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A lively and thoughtful exploration of how book clubs change the way we read.

In this engaging and vivacious memoir, college professor Katarzyna Bartoszyńska thinks back on various book clubs she has been a part of. Through brief discussions of a variety of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction works such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums, and Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing in Cuba, she considers how the things she has learned in book club discussions differ from what she tries to teach students in her literature classes. As she muses on the various benefits that we imagine reading offers, she describes the unique knowledge that book clubs can provide.

Bestselling Irish novelist Sally Rooney has emerged as the defining voice of a generation, a cultural phenomenon whose spare, intelligent prose and sharp social insight have reshaped contemporary fiction and sparked a global conversation about intimacy, politics, and the millennial condition. This new collection brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to offer fresh critical readings of Rooney’s influential novels, alongside adaptable strategies for teaching her work in today’s undergraduate and graduate classrooms. The essays situate Rooney within literary traditions from Romantic poetry to the bildungsroman and the contemporary campus novel, while engaging with contemporary topics such as gender politics, late capitalism, and media adaptation. Providing accessible yet rigorous frameworks for exploring Rooney’s fiction, this volume confirms her significance not only within contemporary literary studies but also as a cultural force whose work reaffirms the relevance of the humanities in the twenty-first-century classroom.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Collaboratively reassesses Barbara Johnson’s legacy as a reader and thinker with an eye to contemporary conditions

Across an archive of essays on abortion and race, Mallarmé and Melville, feminist philosophy, rhetorical device, and pedagogical method, Barbara Johnson built a legacy of thought whose energies reverberate into the present. This collected volume gathers writers and critics from a range of North American higher educational settings to engage with this essential but still often underappreciated critic in a time of renewed and deepening crisis.

In Zoom meetings and shared essays, across a virtualized map of today’s academic and para-academic worlds, the group assessed how the rolling catastrophes of late neoliberalism continue to stage the sort of analogy Johnson herself would highlight between patriarchy, capitalism, ecocide, and other forms of structural violence. Emerging from that assemblage, this experimental collection tracks Johnson’s efforts to link literary reading with concrete matters of personhood and care at a moment when the very system of higher education that enabled Johnson’s work in the 1980s and 1990s faces existential threat. The frozen record of a live experience, the book is an impure procedure, tangled in the idiom of its own unfolding: a temporary culmination of an ongoing collaborative undertaking that will always remain unfinished.