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Nocturne and Five Tales of Love and Death is a book of prose by Gabrielle D’Annunzio translated from Italian to English by Raymond Rosenthal.

A sweeping multigenerational tale complicates traditional narratives as it follows two families—one Moroccan, one Polish—filled with Zionists, anti-Zionists, socialists, and reactionaries.

Spanning from 1932 to 1973, Nothing Vast delves deeply into the circumstances and concerns of Jews in cities across the globe—in Poland, France, Morocco, and the United States—as well as in Israel. Giving voice to characters male and female, young and old, Moshe Zvi Marvit braids together stories of migration and struggle, of custom and superstition, of long-held secrets and lies. This beautifully crafted novel follows a survivor of sexual assault, a member of the French resistance, a dream interpreter, a petty criminal, and a venerated rabbi.

Based on the experiences and traditions of the author’s own half-Arab Jewish family, the book is rife with historical and cultural detail and with the intricacies of faith and identity, both personal and national. At the center of the novel is Israel itself—a place existing first in the collective imagination, then in reality as Marvit slips into nonfiction to document the establishment of the country and the reactions to its birth. The characters’ experiences upon arrival in their new nation are vastly different: one family is given a large orange grove upon which to establish a Yeshiva, while the other, not accorded the same privileges, lives beneath notice. The story takes yet another twist when, years later, a grandchild of one of the founding rabbis, seeking answers, discovers the origin of his family’s land.

Visceral, intellectual, and searching, Nothing Vast is nothing short of a virtuosic debut.
 

Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional struggle to make American novels matter between 1965 and 1999. As corporations took over the book business, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture competed with novels as never before for a form of prestige that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. In the context of this competition, developments like the emergence of Rolling Stone magazine, regional publishers, Black studies programs, and “New Hollywood” became key events in the life of the American novel. Novels by Truman Capote, Ann Beattie, Toni Cade Bambara, Cynthia Ozick, and Larry McMurtry—among many others—are recast as prescient reports on, and formal responses to, a world suddenly less hospitable to old claims about the novel’s value. This book brings to light the story of the novel’s perceived decline and the surprising ways American fiction transformed in its wake.
 

How does contemporary literature contend with the power and responsibility of authorship, particularly when considering marginalized groups? How have the works of multiethnic authors challenged the notion that writing and authorship are neutral or universal?

In Novel Subjects, Leah Milne offers a new way to look at multicultural literature by focusing on scenes of writing in contemporary works by authors with marginalized identities. These scenes, she argues, establish authorship as a form of radical self-care—a term we owe to Audre Lorde, who defines self-care as self-preservation and “an act of political warfare.”

In engaging in this battle, the works discussed in this study confront limitations on ethnicity and nationality wrought by the institutionalization of multiculturalism. They also focus on identities whose mere presence on the cultural landscape is often perceived as vindictive or willful. Analyzing recent texts by Carmen Maria Machado, Louise Erdrich, Ruth Ozeki, Toni Morrison, and more, Milne connects works across cultures and nationalities in search of reasons for this recent trend of depicting writers as characters in multicultural texts. Her exploration uncovers fiction that embrace unacceptable or marginalized modes of storytelling—such as plagiarism, historical revisions, jokes, and lies—as well as inauthentic, invisible, and unexceptional subjects. These works ultimately reveal a shared goal of expanding the borders of belonging in ethnic and cultural groups, and thus add to the ever-evolving conversations surrounding both multicultural literature and self-care.

A wide-ranging account of the twenty-first century’s fascination with the weird.
 
Twenty-first-century fiction and theory have taken a decidedly weird turn. They both show a marked interest in the nonhuman and in the preternatural moods that the nonhuman often evokes. Writers of fiction and criticism are avidly experimenting with strange, even alien perspectives and protagonists. Kate Marshall’s Novels by Aliens explores this development broadly while focusing on problems of genre fiction. She identifies three key generic hybrids that harness a longing for the nonhuman: the old weird, an alternative tradition within naturalism and modernism for the twenty-first century’s cowboys and aliens; cosmic realism, the reach for words legible only from space in otherwise terrestrial narratives; and pseudoscience fiction, which imagines speculative futures beyond human life on earth. Offering sharp and surprising insights about a breathtaking range of authors, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Kazuo Ishiguro, Willa Cather to Maggie Nelson, Novels by Aliens tells the story of how genre became mood in the twenty-first century.