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Sui generis, Dana Roeser's poems are spoken by a stand-up comic having a bad night at the local club. The long extended syntax, spread over her quirky, syncopated short lines, contains (barely) the speaker's anxieties over an aging father with Parkinson's, the maturation of two daughters, friends at twelve-step meetings and their sometimes suicidal urges—acted on or resisted—and her own place in a world that seems about to spin out of control. Bad weather and tiny economy cars speeding down the interstate next to Jurassic semis become the metaphor, or figurative vehicle, for this poet's sense of her own precariousness. 

Roeser brings a host of characters into her poems—a Catholic priest raging against the commercialism of Mother's Day, the injured tennis player James Blake, a man struck by lightning, drunk partygoers, an ex-marine, Sylvia Plath's son Nicholas Hughes, a neighbor, travelers encountered in airport terminals, various talk therapists—and lets them speak. She records with high fidelity the nuances of our ordinary exigencies so that the poems become extraordinary arias sung by a husky-voiced diva with coloratura phrasing to die for, “the dark notes” that Lorca famously called the duende. The book is infused with the energy of misfortune, accident, coincidence, luck, grace, panic, hilarity. The characters and narrator, in extremis, speak their truths urgently.

Winner, Transatlantic Studies Association and Cambridge University Press Book Prize, 2023

During the antebellum period, British publishers increasingly brought out their own authorized and unauthorized editions of American literary works as the popularity of print exploded and literacy rates grew. Playing a formative role in the shaping of American literature, the industry championed the work of US-based writers, highlighted the cultural value of American literary works, and intervened in debates about the future of American literature, authorship, and print culture.

The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature examines the British editions of American fiction, poetry, essays, and autobiographies from writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Flagg Gould. Putting these publications into historical context, Katie McGettigan considers key issues of the day, including developments in copyright law, changing print technologies, and the financial considerations at play for authors and publishers. This innovative study also uncovers how the transatlantic circulation of these works exposed the racial violence and cultural nationalism at the heart of the American experiment, producing overlapping and competing visions of American nationhood in the process.

In the work of literary resurrection there is always a small act of defiance. The Two Worlds of William March by Roy S. Simmonds restores to view one of the most remarkable and least celebrated American writers of the twentieth century. With intelligence, restraint, and a keen eye for contradiction, Simmonds traces March’s path from Alabama beginnings through war, business success, and literary achievement. The result is more than a biography. It is an inquiry into the making of a writer whose novels continue to unsettle, disturb, and illuminate long after the fashions of his age have passed. 

What lingers is the paradox of William March himself. He was a man of outward accomplishment who remained drawn to the hidden regions of experience. He wrote memorably of war without glamorizing it, and of evil without simplifying it. Unlike so many public literary figures, he seemed to cultivate disappearance rather than celebrity. The silence around him became part of the story. Simmonds treats that silence not as a void but as evidence, revealing a complex and deeply observant mind at work beneath an unusually quiet life. 

The questions that occupied March remain with us. How well do we know ourselves? What lies beneath ordinary behavior? How does experience become art? For readers of Southern literature, literary biography, American history, war literature, psychology, Alabama culture, and twentieth-century fiction, this book offers both discovery and reconsideration. It will especially appeal to those who suspect that the most revealing stories are often hidden in plain sight.

A fresh batch of deliciously distinctive recipes from the Star Tribune’s beloved annual cookie contest—with even more recipes, enticing photographs, and bakers’ stories

Cold winters call for warm kitchens and cookie baking, especially around the holidays. The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book, a compendium of Minnesota’s rich baking traditions and innovative recipes, stirs up winning treats from twenty years of the Star Tribune’s popular holiday cookie contest.

Significantly expanding and updating its 2018 predecessor, The Great Minnesota Cookie Book, this collection features thirty-five new recipes, including Grasshoppers and Dark Chocolate Fig Rolls, Tiramisu Twists and Cardamom Cherry Buttons, Diablo Snowballs, Spumoni Squares, and Maple-Roasted Walnut Delights. This sweet-tooth treasure trove of cookie recipes will inspire bakers to discover how many ways flour, sugar, butter, and eggs (plus several unexpected ingredients) can be combined to create new favorites for the holidays—or any time of year.

The best of the best, these contest-winning cookies are accompanied by beautiful photographs and baking tips, insights, and essays. Indulge in these delightful, mouth-watering recipes while Minnesota’s best bakers share stories of cherished holiday traditions, recall memorable cookie moments, and celebrate how baking brings us together.

Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Awards’ Silver Prize for Multicultural Fiction

Alarmed by her father’s unexplained disappearance, Julia Castro travels from California to her family’s ancestral home in the Azores to find the islands abuzz with tales of ghost ships, seductive sirens, and witchcraft. The mystery deepens when a drowned man’s body is discovered on a mountainside and an unknown island emerges from the sea. While she is on the hunt for her father, Julia succumbs to the bewitching allure of the islands—and to Nicolau, a fellow musician. History, legend, poetry, and myth are seamlessly interwoven as the novel explores relationships between personal and cultural identity, fate and self-determination, reality and illusion. This revised edition of The Undiscovered Island features a new introduction from Katherine Vaz.

The work and times of the Black writer, editor, and intellectual

John Cullen Gruesser edits essays that explore the literary and journalistic career of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. A Black woman writer at the turn of the twentieth century, Hopkins worked as the unacknowledged editor-in-chief of the Colored American Magazine but also wrote short fiction, novels, nonfiction articles, and a play believed to be the first by a Black woman. Versatile and politically committed, she was fired when her strong editorial stands and non-conciliatory politics offended the new owner of Colored American Magazine.

A rare examination of an overlooked figure in Black letters, The Unruly Voice explores Hopkins’s writing and her significance for contemporary readers.

Contributors: Elizabeth Ammons; Kristina Brooks; Lois Lamphere Brown; C. K. Doreski; John Cullen Gruesser; Jennie A. Kassanoff; Kate McCullough; Nelly Y. McKay; and Cynthia D. Schrager

The Vital Lie: Reality and Illusion in Modern Drama is a sweeping inquiry into the stories people tell themselves in order to endure, survive, and belong. Moving from Ibsen and Strindberg to Beckett, Pinter, and beyond, Anthony S. Abbott traces the uneasy traffic between actuality and self-invention that animates modern theater. Rather than offering a simple survey, he uncovers a recurring dramatic predicament: the cognitive dissonance that afflict people when the beliefs they hold about themselves collide with reality.

Anthony S. Abbott writes with the erudite observation of a critic and the curiosity of a participant. His book explores illusion, meaning, and human resilience, a perspective that lends unusual urgency to its readings of canonical playwrights. Abbott's scholarship is expansive without becoming academic in the pejorative sense; his arguments remain animated by large questions about purpose, dignity, and the imaginative structures that sustain ordinary lives. 

Ideal for theater devotees, literary historians, students of modernism, philosophy-minded readers, directors, dramaturgs, and anyone fascinated by self-deception, mythmaking, and identity. Admirers of intellectual biography, cultural criticism, existential inquiry, and ambitious cross-author interpretation will find this volume especially rewarding. Those who relish fresh angles on familiar classics will discover a study that is probing, elegant, and unexpectedly memorable.

How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? In this ambitious book, Michael T. Gilmore argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with the demands for silence and circumspection that accompanied the antebellum fear of disunion and the postwar reconciliation between the North and South.

Proposing a radical new interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature, The War on Words examines struggles over permissible and impermissible utterance in works ranging from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” to Henry James’s The Bostonians. Combining historical knowledge with groundbreaking readings of some of the classic texts of the American past, The War on Words places Lincoln’s Cooper Union address in the same constellation as Margaret Fuller’s feminism and Thomas Dixon’s defense of lynching. Arguing that slavery and race exerted coercive pressure on freedom of expression, Gilmore offers here a transformative study that alters our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture and its fraught engagement with the right to speak.

The Whitman Revolution brings together a rich collection of Betsy Erkkila’s phenomenally influential essays that have been published over the years, along with two powerful new essays. Erkkila offers a moving account of the inseparable mix of the spiritual-sexual-political in Whitman and the absolute centrality of male-male connection to his work and thinking. Her work has been at the forefront of scholarship positing that Whitman’s songs are songs not only of workers and occupations but of sex and the body, homoeroticism, and liberation. What is more, Erkkila’s writing demonstrates that this sexuality and communal impulse is central to Whitman’s revolutionary poetry and his conception of democracy itself—an insight that was all but suppressed during the mid-twentieth century emergence of American literature as a field of study.

Highlights of this collection include Erkkila’s essays on pairings such as Marx and Whitman, Dickinson and Whitman, and Melville and Whitman. Across the volume, she demonstrates an international vision that highlights the place of Leaves of Grass within a global struggle for democracy. The Whitman Revolution is evidence of Erkkila’s remarkable ability to lead critical discussions, and marks an exciting event in Whitman studies.