New Books

Situating us in the present as country music goes through a fresh renaissance, with a new wave of Black artists enjoying success, My Black Country is both an earnest reclamation of the genre and a vibrant introduction for a new generation of listeners who appreciate the radical joy in realizing the power of Black influence on American culture.

Known as opera's 'disrupter-in-residence,' director Yuval Sharon has never adhered to the art form's conventions. In his many productions in both the United States and Europe, he constantly challenges the perception of opera as aloof by urging, among other things: performing operas in 'non-places,' such as parking lots; encouraging the use of amplification; and shuffling the traditional structure of classic works, like performing Puccini's La boheme in reverse order, ending not with the tubercular heroine Mimi's death but with her first falling in love. With A New Philosophy of Opera, Sharon has crafted a radical and refreshing book that can act as an introduction to the art form for the culturally curious, or as a manifesto for his fellow artists.

Neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin reveals how the deep connections between music and the human brain can be harnessed for healing. Music is perhaps one of humanity's oldest medicines as well as its most universal: from China to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and pre-colonial South America, cultures have developed rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, spur healing, and calm the mind. Despite this history, musical therapy has long been considered the remit of ancient practice and alternative medicine, if not outright quackery and pseudoscience. In the last decade, however, an overwhelming body of scientific evidence has emerged that persuasively argues music can offer profoundly effective treatment for a whole host of ailments, from Alzheimer's to PTSD, depression, pain, and cognitive injury. It is, in short, one of the most potent and remarkably promising new therapies available today.

In this comprehensive guide, Jonathan Clements chronicles the production and reception history of the entire medium, from a handful of hobbyists in the 1910s to the Oscar-winning Spirited Away and beyond. Exploring the cultural and technological developments of the past century, Clements addresses how anime's history has been written by Japanese scholars, and covers previously neglected topics such as wartime instructional animation and work-for-hire for American clients. This new edition has been updated and revised throughout, with full colour illustrations and three new chapters on anime's fortunes among Chinese audiences and subcontractors, twenty-first century trends in 'otaku economics' and the huge transformations brought about by the rise of global streaming technology.

Opening with the re-working of an opera she wrote entitled Lady Loathly as a kind of parable for feminist criticism, the author of The Scandal of Pleasure and Venus in Exile here re-evaluates both the tropes of female desire, rape, beauty, and art and their aesthetic expressions in light of the #MeToo movement.

In Heavyweight, Jordana Moore Saggese examines images of Black heavyweight boxers to map the visual terrain of racist ideology in the United States, paying particular attention to the intersecting discourses of Blackness, masculinity, and sport.

From Big Bang to Big Data is a long history of the media--how it has been established, used, and transformed from the beginning of recorded time until the present. It is not primarily a story of revolutions and innovations, but of continuities and overlaps that reveal surprising patterns across history. From Big Bang to Big Data provides a new way of thinking about media in history--and about human societies past and present.

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams--invasive images of blood and brutality--torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home.

When a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed in the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. Through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope unfolds the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

The essays collected in 'Better Living through TV: Contemporary TC and Moral Identity Formation' analyze a variety of contemporary television shows to argue for the role that TV plays in moral identity formation. Audiences take from television viewing a better sense of what matters to them, ways of relating to others, and a moral sense of the world they inhabit.

Featuring films such as The Conjuring and Don't Breathe, White Terror explores how motifs of home invasion, exorcism, possession, and hauntings mirror cultural debates around white masculinity, class, religion, socioeconomics, and more. In the vein of Jordan Peele, White Terror exposes how white mainstream fear affects the horror film industry, which in turn cashes in on that fear and draws voters to candidates like Trump.

Made-Up Asians traces the history of yellowface, the theatrical convention of non-Asian actors putting on makeup and costume to look East Asian. The book examines a wide-ranging set of primary resources, including makeup guidebooks, play catalogs, advertisements, biographies, and backstage anecdotes, providing new ways of understanding and categorizing yellowface as theatrical practice and historical subject. Made-Up Asians also shows how lingering effects of Asian exclusionary laws can still be seen in yellowface performances, casting practices, and anti-Asian violence into the twenty-first century.

Works of genre fiction are a source of enjoyment, read during cherished leisure time and in incidental moments of relaxation. This original book takes readers inside popular genres of fiction, including crime, fantasy, and romance, to reveal how personal tastes, social connections, and industry knowledge shape genre worlds.

Business owners, consumers and employees have relied, either directly or indirectly, on business news and information for centuries to make financial decisions - what to buy, who to hire, what products to produce. And that news and information has primarily come from various forms of media. But in the 21st century, that news and information has shifted to primarily provide content to only the big businesses and executives who can afford it while most consumers and small business owners are left scrambling to find the news they need to succeed and thrive. "The Future of Business Journalism" explores how the field evolved into this divide and offers solutions on how business journalism can once again provide the stories and content that broad society needs.

Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories -- our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking -- expose and distort our realities.

Drawing on a rich variety of case studies, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of how propaganda and fake news are utilized to promote misinformation in America. It is ideal reading for anyone interested in how people are socialized to think about fake news in contemporary politics and society.

From fibs in America's first newspaper about royal incest to social media-driven conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birthplace, Andie Tucher explores how American audiences have argued over what's real and what's not and why that matters for democracy.

As an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night. How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage? Drawing on Wiesel’s prodigious literary output and interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger seeks to answer this question.

Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched [this characters] influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers.

From On James Baldwin, Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his White novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. On James Baldwin is a magnificent contemporary author's tribute to one of his most consequential literary progenitors.

In Tina Barr's gorgeous Green Target, her garden-that is, Nature itself-is a place of breath-taking beauty and mortal danger. With exquisite precision, Barr braids facts from our violent world with details of pastoral fecundity.

"Jaki Shelton Green brings her emotional landscape and our sociopolitical environment together on the territory of the body. These poems are beautifully, terribly alive--they will pump her blood into your veins. Read them and learn how to see in the dark." - Evie Shockley

In conjure blues, words are spoken at the crossroads of poetry and social consciousness. The context here is sisterhood, racism, The South, the good dirt and the strength of kinship. These words document while they conjure. They hex, declare, and insist.

In this stunningly intuitive and elemental collection, Hettich celebrates the unspoken dialogues of the natural world with linguistic dexterity and fierce transformative details. We return to ourselves in caves, with marrow and fur; to the primordial animal that resides within us; to our ancestors in the elements, reminding us of our brief and earthly inheritance.

The poems in Wild Persistence often involve moments when the human and natural worlds intersect: a Sandhill Crane dancing at the window of a grieving woman, a copperhead snake confronting a gardener, a billboard photo of a missing child slowly being eroded by weather and the passage of time. Although these poems mourn numerous losses, they celebrate the world in which such losses take place, turning for perspective to nature with its cyclical renewals and to the resilience of the human spirit.

In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands. Mr. Mercedes is a war between good and evil, from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable.

Horse Not Zebra, we learn in the title poem of this collection, refers to advice given to medical students-to look first to "the common, not the exotic" when diagnosing patients. Eric Nelson embraces that advice in his poems, exploring the common rituals of daily life- family interactions, gardening, long walks with or without dogs, even the clomp of a neighbor's boots can be, for him, a call to action.

In her eighth collection of poetry, Polishing the Glass Storm, Katherine Soniat constructs a riveting sequence of verse that explores how archetype can expand both personal vision and narrative perspective as we try to polish our experiences into an understanding of shared commonality.

These poems explore the complex memory of the American South, a history that belongs to all Americans. The sequence forming the spine of the collection follows the Native Guard, one of the first Black regiments mustered into service in the Civil War. In the author's hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, a plaque honors Confederate POWs, but there is no memorial to these vanguard Union soldiers. This collection is both a pilgrimage and an elegy, as the author employs a variety of poetic forms to create a lyrical monument to these forgotten voices. Interwoven are poems honoring her mother and recalling her fraught childhood - as her parents' interracial marriage was still illegal in 1966 in Mississippi. This book is a narrative caught in the intersections of public and personal testament. As Rita Dove proclaimed, "Here is a young poet in full possession of her craft."

In the spare, passionate language with which she limned the women of Appalachia in Coal River Road, Kathy Ackerman illuminates the history of the Curies and the miracles and horrors birthed by the discovery of radium.

Set in the coal country of southern Appalachia, Joseph Bathanti's Light at the Seam depicts the scourge and predations of mountaintop removal, capturing not only its ruthless, mammon-driven eradication of entire landscapes, but also its attempt to eviscerate memory and displace inhabitants. At the core of this meditative volume lies the deep, soulful spirits evident in those landscapes: the fearless working-class kindred, their abiding, fierce hold on home and hearth, and the cherished, ancient land upon which they have toiled, birthed, loved, worshipped, and died for generations.

The poems in Joan Barasovska's Birthing Age tell the story of a woman from childhood to late age simply and beautifully-from the summer innocence and trust she knew as a child through a bleak emotional winter, and finally to warmer seasons of her own "reawakened life" ("Summer's Start"). Birthing Age is not simply about a woman's coming to terms with the aging process , as the title might imply, but more profoundly, about bringing herself to full birth as she grows beyond expected female roles.

Inspired by The Wiz, this poetry collection celebrates South Side Chicago and a Black woman's quest for self-discovery--one that pulls her away from the safety of home and into her power.

Diana Ewell Engel's Excavating Light is a super debut collection, full of quiet personal poems about family and nature and the poet's place in that natural world. Engel lets you in close with poems that can break your heart and lift you up all in a single page.

In Jose Hernandez Diaz's Bad Mexican, Bad American, the prose poem reigns, along with the jackal tattoo, the Rage Against the Machine T-shirt worn to a job interview, and graffiti painted by 'first-gen guys from the neighborhood growing up like me, between cultures, between poverty and wealth'...

A fire eater, a man, a flame, a mime, a red house, a man in a Pink Floyd t-shirt, and a skeleton walk into a bar. They order drinks and begin a conversation about what it's like to be a character in a prose poem written by Jose Hernandez Diaz. They agree that, after a while, the internal logic makes sense, and they feel free to be themselves, to wander the landscapes of Los Angeles or the moon. They express their gratitude by promising to show up whenever Diaz needs them. Luckily, the readers of this chapbook can see the results. In Edson-esque turns of playfully absurd scenarios, Diaz reaches to the heart of our existence, and like a magician, he delights us as he confounds us. How does he do it? the audience will ask. With humor, compassion, and imagination, the three ingredients I want in any work of art.

Waco, Texas, 1993. A charismatic figure known as the Lamb gathers his flock and his weapons to await the fulfillment of God's prophesy for the last days. "In olden days, when somebody said you've gone to Texas, that meant you'd lost your marbles," the Lamb told his followers. "But we're heading to Texas because we ain't crazy." From all over the world they come to join the Lamb, lost on earth and desperate to be found in heaven. The novel follows a teenage girl named Jaye and her mother as they leave their California home to move in to the Lamb's compound and be counted at the time of redeeming. Jaye is a smartass kid who doesn't care for rules much less religion, and couldn't understand what her mother saw in the Lamb-whom she calls by his birth name, "Perry"-a landscaper who wanted to be a guitar god and somehow became an actual god instead. But Jaye is looking for something, and when she meets Roy, the sheriff's son, the two teenagers are drawn to each other, even as they careen toward the fulfillment of the Lamb's final, violent visions in this prairie epic of the Montagues and the Capulets

David Treadway Manning's Sailing the Bright Stream: New and Selected Poems is an immersion into shimmer and revelation, the lyric circumnavigation over not just water, but terra firma-the often intimidating, yet familiar and cherished, geography of the querulous heart, its rites and fractures, the gleam of language flowing from the poet's pen. These are poems with heft and imagination, a sense of humor, and abiding faith.

The Big Smoke, Adrian Matejka's third work of poetry, follows the fighter's journey from poverty to the most coveted title in sports through the multi-layered voices of Johnson and the white women he brazenly loved. Matejka's book is part historic reclamation and part interrogation of Johnson's complicated legacy, one that often misremembers the magnetic man behind the myth.

With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping spy novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

When coal dust infiltrates the lungs of coal miners, we call that disease black lung. Kimberly O'Connor's debut collection, White Lung, illuminates how racism also permeates American air-hate, fear, and shame left in our wake.

The speaker of Engrams is one who transcribes her travels across Asia and returns to the U.S with the keen and wise eye of a modern-day Zen master. This collection is about travel, yes, but more than that, it's about how you find yourself a different person in an altogether different world when you return home.

Two breakout plays by an Iranian-American playwright that examine the human costs of migration, both for those who leave their home country and for those who stay. Taken together, these two plays provide a deeply humanizing portrait of the complex effects of diaspora both within and outside of Iran.