The new books have been flying into the English Faculty Library thick and fast this summer! Our Library Assistants have been squirreling away to get books on the shelves for you – and here’s a little selection of some that caught our eye. You can see the full selection over on LibraryThing.
Juliana Spahr. That Winter the Wolf Came. 2015.
Poetry meets prose meets essay in this elusive, electrifying, and engaging collection that’s both political and deeply emotional. Its work is formed from gathered pieces and blended into juxtaposed art that examines ecology, policing, the natural world, parenting, and capitalism. Despite its relative age, the subject matter feels incredibly topical. Juliana Spahr’s writing is both stripped back and reserved, relying on building tensions, overlapping phrases, and clever parallels to create a poetic collage. This book is more than just the sizable sum of its intelligent and insightful parts.
Henry Dumas. John Keene. Eugene B. Redmond (ed.). Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas. 2021.
Through science fiction, ghost stories, psychological thrillers and more, Dumas creates here a broad series of experimental short-story portraits about the lives of black people in America. He connects to his contemporary world, the future, and the past through mythology and folklore, with an unflinching portrayal of systemic oppression. This collection also contains an introduction by John Keene and a foreword by Eugene B. Redmond, properly contextualising Dumas and his aesthetic.
Rosi Braidotti. Posthuman Feminism. 2022.
Braidotti defines the posthuman condition as “a convergence between posthumanism on the one hand and anthropocentrism on the other” (blurb). How do feminists, in a modern world stamped by the backlash of patriarchy and white supremacy, grapple with this posthuman condition? And why have posthuman studies largely ignored feminist theory, when Braidotti argues that feminism is its precursor? That each will always feed and mutually support the other? This book is electrifying, exciting, and broad-ranging in its scope: it examines sexism, racism, ecocide, and neoliberal capitalism.
Andreas Malm. The Zetkin Collective. White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. 2021.
The Zetkin Collective, for those unfamiliar, is a large collection of scholars, activists, and students who are researching the political ecology of the far right. In this vein, this book describes itself as “the first study of the far right’s role in the climate crisis” (blurb). Malm and TZC (The Zetkin Collective) delve into the history of the ways in which the fossil fuel industry are entrenched in racism, and how the far right are influencing their current practices. This includes topics such as border politics, climate denialism, and ecofascism.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Heads of the Colored People. 2019.
This book is a lively and often funny collection of twelve short stories. Each examines the lives of black Americans, exposing the so-called ‘post-racial era’ for its racial violence against apparently successful individuals. At its heart, the collection follows the coming-of-age of one young woman trying to negotiate her identity in an uncertain world. This book is clever, comedic, and critical. Despite that, it also has a whole lot of heart to it as well. Not to mention the fact that these short, snappy stories are easy to devour in bite-size chunks, making the act of reading thoroughly pleasurable.
Purchased through the Drue Heinz Fund.