As always, we’ve had lots of new books flying into the library this month! Did you know you can find our new books on the display as you come into the library? You often need to be quick to catch them – if you miss something, you can always find it on LibraryThing.

Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (2022).

Brooks (1917-2000) was a highly celebrated poet. In 1950 she became the first Black author to win a Pulitzer Prize and, among her many other awards and prizes, she also received a National Endowment for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award.

Maud Martha is her only novel; originally published in 1953, this is the first time it has been published in Britain. Comprised of thirty-four vignettes, the novel follows the life of the titular Maud Martha Brown from her childhood in 1940s Chicago as she grows up, starts relationships and has a family, and as she experiences loss, heartbreak, and the racist indignities, tragedies, and humiliations of life for African Americans in the mid-twentieth century.

It is the story of an ordinary life which, through Brooks’s beautiful, lyrical and evocative prose style, is transformed into something exquisite, in which everyday mundanities are elevated to something insightful, universal and profound. Brooks herself described the chapters ‘as “tiny stories’: condensed narratives which pack in as much drama, tragedy and comedy as thousand page novels’ (from the publisher). Described by Bernardine Evaristo as a ‘lost literary treasure’, this is ‘a poetic collage of happenings that forms an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary life’ (from the cover). 

Also at the EFL: The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (2005). Edited by Elizabeth Alexander. 

Beguma Rokeya, Motichur: Sultana’s Dream and Other Writings of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (2015). 

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932, also known by the honorific Beguma Rokeya) is lauded as Bengal’s earliest feminist writer. However, although she is well-known and celebrated in Bengali history, she has received little attention from western audiences.

Born in what is now Bangladesh, she educated herself despite her family’s opposition. She championed human rights and especially women’s rights, advocating strongly for an end to the oppression of Muslim women. Fundamentally, Rokeya believed women had the same potential as men but that they were denied opportunities. In her writing, she explores how women might throw off the oppression they suffer under.

For example, in Sultana’s Dream, one of the texts in this volume, Rokeya describes a feminist utopia free from patriarchal oppression – there is no child marriage, women’s education is encouraged, and there is a strong emphasis on truthfulness. She shows the traditional gender hierarchy completely reversed: instead of men oppressing women through use of strength, women have tricked men into subjugation by using their brains. Rokeya’s prose is more pragmatic than artistic – she looked primarily to the edification of her readers, rather than turning her pen to any merely literary or aesthetic end – allowing the feminist ideas she championed to shine through.

Available online (with an Oxford SSO login): The Essential Rokeya: Selected works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932) (2013). Edited by Mohammad A. Quayum.

Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2020).

Percival Everett has written a huge amount over a career spanning two decades – I Am Not Sidney Poitier, originally published in 2009, is his 17th novel. The story follows the life of Not Sidney Poitier, who, aged 11, inherits a huge sum of money and spends the rest of his life trying to establish who he is, and who he is not. This quest for identity is not helped by the fact that the events in Not Sidney’s life begin to mirror the life and films of the actual Sidney Poitier.

While some knowledge of actual-Poitier’s films will add more layers to the narration, it’s not necessary in order to appreciate what is undoubtedly a comedy, with misunderstandings and farcical situations spilling from the pages. But Everett does not only reveal the ridiculous elements of Not Sidney’s coming-of-age story, as the novel is also profoundly concerned with race, class and celebrity in America today. Through Not Sidney, Everett explores the negation of identity, especially the apparent requirement for African-Americans ‘to erase their identities and become colour-free’ (from NPR review). Like much of Everett’s canon, I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a layered work which is all at once comic, tragic, and fundamentally thought-provoking.  

Also by Percival Everett at the EFL: Erasure: A novel (2003) ; Glyph: A novel (2014).

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (2020).

In the Dream House is on one level a memoir of an abusive lesbian relationship, with the horror of the unnamed partner’s cruelty slowly becoming clear to Machado and the reader. But this simplification does a disservice to the innovative, experimental nature of Machado’s writing.

More than documenting the relationship, Machado aims to build a language and frame of reference to talk about abuse in queer relationships, a task she described as building an ’archive’. To do so, Machado draws on a plethora of genres, from romance to lesbian pulp-fiction and road-trip narratives. This genre-hopping is a little unsettling, preventing you from getting too comfortable while reflecting the realities of life – after all, ‘What relationship exists in purely one genre? What life?’ (from NYT review).

But these are not mere exercises in style – they combine to powerfully demonstrate how form and expectations constrain us, and yet without them we struggle to say anything. The result is a fascinating work of activism which facilitates and encourages openness about the fact that queer and heterosexual relationships alike can be abusive. Combining inventiveness with unmitigated honesty, it is ‘a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be’ (from the publisher). 

Don Paterson, The Arctic (2022).

Paterson is a highly decorated poet, having won multiple awards including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. The Arctic is Paterson’s 10th collection and takes its name from the pub which features in the fourth part of his ongoing poem ‘The Alexandrian Library’, though it’s also the name of a real pub in Dundee.

The other poems in the collection are disparate in their subjects – ranging from the climate crisis to coronavirus and the war in Ukraine – yet they are united in the ‘rigorous pessimism, comic vitriol and unswerving formal skill’ of the poet (from the Guardian’s review). They are often mournful, such as the researcher atop Ben Nevis who ‘had started to upload my stats to the cloud / when the cloud disappeared’ (p.62), or the fruit-laden tree in the collection’s concluding poem, ‘refilling and refilling his own cup, / not giving a damn if it could keep it up’ (p.82).

Indeed, a strong sense of endings permeates the collection; as Paterson says, ‘Ends write themselves, but where to begin.’ (p.61). This is, then, a thoughtful and fascinating collection from a masterful poet, imbued with melancholy and not a little of Paterson’s characteristic outrage (from The Scotsman).

There are many other works by Don Paterson at the EFL. You can browse them on SOLO.

Elisa Tamarkin, Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (2022).

In this intriguing book, Elisa Tamarkin explores how relevance emerged as a concept and as a way of ordering and understanding – or perhaps more accurately filtering – the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This was a key issue which exercised the minds of Anglo-American intellectual figures, from philosophers to critics, linguists and sociologists, and yet the terms ‘relevant’ and ‘irrelevant’ are comparatively young. Although the word ‘relevant’ has been used in a legal context since the sixteenth century, Tamarkin argues its current usage dates back only as far as the late eighteenth century. She also notes that the vocabulary of relevance and irrelevance is peculiarly English – there were initially no direct translations in other European languages, and many have since adopted variations of the English words (such as the French relevante or German Relevanz). Tamarkin ultimately asks why some things – objects, concepts, or events – are raised into ‘relevancy’ while others are relegated to irrelevancy and obscurity, and why this process of relevancy became so interesting to the intellectuals of the last 200-odd years.