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A print-driven history of American art in the long nineteenth century.

Juliet Sperling’s Tactile Sensibilities uses interactive printed objects to uncover culturally instilled ideas about touch’s role in perception and shows how these frameworks were integral to ways of making and appreciating even seemingly untouchable works of painting and sculpture. Crucial to Sperling’s argument is a genre of paper constructions designed to engage the hand and eye in tandem: multilayered and lift-the-flap book plates, pull-tab engravings, foldable playbills, and spinning paper wheels that built expectations of touch as a trained, focused process into their structure and material. Intimately scaled and portable, tactile prints cut across multiple spheres of experience, including spaces in which people learned to view, understand, and create art.

Sperling reverses standard procedures for integrating prints into art history. Rather than working her way outward from canonical artworks toward ephemeral sources within the artist’s orbit, she uses previously unstudied printed materials to open period discourses of tactile sensibility that ultimately lead to art objects, unlocking new meanings behind works of painting and sculpture by artists including Raphaelle Peale, Hiram Powers, William Sidney Mount, and Winslow Homer. In treating sidelined materials as dedicated objects of study in their own right, Tactile Sensibilities reveals that in the long nineteenth century, print was an intellectually dense and powerfully connective medium, vital in mediating the tactile sensibilities that shaped ways of making and appreciating art. 

Tasker Street, winner of the Juniper Prize for poetry, is the second collection of poems by the acclaimed American poet Mark Halliday. Following his debut, Little Star (1987), which was selected for the National Poetry Series, Tasker Street confirmed Halliday as one of the most distinctive and engaging voices in contemporary American poetry.

Halliday's poems are marked by a restless, probing intelligence and a distinctly conversational energy. The poems in Tasker Street are personal in tone, narrative in impulse, and unafraid to range widely across the textures of everyday life: relationships, memory, desire, self-doubt, ambition, and the comic absurdities of being alive. These are poems that think out loud, circling back on themselves with a self-awareness that is at once disarming and deeply serious, even as they entertain with wit, verbal dexterity, and a refusal to settle for easy resolutions.

Drawing on the traditions of Frank O'Hara's personism and the narrative directness of the New York School, yet infused with a philosophical attentiveness honed by Halliday's scholarly engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the poems in Tasker Street balance accessibility with intellectual ambition. They invite readers into a voice that is simultaneously intimate and performative, one that embraces digression, self-interrogation, and the pleasures of language even while confronting questions of mortality, meaning, and the stubborn persistence of the self.

A CHOICE 2025 Outstanding Academic Title

Honorable Mention, 2023-2024 Research Society of American Periodicals Book Prize

In its February 1926 issue, Good Housekeeping magazine introduced a column for its approximately one million subscribers called “Tasting and Testing Books.” The column’s author, Emily Newell Blair, would go on to produce ninety-one reading advice columns for the magazine between 1926 and 1934. During this period, Good Housekeeping became the most widely circulated periodical in the United States, doubling its circulation to over two million copies. Much of its popularity stemmed from its intensive promotion of its Seal of Approval for a variety of products, which brought consumers to it for utilitarian purposes. With her focus on regular books, Blair distinguished herself from highbrow literary critics, many of whom have been objects of study as High Modernists. She offered advice to help middle-class women readers make their own choices about the best books in which to invest time and money, rather than dictating what they should or should not read. She aligns herself with the average subscriber, outside the book publishing and reviewer industries, focusing on books that would now be termed middlebrow reading.

Blair’s time at Good Housekeeping covers the era from the heights of the “Roaring Twenties” to the depths of the Great Depression, and her recommendations offer a window into the uses of middlebrow reading during this period of dramatic economic and social shifts. Tasting and Testing Books argues that the consumer-first message of Good Housekeeping infused Blair’s advice column and validated a new attitude of proudly middlebrow pleasure reading in the mid-twentieth century. These columns shed new light on the reading lives of too-often overlooked women, often living outside of urban centers and away from elite literary circles, and present Emily Newell Blair, who strongly identified with her readers as a truly democratic tastemaker.

The Alaska Pipeline becomes a line of poetry, a line in the land—the beginning of an epic and the end of an era. A map in the Antarctic becomes the ground beneath the reader’s feet, erasing itself with every step. A monk in a monastery beneath Mount Everest writes a prayer as the mountain traces a contrail across the upper atmosphere, inscribing a path to be followed.

In each place, William L. Fox reveals how the world leaves its mark on us—and how, through language, we move toward a sense of belonging. His spare, minimalist poems inhabit the planet’s wide empty spaces: Nevada’s Great Basin, the Antarctic and Arctic, the red deserts of interior Australia, the immense playas of Chile’s Atacama, and beyond. Between and within these lines, the poems explore how land becomes landscape, how terrain becomes territory, and how meaning is made.

With a bounty of locally grown meats and produce, artisanal cheeses, and a flourishing wine culture, it’s a luscious time to be cooking in Texas. From restaurant chefs to home cooks, Texans are going to local dairies, orchards, farmers’ markets, ranches, vineyards, and seafood sellers to buy the very freshest ingredients, whether we’re cooking traditional favorites or the latest haute cuisine. We’ve discovered that Texas terroir—our rich variety of climates and soils, as well as our diverse ethnic cultures—creates a unique “taste of place” that gives Texas food a flavor all its own.

Written by one of Texas’s leading cookbook authors, Terry Thompson-Anderson, Texas on the Table presents 150 new and classic recipes, along with stories of the people—farmers, ranchers, shrimpers, cheesemakers, winemakers, and chefs—who inspired so many of them and who are changing the taste of Texas food. The recipes span the full range from finger foods and first courses to soups and breads, salads, seafood, chicken, meat (including wild game), sides and vegetarian dishes, and sweets. Some of the recipes come from the state’s most renowned chefs, and all are user-friendly for home cooks. Finally, the authors and winemakers tell which recipes they turn to when opening their favorite wines.

This delicious compilation of recipes and stories of the people behind them, illustrated with Sandy Wilson’s beautiful photographs, makes Texas on the Table the must-have cookbook for everyone who relishes the flavors of the Lone Star State.

When The Absurd Hero in American Fiction was first released in 1966, Granville Hicks praised it in a lead article for the Saturday Review as a sensitive and definitive study of a new trend in postwar American literature. In the years that followed, David Galloway’s analysis of the writings of John Updike, William Styron, Saul Bellow, and J. D. Salinger became a standard critical work, an indispensable tool for readers concerned with contemporary American literature. The New York Times described the book as “a seminal study of the modern literary imagination."

David Galloway, himself an established novelist, later extensively revised The Absurd Hero to include authoritative discussions of more than a dozen novels which had appeared since the first revised edition was released in 1970. Among them are John Updike’s Couples, Rabbit Redux, and The Coup; William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice; and Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Humboldt’s Gift. Through detailed analyses of these works, Galloway demonstrates the continuing relevance of his own provocative concept of the absurd hero and provides important insights into the literary achievements of four of America’s most influential postwar novelists.

Literary realism rose to prominence in postbellum America with what the realists heralded as artful and accurate depictions of the world. Realism is thought to have replaced sentimentality—an earlier mode of writing the realists disparaged, which has often been seen as antithetical to realism. Literary scholar Faye Halpern challenges this apparent binary by uncovering how and why William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Charles Chesnutt incorporated sentimental elements into their most famous works.

With its distinctively narratological approach, The Afterlife of Sympathy offers a more rhetorical way to understand sentimentality and assess the ethical complexity of sympathy. Halpern demonstrates how sentimentality enables authors to form intimate relationships between their characters and readers to supplement the critical distance that realist writers otherwise celebrate and that has remained a key value in literary studies today. In reassessing American literary realism, Halpern seeks not only to understand why these writers adopted sentimental techniques but to provide insight into contemporary arguments in literary studies about critical distance and sympathetic identification.

Connecting literary studies, media theory, and cultural criticism, The Afterlife of Taste Hierarchies in Contemporary U.S. Art and Literature offers a fresh vocabulary for understanding how we evaluate art and each other in an age of digital mediation. Drawing on works and artifacts ranging from Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Andrea Long Chu’s “China Brain” to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the viral Bernie Sanders mittens meme, Monique Rooney traces how aspirations to refinement and gestures of condescension—once associated with high-, middle-, and lowbrow culture—continue to define aesthetic experience. This book moves between literary and popular forms, attending as closely to the meme’s dispersed creativity as to the novel’s intentional aesthetics.