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. 

The end of Trinity Term is slowly approaching – but the new books haven’t been slowing down at all! As ever, we had lots of new books at the library in May. Find out more about a few which caught our eye this month below, or head over to LibraryThing to browse all the latest arrivals.

Carolyne Larrington, The Norse Myths that Shape the Way We Think (2023)

This is the third entry in a series exploring ‘Myths that Shape the Way We Think’ – the first two looked at Celtic and Greek myths respectively (both can be requested from the offsite store). In this book, Larrington explores the contemporary resonances and popular reimaginings of Norse mythology. It’s a fascinating study, full of examples drawn from the myths themselves, historical and archaeological findings, and popular culture, including Marvel, Tolkien, video games and even death metal.

There are many works by Larrington available at the EFL. You can find them on SOLO.

George Saunders, Liberation Day (2022)

Liberation Day brings together nine short stories by Saunders – four are new for this collection, the other five having previously appeared in the New Yorker. The stories feature characters who are trapped, imprisoned, and suspended, often by ‘their own foolishness’. Themes of ‘brainwashing, thought control and mindless violence’ underpin the collection, reflecting the state of modern American politics. Though revelling in un-reality, these stories are nothing less than political; Saunders suggests it is impossible to be otherwise.

Also by Saunders at the EFL: Tenth of December (2014); Lincoln in the Bardo (2017).

Sophie Duncan, Searching for Juliet: The Lives and Deaths of Shakespeare’s first tragic heroine (2023)

This engaging study explores the cultural imaginings and re-imaginings of Juliet in Western culture since the sixteenth century, from Shakespeare’s original sources to Taylor Swift and beyond. Duncan’s in-depth knowledge of, and passion for, this ‘tragic heroine’ shines through; she even spent time as one of Juliet’s Secretaries in Verona, answering letters seeking love advice from the city’s Juliet Club. The result is a compelling cultural history ‘as vital and provocative as the character herself’.

Also by Duncan at the EFL: Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siècle (2016).

Miranda Seymour, I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys (2022)

Like much of the recent scholarship on Rhys, this biography considers Rhys’s upbringing in and exile from the Caribbean as key to her writing without making the ‘mistake’ of using fiction to fill in biographical gaps. While Seymour does not shy away from any detail of Rhys’s life, she does not present Rhys as a victim. Instead, she writes with ‘an acute empathy’, drawing a ‘highly readable, sympathetic portrait’ of a complex woman.

Also by Seymour at the EFL: A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and his literary circle, 1895-1915 (1988); Robert Graves: Life on the edge (1995); Mary Shelley (2000).

Many of Rhys’s works are available at the EFL. You can browse them on SOLO.

Nandini Das, Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (2023)

Courting India follows Sir Thomas Roe, seventeenth-century ambassador to India, investigating his impressions of the Mughal court through a wealth of literary sources. Roe is often interpreted as the herald of empire, yet he achieved very little; Das is more interested in Roe’s embassy as an ‘unpropitious moment of intercultural contact’. It is the cultural legacy of Roe’s time in India, of the images and truisms which bled into British understandings of India and empire, which remains Das’s focus.

There are many works by Das available at the EFL. You can find them on SOLO.

Laline Paull, The Bees (2015)

The Bees is Paull’s debut novel, nominated for the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. The story follows Flora 717, a sanitation bee who must contend with the orthodoxy of the hive and its injunction to ‘accept, obey, serve’. The novel combines a bee’s fairytale biography, an examination of dystopian totalitarianism, and an exploration of the importance of bees in human lives, with an undercurrent of race and difference – all through the lens of ‘our appealing insect heroine’. 

We’ve got lots of lovely new books (and DVDs!) at the EFL, ready to welcome everyone back for Trinity Term. If you’re worried you might have missed out on some of the new arrivals while away from Oxford for the vacation, don’t worry – catch up on all of them over on LibraryThing, or keep reading to see a few selections that caught our eye in April …

Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden (2021)

Chaucer’s Alison, the Wife of Bath, has a long history of being interpreted and reinterpreted – she is Chaucer’s ‘most enduring and appealing character‘. In Smith’s retelling, Alison is reimagined as Alvita, ‘an unashamedly sex-positive woman in her mid-50s’. Over the course of a lock-in at the local pub, Alvita tells her story of living life her way, refusing to be told what she can and cannot do by husbands, society, religion – or anyone else for that matter.

The Wife of Willesden is Smith’s debut play, written to tie in with the Borough of Brent’s year as London Borough of Culture. As much as it celebrates Alvita, it is also a love-letter to Willesden and its vibrant community – a common thread in much of Smith’s work.

There are lots of works by Smith at the EFL. Browse them on SOLO.

Benjamin Bateman, Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2023)

In this study, Bateman works to find an alternative to what might be termed ‘queer progressive narratives’ in contemporary fiction. By placing modernist classics by authors including E. M. Forster and Willa Cather in conversation with contemporary queer and environmental fiction, Bateman ‘refuses the common wisdom that queerness becomes louder and prouder over time, delineating instead a minimalist and daydreaming subjectivity wherein queerness finds escape, respite, and varied opportunities for imaginative reverie’.

Ultimately, Bateman brings together literary studies, queer theory, and the environmental humanities to offer critical alternatives to ‘coming out’ narratives, to revise theories of gender and sexual performativity, and to explore a world in which ‘queer disappearance’ might be just as important as queer presence.

This title is also available as an e-book.

Also by Bateman: The Modernist Art of Queer Survival (2017, e-book).

Kathy A. Perkins (ed.), Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950 (1990)

This anthology brings together nineteen plays from seven African American women, written between roughly 1910 and 1940. While this selection cannot be comprehensive, it is nonetheless representative of the works African American women were producing in the early twentieth century and the importance of these playwrights in the development of African American drama more generally. Perkins presents the plays alongside biographies of the seven playwrights which outline ‘each writer’s education, dramatic interests, and achievements‘, in addition to an Introduction to the collection which outlines the historical background of these playwrights’ work. The result is an anthology which forms a valuable starting point for explorations of ‘a neglected segment of black theatre‘.

Also by Perkins: Contemporary Plays by Women of Color: An Anthology (1996).

Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets (2021)

The Prophets, Jones’s debut novel, explores queer love between two enslaved men in the antebellum south. With lyricism and a ‘rich, distinctive‘ style lending itself to comparisons with Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, Jones delivers ‘an outstanding novel […] but also a great sweep of history‘, all while compensating for that history’s elision of the human. The nucleus of the story is the love between Isaiah and Samuel, but their world is also populated by a plethora of characters, each ‘richly evoked, rendering the complexity of their desires and depravations‘.

This is far from an easy read. But what Jones has created, amid the horror and cruelty, is a testimony to the fact ‘that humans do still love, even when the most terrifying threats hang over them’.

Cecilia Rosengren, Per Sivefors, and Rikard Wingard (eds.), Changing Satire: Transformations and Continuities in Europe, 1660-1830 (2022)

This collection of essays brings together literary scholars and art historians to trace developments in satire from the seventeenth through to the early nineteenth centuries. Over this period, satire became less genre-driven and increasingly visual, flourishing in various formats. The contributions to this collection consider works of satire by well-known figures like Swift and Milton, as well as lesser-known manuscript sources and prints from the period. While there is a general focus on England, the collected essays also consider satire across Europe, in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. The result is a fascinating study which maps the development of satire, revealing it ultimately to be a key vehicle for the transgression of boundaries.

This title is also available as an e-book. 

The Farewell, dir. Lulu Wang (2020)

The Farewell is a ‘beautifully bittersweet‘ comedy starring Awkwafina as Billi. Born in China but raised in the USA, these two aspects of Billi’s identity start to clash when she and her extended family return to China to say goodbye to their matriarch, Nai Nai – but no-one has told Nai Nai that she is terminally ill. The result is a witty, funny, and ultimately endearing exploration of identity, culture and family.

Many DVDs arrived at the library this month – you can browse the latest arrivals on LibraryThing. Portable DVD players can be borrowed from the enquiry desk. Alternatively, you can view films in the computer room; just ask at the desk if you’d like help getting set up.

The end of another month brings another blog post highlighting just a few of the books which arrived at the library in March. From short fiction to memoirs, historical studies to explorations of the power of narrative and storytelling, there’s lots of variety in this month’s new book selection.

As ever, this is only a snapshot of the new books that have arrived at the library. Check out the whole selection on LibraryThing!

Alan Garner, Treacle Walker (2022).

Treacle Walker is a ‘short but profound‘ novel, shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Garner’s work is often divided by publishers and booksellers into children’s literature and adult’s literature, though Garner has said he doesn’t see such a distinction – and Treacle Walker undoubtedly blends the two.

While the story is about a child, ‘its philosophical meditations and terrifying climax mean it is definitely for adults’. It is ‘a flinty fable about a convalescent boy visited by a rag-and-bone man’, exploring themes of time, our relationship to the present and its roots in an older mythic and folkloric past.

There are many works by Garner at the EFL – you can find them on SOLO.

James Buzard et al. (eds.), Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (2007).

The Great Exhibition of 1851 is synonymous with the Crystal Palace, the great glass-and-iron cathedral to science which housed it. This collection of essays takes an interdisciplinary approach to the Exhibition’s significance, legacy, and impact around the world.

Reviewers generally agree this is an interesting collection. Some criticisms include a lack of thematic coherence, with the loose concept of ‘modernity’ doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Others note an uncritical use of sources in parts and an assumption that the reader will already know ‘the basic story‘. That said, it offers interesting and valuable interdisciplinary perspectives on the Crystal Palace’s significance and legacy.

Deborah Levy, Black Vodka (2017).

Black Vodka is a collection of ten short stories, set across a handful of European cities. No matter which city Levy’s characters find themselves in, they are complex, flawed and surprising people, disconcerting to each other and to us.

These are ‘fragmentary, elliptical’ stories which ‘refuse to settle down into something immediately recognisable’. The stories and characters are layered and elusive, seeming to reveal something yet leaving the sense that much more has been concealed. With her ‘incantatory, gorgeous writing’ and ‘coiled, polished sentences’, Levy has created a powerful exploration of what drives us together, and what keeps us apart.

Also by Levy at the EFL: Hot Milk (2017); The Man who Saw Everything (2019).

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces (2023).

In 2017, Douglas-Fairhurst was diagnosed with MS. In Metamorphosis, he recounts his response to this diagnosis, and how turning to literature helped him.

With writing full of ‘elegance, wit and insight‘, Douglas-Fairhurst explores the power of stories. As a professor of English at Oxford, turning to books was an instinctive response. He ‘read furiously‘, finding ‘no shortage of authors and characters as beleaguered as him‘. Through this bibliotherapy, Douglas-Fairhurst has created not just a record of illness, but a funny and raw exploration of the relationship between literature and life.

Also by Douglas-Fairhurst at the EFL: Victorian Afterlives: The shaping of influence in nineteenth-century literature (2002); Becoming Dickens: The invention of a novelist (2011); The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the secret history of Wonderland (2015); The Turning Point: A year that changed Dickens and the world (2021).

Susan Civale, Romantic Women’s Life Writing: Reputation and Afterlife (2019).

Civale presents case studies of the life writing by and about four Romantic women: Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Mary Hays. She fully contextualises each woman’s life writing, exploring their other work, their biographies, and their social, cultural and intellectual contexts.

Crucially, Civale considers not only the women’s writing but how their readers responded to it, from the texts’ publication right through the long nineteenth century. She notes that this is a key departure from the existing historiography. It is this which makes Civale’s work such a fascinating study of women’s life writing in the Romantic period and beyond.

This book is also available as an e-book.

Peter Brooks, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (2022).

Brooks laments what he calls the ‘storification of reality‘ – the omnipresence of narrative which turns us into uncritical consumers of information. But instead of attacking narrative, he offers ‘a potent defence of attentive reading and its real-world applications‘.

Some critics have pointed to the preponderance of old, white, male authors in Brooks’s examples of novels; others have wondered why he doesn’t consider other media – especially narrative creation and consumption on the internet. These criticisms notwithstanding, this remains a powerful demonstration of the power of narrative and the dangers of our over-reliance on it.

There are many works by Brooks at the EFL – you can find them on SOLO. These other works include Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1985), Brooks’s first study of the significance of narrative.

February may be the shortest month, but there has been no shortage of books arriving at the library! With a number of anthologies as well as fiction, poetry, and literary studies all making their EFL debut, there’s plenty to choose from. Keep reading to find out more about a few select highlights, or browse all our new books on LibraryThing.

Nina Auerbach & U. C. Knoepflmacher, Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (1993).

This anthology brings together eleven stories by Victorian women writers, all of which were previously inaccessible to readers in modern published forms. They are presented here with their original illustrations, along with critical introductions and biographical notes which illuminate their historical and social context.

Auerbach and Knoepflmacher group the stories into four sections. The unifying theme is subversion, both of the tropes of traditional children’s literature and of the gendered expectations placed upon Victorian women.

Some reviewers have questioned Auerbach and Knoepflmacher’s commentaries. They’ve queried how subversive women’s association with fairy tales could be, given the genre’s association with domesticity and childcare, as well as a general contemporary acceptance of children’s literature as appropriate for women writers. Others have wondered whether the concerns of late twentieth-century feminism drive the editor’s commentaries, rather than the texts or the authors themselves. Forbidden Journeys is nonetheless a fascinating collection, though it perhaps reveals as much about late twentieth-century reappraisals of fairy tales as it does about the Victorian women who wrote them.

There are numerous works by Auerbach and by Knoepflmacher at the EFL – click the links to browse them on SOLO.

Jonathan Raban, The Oxford Book of the Sea (2001).

When the subject of your anthology covers seven-tenths of the earth’s surface, no-one is going to be entirely satisfied with your selections – making it all the more impressive that reviewers almost unanimously agree that this remains an excellent anthology.

Raban organises his selections chronologically, ‘from bitter Anglo-Saxon to wry Updike, without the breakwaters of chapter divisions’. But that structural continuity doesn’t mean there’s been no change in literature about the sea. In fact, underpinning Raban’s selections is a growing attention to and curiosity about the sea, especially after the Enlightenment.

With such a large topic, one anthology is never going to cover everything. There is a geographical focus on British, with the addition of some American, writing – while this makes the subject infinitely more manageable, Raban notes that ‘the French sea, the German sea, the Japanese sea are importantly different places’ and an equally rich anthology could be compiled on each (p.xvii). All the same, ‘although the ideal Book of the Sea, the whole sea and nothing but the sea, has yet to be written, this foretaste of it makes a very agreeable companion’.

There are numerous works by Raban at the EFL – you can browse them on SOLO.

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (2022).

Demon Copperhead – winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023 – takes Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield as its inspiration. Those familiar with Dickens’s work will recognise not only many characters but many of the events in the titular Demon’s life, as Kingsolver transposes the Victorian poverty, suffering and injustices that Dickens exposed to her own home territory of Appalachia, and a community in the grip of the opioid crisis.

Kingsolver paints a grim picture of ‘a society so ailing, the word bleak is a cheerful way to describe it’. The novel is rescued from becoming merely a grim melodrama by the wry humour and weary cynicism of its narrator, Demon. Many have praised Kingsolver’s characterisation of Demon and her use of ‘the natural poetry of the American vernacular’, a key element of Demon’s charm.

Comparisons will always be drawn between Demon Copperhead and David Copperfield – though not always favourably. Like Dickens, Kingsolver has produced a damning critique of society’s marginalisation of the most vulnerable. It is a striking and compelling examination of poverty and addiction ‘tucked away in the richest country on earth’.

Other work by Kingsolver at the EFL: Flight Behaviour (2013); Unsheltered (2019).

Hannah Sullivan, Was It for This (2023).

Was It for This is Sullivan’s second collection – her first, Three Poems, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2018. Encompassing themes of home, tragedy, and the passage of time, this collection is just as stunning as her debut.

The collection contains three poems. The first focuses on the Grenfell fire in 2017, blending the personal with the collective and political as Sullivan, who lived nearby at the time, is wrenched from the ‘cocoon’ of new motherhood and confronts the tragedy. The second explores home: the places Sullivan has lived, the generational chasm synonymous with home ownership, and the memories our homes hold. The third and final poem, Happy Birthday, is preoccupied with ageing and the passage of time.

Sullivan’s poems are powerful and emotional, so compelling that ‘the masterful architecture of her writing is almost invisible’. Her poetry often shifts into prose, as she ‘moves instinctively between forms as if stepping from one room into another’ – fitting, in a collection to which homes are so central. All these elements come together beautifully, as they ‘combine to consecrate the orindary among the exceptional’.

Other work by Sullivan at the EFL: The Work of Revision (2013); Three Poems (2018).

New York Times Magazine (ed.), The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic (2020).

In the fourteenth century, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron. The story takes place during the Black Death which ravaged Europe at that time, following a group of young people who flee Florence, hole up in a country retreat, and share stories to entertain one another – and to process the enormity of the plague.

In 2020, the New York Times Magazine revived the idea and structure of The Decameron in response to COVID-19. They gathered an international group of authors, each of whom crafted their response to the pandemic in the form of a short story. The stories were first published in the New York Times Magazine in July 2020, and are now brought together in this edition.

The stories all have fascinating premises, though the quality of their execution varies; these are after all rapid-fire responses to immediate crisis. The definitive COVID novel is yet to be written – and we almost certainly need more distance from the pandemic before it can become reality. But while we wait, these stories show the power of fiction, and its ability to help both storyteller and listener process anxiety and the isolation which the pandemic brought.

Marion Turner, The Wife of Bath: A Biography (2023).

Following her biography of Chaucer in 2019 (available at the EFL and online), Turner has written another biography. This time, she focuses not on the poet but on one of his creations: Alison, the Wife of Bath.

It may seem strange to write a biography of a fictional character, but what Turner has achieved is a compelling account of both the ordinary medieval women Alison represents and her literary legacy in the 600 years since Chaucer wrote her. Turner argues that Alison is the first fully-rounded character, male or female, in English literature, presented in all her complexity. This complexity has been celebrated, demonised and censured, according to the values of her various interpreters, but ‘at no point has she been a neutral figure’.

Chaucer wrote Alison as ‘a rounded character with an interior life’, and it is this which draws readers to her. Yet adaptations of the Wife of Bath have more often than not depicted her as a monster or reduced her to fit within narrow gender stereotypes – as Turner says, ‘it is only in very recent years that new adaptations are no longer less progressive than the original’. Nevertheless, the Wife of Bath – and our fascination with her – persists; ‘her voice is now louder than ever’.

Also available as an e-book.

Turner discussed this book in a piece for The Conversation – we’ve republished it on the EFL blog.

Other work by Turner at the EFL: A handbook of Middle English studies (2013); Chaucer: A European Life (2019).

January seems to have flown by, with Hilary Term now well underway. If the hectic start of term has meant you haven’t kept abreast of all the new books arriving at the library this month, don’t worry – you can find them all on LibraryThing or just catch up with the highlights in this blog post!

This month over 70 new books have arrived, covering subjects from medieval studies to explorations of the modern city, as well as literature and fiction old and new. But did you know we regularly get new films as well? You can browse our latest DVDs and Blu-rays on LibraryThing. And if your laptop doesn’t have a disc drive, all is not lost – we have portable DVD players you can borrow from the enquiry desk.

David Pearson, Book Ownership in Stuart England (2021).

This fascinating study explores who owned books in seventeenth-century England, and which books were in their possession. It’s based on the 2018 Lyell Lectures which Pearson delivered in Oxford, and which you can read about on the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book blog.

Pearson makes clear from the outset that he’s not interested in what people read, much less what they might have thought about what they were reading. Instead, he focuses on the book as object, seeking to establish ‘what books people owned, but also why they owned them‘. One of Pearson’s key arguments is that the evidence for book ownership is much broader than many historians lament, including evidence for women and non-elite individuals owning substantial numbers of books.

To borrow Pearson’s phrasing, this study takes ‘the parachutist, rather than the truffle-hunting, methodology’ (p.7). What that means is, instead of looking at one or two individuals and their books, Pearson takes an incredibly broad view, compiling evidence of book ownership across all levels of society. That breadth is what makes this such an interesting and invaluable book.

Also available as an ebook.

Also by Pearson at the EFL: Provenance research in book history: A handbook (1994); Oxford bookbinding 1500-1640 (2000); English bookbinding styles, 1450-1800: A handbook (2005); Books as history: The importance of books beyond their texts (2008).

Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (2017).

The flâneur emerged in nineteenth century cities, especially the Paris of Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac. He was – and substantively remains – a male creation who enjoys a degree of urban freedom that, even today, women can struggle to lay claim to. That’s partly what leads Elkin to champion the radical potential of the flâneuse.

Elkin’s narrative interweaves the flâneuserie, as she terms it, of women writers who have walked the city – from Virginia Woolf to Martha Gellhorn – with her own personal experiences of urban walking. For all of Elkin’s flâneuses, herself included, taking to the streets on foot is a liberating act, enabling women to shift ‘from being looked at to looking‘. 

Ultimately, flânerie for Elkin is about freedom, disruption, and the joy found by walking through the city streets. Through her discussions and reflections, flâneuserie becomes ‘not just a means of traversing the city but a way of life and even a form of ethics‘. As Elkin puts it, in a world where the flâneur is becoming subsumed by the commercialisation and industrialisation he first took to the street in protest against, ‘the flâneuse is the more radical idea’. 

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2021). 

As the subtitle suggests, Lose Your Mother is a journey, in more ways than one. Hartman travelled to Ghana as an academic, researching the slave trade from the other side of the Atlantic. But what started as a scholarly exercise became deeply personal as she searched for her ancestors’ voices, with her narratives morphing into a meditation on identity, loss, and grief.

Hartman’s writing is haunted by the unknown and the unknowable. She has described the book as being ‘about those losses that haunt us, those ancestors we know but can’t name’. She considers the ‘irreparable violence’ of the slave trade, those who have disappeared from the archives – if they were ever there – and the consequences of that loss for their descendants in the United States as well as those who remain in Africa.

It’s undeniable that Hartman’s moving account demands ‘significant emotional expenditure‘ from its readers. But it is above all an intimate and accessible narrative that unites the academic and the personal in its search for the past.

Also by Hartman at the EFL: Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery and self-making in nineteenth-century America (1997); Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate histories of riotous black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals (2021) – also new at the EFL this month!

Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2018).

Li’s Dear Friend is a memoir with a difference. In it, we learn very little of Li’s life, either in China or in America, and she expresses her discomfort with the word ‘I’. (If you saw the December new books blog post, you may remember that Christine Brooke-Rose’s Remake is another new-to-the-EFL memoir which avoids that particular pronoun.)

Instead of narrating the events of Li’s life, Dear Friend is at heart a profoundly thoughtful book. It discusses language at length, including Li’s decision to abandon her native Chinese, not only writing but thinking exclusively in English. Her ruminations on language sit alongside a series of meditations on both reading and writing, as Li reflects on the importance of literature in the wake of her hospitalisations following suicide attempts. Reading was her means of survival, and ‘literature offer[ed] her both recovery and discovery‘.

Above all, Dear Friend is beautifully written – it’s been described as ‘calm, but not soothing, matter-of-fact, yet dreamlike‘. It is a moving exploration of the possibilities and limits of language, and how to cope with the point at which thinking ends and feeling begins.

Also by Li at the EFL: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2006); Where Reasons End: A Novel (2019).

Brian Dillon, Objects in This Mirror (2014). 

This collection brings together essays written and published over a decade. Together, the essays explore a huge range of subjects as Dillon seeks to make the most of what the essay form can be and the possibilities it contains.

There’s no real theme that underpins the collected essays; featured topics range from hypochondria and taste to the Dewey decimal system and slapstick. Instead, ‘Dillon’s wide-ranging curiosity is the unifying force‘. As another reviewer said, few writers are ‘more consistently interesting on as wide a range of subjects‘ as Dillon is revealed to be in this collection.

Perhaps the other unifying element is the importance Dillon places on the essay form itself. In interviews, he’s described the ‘conjunction between unlikely topics or unlikely narratives‘ that is uniquely possible in an essay. He has also expressed admiration for, and his desire to continue, the tradition of essay-writing as it’s developed since the seventeenth century. What motivates him – and what is clear from this collection – is ‘a sense that in the essay you can write about absolutely anything‘.

Also by Dillon at the EFL: Essayism (2017); Suppose a Sentence (2021).

Toni Morrison, Recitatif (2022). 

Originally published in 1983, Recitatif is Morrison’s only short story, and appears in this edition with a new introduction by Zadie Smith. The story follows two girls, Twyla and Roberta, who become inseparable as children at St. Bonaventure’s orphanage, but as fate throws them together as adults differences and tensions emerge between them.

Race and the perception of it are key to the story. One girl is black, and the other is white – but Morrison never tells us which is which. The effect is to shift the story’s focus from the characters’ race to the reader’s perception of racial difference. Smith draws out the implications of this in her introduction, which is well worth reading.

But it’s not just race that separates the two girls as adults. There are socio-economic differences between them, as well as the dividing line of memory. There was a disabled worker at the orphanage, Maggie, and while differing memories of her fate divide Twyla and Roberta as adults, her story can become lost in the reader’s efforts to solve the mystery of racial identity. This is undoubtedly a story that benefits from being read, reread, and reread again.

Many of Morrison’s works are available at the EFL. Find them on SOLO.

2022 may have come to a close, but the new books were flying into the library right up until the last minute! You can find a selection of books which caught our eye below – why not pick up something new for the new year?

As ever, if you’d like to browse all of the EFL’s new books, head on over to LibraryThing.

N. K. Jemisin, How long ’til Black Future Month? (2018).

Jemisin has written a number of works of fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction, including three (highly decorated) series: the Dreamblood duology, the Inheritance trilogy, and the Broken Earth trilogy. How long ’til black future month? is her first collection of short stories, and won the Locus award in 2019.

The collection contains 22 stories, and takes its title from an essay Jemisin published on her blog in 2013. Most of the stories were written between 2004 and 2017 and had previously been published, while four are new for this collection. They contain themes of community, revolution, justice and power, and often feature characters on the margins of society. While they all sit under the umbrella of speculative fiction, they are written in a smorgasbord of different styles, from cyberpunk and steam punk to alien invasion and high fantasy.

Some of the stories explore the same worlds as her novels, such as ‘Stone Hunger’ which takes place in the same universe as the Broken Earth trilogy. Others provide tantalising glimpses of Jemisin’s ideas, and read ‘like a provacative sketch for a much longer work‘. Across all the fascinating stories in this collection, Jemisin revels in the ‘uncanny moments in which the human integrates with what feels profoundly inhuman‘.

Also by Jemisin at the EFL: the Broken Earth trilogy (2015-17).

Christine Brooke-Rose, Remake (1996).

Brooke-Rose (1923-2012) was an experimentalist writer who wrote novels, short stories and poems as well as criticism. Her work is often described as ‘playful and difficult’, and Remake is no exception.

Remake is autobiographical in the sense that Brooke-Rose was writing about her own life. But she was extremely resistant to the idea of writing an autobiography, and arguably did not write one: Remake has been described as ‘an autobiographical novel with a difference’ (from the publisher) and even as ‘a kind of antibiography’. Discussing the process of writing Remake, Brooke-Rose talked about struggling with a long list of the ‘facts’ of her life, a list she said ‘even I couldn’t re-read’. Her writing was only really enabled when she found ‘a constraint’ in the form of writing an autobiography containing no personal pronouns and no possessive adjectives.

Remake is ‘more narratively straightforward’ than Brooke-Rose’s more experimental, ‘difficult’ novels. But Brooke-Rose didn’t see difficulty as a bad thing. For her, ‘difficulty [was] the locus of pleasure’, meaning that reading becomes more enjoyable when it makes demands of the reader. Whatever your view on difficulty, Remake is a fascinating third-person fiction capturing ‘not the facts but the content of those facts’ (from the publisher), the textures, feelings, tones and transformations of a life.

Many of Brooke-Rose’s other works are also available at the EFL. You can find them on SOLO.

Francis Spufford, Golden Hill (2016).

Although Golden Hill is Spufford’s first novel, he has previously written in a dizzying array of genres. These include his memoir, The Child That Books Built (available in the library), as well as more experimental work, such as Red Plenty (available on Bodleian PCs) which blends history and real people with fiction.

Spufford has form when it comes to bringing authentic history and gripping stories together – and he does so masterfully well in Golden Hill. Without giving too much away, the novel follows Mr Smith who arrives in mid-eighteenth-century New York with a note for £1,000 that he wants to exchange for cash with a local trader. If Smith is not who he says he is, this would prove ruinous. The story follows Smith as he navigates this New World – and as the city’s inhabitants seek to establish what Mr Smith is hiding.

This is historical fiction underpinned by a huge amount of research, although that research is ‘worn refreshingly lightly‘. Spufford creates a vivid and authentic eighteenth-century world that echoes eighteenth-century novelists such as Sterne, Smollett and the Fieldings. But Spufford never seems weighed down by his eighteenth-century antecedents – nor does he let things like archaic spelling get in the way of what is at the end of the day a marvellous story!

Also by Spufford at the EFL: The Child That Books Built (2002).

Arji Manuelpillai, Improvised Explosive Device (2022).

Manuelpillai is a British Sri Lankan poet who hasn’t always been a poet. He has previously rapped with an international touring band and his own band, worked with a children’s theatre company and on various other shows, and taught workshops and multidisciplinary art. All of this has been motivated by what he calls a fascination with people: Improvised Explosive Device is the result of bringing ‘[his] love for poems and people together into one collection‘.

Improvised Explosive Device is Manuelpillai’s first poetry collection, described as a ‘powerful political debut‘. It explores extremist violence, the lives and experiences of people who engage with terrorist groups, and how close we all are to acts of violence. Underpinned by extensive research including conversations with former members of extremist groups and their families as well as academics and sociologists, these are ‘complex, unnerving texts’ chronicling how people turn to violence (from the publisher).

When speaking to people for this collection, Manualpillai has described being inspired by people whose ‘stories were truly unheard’. He sought to listen without interruption or judgement, then capture their stories in his poems. The result is an incredibly powerful collection which ‘will change the way you look at the world’ (from the publisher).

Yasmin Arshad, Imagining Cleopatra: Performing gender and power in early modern England (2021).

Cleopatra ‘is one of the most renowned and enduring figures from classical antiquity, yet remains one of its most elusive’ (from Arshad’s Introduction). This study aims to establish not how we perceive Cleopatra today, but how she was imagined and used by early modern English writers and audiences.

Arshad’s key aim is to expand our understanding of the different and multiple early-modern imaginings of Cleopatra, moving beyond both how Shakespeare presented her and how we imagine her today. In particular, she shows how Cleopatra was a model for femininity and motherhood, as well as serving as a vehicle for critiques of and commentary on contemporary political developments at the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts.

Arshad’s work has generally been well-received by critics. Some have pointed out that, although Arshad states she wants to ‘decentre’ Shakespeare from understandings of Cleopatra in early modern England, he in fact frames her analysis, appearing on the first page and forming the subject of the last chapter (from review by Rutter). Others say that, while Arshad’s analysis of gendered imaginings is admirable, her discussion of race lacks depth (from review by Léon Alfar). However, the overall consensus is that Arshad has produced ‘an accomplished and varied scholarly work that provides a necessary and unexpected interpretation of a popular figure’ (from review by Green).

An e-book of the 2019 edition of this work is also available.

Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin (2011).

Donoghue is a writer of novels, historical fiction, children’s books and short story collections, as well as works of literary history. In Slammerkin, she draws on the ‘nasty, brutish and short‘ (real) life of Mary Saunders, re-imagining a vivid inner life for Mary based on the merest fragments of historical record.

We know very little of the real Mary except that in 1764, aged sixteen or seventeen, she was hanged for the murder of her mistress. At the time, newspaper accounts said Mary’s crime was motivated by her desire for fine clothing. But Donoghue looks beyond this, to find a child who wants more than drudgery and poverty, whose ‘murderous outburst [is] a reaction to the physical traumas [she] suffered’ (from article by Mulvany).

Perhaps because of Donoghue’s background as a historian, Slammerkin has received a wealth of scholarly attention. Some have found elements of queer theory in Mary’s rejection of chrono-normativity (the heteronormative lifecycle of childhood, marriage, family and death), a refusal to abide by society’s rules that leads to her ultimate end (see article by Mulvany). Others have pointed to Donoghue’s use of historical fiction as a feminist political tool, rediscovering and giving some degree of agency to historical women (see article by O’Callaghan and Young). But Slammerkin is also the gripping and moving story of a young girl who tried to find a world beyond the class and gender boundaries she faces.

Also by Donoghue at the EFL: We are Michael Field (1998); Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1999); The Sealed Letter (2012).

As ever, lots of new books arrived at the library in November, from novels and poetry to essays and literary criticism. Read on to see a selection of titles which caught our eye this month, or browse all our new books on LibraryThing.

Did you know that November was National Native American Heritage Month in the USA? Fittingly, it coincided with the arrival of a collection of Native Nations poetry at the library, which is one of the titles featured below. You can also explore LibraryThing to see the new books about Native American Literature which have arrived at the EFL recently.

Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (2021).

Originally published in 1991, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents was Alvarez’s first book. The story follows the four García sisters and their parents as they flee the Dominican Republic and start new lives in America.

Intriguingly, Alvarez writes in reverse chronology. The novel opens in the late 1980s with the adult García sisters, proceeding backwards through the family’s move to New York in the 1960s and their struggles to adjust, all the way to the girls’ childhoods in the Dominican Republic. This creates a sense of fragmentation and a lack of cohesion which is underscored by the narrative shifts between the four sisters.

That theme of fragmentation looms large. The tension between the García girls’ Dominican and American identities is omnipresent, as they try to understand where they’ve come from and where they belong. It’s this sense of being stuck between one place and another that makes Alvarez’s novel such a powerful exploration of the immigrant experience.

When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). Eds. Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, and Jennifer Elise.

This collection of Native Nations poetry, edited by Joy Harjo – the first Indigenous poet laureate of the United States – has been hailed as ‘nothing less than a landmark’ (from NY Journal of Books review). It features 161 authors, covering more than three centuries (1678-2019) and over 90 nations across what is now the United States.

Many of the works contain themes of nature and the natural world, but they range widely in subject and style. Some address colonialism or healing from the trauma of war, others turn to personal and collective experiences of loss and cultural destruction. The result is a collection which encompasses both light and dark.

The poems are not presented chronologically. They are instead grouped by region, an editorial decision which creates conversations between poems and poets around shared experiences and events. Many reviewers have noted how unusual – and welcome – the anthology is in the way it foregrounds inter-generational community dialogues, ‘decentr[ing] the individual author and his or her accomplishments in favour of supporting an entire community’ (from The Los Angeles Review of Books).

Also new this month: Joy Harjo, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (2004).

Interested in more? You can browse the EFL’s latest books on Native American Literature on LibraryThing.

Beryl Gilroy, Black Teacher (2021).

First published in 1976, Black Teacher is the memoir of the first black headteacher in London and quite probably in the country. Born in Guyana, Gilroy was a qualified and experienced teacher when she arrived in England in 1952. But she faced hostility and racism, struggling to find a teaching post for many years.

Black Teacher documents the racism that Gilroy faced from colleagues, pupils and parents, as well as in her daily life. It has been described as a survival strategy, Gilroy’s ‘remedy to living in Britain as a West Indian woman’ (from Guardian review). But above all, Black Teacher is a testament to Gilroy’s achievements as a teacher as she forged her own path, overcoming the barriers she faced in English classrooms to assert her excellence as an educator.

When first published, Black Teacher was criticised for Gilroy’s supposed vanity, and some reviewers asked whether the racial struggles it presents were still relevant (from British Library article). But more recently, it has undergone a critical reappraisal and is now recognised as a lost classic. This edition, introduced by Bernardine Evaristo, certainly emphasises the incredible trail-blazing legacy of Gilroy’s writing, and indeed her life.

Paul Farley, The Mizzy (2019).

Farley, described as ‘one of the leading English poets writing today’ (from the publisher), is the author of a number of poetry collections as well as other varied works. The Mizzy is his latest collection, and in 2019 was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award.

The collection takes its title from a nickname for the mistle thrush. While there’s no central underlying theme, birds appear frequently, from the eponymous mistle thrush to robins and starlings. But these birds sit alongside other subjects and themes in a ‘stirring miscellany’, including ruminations on childhood, modernity, and technology (from Guardian review). Even in these, though, birds and nature are not entirely absent; they appear in, for example, the ‘avian shrill’ of a phone that can ‘thrum in your hand like a frightened bird’.

At its heart, this collection is self-aware and vulnerable, engaging with life in its entirety from a philosophical angle. While it is sometimes unnerving and occasionally dark, it remains playful and joyful throughout.

Also by Farley at the EFL: The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998), The Dark Film (2012), The Ice Age (2002), and Tramp in Flames (2006).

Stephanie Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009).

Burt is a scholar of post-WWII American poetry, as well as a poet and prolific writer of reviews. This collection brings some of those reviews together alongside longer essays.

The common aim underpinning all of Burt’s writing is to make poetry accessible and appealing to people who may have never encountered poetry, or who had a ‘bad experience’ and swore off poetry for good. With that aim in mind, Close Calls with Nonsense is undoubtedly a success; it has been described as ‘abounding with an excited spirit more common to film and pop music reviews than to literary criticism’ (from Publishers Weekly).

Although Burt has written about the works of a huge range of poets, this collection brings together reviews predominantly focused on American poets (with some exceptions). Burt herself has said she regrets that this was the publisher’s wish, as she would like there to be more dialogue between American and British poets and readers (from PN Review interview). If you would like to contribute to creating and nurturing that dialogue by becoming more familiar with American poetry, this collection is a great place to start!

Also by Burt at the EFL: Randall Jarrell and His Age (2002), The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (2016), and The Art of the Sonnet (2010).

Flannery O’Connor’s Radical Reality (2006). Eds. Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp.

This collection of 14 previously unpublished essays explores the work of Flannery O’Connor, focusing in particular on the influence of the wider world on O’Connor’s writing and how she responded to the issues and debates around her.

O’Connor (1925-1964) wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as numerous reviews and commentaries. Her writing is coloured by her experiences living in the American South, her Roman Catholic faith, and her relationships, especially with her mother. Her faith in particular cannot be divorced from her writing, as she often grappled with moral and ethical concerns in her work. But a further, sadly unavoidable influence on O’Connor’s writing was her own ill-health; diagnosed with lupus in 1952, her health progressively worsened until her death aged 39.

While these more personal influences on O’Connor’s writing have been explored elsewhere (for example the special issue of the journal Women’s Studies, vol.51:4 (2022)), this collection aims to place O’Connor and her work within the various social, cultural and political contexts of the time. Many essays explore the significance of contemporary events and debates such as the Cold War or the Civil Rights Movement, and how she both responded to and ‘aesthetically transformed’ them (from Gretlund and Westarp’s Introduction). It is, all-in-all, a fascinating collection exploring O’Connor’s work and the world she lived in.

Interested in O’Connor’s work? A number of her books are available at the EFL, including her two novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1950), as well as her Collected Works (1988, ed. Sally Fitzgerald).