With Hilary Term all wrapped up, we’ve reached everyone’s favourite time of month again. That’s right, it’s time for your monthly highlights from the EFL’s new books list! Cosy down against the last of the winter chill with a good book. As always, you can find the complete collection over on LibraryThing.
James Naremore. Letter from an Unknown Woman. 2021.
One for the film scholars, here! What started in 1922 as a novel by Stefan Zweig was later adapted into a movie by Max Ophuls in 1948. In 2021, James Naremore published this nuanced analysis of the movie. Naremore looks at the film’s reception, its place in feminist theory and criticism, and what the blurb calls “the poetics of melodramatic recognition, in which the revelation of a character’s identity leads to crisis and political revolution.” This book was published as part of the BFI Film Classics Series.
Jessica Traynor. Pit Lullabies. 2022.
This poetry collection is equal parts chilling and enthralling. The poems here lift the creatures of folklore – witches, changelings, spirits, and more – and uses them to deal with the unsettling human afflictions of death and illness. Delicate and sometimes grotesque, both delightful and disturbing, these poems explore themes such as parenthood, violence against women, and environmental destruction, and what the blurb describes as “the anxieties which plague us when night falls”. It’s no surprise that Jessica Traynor’s Pit Lullabies was given a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall. Prison Writing and the Literary World: Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice. 2021.
Kelly and Westall use this book to take an international and interdisciplinary approach to the study of prison literature. They investigate aesthetics, values, censorship, institutionalisation, and criticism, looking at everything from political imprisonment to questions of building nations to theatre and writing in the prison environment. This wide-reaching and fascinating book sheds a light on an important facet of literature.
Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.
Warsan Shire. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head. 2022.
This is the first full-length poetry collection by Warsan Shire, and it’s both tender and fearless. The poems explore the life of a girl struggling to find her way to womanhood without a guiding hand, touching on pop culture and the news as well as in-jokes and banter. The experiences of women – black women, refugees, immigrants, and teenagers – are examined in adoring and vivid detail between the pages and lines of this book. It’s an experience that places you – literally, by the cover design – inside the head of ‘the daughter’.
Christopher Isherwood. Christopher and His Kind. 2012.
This memoir follows the life of Christopher Isherwood from 1929-1939, when he lived in Berlin. The book explores Isherwood’s life there, in particular “the decadence of Berlin’s night scene and his route to sexual liberation” (blurb) – a choice that Isherwood made to refuse his own self-censorship and contribute to gay liberation. The memoir also follows the Nazi Party’s rise to power, and Christopher’s “struggle to save his partner Heinz from persecution” (blurb).
Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.