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In 1847, in the third year of Ireland's Great Famine and the thirteenth year of their rent strike against the Crown, hundreds of tenant farmers in Ballykilcline, County Roscommon, were evicted by the Queen's agents and shipped to New York. Mary Lee Dunn tells their story in this meticulously researched book. Using numerous Irish and U.S. sources and with descendants' help, she traces dozens of the evictees to Rutland, Vermont, as railroads and marble quarries transformed the local economy. She follows the immigrants up to 1870 and learns not only what happened to them but also what light American experience and records cast on their Irish “rebellion.”

Dunn begins with Ireland's pre-Famine social and political landscape as context for the Ballykilcline strike. The tenants had rented earlier from the Mahons of Strokestown, whose former property now houses Ireland's Famine Museum. In 1847, landlord Denis Mahon evicted and sent nearly a thousand tenants to Quebec, where half died before or just after reaching the Grosse Ile quarantine station. Mahon was gunned down months later. His murder provoked an international controversy involving the Vatican. An early suspect in the case was a man from Ballykilcline.

In the United States, many of the immigrants resettled in clusters in several locations, including Vermont, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, and New York. In Vermont they found jobs in the marble quarries, but some of them lost their homes again in quarry labor actions after 1859. Others prospered in their new lives. A number of Ballykilcline families who stopped in Rutland later moved west; one had a son kidnapped by Indians in Minnesota. Readers who have Irish Famine roots will gain a sense of their own “back story” from this account of Ireland and the native Irish, and scholars in the field of immigration studies will find it particularly useful.

This book opens a window on a forgotten and glorious time—the life of colonial Mexico. Here is the color of that era in a mosaic of life—a worldly ambitious archbishop, a beautiful nun-poetess, a Creole scholar torn between faith and scientific learning, poetasters, inquisitors—and in the background, the first glimmers of Mexican nationalism. Baroque in its intricate pattern of caste and custom, rich with silver pouring from its mines, the feudal society of Old Mexico lives in this account of a vanished time.

Becoming Hybrid offers an intimate exploration of creative process and hybrid poetics. Weaving together essays, interviews, personal narrative, and pedagogical reflections, this book explores what it means to be “hybrid” in the twenty-first century, as artists increasingly produce work that challenges traditional formal boundaries. The book examines the transdisciplinary practice of artists like Cecilia Vicuña, Don Mee Choi, and Claudia Rankine, many of whom write from diasporic experience or from identities historically pushed to the margins. Emerging from Barizo’s lifelong engagements with music, philosophy, art, and literature, the book illuminates the idiosyncratic pathways she has taken to unsettle disciplinary boundaries as an author, artist, and performer. Becoming Hybrid traces how disciplinary and genre-bound conventions have shifted and dissolved across time, offering tools for decolonial pedagogy and collaborative writing workshops that honor multiple voices, lived experiences, and cultural traditions. Accessible yet intellectually rigorous, the book opens up a conversation about hybridity and creativity, making it an essential guide for anyone interested in how contemporary art and literature are reshaping the ways we think, write, and create today.

The 1963 publication of Thomas Pynchon’s V. changed the landscape of American fiction. Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. offers a detailed examination of the dramatic transformations that took place as Pynchon’s foundational novel went from typescript to published work. Luc Herman and John M. Krafft develop and deploy a rich theory of genetic narratology to examine the performance of genre in the novel. Pushing back against the current dominance of cognitive narratology, they discuss focalization, character construction, and evocation of consciousness as clues to Pynchon’s developing narratology of historical fiction. Their theoretical interventions offer an important and timely corrective to the field of narratology with a method that brings the author back into the analytical frame. 

Herman and Krafft use as their guide the typescript of V. that surfaced in 2001, when it was acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, as well as Pynchon’s editorial correspondence with Corlies Smith, his first editor at J. B. Lippincott. Becoming Pynchon assembles a comprehensive and unequaled picture of Pynchon’s writing process that will appeal both to Pynchonians and to postmodernism scholars more broadly. 

Drawing on evidence from a wide collection of surviving family papers, Beloved Children is a valuable contribution to literature available concerning childhood history in pre-industrial Central Europe.

With the aid of detailed case studies, the volume illustrates every aspect of Hungarian childhood in the early modern age from a variety of contrasting perspectives—birth, care, education, marriage, orphanhood and death. The book also includes a unique portrayal of family life in the Hungarian aristocracy.

Beloved Children is a comprehensive study examining topics such as family intimacy, paternal and maternal attitudes, providing the reader with a valuable insight into a child’s life in Hungary during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals--amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners--inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced re-creation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works.

This memoir about the experiences of German occupation during the siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) was written by Moscow-born Evdokiia Vasil’evna Baskakova-Bogacheva (1888–1976), an émigré in Australia, at the age of eighty-one. The text had been forgotten in the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco since 1970 until the editors of this volume discovered it.

In the memoirs, after accounting on her youth spent against the background of the First World War and of the two Russian revolutions of 1917, Evdokiia describes the inferno of the Nazi occupation as experienced in a suburb of Leningrad in 1941-43. She survived for nearly two years almost on the front line, within a few kilometers of the blockade ring. As a medical practitioner, she became useful for the occupational authorities and the ever-shrinking town population, until her family was evacuated to the west in October 1943. Besides hunger, discord, disease, the hunt for food and firewood, along with violence and death, Evdokiia’s account deals with various forms of cooperation between Soviet citizens and the new authorities.

All the events she recalls can be confirmed through other sources. The introduction and the detailed notes to the text help the reader to locate Evdokiia’s recollections in time and place, and situate them in their historical context. 

In this book, Makarychev and Medvedev examine the importance of biopolitics in fueling Russia’s confrontation with the West. In their view, the development of Putin’s illiberal authoritarianism was largely triggered by what they call a biopolitical turn. This shift is exemplified by the use of an increasing number of regulatory mechanisms to discipline and constrain the human body. Such political practices concern issues of sexuality, reproductive behavior, adoption, fertility, family planning, public hygiene, and demography. This turn created a new disciplinary framework for the population and the elite. Bans and restrictions of a biopolitical nature, became one of the main tools for articulating the rules of belonging in the political community and drawing its political boundaries. Biopolitical discourses have taken up the core of the Russian identity formation, which contrasts a positive “conservative Russia” with a supposedly vicious “liberal West.”

The presentation of the political genealogy of the body-centric structures of power and hegemony in Russia implies their transformation from bio- to necropolitics. Necropolitical (repressive and life-depriving) components are inscribed in the biopolitical regimes of power: they form the core of Putin’s rule over Russia and are a key factor behind the war against Ukraine. 

Step into Birkenau, Marco Nahon’s unflinching memoir of survival in Auschwitz, where a Greek doctor bears witness to brutality, loss, and endurance—preserving forgotten voices and compelling readers to confront history through one unforgettable, human testimony

Birkenau is a searing firsthand Holocaust memoir by Greek physician Marco Nahon, recounting his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau and survival of one of history’s most lethal extermination camps. Writing soon after liberation, Nahon offers a deeply personal chronicle of Nazi persecution. He recounts the occupation of Greece, the ghettoization of Greek Jews, their transport to German death camps, and the daily horrors of camp life. He documents the dehumanization and destruction of Greek Jews while preserving the memory of those who perished. 

Nahon presents his story episodically, guiding readers through his arrest, transport, forced labor, and survival. He illuminates the historical context of the Holocaust with vivid stories from daily life in the death camps. Rounding out the work are maps, appendices, and Bowman’s introduction, which provides background on Greek Jewry—whose complex story is little known—and describes the progress of the Nazi occupation of Greece and the Balkans.

Nahon, an MD trained in Beirut who lost much of his family, writes with restrained objectivity that heightens the emotional force of his account, while the translation and editorial framing make this early memoir accessible to modern readers. 

This book will resonate with scholars of the Holocaust, students of World War II, and general readers seeking an authentic survivor voice. It is especially valuable for those interested in lesser-known aspects of the genocide, such as the fate of Greek Jewish communities. Both an indispensable historical document and a powerful act of remembrance, it speaks urgently to anyone committed to understanding—and never forgetting—the human realities of genocide.

Exploring the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives

At a moment in U.S. history with repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois is the first book to consider the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that nonetheless remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literary texts, Candice M. Jenkins reminds us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon.

Focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Michael Thomas, Jenkins shows that the seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post–Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from an emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on vulnerability and precariousness, suggests a pendulum swing between two interrelated positions still in tension. By analyzing how these narratives stage the fraught interaction between the black and the bourgeois, Jenkins offers renewed attention to class as a framework for the study of black life—a necessary shift in an age of rapidly increasing income inequality and societal stratification.

Black Bourgeois thus challenges the assumed link between blackness and poverty that has become so ingrained in the United States, reminding us that privileged subjects, too, are “classed.” This book offers, finally, a rigorous and nuanced grasp of how African Americans live within complex, intersecting identities.