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).