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A little over 100 years ago, the first production of An-sky’s The Dybbuk, a play about the possession of a young woman by a dislocated spirit, opened in Warsaw. In the century that followed, The Dybbuk became a theatrical conduit for a wide range of discourses about Jews, belonging, and modernity. This timeless Yiddish play about spiritual possession beyond the grave would go on to exert a remarkable and unforgettable impact on modern theater, film, literature, music, and culture. 

The Dybbuk Century collects essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars who explore the play’s original Yiddish and Hebrew productions and offer critical reflections on the play’s enduring influence. The collection will appeal to scholars, students, and theater practitioners, as well as general readers.

Like many men of his generation, poet Robert Graves was indelibly marked by his experience of trench warfare in World War I. The horrific battles in which he fought and his guilt over surviving when so many perished left Graves shell-shocked and disoriented, desperately seeking a way to bridge the rupture between his conventional upbringing and the uncertainties of postwar British society.

In this study of Graves's early poetry, Frank Kersnowski explores how his war neurosis opened a door into the unconscious for Graves and led him to reject the essential components of the Western idea of reality—reason and predictability. In particular, Kersnowski traces the emergence in Graves's early poems of a figure he later called "The White Goddess," a being at once terrifying and glorious, who sustains life and inspires poetry. Drawing on interviews with Graves's family, as well as unpublished correspondence and drafts of poems, Kersnowski argues that Graves actually experienced the White Goddess as a real being and that his life as a poet was driven by the purpose of celebrating and explaining this deity and her matriarchy.

A meticulous examination of the history and roots of economic inequality within the United States.

This volume refines and extends the economic history literature on economic inequality in the United States. Economic inequality manifests itself on various dimensions, including access to resources and economic security, as well as access to education and opportunities for migration, marriage, and other important life decisions. Measuring inequality and studying its variation over time and in response to economic shocks such as recessions and wars deepen our understanding of how the economy operates and can inform the design of public policies. The studies in this compendium present comprehensive evidence on income distribution during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on new data on wages and prices. They also consider disparities in economic well-being that are reflected in outcomes other than wage and salary income, such as homeownership and marriage. The volume also presents new evidence on the effects of income inequality on social outcomes. It concludes with an intellectual history of “human capital,” a core concept in the economic analysis of the underpinnings of labor market inequality.

This tale of a repressive priest and his small Mexican village during the eighteen months preceding the Revolution of 1910 is a great novel, one that exposes the struggle between human desire and paralyzing fear—fear of humanity, fear of nature, fear of the wrath of God. Agustín Yáñez probes the actions of people caught in life’s currents, enthralling his readers with mounting dramatic tension as he shows that no power can forge saints from the human masses, that any attempt to do so, in fact, often has exactly the opposite result.

Yáñez brings to his work a deep understanding of people—his people—and he illuminates a great truth—that no one, anywhere, seems very strange when we understand the environment that has produced him or her.

Offering the everyday tasks of literary editors as inspired sources of postwar literary history

Michel Foucault famously theorized “the author function” in his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?” proposing that the existence of the author limits textual meaning. Abram Foley shows a similar critique at work in the labor of several postwar editors who sought to question and undo the corporate “editorial/industrial complex.” Marking an end to the powerful trope of the editor as gatekeeper, The Editor Function demonstrates how practices of editing and publishing constitute their own kinds of thought, calling on us to rethink what we read and how.

The Editor Function follows avant-garde American literary editors and the publishing practices they developed to compete against the postwar corporate consolidation of the publishing industry. Foley studies editing and publishing through archival readings and small press and literary journal publishing lists as unique sites for literary inquiry. Pairing histories and analyses of well- and lesser-known figures and publishing formations, from Cid Corman’s Origin and Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone to Dalkey Archive Press and Semiotext(e), Foley offers the first in-depth engagement with major publishing initiatives in the postwar United States.

The Editor Function proposes that from the seemingly mundane tasks of these editors—routine editorial correspondence, line editing, list formation—emerge visions of new, better worlds and new textual and conceptual spaces for collective action.

“I went to Nicaragua with nothing but a tourist visa, $1,500 in cash, the name of someone at the Agrarian Reform Ministry, and the idea of being a revolutionary intellectual. . . . The idea took hold in a simple character flaw: wanting to believe that I knew better than everyone else.” —From the preface

When Michael Johns joined a Sandinista militia in 1983, a fellow revolutionary dubbed him a rábano, a radish: red on the outside but white on the inside. Now, more than twenty-five years later, Johns appreciates the wisdom of that label as he revisits the questions of identity he tried to resolve by working with the Sandinistas at that point in his life. In The Education of a Radical, Johns recounts his immersion in Marxism and the Nicaraguan sojourn it led to, with a painful maturation process along the way.

His conversion began in college, where he joined a student group called the Latin American Solidarity Association and traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, for research on his senior thesis. Overwhelmed by the poverty he witnessed (and fascinated by a new friend named Maricela who was trying to turn peasants into revolutionaries and who carried a heavily highlighted copy of Late Capitalism), he experienced an ideological transformation. When a Marxist professor later encouraged him to travel to Nicaragua, the real internal battle began for him, a battle that was intensified by the U.S. invasion of Grenada and its effect on the Sandinistas, who believed they were the next target for an imminent American invasion. Before he knew it, Johns was digging trenches and learning how to use an AK-47. His intellectual ideals came face-to-face with revolutionary facts, and the results would perplex him for years to come.

Bringing to life a vivid portrait of the sometimes painful process of reconciling reality with romanticized principles, The Education of a Radical encapsulates a trove of truths about humanity, economics, and politics in one man’s memorable journey.

A detailed, empirically grounded account of the Prague Spring.

The Eight Months of Prague Spring 1968 focuses on the key political and social developments between January and August, while situating them within the broader context of the deepening crisis of Czechoslovak state socialism since 1967. Structured chronologically into five parts, the book traces the fall of Antonín Novotný, the rise of Alexander Dubček and the reform project known as “socialism with a human face,” the rapid emancipation of media and civil society, the escalating conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies, and the Warsaw Pact invasion, followed by the Moscow negotiations. Drawing primarily on edited archival sources and critically engaging with extensive Czech and international scholarship, the study analyzes the Prague Spring as a distinctive democratization process centered on the transformation of the Communist Party’s leading role. Emphasizing empathetic historical interpretation, it provides a nuanced portrayal of key actors and decision-making dynamics, highlighting both the possibilities and structural limits of reform within a non-democratic socialist system.

September 12, 1910: The world premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his life. Munich’s new Musik Festhalle was filled to capacity on two successive evenings for the performances, which were received with rapturous applause. Representatives of many European royal houses were in attendance, along with an array of stars from the musical and literary world, including Thomas Mann and the young Arnold Schoenberg. Also present were Alma Mahler, the composer’s wife, and Alma’s longtime lover, the architect Walter Gropius. Knowledge of their relationship would precipitate an emotional crisis in Mahler that, compounded with his heart condition and the loss of his young daughter Maria, would lead to his premature death the next year.

In The Eighth, Stephen Johnson provides a masterful account of the symphony’s far-reaching consequences and its effect on composers, conductors, and writers of the time. The Eighth looks behind the scenes at the demanding one-week rehearsal period leading up to the premiere—something unheard of at the time—and provides fascinating insight into Mahler’s compositional habits, his busy life as a conductor, his philosophical and literary interests, and his personal and professional relationships. Johnson expertly contextualizes Mahler’s work among the prevailing attitudes and political climate of his age, considering the art, science, technology, and mass entertainment that informed the world in 1910. The Eighth is an absorbing history of a musical masterpiece and the troubled man who created it.

Why should Hudson Strode matter to readers today? Because his life was a masterclass in reinvention and a backstage pass to the Jazz Age’s wittiest salons. Strode wasn’t just a professor in Tuscaloosa; he was a cultural impresario who turned a modest Southern life into a global adventure. He taught generations of writers, staged Shakespeare with bravura, and wrote travel books that earned him a knighthood from the King of Sweden.

But the real allure? The gossip. Strode dined with Lady Astor, traded quips with H. L. Mencken, and sipped cocktails with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald when they were the incandescent couple of the 1920s. He met Hemingway in Cuba, Robinson Jeffers in Carmel, and Isak Dinesen in Denmark—then wrote about them with candor and charm. His memoir brims with stories of literary giants, royal encounters, and the occasional eyebrow-raising escapade (ask him about the brothel in Birmingham).

For contemporary readers, The Eleventh House is both a captivating autobiography and a time capsule of ambition, art, and audacity. Strode’s world—where Southern gentility collided with European modernism and Jazz Age excess—feels startlingly relevant in an era obsessed with reinvention and celebrity culture. If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to gossip with the Fitzgeralds or watch the devil admire himself in a porch mirror, this memoir delivers.

Step inside Hudson Strode’s The Eleventh House. It’s witty, worldly, and just scandalous enough to keep you turning pages.

Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.

Scholars and practitioners from both sides of the divide, Czech and Slovak, as well as international experts, take an in-depth look at the causes of Czechoslovakia's break-up, and explain why a seemingly successful country should disintegrate so quickly after the collapse of the communist regime. Besides exploring the political processes leading to the split, the authors analyse the underlying social, economic and cultural differences between the two nations and examine the historical roots of the problems. Particular attention is paid to changing Czech and Slovak attitudes towards the common state and towards each other, from the heyday of the First Republic to the disillusionment of the post-1989 period.

In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, “Wanted, Dead or Alive”); how his administration brought “victory culture” roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Husseins's Iraq; and how, from its “Mission Accomplished” moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.

A landmark study of cultural exchange across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935 explores a remarkable period when Mexico captured the imagination of the United States and became a powerful source of artistic, intellectual, and cultural inspiration. Historian Helen Delpar examines the flourishing exchange between the two nations during the interwar years, revealing how artists, writers, educators, political activists, archaeologists, and travelers helped forge unprecedented connections across the border.

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, Americans increasingly looked to Mexico as a place of cultural authenticity, creative innovation, and social experimentation. Mexican art, music, literature, archaeology, and revolutionary ideals attracted widespread attention in the United States, while Mexican intellectuals and artists actively engaged with audiences north of the border. Delpar traces the individuals, institutions, and cultural movements that fueled this phenomenon, demonstrating how a growing fascination with Mexico reshaped American perceptions of its southern neighbor.

The book examines the rise of the celebrated Mexican mural movement, expanding interest in Indigenous cultures, and the influence of Mexican themes on American literature, visual arts, music, and education. It also explores the political and social forces that encouraged cultural exchange, including enthusiasm among American liberals for the Mexican Revolution and broader movements toward cultural nationalism in both countries.

By focusing on cultural relationships rather than diplomatic or economic ties, Delpar offers a fresh perspective on the history of U.S.-Mexican relations. Richly researched and engagingly written, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican remains an essential work for readers interested in cultural history, Latin American studies, art history, borderlands studies, and the evolving relationship between two neighboring nations whose histories have long been intertwined.

To address this oversight, Loureiro draws from his own experiences as well as from a wide range of previous theoretical works on autobiography, especially from the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, who believed that the self does not begin as a self-positing consciousness but as a response to an address from the other. On this basis, Loureiro then brilliantly traces the complex interplays between the political, discursive, rhetorical, and ethical dimensions of autobiography.

After laying out these theoretical foundations, Loureiro puts them to work in analyzing four of the most fascinating autobiographies written by Spanish exiles: The Life of Joseph Blanco White, who lived from 1775 to 1841, Memoria de la Melancolia by Maria Teresa Leon (1904-1988), Coto vedado and En los reinos de taifa by Juan Goytisolo (born 1931), and Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun (born 1923). The lives of these authors, all of whom were exiled for political reasons, were disrupted by some of the most crucial events in Spain's tortuous road to modernity and democracy.

The book closes with a discussion of why there have been so few critical examinations of autobiographies written in modern Spain. Loureiro proposes that, even in today's Spain, stifling social and political forces smother ethical responsibility, which is an essential ingredient in creating autobiographies that dare to be more than a humdrum inventory of personal recollections. Only in exile have Spanish authors seemed able to find the conditions to write their lives in a truly responsible manner. This answer to a call that grounds the subject in an other is ultimately the only form of truth available in autobiography.