Roland Barthes
Seagull Books, 2016
Edited by Pamela N. Corey, Nora A. Taylor, and Do Tuong Linh
National University of Singapore Press, 2026
The first English-language volume on Vietnamese contemporary art.
Contemporary art in Vietnam is a dynamic field shaped by memory, history, and experimentation. Over the last thirty years, Vietnamese artists have come to command international recognition, even as a growing domestic market for contemporary art fosters alternative infrastructures of collection and exhibition. Signs and Signals from Vietnam brings together artists, curators, and academics to examine artistic practice and contemporary art histories in Vietnam today.
Moving beyond familiar North-South or diasporic-national divides, the essays represent the perspectives of Vietnamese, Vietnamese diasporic, and non-Vietnamese writers of different generations, affiliations, and positionalities. Contributors trace the inventive ways artists work with language, narrative, performance, and archival practice to communicate through their art. Key themes running through the volume represent the predominant concerns of Vietnamese artists over the past three decades, including the enduring impact of socialist paradigms in contemporary art, gender, diaspora, memory, and the environment. Together, these essays demonstrate how contemporary art can convey lesser-known histories, contested narratives, and personal perspectives.
Edited by Mary Lynn Broe. Afterword by Catharine Stimpson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991
Roughly chronological, these essays explore Barnes’ early work in the New York newspaper world of the ‘teens, proceed through the 1954 publication of The Antiphon, and include several approaches to such works as Ryder, Ladies Almanack, and Nightwood. This judicious mix of essays—many of them illustrated by photographs and drawings—presents a comprehensive picture of the creative imagination of Djuna Barnes.
Essayists include Mary Lynn Broe, Nancy J. Levine, Ann Larabee, Joan Retallack, Carolyn Allen, Carolyn Burke, Sheryl Stevenson, Marie Ponsot, Frances M. Doughty, Susan Sniader Lanser, Frann Michel, Karla Jay, Jane Marcus, Judith Lee, Julie L. Abraham, Meryl Altman, Lynda Curry, Louise A. DeSalvo, and Catharine Stimpson. Individuals sharing personal recollections of Barnes are Ruth Ford, James B. Scott, Alex Gildzen, Hank O’Neal, Chester Page, Andrew Field, and Frances McCullough. Janice Thom and Kevin Engel provide an updated bibliography.
From The Book of Repulsive Women to The Antiphon, Barnes challenged old gender dichotomies as she shaped radical sociopolitical views. Her textual methods celebrated a multiplicity of voices, heterodox forms, and genres, transgressing those tenets of modernism that privilege the “high art” of a single, unified textual identity or a discrete discourse. These essays offer various critical approaches and sinuous readings of the full range of Barnes’ achievement. Interwoven through the essays and reminiscences is a lively commentary from Barnes’ friends and contemporaries as well as Barnes herself.
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Marianne Boruch
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Thomas L Fleischner
University of Utah Press, 1999
Integrating personal narrative and natural history, Fleischner presents what he calls a "guide to understanding" the relatively unknown landscape of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Like a bright blue seam incised deep in solid rock, the Escalante River binds the fir forests of Utah’s High Plateau with the barren deserts of the canyonlands region in the newly designed Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. To this wild landscape, naturalist Thomas Fleischner brings both emotional engagement and a wealth of knowledge. With unabashed passion and patient and learned observations Fleischner presents this relatively unknown landscape.
Singing Stone is ideal for curious visitors to the national monument as well as students of environmental studies. Fleischner’s background as a conservation biologist and former park ranger, a professor of environmental studies, and a naturalist in the Escalante Region for almost twenty years has provided him with a deep reservoir of experience and knowledge.
The book’s first three chapters survey the unique geology, flora and fauna, and human history of the region. Chapters four and five trace the more recent impacts of human activities—grazing and wilderness recreation—and explore the shifts in cultural values and public policy that have occurred as a result. Examining these topics in the context of a specific landscape offers a lens through which these changes, now the topic of examination and controversy throughout the New West, can be clearly seen and, hopefully, re-evaluated.
Davies
Templeton Press, 2018
James Edward Beitler
University Press of Colorado, 2026
Sites of Writing builds upon the multiple contributions of Anne Ruggles Gere across a long and highly productive career. The chapters in this edited collection, written by leading scholars (including some of Gere’s former students) to track her major contributions to writing studies, situate those contributions within the broader landscape of field development, and draw on those findings to assess important trends and project productive pathways for the future. The contributors to the collection consider disciplinary history, language and literacy, writing across the curriculum, digital rhetoric, writing’s extracurriculum, assessment, and English education, among other areas. Connecting these multiple fields of activity, Sites of Writing affirms Gere’s view of writing as a powerful social and cultural activity and of literacy, broadly conceived, as enabling cultural transformations and, in the process, transforming writing studies and other fields.
David Bromwich
University of Chicago Press, 2001

Donald Davie
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Carl Elliott, ed.
Duke University Press, 2001
Contributors. Larry Churchill, David DeGrazia, Cora Diamond, James Edwards, Carl Elliott, Grant Gillett, Paul Johnston, Margaret Olivia Little, James Lindemann Nelson, Knut Erik Tranoy
Allen M. Young
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000
Small Creatures and Ordinary Places reveals to us the beauty and value of hornets, bats, katydids, mice, cicadas, and other tiny dwellers in our own backyards. Young, a renowned expert on butterflies and cicadas of the American tropics, records in these charming essays his keen observations of the natural world as he walks through an urban woods near the Lake Michigan shore, or sits on his deck facing his backyard, or gazes at a field of corn stubble in autumn. He invites us to venture into our own yards, neighborhood parks, fields, and forests and pause there . . . to look and to listen.
Small creatures have unique and interesting stories to tell us, Young points out. Their brief life cycles illustrate the intricate workings of a bigger clock driving the seasons, and they dominate the larger web of life in which humans are but a strand. Far too often they are ignored, taken for granted, reviled, or misunderstood. Even now, Young writes, as we move into a new millennium as a species and the technological pace of our existence further quickens, we can gain much from appreciating nature close at hand, despite how steadily it is being pushed aside.
Richard Chalfen
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987
Eve Quesnel
University of Nevada Press, 2025
Philip Levine
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Alexander García Düttmann
Northwestern University Press, 2023
Kevin D. Cordi, Ph.D., Kirstin J. Milks, PhD., Rebecca Van Tassell
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022

Richard Harvey Brown
University of Chicago Press, 1989
David C. Hammack
Russell Sage Foundation, 1994
Saul M. Olyan
SBL Press, 2012
F. A. Hayek
University of Chicago Press, 1997

Edited by Jess Moriarty and Kate Aughterson
Intellect Books, 2024

Richard Harvey Brown
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Ronald A. T. Judy, ed.
Duke University Press, 0
Contributors. Kenneth Barkin, Nahum Chandler, Ronald Judy, David Krell, Charles Lemert, Sieglinde D. Lemke, Tommy Lott, Kevin Miles, Abdulkarim Mustapha, Ken Warren
Ariel Dorfman
Duke University Press, 1991
Praise for Ariel Dorfman
“One of the most important voices coming out of Latin America.”—Salman Rushdie
“A remarkable writer . . . writing out of a very different cultural perspective from comfortable American readers.”—Digby Diehl, Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“One of the six greatest Latin American novelists.”—Jacobo Timmerman, Newsweek
Rick Bragg
University of Alabama Press, 2000
Michael Feldman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
What we have here is another mighty slim volume from Michael Feldman, best known (when known at all) for his public radio show "Whad'ya Know" (sic). Feldman, who spouts off about things he knows "not much" about weekly, here writes them down:
· how to get your own radio show and what you can do with it once you do
· paranoia
· marriage (or as Feldman likes to refer to it, "a long-term bad relationship")
· Hitler
· SUVs
· child-rearing (although it sounds like it's the author who is being reared)
· a number of short pieces on places he and his crew have visited for their "remote possibilities"
· more references to "gentiles" than absolutely necessary (seems to be an issue for Feldman, although he is tickled with the
notion that, to a Mormon, he is one)
· some attempts to misrepresent scientific or social research for humorous purposes
· many personal revelations that prove the examined life is not necessarily worth living either
· and pages and pages of fluff.
Mr. Feldman has not been compared, to our knowledge, to S. J. Perlman.
But here is some of what Michael Feldman says in Something I Said:
"The paranoid no longer is: paranoia has outlived its usefulness when everybody is out to get us."
"Take the phrase 'no problem': I can use it, although it is the very opposite of my two-word world view ('Nothing works')."
"Whatever latitude beauty may have in the eye of the beholder, funny is not readily apparent to all, and, who knows, they may be right. More importantly, they may be bigger."
Includes a music CD by Michael Feldman and John Sieger.
Edited by Jody A. Marín and Norma E. Cantú
University of Texas Press, 2025
2026 Outstanding Book Award for Non-Fiction, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Tejas Foco
2026 Silver Medal for the Dolores Huerta Best Cultural & Community Themed Book – English, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)
An expansive volume on Tejana identity and Tejanidad told through personal narratives, poetry, and essays.
Being Tejanx is different than just being from Texas. Being Tejanx means you are a border subject. Being Tejanx means living in and from a certain history of oppression, possibility, activism, and cultural-linguistic hybridity arising within the US-Mexico borderland that is home. And being Tejanx means something in particular if you are a woman.
In ¡Somos Tejanas!, editors Norma E. Cantú and Jody A. Marín assemble contemporary Tejanx writers who provide firsthand accounts of their experience of identity, enriching the field of Tejanx studies through an encounter with gender and sexuality. The contributions, including personal and scholarly essays, poems, criticism, and artworks, explore the heterogeneity of Tejana identity and the sociopolitical movements, stories, dances, music, and athletic feats that mark Tejanidad. Authors contemplate the history and memory of segregation in Texas, the struggles of surviving the unnatural disaster and blackouts of 2021 amid the global pandemic of COVID-19, and the drug-war violence and ever-tightening immigration restrictions that strangle a transborder way of life shared by millions. An unrepentant act of expression from women under attack by state policymakers, this collection dispels the silence imposed by colonial erasure.
By Charles Bowden; foreword by Alfredo Corchado
University of Texas Press, 2020
"I believe every sunrise and I remember the smell of wet grass, the color of robins, and rustle of leaves on the big oaks that outlive nations, all this comes with each sunrise."
Sonata marks the sixth and final installment of Charles Bowden’s towering “Unnatural History of America” series. While his earlier volumes were suffused with violence and war, Bowden offers here a celebration of rebirth and regrowth. Rendered in Bowden's inimitable style, more prose poetry than reportage, he evokes panoramas that contain the potential for respite and offer a state of grace all but lost in the endless wars of man.
Bowden travels back in time to the worlds of artists Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh, the latter painting furiously against encroaching madness. “Van Gogh tries to dream a life of color,” writes Bowden. “Powder blue sheds, yellow stubble, pink skies—but the fears and dark things drag him down.” As Bowden’s vivid prose wrestles with the madness of the world, van Gogh’s paintings represent an act of resistance, ultimately unsuccessful, against depression and suicide.
Moving from the vibrant hues of van Gogh’s painted gardens to America’s southern border, Bowden returns once more to the Mexican asylum run by "El Pastor," Jose Antonio Galvan, who was first introduced to readers of the sextet in Jericho. Here, too, is the dream of a garden that will be planted in the desert, a promise of regeneration in a world gone mad. Poetic, elegiac, and elliptical, Sonata is the final, captivating book of Bowden’s monumental career.
Ian Bostridge
University of Chicago Press, 2023
John Taggart
University of Alabama Press, 1994
Text by Gary Paul Nabhan; Illustrations by Robert J. Long
University of Arizona Press, 2026
The Sonoran Desert has many marvelous and well-known creatures such as the javelina and the coyote, often found on postcards and lawn ornaments. But what about the lesser-known creatures—the ones that are underfoot yet unseen, that lurk only in the shadows and in our imaginations? In this collection of essays, prose poems, and illustrations, naturalist Gary Paul Nabhan and artist Robert J. Long team up to celebrate these unsung beings of the Sonoran Desert.
This desert bestiary includes creatures whose existence lies largely in traditional story and belief, as well as creatures whose life cycles are so cryptic they seem mythic, such as the walking catfish and the carbunco. Positioned at the dynamic intersection of folklore and natural history, the book reflects on the reasons why human imaginations over the ages have reached into this realm of seldom seen but often intuited animals. Focusing on small animals and charismatic mini-fauna, Nabhan expands our understanding of the natural world by delightfully describing the interactions between animals and plants.
This more-than-natural history is for anyone who finds joy in the marvels of the natural world.
Theodore H. Fleming
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight, eds.
Duke University Press, 2001
Donald L. Donham
Ohio University Press, 2002
This pioneering book, first published to wide acclaim in 1986, traces the way the Ethiopian center and the peripheral regions of the country affected each other. It looks specifically at the expansion of the highland Ethiopian state into the western and southern lowlands from the 1890s up to 1974.
Fred Arroyo
University of Arizona Press, 2020
Edited by Laura Vaughan, John Peponis, and Ruth Dalton
University College London, 2025
Edited by Dean Rader and Janice Gould
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Speak to Me Words is a stimulating blend of classic articles and original pieces that reflect the energy of modern American Indian literary studies. Highlighting various aspects of poetry written by American Indians since the 1960s, it is a wide-ranging collection that balances the insights of Natives and non-Natives, men and women, old and new voices. Included here are such landmark articles as "Answering the Deer" by Paula Gunn Allen, "Herbs of Healing" by Carter Revard, and "Song, Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception" by Simon Ortiz—all pieces that have shaped how we think about Native poetry. Among the contributions appearing for the first time are Elaine Jahner writing on Paula Gunn Allen's use of formal structures; Robert Nelson addressing pan-Indian tropes of emergence, survival, return, and renewal; and Janet McAdams focusing on Carter Revard's "angled mirrors." Although many Native writers may disregard distinctions between genres, together these writings help readers see the difference between American Indian poetry and other forms of Native literature.
These essays are as broad, encompassing, and provocative as Native poetry itself, branching off from and weaving back into one another. In showing how American Indian poetry redefines our social order and articulates how Indian communities think about themselves, these writers establish a new foundation for the study—and enjoyment—of this vital art.
David M. Rubenstein
Duke University Press, 2026
Featuring interviews with eminent historians, journalists, and writers, Speaking of America brings together nineteen wide-ranging conversations from philanthropist and financier David M. Rubenstein’s long-running Congressional Dialogues series of interviews at the Library of Congress. Highlights include Ken Burns on documenting American history, Stacy Schiff on Samuel Adams, Manisha Sinha on Reconstruction, and David McCullough on the American frontier.
Published in association with the Library of Congress
Featuring interviews with eminent historians, journalists, and writers, Speaking of America brings together nineteen wide-ranging conversations from philanthropist and financier David M. Rubenstein’s long-running Congressional Dialogues series of interviews at the Library of Congress. Rubenstein and his guests bring to life notable figures, events, and trends drawn from American history and culture and beyond.
Highlights include Ken Burns on bringing American history to life, Stacy Schiff on Samuel Adams, Manisha Sinha on Reconstruction, David McCullough on the American frontier, Beverly Gage on J. Edgar Hoover, Chris Wallace on the presidential election of 1960, Evan Thomas on Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Eric Schmidt on artificial intelligence, Arthur Brooks on happiness, and David Grann on The Wager, his best-selling story of shipwreck and mutiny. Taken together, the conversations in Speaking of America all build toward the same shared message of dialogue, cooperation, and the importance of knowledge and reflection, highlighting how the study of history can enrich our understanding of current-day challenges in politics and policy.
Uncertain Commons
Duke University Press, 2013
Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, with Prem Krishnamurty and Carin Kuoni, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Michael Hicks
Signature Books, 2020
Lara Messersmith-Glavin
University of Alaska Press, 2022
Lara Messersmith-Glavin
University of Alaska Press, 2022
John Marks Templeton
Templeton Press, 1998
Spiritual Evolution: Scientists Discuss Their Beliefs describes the intellectual and emotional journeys traveled by esteemed scientists worldwide. Authors share the personal steps they have taken to blend an understanding of the Divine with their scientific perspectives.
Charles Birch, S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Larry Dossey, Owen Gingerich, Peter E. Hodgson, Stanley L. Jaki, Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Russell Stannard, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker offer accounts of their spirituality and scientific inquiry. Noting the impact of religious upbringing, academic and spiritual mentors, personal devotional practice, and study, these authors make a compelling case for the blending of both scientific and spiritual worlds. They share insights that keep them attending church, engaging in prayer, and continuing the search to understand the Infinite.
Thomas Larson
Ohio University Press, 2019
Today, the surprisingly elastic form of the memoir embraces subjects that include dying, illness, loss, relationships, and self-awareness. Writing to reveal the inner self—the pilgrimage into one’s spiritual and/or religious nature—is a primary calling. Contemporary memoirists are exploring this field with innovative storytelling, rigorous craft, and new styles of confessional authorship. Now, Thomas Larson brings his expertise as a critic, reader, and teacher to the boldly evolving and improvisatory world of spiritual literature.
In his book-length essay Spirituality and the Writer, Larson surveys the literary insights of authors old and new who have shaped religious autobiography and spiritual memoir—from Augustine to Thomas Merton, from Peter Matthiessen to Cheryl Strayed. He holds them to an exacting standard: they must render transcendent experience in the writing itself. Only when the writer’s craft prevails can the fleeting and profound personal truths of the spirit be captured. Like its predecessor, Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist,Spirituality and the Writer will find a home in writing classrooms and book groups, and be a resource for students, teachers, and writers who seek guidance with exploring their spiritual lives.
Edited by Jack W. Berryman and Roberta J. Parks
University of Illinois Press, 1992
William J.Morgan
Temple University Press, 2020
What is the purpose of sport, and how are ethical conceptions of sport shaped by the answers to this question? In Sport and Moral Conflict, William Morgan investigates, examining sport as a moral crucible that puts athletes in competitive, emotionally charged situations where fairness and equality are contested alongside accomplishment.
Morgan looks at the modern Olympics—from 1906 Athens to 1924 Paris, when the Games reached international prestige — in order to highlight the debate about athletic excellence and the amateur-professional divide. Whereas the Americans emphasized winning, the Europeans valued a love of the game. Morgan argues that the existing moral theories of sport—formalism and broad internalism (aka interpretivism), which rely on rules and general principles—fall short when confronted with such a dispute as the transition from amateur to professional sport. As such, he develops a theory of conventionalism, in which the norms at work in athletic communities determine how players should ethically acquit themselves. Presenting his case for an ethical theory of sport, Morgan provides insights regarding the moral controversies and crises that persist today.
Samuel O. Regalado
University of Arkansas Press, 2014
Edited by Maureen M. Smith, Daniel A. Nathan, and Sarah K. Fields
University of Texas Press, 2024
2025 Anthology Award, North American Society for Sport History
The stories behind and legacies of important sports photos from the last 130 years.
Ever since photography and professional sports originated in the nineteenth century, photographers have shaped how we perceive sports. Sports through the Lens collects essays by twenty-five historians that consider what it means to capture and revisit a moment of cultural significance in sports, looking at each photo’s creation, its contexts, and how its meaning has shifted over time. Some essays provide fresh perspectives on such iconic images as Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston at their 1965 rematch and Michael Jordan soaring at the 1988 NBA All-Star Game slam dunk competition; others introduce readers to the lesser-known stories of the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon or the inaugural World Indigenous Games. The authors examine the photos' legacies alongside the artistry of both the athletes and the photographers. Reflecting on images of athletes from around the world engaged in sports from baseball to horse-racing to hockey, Sports through the Lens provides a wide-ranging meditation on the visual, historical, and cultural meaning of sports photographs.