It’s been an eclectic mix of books this month – but then isn’t it always with the breadth of literature our readers study! There’s no common theme this month, unlike November, we have simply chosen some of our recent fiction additions to highlight.

As we enter winter vacation, our lending policies have changed slightly. From November 27^th, all loanable books will be due back on January 16^th – so you’ll have plenty of time to cosy up with a book during the festive period. You can find more information in this blog post, but if you have any further questions do feel free to send us an email or chat to us in-person at the Enquiries Desk.

With all that being said, onto the books!

Mourning Dove, Cogewea, The Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (1981)

You may notice that one of our recent displays at the EFL was on Native American literature (you can find pictures on our social media here). In that vein, Cogewea is a great addition to the EFL’s collections, not only as one of the first fiction novels written by an Indigenous woman but in the themes it covers as well. Mourning Dove (Okanogan) takes on the difficult task of writing a Western, a genre notorious for its disparaging depictions of Indigenous people – not to mention women. However, she manages this task magnificently, marrying together the Western genre with the internal struggle that Cogewea grapples with as someone who is caught between both Indigenous and White blood. Cogewea did not have an easy to path to publication: it was finished by Mourning Dove in 1912 but not published until 1927 (and only when her publisher was threatened with legal action). Even once published she was accused of not being the author! As November is Native American Heritage Month, I would challenge anyone to pick up a book written by an Indigenous author; if Cogewea intrigues you, you might also enjoy other Indigenous writing from the early 20^th century such as Zitkála-Šá’s essays, or Waterlily by Ella Deloria.

Rebecca Stott, Dark Earth (2022)

Dark Earth covers a lightly trod period of historical fiction aimed at women, known to many as the Dark Ages (although I hasten to add that no medievalist would ever call it this!). Set in approximately 500CE, post the Roman occupation of Britain, we follow two sisters – Blue and Isla – as they navigate being a woman in a world in which there’s little room for them; Stott depicting their respective gifts of herbalism and smithing as unacceptable for women in Anglo-Saxon society. After some serious personal and political upheaval (we won’t expand on that lest we get into spoiler territory), the sisters flee to the ruins of Londinium in order to survive the wrath of the merciless Seax Lord, Osric, and his son. However, they will have to leave the comfort of their found community in Londinium to save them. If you enjoy feministic retellings of history such as The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, you will likely enjoy this. However, if you want something to evoke the ghostly feeling of the ruins of Londinium, then perhaps you might be interested The Ruin, an elegy in the Exeter Book from 700-800CE describing the crumbling remains of a once great ancient city.

David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident: A Novel (1981)

John Washington, our protagonist, is a black man and professor of history – not unlike the author himself. He is unwillingly thrown into uncovering the true circumstances of his father’s death, using his training as a historian to piece together the clues while uncovering deeper, darker secrets along the way. Oscillating between the past and Washington’s present, we witness the multigenerational trauma of racism and slavery and how it affects how Washington perceives himself and his family history. It’s gripping from the very first page, a true must-read for anyone interested in the ongoing and complex history of racism in the United States, and how cultural identities are forged in the face this. If you enjoy Toni Morrison’s works, such as Song of Solomon, or Let us Descend by Jesmyn Ward, this might be the book for you.

Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream (2014)

Translated from Spanish, a young woman lies dying in a rural Argentinian hospital. Her daughter is nowhere to be seen – instead a young boy named David is at her side, and she can’t shake the lingering feeling that she needs to remember what happened to her and her daughter. Some of the main themes of Fever Dream are parental anxiety, the effects of pesticides and industrial-scale farming, and the transmutation of the soul. If this sounds like a bizarre mixture of themes, perhaps even a fever dream, that would be because it is – and that suits the novel just fine. Told in dialogue, the book’s sparse prose is disorienting at times, adding to the relentless tension creeping in the background of the novel. It’s not quite a midwinter ghost story, but if you’re looking for something to leave you unsettled and looking over your shoulder this December, then this might be the book for you. Great for fans of The Grip of It by Jac Jemc or Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (which was quite literally written in a fevered state!)

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2015)

Station Eleven is a strange read in a post-Covid world, somewhat predicting the lead-up to lockdown in its opening chapters with hospital beds overflowing and conflicting reports on statistics. Luckily for us, however, we have fared slightly better than those in the book in which most of humanity has been wiped out by the Georgia Flu (loosely based on Swine Flu). St. John Mandel expertly weaves together the stories of a diverse mix of people across the decades following the pandemic, looking at the bonds of community that can form in the wake of disaster (because “survival is insufficient”) and how these communities can become twisted. A great read if you’re a fan of works like Severence by Ling Ma, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

(Nb. There are depictions of sexual violence so please proceed with care!)

A belated (but no less warm) welcome to all our new and returning readers this term! We have had a huge range of new arrivals in the last month or two, from young adult fiction to a multitude of medieval offerings – and even a book about mermaids. However, in the wake of Black History Month coming to an end, we have picked out a range of books from Black authors that have arrived at the EFL in October. It should be noted that this is simply a jumping-off point for literature written by Black authors, and that you can find much more in the library at large – see our LibraryThing feed for more. We are also open to requests, which you can email to us until our request form opens up again – usually it is located here.

Claude Mckay, Romance in Marseille (2020)

Published posthumously nearly 90 years after it was initially written, we are introduced to Lafala. He is a West-African sailor who loses both of his lower-legs to frost-bite after being locked in a freezing room aboard the trans-Atlantic freighter he had been stowing away in. Set during the Jazz Age, we follow Lafala’s life post-amputation, delving into themes of disability, queerness, and the legacy of slavery. Romance in Marseille was considered too transgressive for its time which is why it took so long to be published, even after the death of McKay. I would, however, like to warn readers that there are some anti-Semitic instances in the novel and would suggest proceeding with care.

Eds. Mojisola Adebayo, Lynette Goddard, Black British Queer Plays and Practitioners: An Anthology of Afriquia Theatre (2023)

Next we have more queer literature by Black British authors in the form of a collection of seven plays. These radical plays explore a whole range of LGBTQ+ experiences in Black British queer theatre, taking the reader from the 1980s through to the present day. Sandwiched in-between are conversations between Black LGBTQ+ artists, who discuss how the plays featured have influenced their work, and consider how they may affect the future as well. Not to worry if you are a newcomer to the genre, however, as this edition begins with a thorough introduction which gives a great amount of socio-political context so you can get the most from each play.

Eds. Paul Field et al. Here to Stay, Here to Fight: A Race Today Anthology (2019)

Race Today was a monthly British periodical that ran between 1969-1988, considered to be the leading voice for Black politics in the UK at the time. In its contributions it drew together giants such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and many more. Well-read during its run, the publication gave unique insight into how socio-political factors such as class, race, and gender affected everything nationally and internationally. At the time of publication of the anthology, it was difficult to access Race Today, and so it was ground-breaking for anything to come of it. However, this year the entire archives were published here on archive.org. The anthology is a great starting point, however, we highly encourage you to dip into the full publication as well!

Ed. Harvey Young The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre 2^nd Edition (2023)

Hot off the press and newly updated from its 2012 predecessor, we have the latest and most comprehensive overview of African American theatre to date. Covering from the 1800s to the present day, this new edition includes new chapters exploring how recent political movements (such as Black Lives Matter) have affected the theatre space, and how queer identity and African American theatre intersect. This would be a great accompaniment to Black British Queer Plays and Practitioners: An Anthology of Afriquia Theatre to compare how performance art by Black creators has developed and diverged across the pond versus in Britain!

Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (2023)

An (unfortunately) lesser known figure in North American history, Mary Ann Shadd Cary was an eminent figure in the women’s suffrage movement in America. She was the first Black North American woman to edit and publish her own newspaper (The Provincial Freeman), as well as one of the first women at Howard University to received a degree in law, and an activist, setting up a desegregated school in Canada 100 years before desegregation happened in America. If she sounds like a powerhouse, it’s because she is – and we could all do with learning a little more about her.

Even though many of our readers have now left Oxford for the vacation, the new books haven’t stopped pouring into the library. We’ve been working hard to get them all out on the library’s shelves, ready for everyone to come back for the start of Michaelmas Term!

Because we’ve had so many new books arrive at the library (nearly 150!), this month’s new book post is a little different. We’ve selected a few books which show the huge range of genres, subjects and ideas represented among the new books, from poetry and fiction to literary studies and criticism. Click here to see the new books for this month, or keep reading to see the titles featured in this month’s new book post. Alternatively, you can visit our LibraryThing page to browse all the new arrivals.

If you can’t wait until September to start reading, the library is open 9am-5pm on weekdays until Friday 11 August. The library is closed from Monday 14 to Monday 28 August, re-opening at 9am on Tuesday 29 August. Find all the details about our vacation opening hours and contact details on our website.

We hope everyone is enjoying a restful vacation, and look forward to seeing you all back in the library soon!

The Books

You may have heard that we’re making some changes to our library system this summer, and that includes some behind-the-scenes changes to SOLO. One of the consequences of this is that the permalinks to find items on SOLO will be changing.

Because of that, we’ve not provided direct links to the catalogue in this month’s new book post. Instead, keep reading to see a list of titles and whether they’re available as an e-book, which you can use to conduct your own SOLO searches. If you’re having trouble finding anything, just get in touch with the library – we’re happy to help!

Poetry

Bulley, Victoria Adukwei, Quiet (2022). Also available as an e-book.

Davidson, Peter, Arctic Elegies (2023).

Dudley, Nikki, I’d Better Let You Go (2021).

Fowler, SJ, The selected scribbling and scrawling of SJ Fowler: asemic poems (2020).

Howe, Sarah, Loop of Jade (2015).

Le Guin, Ursula K., Collected Poems (2023).

Marson, Una, Una Marson: Selected Poems (2011).

Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, Collected Poems (2022)

Oswald, Alice, Nobody (2019)

Prynne, J. H., Kernels in Vernal Silence (2020)

Literature: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

Behn, Aphra, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1987). Also available as an e-book (different edition).

Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative (2018). Also available as an e-book (different edition).

Finberg, Melinda C. (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists (2009).

Gay, John, Trivia: or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (2016). Also available as an e-book (different edition).

Middleton, Thomas, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (2007). Also available as an e-book.

Literature: Nineteenth Century

Beckson, Karl, Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose (2005).

Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (2022). Also available as an e-book.

Collins, Wilkie, The Moonstone (2019). Also available as an e-book.

Cox, Michael, and R. A. Gilbert (eds.), The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (2003).

Lady Dilke, The Outcast Spirit: and Other Stories (2016).

Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2009). Also available as an e-book.

Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (2023). Also available as an e-book.

Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories (2014). Also available as an e-book.

Gaskell, Elizabeth, Mary Barton (2012). Also available as an e-book (different edition).

Kipling, Rudyard, The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales (2007).

Nesbit, E., Horror Stories (2016).

Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe (1997). Also available as an e-book.

Seacole, Mary, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (2005).

Literature: Twentieth Century

Buchan, John, The Thirty-Nine Steps (2009). Also available as an e-book.

Giono, Jean, The Man Who Planted Trees (2022).

Hurston, Zora Neale, Dust Tracks on a Road: A Memoir (2010).

Isherwood, Christopher, Goodbye to Berlin (2022).

Kincaid, Jamaica, At the Bottom of the River (2022).

Kincaid, Jamaica, The Autobiography of my Mother (2022).

Lehmann, Rosamund, Weather in the Streets (2018).

Marechera, Dambudzo, The House of Hunger (2022).

Morrison, Toni, Jazz (2001).

Murdoch, Iris, The Black Prince (2013).

Naipaul, V. S., The Mimic Men (2011).

Orwell, George, Decline of the English Murder (2009).

Orwell, George, Inside the Whale (2022).

Pym, Barbara, Excellent Women (2022).

Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea (2000).

Sackville-West, Vita, Seducers in Ecuador & The Heir (2018).

Selvon, Sam, The Lonely Londoners (2021).

Sillitoe, Alan, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (2008).

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., In the First Circle (2009).

Wilson, Angus, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (2011).

Wyndham, John, The Midwich Cuckoos (2008).

Literature: Twenty-first Century

Baume, Sara, Seven Steeples (2022). Also available as an e-book.

Daoud, Kamel, The Meursault Investigation (2015).

Masud, Noreen, A Flat Place (2023).

Morgan, Clare, Scar Tissue (2022).

Shamsie, Kamila, Home Fire (2018).

Spiegelman, Art, In the Shadow of No Towers (2004).

Literature: Travel- and Nature-Writing

Aldersey-Williams, Hugh, Tide (2017).

Bullough, Tom, Sarn Helen: A Journey Through Wales, Past, Present and Future (2023).

Clark, Timothy, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The anthropocene as a threshold concept (2015). Also available as an e-book.

Hoare, Philip, The Sea Inside (2014).

Mabey, Richard, Turning the Boat for Home: A Life Writing about Nature (2019).

Macfarlane, Robert, The Lost Words (2017).

Mackintosh-Smith, Tim (ed.), The Travels of Ibn Battutah (2016).

Torma, Franziska (ed.), A Cultural History of the Sea in the Global Age (2023).

Literary Studies: Old English and Medieval Studies

Jeffs, Amy, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain (2021).

Jeffs, Amy, Wild: Tales from early medieval Britain (2022).

Karkov, Catherine E., and Nicholas Howe (eds.), Conversion and Colonization in Anglo-Saxon England (2006).

Newman, Barbara, The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships (2021). Also available as an e-book.

Niles, John D., God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (2018). Also available as an e-book.

Owens, Susan, Imagining England’s Past: Inspiration, Enchantment, Obsession (2023).

Robertson, Elizabeth, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (1990).

Literary Studies: Politics, Philosophy and Culture

Davies, Stephen, Art and Its Messages: Meaning, Morality, and Society (1997).

Federici, Silvia, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2021).

Matthews, Steven, and Matthew Feldman (eds.), Samuel Beckett’s “Philosophy Notes” (2020).

Odell, Jenny, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019). Also available as an e-book.

Quashie, Kevin, Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Also available as an e-book.

Spires, Derrick R., The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Early Print Culture in the Early United States (2019). Also available as an e-book.

Tatar, Maria, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces (2021).

Literary Studies: Imperialism and Colonialism

Ulka Anjaria (ed.), A History of the Indian Novel in English (2015). Also available as an e-book.

Erica R. Edwards, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire (2021). Also available as an e-book.

Philip Steer, Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire (2020). Also available as an e-book.

Winter Jade Werner, Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2020).

Literary Studies: Shakespeare and Early Modern Theatre Studies

Bourne, Claire M. L., Shakespeare / Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance (2021). Also available as an e-book.

Shakespeare, William, The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile (1996).

Stern, Tiffany (ed.), Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England (2019).

Syme, Holger Schott, Theatre History, Attribution Studies, and the Question of Evidence (2023). Also available as an e-book.

Wright, Laura Jayne, Sound Effects: Hearing the Early Modern Stage (2023).

Literary Studies: History of Literature, Biography, and Other Topics

Bhanot, Kavita, and Jeremy Tiang (eds.), Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (2022).

Bostridge, Mark (ed.), Lives for Sale: Biographers Tales (2005).

Caruth, Cathy (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995).

Puchner, Martin, The Written World: How Literature Shapes History (2018).

Sloan, John, Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect (2023).

Sullivan, Hannah, The Work of Revision (2013).

Just because we’re into the Long Vacation doesn’t mean the new books have stopped pouring in here at the library! We’ve had a wide range of new arrivals this month, including fiction from around the world, studies foregrounding culture, gender and race, and a selection of poetry.

Keep reading to find out more about a few titles which caught our eye, or visit our LibraryThing page to browse all the new arrivals. Vacation loans are now in full swing, meaning any books borrowed don’t have to be returned until October, so if you’d like to pick up any of these intriguing titles you might want to act fast!

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Season of Crimson Blossoms (2017) 

In this debut novel, Ibrahim tells the story of an illicit affair between a 55-year-old widow, Binta, and 26-year-old ‘Reza’, a street gang leader. Set in the conservative, predominantly Muslim north of Nigeria, the novel explores both Binta and Reza’s relationship and the world around them. With a backdrop of political violence and domestic squabbles, Ibrahim takes his time to tell the story of Binta and Reza. This slow, unhurried pacing, combined with a ‘gorgeous tapestry of language’, creates a rich narrative exploring ‘love, heartbreak, hope, desire, the human condition and our collective humanity’. 

Martin Puchner, Culture: A New World History (2023) 

In a political landscape bounded by extremes, Puchner makes the case for the necessity – and long-standing fact – of cross-cultural exchange. In 15 ‘lively case studies’, he traces the movement, interpretation and re-interpretation of objects and ideas across time and space, encompassing Egypt, Jerusalem, Ethiopia, the Ottoman Empire, Tokyo, Berlin and more. With his assertion that ‘everyone is influenced by someone’, Puchner makes a powerful case for the fact that cultural transfer is to be found ‘at the heart of the story of human expression’. 

Also by Puchner at the EFL: Stage fright: modernism, anti-theaticality, and drama (2002); Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, manifestos and the avant-gardes (2006); The Written World: How Literature Shaped History (2018).  

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2022). 

The Road is McCarthy’s tenth novel and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. It is a bleak story of a father and son’s fight to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. We’re never told what disaster has happened but, ‘faced with such loss’, it’s almost irrelevant. It’s a story not only of survival, but of what makes that survival meaningful; the father repeatedly reassures his son that they are ‘the good guys’. The prose is almost as sparse as the landscape they travel through, with ‘an economy of words, even an economy of thought, that parallels [the story]’. But despite the horror, a certain beauty remains: ‘In creating an exquisite nightmare, it does not add to the cruelty and ugliness of our times; it warns us now how much we have to lose.’ 

McCarthy died earlier this month at the age of 89. 

Also available as an e-book (2009 edition).  

There are many works by McCarthy available at the EFL. You can browse them on SOLO. 

Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: Shakespeare, Race and the Future (2023) 

Karim-Cooper is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London, and Co-Director of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe. That background in education is reflected in the book’s aim ‘to restore the swan of Avon as a playwright for all’. She is careful to understand Shakespeare within his Tudor context while emphasising that this was not an all-white England, and argues that Shakespeare’s work remains relevant to modern readers and audiences. The challenge is to consider ‘how students … or actors of colour … can get to grips with the excessively valued and quite sublime poetry that just happens to, at times, diminish their own bodies’. 

Also by Karim-Cooper at the EFL: The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (2016). She has also edited a number of volumes about Shakespeare, which you can find on SOLO. 

Airea D. Matthews, Bread and Circus (2023) 

Bread and Circus is ‘a hybrid and palimpsestic memoir-in-verse‘, ‘a bold poetic reckoning with the realities of class and race and their intergenerational effects’. As an economics student, Matthews became ‘fascinated and disturbed’ by the ideas of Adam Smith, and here she issues a ‘direct challenge’ to his theories. She demonstrates how Smith’s emphasis on self-interest as the driver of capitalism falls apart when the individual becomes a commodity. From the perspective of the different roles she has performed through her life, Matthews ‘asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished’ amidst this capitalist failure – ‘and at what cost’. 

Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism (2021) 

In this work, Schuller aims to ‘demonstrate the case for the end of white feminism, and its replacement by intersectional feminism’. To that end, the book is structured around comparisons between the writing of white feminists and intersectional feminists. Schuller makes clear that she sees ‘white feminism’ as a political position rather than an identity, one which upholds both the patriarchy and white supremacy. This is an incredibly rich account, full of ‘complexity, contradiction and nuance’ which succeeds in its aim to bring to the fore intersectional feminists whose work and ideas are not as celebrated as they could be.