotional restraint lend authority to the collection, while a subtle psalmic undercurrent adds spiritual depth without sacrificing nuance. As the poems move through themes of joy, grief, witness, and renewal, Cottondale becomes both a physical community and a symbolic terrain shaped by race, land, memory, and hope.

Inspired by writings that engage history, geography, and culture, A Psalm for Cottondale offers an elegant and deeply attentive reflection on Southern and American life, illuminating the ways people endure, adapt, and find meaning in a changing world. Ideal for readers of contemporary poetry, Southern literature, African American studies, place-based writing, and works that explore history, memory, faith, and community through a lyrical lens.
 

These lyric, unsparing poems stitch together a story of identity, belonging, and dissolution.

A Theory of Knots explores the loops of how identity and belonging are constructed, broken, resurrected, and dissolved. In sections, knots weave DNA and cords, memory and mythology, home and tongue; they draw on desire, Zoroastrian rituals, tradition and transgression, and the legacies of womanhood, asking what connects us, and at what cost.

As layers of identity are examined, Pervin Saket's poems return to language: heirloom, hazard, half-truth. Soon enough, language is both subject and suspect; having exposed the artificial nature of our truths, the poems confront the artificial nature of language itself. At the end, poetry reaches the wilderness of earth, collapses upon itself, dissolving on the page—untangling the final knot.

How Black Atlantic literature can challenge conventions and redefine literary scholarship

Abolition Time is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, Jess A. Goldberg reveals how literary studies can help undo carceral epistemologies embedded in language and poetics.

Goldberg examines poetry, drama, and novels from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first—such as William Wells Brown’s The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—to consider literature and literary scholarship’s roles in shaping societal paradigms. Focusing on how Black Atlantic literature disrupts the grammar of law and order, they show how these texts propose nonlinear theories of time that imagine a queer relationality characterized by care rather than inheritance, property, or biology. 

Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking critically about what is meant by the term justice in the broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the abolitionist movement.

A fresh exploration of the humor, irony, and hidden depths of Mark Twain's literary imagination.

Through a close reading of the fictions–short and long, early and late–Griffith contends that Mark Twain's strength lay not in comedy or in satire or (as the 19th century understood the term) even in the practice of humor. Rather his genius lay in the joke, specifically the "sick joke." For all his finesse and seeming variety, Twain tells the same joke, with its single cast of doomed and damned characters, its single dead-end conclusion, over and over endlessly.

As he attempted to attain the comic resolution and comically transfigured characters he yearned for, Twain forever played, for Griffith, the role of the Achilles of Zeno's Paradox. Like the tortoise that Achilles cannot overtake in Zeno's tale, the richness of comic life forever remained outside Twain's grasp.

The last third of Griffith's study draws parallels between Mark Twain and Herman Melville. Although the two authors never met and seem not to have read each other's works, they labored under the sense of what, in Moby-Dick, Ishmael calls "a vast practical joke . . . at nobody's expense but [one's] own." The laughter occasioned by this cosmic conspiracy shapes the career of Huckleberry Finn fully as much as it does Ishmael's voyage. Out of the laughter are generated the respective obsessions of Captain Ahab and Bartleby, of Pudd'nhead Wilson and Hadleyburg. Reduced at last to a dry mock, the laughter is the prevailing tone of both Billy Budd and The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts.

Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

“When I wake I’m in ninth grade again,” begins “Reunion,” the first poem in Caleb Nolen’s debut collection Afterlight. These haunting, tender poems revisit the fraught adolescence of a group of boys growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Told through the voice of one of the boys who left and is later looking back, Afterlight navigates the silences left by absent fathers, early deaths, and a God who doesn't speak. Interwoven throughout are letters to saints and biblical figures: pleas for intercession and understanding that echo the speaker’s search for grace amid violence and loss. By the book’s end, the lost boys and the saints share the same hallowed space, their stories entwined. Written in plain, unsparing language, these poems reveal the tenderness within troubled masculinity and the ache of trying to love what has already vanished.

A poetic journey through the past of the Roman Empress Agrippina looks toward the future
 
Agrippina the Younger follows one woman’s study of another, separated by thousands of miles and two millennia but bound by a shared sense of powerlessness. Agrippina was a daughter in a golden political family, destined for greatness—but she hungered for more power than women were allowed. Exhausted by the misogyny of the present, Diana Arterian reaches into the past to try to understand the patriarchal systems of today. In lyric verse and prose poems, she traces Agrippina’s rise, interrogating a life studded with intrigue, sex, murder, and manipulation. Arterian eagerly pursues Agrippina through texts, ruins, and films, exhuming the hidden details of the ancient noblewoman’s life. These poems consider the valences of patriarchy, power, and the archive to try to answer the question: How do we recover a woman erased by history? 

A feminist poetry collection re-examining the figure of the crone and upending the patriarchal expectations she embodies.

In Alchemist or Arsonist, her second full-length collection, Beth Gordon supercharges the term crone, demonstrating in image-rich poems the magical strength of older women. The Crone is frank about the realities of aging—including plucking chin hairs—yet she also surprises, warning the reader: “The tiger has always been there. . . . She is right in front of you.” Taking afternoon shots of mescal and waiting in line for Mexican street corn, she contemplates Captcha pictures, AI, and tattoos.

The book expands its concerns in several long poems and sequences, encompassing the full range of human experience. “The Secret Fate of All Life,” a series of golden shovels based on quotes from the HBO show True Detective, moves into the surreal to represent language’s failure to describe the death of an infant, and how time can be displaced by grief. Other works explore the transformation that can come from tragedy, the perils of marriage and other relationships, and the complicated conversation older and younger versions of the self would have with each other.

Gordon’s candid, wry, uncompromising voice is both refreshing and bracing, and the poems perform alchemy as they set fire to traditional expectations. With an undercurrent of violence and murder, the book reveals the ultimate consequences of patriarchy. “Alchemist or arsonist: the end is the same,” The Crone tells us. “Something becomes something else.”

Marking Aiden Heung’s debut collection, All There Is to Lose is the 2024 winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. The selecting judge, National Book Award Finalist Ilya Kaminsky, praises the resonant particularities and depth of feeling found in these poems, which convert “elegy [into] its driving force.” Poet and Critic Felicity Plunkett observes, “Dreams and memory move through these porous, venturesome poems. The spectral jostles with the sensual to tell ‘a story in which I could be found.’ Achily tender, they open to light, love and the jab of a joke.” Poet David Tait notes, “Unsettling and luminous, the poems preserve the memory of Village 915: its volatile seasons and hard-worn inhabitants, its headstones, spirits, and myriad forms of water. Here you’ll find not only poems of lyrical beauty, but of grim exactness.” The result is a stunning achievement of a first book, what Kaminsky identifies as an exemplar of “that ages-old mode of poetry wherein the poet uses language to break bread with the dead, to bring them back to life, if only for the moment, for a portion of the moment, an instant, before the line breaks.” Channeling the poet as medium, “I am the tension on the bow that draws the arrow,” Heung writes in “Epilogue.” “To lose myself — that is my destiny.” 

If the list, as Umberto Eco once claimed, is the basis of culture, then the poems in this collection are a soil sample of all the rotted fauna and toxic waste that make up the loam contemporary white fatherhood plants its monoculture in—girldad fighterjets, midwestern vanity license plates, Clark Griswold prodding a caged ape, Fabio bleeding in the bathroom as reckless gender reveals incinerate a blasted landscape. In a world that is more poison than paradise, that is as much microplastic as it is polycrisis, a world that has been hacked into nations and stitched back together by oily supply chains and fuzzy diasporic memory, these poems wonder what a father is, can be, and should teach to their offspring when all they’ve been taught has been how to blend into a country intent on transforming difference and dissent into knickknacks. Knuckled like a crayfish and sieving the trash-clogged streams of our era, Conor Bracken’s poetry is bent—in self-defense? in prayer? supplication?—on bringing the contradictions of creating life in a necrophagous era into the kind of tension necessary to strike a chord or fire an arrow. 

A debut poetry collection set in and around Louisiana’s fishing village of Cocodrie

Altars of Spine and Fraction follows its protagonist through the joys and dangers of childhood on the rural Gulf Coast, through familial loss, and into adulthood. Refusing to romanticize what has been lost, Molbert instead interrogates how nostalgia is most often enjoyed by those with the privilege to reject or indulge it.

Violent hurricanes sweep across the landscapes of the poems, and Molbert probes the class inequalities that these climate crises lay bare. Moving from outdoor rural spaces in its first half to indoor domestic spaces in its second half, the collection explores family history, generational trauma, and the toxic masculinity that is shouldered by boys raised in the Deep South.

A poignant photographic tour of honor, sacrifice, and memory within America's national cemeteries

In America’s National Cemeteries, Timothy B. Spears takes the reader on a grand tour of these singular places of commemoration, the final resting place for more than four million American military personnel who died either in wartime, during their time of service, or after their honorable discharge. His absorbing account—part historical narrative and part travelogue—is enhanced by 180 of his remarkable photographs, which capture the spirit, beauty, and solemn remembrance to be found in each of the 156 national cemeteries across America.

Spears details the history of the cemeteries since their establishment during the American Civil War and explores their ongoing evolution and importance to American society and the commitment America has made to honoring its military dead. With headstones neatly arrayed in rows and each soldier typically buried in an identical fashion, the cemeteries symbolize an enduring connection between human mortality and national identity. They also reflect the nation’s persistent challenges with inequalities and injustice, violence and racism, lingering questions about “good” versus “bad” wars, and the vexed legacies of America’s military forays.

In this unique meditation on American history, memory, and place, Spears embraces the impact of the past on the present, offering an original perspective on the meaning of military service, mortality, and remembrance and how these national cemeteries have evolved into truly iconic and emblematic American spaces. The book also features a foreword by Roderick Gainer, Chief Curator of Arlington National Cemetery since 2013.