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Ramzy Baroud is a veteran journalist and former producer for Al-Jazeera TV. This is his comprehensive account of the momentous events of the last five years which shaped the political landscape not only of Palestine and Israel but of the entire Middle East region.

Addressing the most controversial issues, including the alarming escalation in suicide bombings, and the construction of the Separation Wall, he reports on the huge rate of unemployment and hunger in the Occupied Territories -- statistics so critical that NGOs compare their magnitude to African nations such as the Congo. From the brutality of the Israeli army to the ever-compromising nature of the Palestinian Authority, few are spared Baroud’s thoughtful critique.

The book is clear and concise, with one chapter dedicated to the major events of each year, and includes a comprehensive timeline.

The Second World War casts a long shadow, portrayed as a necessary and paradigmatic war that defeated fascism. During recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, US presidents and British prime ministers have tried to claim they were following in the footsteps of Winston Churchill by standing up to dictators.

In The Second World War Chris Bambery tests this position in a thorough account of the war and tries to understand why it still dominates TV history channels and school history books.

Bambery argues that the conflict ultimately was about a division of the world between the great powers, as well as a rising of ordinary people against fascism. He offers a complex and radical analysis, that is unique when compared to many modern and conventional histories of the war.

A Powerful History of Sephardic Life, Loss, and Resilience During the Holocaust

The Sephardim suffered devastation during the Holocaust, but this facet of history is poorly documented. What literature exists on the Sephardim in the Holocaust focuses on specific countries, such as Yugoslavia and Greece, or on specific cities, such as Salonika, and many of these works are not available in English.

The Sephardim in the Holocaust: A Forgotten People embraces the Sephardim of all the countries shattered by the Holocaust and pays tribute to the memory of the more than 160,000 Sephardim who perished. Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt draw on a wealth of archival sources, family history (Isaac and his family were expelled from Rhodes in 1938), and more than 150 interviews conducted with survivors during research trips to Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States. Lévy follows the Sephardim from Athens, Corfu, Cos, Macedonia, Rhodes, Salonika, and the former Yugoslavia to Auschwitz.

The authors chronicle the interminable cruelty of the camps, from the initial selections to the grisly work of the Sonderkommandos inside the crematoria, detailing the distinctive challenges the Sephardim faced, with their differences in language, physical appearance, and pronunciation of Hebrew, all of which set them apart from the Ashkenazim. They document courageous Sephardic revolts, especially those by Greek Jews, which involved intricate planning, sequestering of gunpowder, and complex coordination and communication between Ashkenazi and Sephardic inmates—all done in the strictest of secrecy. And they follow a number of Sephardic survivors who took refuge in Albania with the benevolent assistance of Muslims and Christians who opened their doors to give sanctuary, and traces the fate of the approximately 430,000 Jews from Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, and Libya from 1939 through the end of the war.

The author’s intention is to include the Sephardim in the shared tragedy with the Ashkenazim and others. The result is a much needed, accessible, and viscerally moving account of the Sephardim’s unique experience of the Holocaust.
 

A gripping account of how the Shan rebellion influenced the colonial struggle between Siam, Britain, and France to expand their power in northern Thailand.

Moving beyond the familiar story of Siam fending off European colonialism, TheShan Rebellion reveals a new historical subject: Siam as colonizer. As European powers expanded their presence in Southeast Asia at the end of the nineteenth century, Siam launched its own colonial project to assert control over tributary states that lay outside the Siamese heartland. Most important was Lanna (now northern Thailand), a region where Siamese, British, and French colonial ambitions intersected. The outbreak of the Shan Rebellion in 1902 began with the violent dismantling of the Siamese colonial administration in Phrae, one of Lanna’s principal towns. As the rebels began moving towards other centers, they tested the limits of Siamese power in Lanna. With the British having valuable commercial interests to protect and the French itching for an opportunity to expand their reach, Siam’s colonial project faced a dangerous moment. Drawing on rich archival sources from Thailand, Burma, India, France, and England, this outstanding study provides the first detailed account of the rebellion and its impact on competitive colonialism in mainland Southeast Asia.

Confronting the rifts created by our common conceptual vocabulary for North American colonial studies 

How can we tell colonial histories in ways that invite intercultural conversation within humanistic fields that are themselves products of colonial domination? Beginning with a famous episode of failed communication from the narrative of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, The Silence of the Miskito Prince explores this question by looking critically at five concepts frequently used to imagine solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural communication: understanding, cosmopolitanism, piety, reciprocity, and patience. 

Focusing on the first two centuries of North American colonization, Matt Cohen traces how these five concepts of cross-cultural relations emerged from, and continue to evolve within, colonial dynamics. Through a series of revealing archival explorations, he argues the need for a new vocabulary for the analysis of past interactions drawn from the intellectual and spiritual domains of the colonized, and for a historiographical practice oriented less toward the illusion of complete understanding and scholarly authority and more toward the beliefs and experiences of descendant communities. 

The Silence of the Miskito Prince argues for new ways of framing scholarly conversations that use past interactions as a site for thinking about intercultural relations today. By investigating the colonial histories of these terms that were assumed to promote inclusion, Cohen offers both a reflection on how we got here and a model of scholarly humility that holds us to our better or worse pasts.

The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance.

The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure. The key concept is that of the archipelago – a network of nuclear facilities spread throughout the Soviet territory, but mutually reliant on each other and densely connected.

The story traces the emergence of nuclear science and technology for military and civilian purposes through to the post-Soviet Russian nuclear corporations as providers of resources and technology. The book explains how nuclear developments in the Soviet Union interacted with processes of environmental and landscape change. The spatial lens offers an analytically fruitful and pedagogically stimulating way to comprehend the nuclear histories of the Soviet Union and its successor states.

Exploring the landscapes, cultures, and psychological spaces where violence takes root in contemporary American fiction.

The Spaces of Violence is an insightful work of literary criticism in which James R. Giles investigates the complex relationship between violence and space in contemporary American fiction. Through close readings of novels by influential writers including Russell Banks, Cormac McCarthy, Lewis Nordan, Dorothy Allison, Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Sherman Alexie, Robert Stone, and Bret Easton Ellis, Giles demonstrates how violence is shaped by the physical, social, and psychological environments in which it occurs.

Drawing on spatial and cultural theory, Giles argues that these novels inhabit a distinctive "fourthspace," a realm existing at the margins of mainstream society where violence permeates everyday life and destabilizes traditional boundaries of identity, community, and morality. Whether set in rural landscapes, urban centers, suburban communities, football stadiums, or transient spaces such as highways and bus stations, the works examined reveal how environments become intertwined with systems of power, alienation, trauma, and destruction.

The book concludes by extending its analysis to representations of violence within family structures, highlighting the far-reaching effects of social and cultural fragmentation. Offering a sophisticated framework for understanding violence in literature, The Spaces of Violence is an important contribution to contemporary literary and cultural studies.

Tracing the origins of the modern short story, Michael Gorra provides the first fully realized picture of a century’s worth of great tales. 

The Storytellers offers a far-reaching account of the rich tradition of short narratives that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe and America, one that both prepared for and eventually gave way to the modern short story. Tracing unexpected resemblances across languages and decades, Michael Gorra restores a wide-angle view of the form in which works usually treated as stand-alone classics reveal themselves as parts of a single, lively conversation.

What unites these tales, Gorra argues, is their blend of novelty and unity. The book’s heart lies in a series of accessible readings of great tales by Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and many more. Beyond its consideration of individual works, The Storytellers examines the formal and thematic concerns that bind the century together: the use of frame tales, accounts of social marginality, and an abundance of ghosts and uncanny coincidences. Over time, Gorra shows, these qualities yielded to a cooler realism, with Anton Chekhov as the key transitional figure. His compressed studies of ordinary lives inspired the modern short story and consigned the gothic flourishes of earlier tales to genre fiction.

What do we want from a story? What makes a tale worth telling? The nineteenth-century tale sought not the grand “meaning of life” promised by the novel, Gorra shows, but sudden revelations from singular events. The Storytellers gives readers an incomparable guide to a vast body of tales that still has the power to thrill and entertain.

Dutch scholars have recognized that Frans Fraet was executed for printing a prognostication by Willem de Vriese, but this prognostication was thought to be lost. A few scholars of sixteenth-century German apocalypticism have briefly noted the prophecies of Wilhelm Friess but have not studied them in depth. The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess is the first to connect de Vriese and Friess, as well as recognize the prophecy of Wilhelm Friess as an adaptation of a French version of theVademecum of Johannes de Rupescissa, making these pamphlets by far the most widespread source for Rupescissa’s apocalyptic thought in Reformation Germany. The book explains the connection between the first and second prophecies of Wilhelm Friess and discovers the Calvinist context of the second prophecy and its connection to Johann Fischart, one of the most important German writers of the time.

Jonathan Green provides a study of how textual history interacts with print history in early modern pamphlets and proposes a model of how early modern prophecies were created and transmitted. The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess makes important contributions to the study of early modern German and Dutch literature, apocalypticism and confessionalization during the Reformation, and the history of printing in the sixteenth century.

Examining subjectivity and narrative perception in Hawthorne’s literary art.

The Style of Hawthorne’s Gaze is an unusual and insightful work that employs a combination of critical strategies drawn from art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and contemporary aesthetic and literary theory to explore Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrative technique and his unique vision of the world. Dolis studies Hawthorne’s anti-technological and essentially Romantic view of the external world and examines the recurring phenomena of lighting, motion, aspectivity, fragmentation, and imagination as they relate to his descriptive techniques.

Dolis sets the world of Hawthorne’s work over and against the aesthetic and philosophical development of the world understood as a “view”, from its inception in the camera obscura and perspective in general, to its 19th-century articulation in photography. In light of this general technology of the image, and drawing upon a wide range of contemporary critical theories, Dolis begins his study of Hawthorne at the level of description, where the world of the work first arises in the reader’s consciousness. Dolis shows how the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida can provide fresh insights into the sophisticated style of Hawthorne’s perception of and system for representing reality.

An exploration of magical realism’s contemporary resurgence, as writers attempt to capture the realities of climate change.

What literary mode could possibly convey the extent of today’s climate catastrophes? In The Surprising New Life of Magical Realism, Charlotte Rogers argues that the answer is magical realism, a genre whose defining characteristic is to make the unbelievable an unremarkable part of everyday life. She pairs classic works by Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Rosario Ferré with contemporary novels by Carlos Fonseca, Fernanda Melchor, and Rita Indiana to show how the techniques of magical realism enable new approaches to scenes of environmental collapse and social injustice. Challenging widespread accounts of the genre’s decline, Rogers shows that the signature aesthetics of magical realism—the marvelous, the amazing, the strange—are integral to twenty-first-century fiction.

How seventeenth-century Europeans, following Jesuit missionary Martino Martini, saw their continent as historically, environmentally, and culturally intertwined with China.

The Tartar Moment focuses on understanding how the Manchu conquest of the Ming Empire in 1644 transformed European science, technology, and politics for over a century. Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh argues that seventeenth-century European natural philosophers found the nomadic takeover of a seemingly eternal empire deeply relevant for their own concerns. They began to reevaluate how they thought about the roles of astronomy, history-writing, agriculture, and military technologies in ensuring the long-term survival of a state. 

The book’s narrative center is the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini, who first grasped the global significance of the Tartar War and its aftermath. Giovannetti-Singh situates Martini as a broker bridging multiple worlds, each grappling with new forms of turbulence. Martini’s writings reinterpreted Chinese knowledge and culture for diverse European audiences urgently seeking order in an age of uncertainty. China ceased to be imagined as a timeless Other and instead appeared as a civilization that, like Europe, confronted recurring disorder and crafted philosophical solutions to maintain stability. During this period, Europeans selectively appropriated Chinese methods of reading the heavens, cultivating the earth, and governing the state.

 

By tracing how Martini recognized, theorized, and recounted crises in Ming, Manchu, and European contexts, The Tartar Moment shows that the 1640s and 1650s were not simply years of collapse but of intense creativity in interpreting and responding to disorder.

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—In Search of Lost Time—is one of the most important and influential novels of the modern era. In recent decades, Proust has enjoyed a new surge of critical attention, as well as a sustained growth in readership—well beyond that of other prose masters of twentieth century modernism such as Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett. The MLA Bibliography presently lists over 3,000 citations to scholarly works devoted to Proust’s novel, and if one Googles “Proust,” the number of hits exceeds 2,000,000.
 The temporal nature of human existence and consciousness is one of the many themes explored in In Search of Lost Time, and it is this dimension of Proust’s work that unifies this collection of essays that grew from a roundtable discussion entitled “The Timelessness of Proust” conducted at the 31st annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society. The collection includes the following essays:

 “In Search of Lost Time: Biographies of Consciousness,” Charles R.  Embry
    “Proust, Transcendence, and Metaxic Existence,” Glenn Hughes
“The Normative Flow of Consciousness and the Self: A Philosophical Meditation on      
     Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Thomas J. McPartland;
“Imprisonment and Freedom: Resisting and Embracing the Tension of Existence in
     Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Paulette Kidder;
“Proust’s Luminous Memory and L’Homme Éternel: The Quest for Limitless Meaning,”
     Michael Henry
“Unsought Revelations of Eternal Reality in Eliot’s Four Quartets and Proust’s In Search 
     of Lost Time,” Glenn Hughes

Persons who are interested not only in the philosophical importance of literary masterworks and in how the philosophical thought of Eric Voegelin may illuminate them, but also in letting Proust serve as a guide in the exploration and understanding of their own lives, will find these essays to be of lasting interest and value.

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.