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).

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.

This Black History Month, we wanted to highlight just some of the work by black writers which arrived at the library in September. These works range from short stories and novels to poetry and non-fiction, by black British, African American, and Zimbabwean authors. The books encompass themes of identity, home and belonging, and of political activism, racism and injustice; but they also speak of hope in a world where nothing is fixed and everything can be changed. As ever, you can find all our new books over on LibraryThing. 

Ferdinand Dennis, The Black and White Museum (2022).

Ferdinand Dennis was born in Jamaica before moving to London with his family at the age of eight, and themes of migration and one’s roots are woven into the very fabric of his work. The Black and White Museum, a short story collection which follows a series of characters in London, is no exception. Together, the stories encompass ‘generational conflict, the social threat of black men, the wistful longings that disrupt lives, [and] the powerlessness of the old’ (from the publisher) against a backdrop of gentrification and change in London since the mid-twentieth century. As Dennis’s characters grow older, some are tempted to leave London and return ‘home’, only to find that just like the London of their youth, home has changed too. Dennis often leaves his characters and their stories abruptly, before any sense of resolution is reached. This has the effect of underlining the uprooted, interrupted, and diasporic experiences of so many of Dennis’s characters, all of whom ultimately want only to feel that they belong.

Also by Ferdinand Dennis at the EFL: Duppy Conqeuror (1998) ; Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (2000).

Natasha Brown, Assembly (2021). 

Perhaps the first thing you might notice about Natasha Brown’s debut novel is its brevity – it runs to only 100 pages, and even the narrative style is characterised by brief and fleeting vignettes in the life of its unnamed narrator. That narrator is a black British woman who has achieved all the trappings of success, from an Oxbridge education to homeownership and a successful career. But when she is diagnosed with cancer, those successes start to ring hollow. By unpacking her narrator’s experiences, Brown confronts the reader with the endless, everyday racism black British women face. This, then, is ‘a story about the stories we live within – those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers’ (from the publisher). The brevity of Brown’s prose does not detract from the relentless and exhausting racism her narrator comes up against, nor does it diminish the emotional punch of the novel’s conclusion.   

June Jordan, The Essential June Jordan (2021). Edited by Christoph Keller and Jan Heller Levi.

June Jordan (1936-2002) was an American poet, activist, journalist, essayist, and teacher. She wrote prolifically, publishing over 25 works of poetry, fiction, and essays, as well as children’s books, journalism, and even lyrics for musicians, plays and musicals. Not only was she an active participant in the politics and struggles that defined the USA in the second half of the twentieth century – from civil rights and feminism to the anti-war and gay and lesbian rights movements – she chronicled those movements too. In this collection, you will find poems exploring issues of gender, race, immigration, and much more, all characterised by Jordan’s ‘dazzling stylistic range’. These are poems ‘moved as much by political animus as by a deep love for the observation of human life in all its foibles, eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses’ (from the publisher). While her poems can and indeed should be read as revealing the heart of the politics, debates and struggles of twentieth-century America, they should also be celebrated for their beauty and musicality.   

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (2020). Edited by Kevin Young.

This anthology of African American poetry, edited by Kevin Young, covers an incredible breadth of poets, poetry, and time periods. The poems are presented in chronological blocks, taking the reader all the way from 1770 to 2020. The poetry styles range from formal to experimental, vernacular, and protest poetry. The selections are hugely varied in terms of theme, too, encompassing ‘beauty and injustice, music and muses, Africa and America, freedoms and foodways, Harlem and history, funk and opera, boredom and longing, jazz and joy’ (from Young’s Introduction). Featuring contemporary African American poets alongside little-known and often out-of-print older works, this is a truly expansive anthology. But Young doesn’t only offer us an enormous breadth of poetry and poets. Each work sits alongside a biography of its author, as well as comprehensive notes which highlight the cultural and historical contexts of the works and, indeed, of the African American experience since the late eighteenth century.

NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory (2022).

Glory is NoViolet Bulawayo’s second novel and, just like her debut (We Need New Names, 2013 – also at the EFL), it features on the Booker Prize shortlist. Bulawayo here satirises Robert Mugabe’s surprise fall from power in Zimbabwe, in the form of a reimagining of Orwell’s Animal Farm described as ‘allegory, satire and fairytale rolled into one mighty punch’ (from The Guardian’s review, March 2022). The country of Jadada has the longest-serving leader any country has ever had, a horse named Old Horse – that is, until he is deposed and supplanted by his erstwhile vice-president turned rival. The hope that regime-change brings quickly gives way to despair once it becomes clear that the corruption, violence, and struggles of daily life in fact remain the same. Into the gap left by lost hope steps Destiny, a young goat newly returned from exile, who seeks to witness and document the cycle of revolution and violence. While anyone familiar with the events in Zimbabwe of late 2017 will recognise certain figures and moments, there is also a universality to Bulawayo’s observations and the innovative dexterity of her prose that speaks to something timeless and entirely human.  

Also by NoViolet Bulawayo at the EFL: We Need New Names (2013).

Race in American Literature and Culture (2022). Edited by John Ernest.

In this volume of essays, edited by John Ernest, you’ll find explorations of the representations of race in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, representations which – it is argued – are key to understanding the whole of the United States. After all, race shapes everything, from economic policy to where people live, forming the ‘ominous subtext’ of the legal, judicial, and wider governmental infrastructure of the state. The contributors to this volume explore how literature has variously been used both to cement racial visual images in the public consciousness and to fight back against those images, to separate people along racial lines and to form communities. Taken together, the essays do not aim to provide a comprehensive or chronological history of race in American literature; rather, they seek to ‘place readers in this chaotic process of literary and cultural development – caught up in a story, already in progress’ (from Ernest’s Introduction).   

Also available as an ebook.

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.

Welcome, dear readers, to the summer vacation! Vacation loans are in full swing, so if you want to nab yourselves any of these intriguing titles, you’ll have to act fast! Books now don’t have to be returned until October, so grab them while you can. As always, here’s a brief selection of some of our newest titles this month. You can find the full list over on LibraryThing.

Meredith Farmer and Jonathan D. S. Schroeder. Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn. 2022.

Ahab Unbound takes one of the most tyrannical characters of fiction – Captain Ahab – and attempts to extend to him some compassion. The essays in this book place Ahab as the centre of a number of research areas – animals, race and ethnicity, disability, environmental humanities, medicine, politics, and posthumanism. As a kingpin in materiality, Ahab’s character becomes a focal point for criticism in our current moment, and for wider questions about the borders of our world and the violence we enact on each other and the world around us.

Monica Youn. Blackacre. 2016.

Blackacre is a very decorated collection of poetry: winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award. The collection focuses on the body, particularly the unexplored relationships between your body and your expectations. This book is both powerful and intimate, employing an exquisite combination of poetic skill and brutal honesty.

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

Emma Smith. Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers. 2022.

This is a delightful delve into books – not the words, not the stories or characters or themes, but the book as an object in itself. Smith dives into the history of the book, touching on topics such as mass-market production, early printing, and even astounding anecdotes like books made of cheese and how our reading habits are shaped by American soldiers. Prepare yourself to crack the spine of why books are a kind of brilliant, and even sometimes dangerous, magic for us all.

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

Maria Tatar. The Fairest of Them All. Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters. 2020.

This book is a look at the cultural strata of fairy tales, the layers of magic and mythology in the stories that we know and repeat. The word ‘fair’ is key, throughout the history of myths and folktales, and it speaks richly of the pitting of woman against woman, of mother-daughter conflict, of more than just Disney’s ‘skin as white as snow’. How do we constantly keep these stories new and relevant for our modern world? What can these classic tales tell us about current issues?

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

Jami Rogers. British Black and Ashian Shakespeareans: Integrating Shakespeare 1966-2018. 2022.

This book looks at the little-known history of of Black and Asian Shakespeare performance, using first-hand accounts and interviews with nearly forty performers. This book covers both the gains of and challenges still facing Black and Asian Shakespeareans such as Joseph Marcell, Adrian Lester, Josette Simon, Lolita Chakrabarti, Rakie Ayola, and Noma Dumezweni (who’s featured on the cover art).

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

We’re in the midst of Trinity Term, and we know lots of you are either up to your eyeballs in assessments or you’ve just finished them. Either way, we’ve decided this month to bring you a selection of books that are (for the most part) either delightful distractions or restful and relaxing. To see our full selection of shiny new books, head on our to the English Faculty Library’s LibraryThing page.

Marina Warner. Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir. 2021.

In this book, Marina Warner tells the story of her mother and father, of an international marriage, and of a relationship that crosses Italy, England, and Cairo – through separation, war, and uprisings. What makes this story all the more remarkable is that it is pieced together from fragments of letters, diaries, film negatives, gifts, and mementoes – scraps of a life recovered between memory and myth. It battles with social differences, cultural influence, and the dangers of assumed privilege and power.

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

Peter Davidson. The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered. 2021.

The image of the lighted window is one popular throughout art, literature, and music. Davidson explores some examples of this concept – Virginia Woolf, Samuel Palmer, Edward Hopper, etc. – and blends them with place writing, memoir, and artwork to produce a book that is just perfect to read of an evening, in a lighted window. The books spans Britain, Europe, and North America, from cities to the countryside, but starts in a familiar library in Oxford…

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

Michael Kalisch. The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction. 2021.

A slightly more academic suggestion here… How much does our representation of male friendship in the American novel reflect ideas of democracy, national identity, and the history of sexuality? Kalisch’s book aims to examine this question through the lens of literature, philosophy, and sociology, dipping into the ideas of late twentieth-century communitarian debates on citizenship. To do so, Michael Kalisch draws on the work of Philip Roth, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole, among others.

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

Chris Kraus. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. 2017.

Kathy Acker is a renowned writer of unique, transgressive, and postmodern poems, plays, and essays. She’s known for exploring rebellion, sexuality, and trauma in her work. Here, Kraus has transposed her wild life to a clever biography that celebrates her rebellious spirit, self-mythologising style, and counter-cultural stardom. Not only does Kraus rejoice in Acker’s life, but she treats her work with the respect and seriousness it deserves as boundary-pushing art.

Purchased through the E. H. W. Meyerstein bequest grant.

Michael Adams. From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages. 2011.

Those of you who caught our fantasy fiction display back in Hilary term will know that there’s at least one Tolkien fan in the EFL staff – so join us and indulge your nerdy philologist with this delightful book on invented languages! But don’t worry if Tolkien’s not your cup of tea, this insightful book looks at a range of languages from Klingon to Esperanto, from Newspeak to Simlish. But Adams doesn’t only examine how these languages are created, but why they’re made, and what they say about the wider society within which they exist.