Welcome, dear readers, to the summer vacation! Vacation loans are in full swing, so if you want to nab yourselves any of these intriguing titles, you’ll have to act fast! Books now don’t have to be returned until October, so grab them while you can. As always, here’s a brief selection of some of our newest titles this month. You can find the full list over on LibraryThing.

Meredith Farmer and Jonathan D. S. Schroeder. Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn. 2022.

Ahab Unbound takes one of the most tyrannical characters of fiction – Captain Ahab – and attempts to extend to him some compassion. The essays in this book place Ahab as the centre of a number of research areas – animals, race and ethnicity, disability, environmental humanities, medicine, politics, and posthumanism. As a kingpin in materiality, Ahab’s character becomes a focal point for criticism in our current moment, and for wider questions about the borders of our world and the violence we enact on each other and the world around us.

Monica Youn. Blackacre. 2016.

Blackacre is a very decorated collection of poetry: winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award. The collection focuses on the body, particularly the unexplored relationships between your body and your expectations. This book is both powerful and intimate, employing an exquisite combination of poetic skill and brutal honesty.

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

Emma Smith. Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers. 2022.

This is a delightful delve into books – not the words, not the stories or characters or themes, but the book as an object in itself. Smith dives into the history of the book, touching on topics such as mass-market production, early printing, and even astounding anecdotes like books made of cheese and how our reading habits are shaped by American soldiers. Prepare yourself to crack the spine of why books are a kind of brilliant, and even sometimes dangerous, magic for us all.

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

Maria Tatar. The Fairest of Them All. Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters. 2020.

This book is a look at the cultural strata of fairy tales, the layers of magic and mythology in the stories that we know and repeat. The word ‘fair’ is key, throughout the history of myths and folktales, and it speaks richly of the pitting of woman against woman, of mother-daughter conflict, of more than just Disney’s ‘skin as white as snow’. How do we constantly keep these stories new and relevant for our modern world? What can these classic tales tell us about current issues?

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

Jami Rogers. British Black and Ashian Shakespeareans: Integrating Shakespeare 1966-2018. 2022.

This book looks at the little-known history of of Black and Asian Shakespeare performance, using first-hand accounts and interviews with nearly forty performers. This book covers both the gains of and challenges still facing Black and Asian Shakespeareans such as Joseph Marcell, Adrian Lester, Josette Simon, Lolita Chakrabarti, Rakie Ayola, and Noma Dumezweni (who’s featured on the cover art).

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.