1. Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems
Author: by Stephanie Burt
Published at: Basic Books (May 21, 2019)
An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys-and challenges-of the genreIn Don’t Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another-and how they can speak to our lives.
She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter.
She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about “poetry,” whether we think we like it or think we don’t, in order to help us cherish-and distinguish among-individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don’t Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingnues and cognoscenti alike.
2. Reading Buechner: Exploring the Work of a Master Memoirist, Novelist, Theologian, and Preacher
Author: by Jeffrey Munroe
Published at: IVP Books; Annotated edition (November 19, 2019)
Frederick Buechner is one of the most gifted writers of his generation, and his legacy casts a long shadow over Christian letters today. As a memoirist, he opened up an entirely new way to think about the genre. As a novelist, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer.
And as a theologian and preacher, he pioneered the art of making theology accessible for a popular audience. Yet for all Buechner’s enormous influence, many readers today are unfamiliar with his work, or have read him only in one genre.
In this book, Buechner expert Jeffrey Munroe presents a collection of the true “essentials” from across Buechner’s diverse catalog, as well as an overview of Buechner’s life and a discussion of the state of his literary legacy today. Here is Buechner in all his complex glory, ready to delight and inspire again.
3. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
Author: by David Shields
Published at: Vintage; unknown edition (February 8, 2011)
A landmark book, brilliant, thoughtful (The Atlantic) and raw and gorgeous (LA Times), that fast-forwards the discussion of the central artistic issues of our time, from the bestselling author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead.Who owns ideas?
How clear is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Has the velocity of digital culture rendered traditional modes obsolete? Exploring these and related questions, Shields orchestrates a chorus of voices, past and present, to reframe debates about the veracity of memoir and the relevance of the novel.
He argues that our culture is obsessed with reality, precisely because we experience hardly any, and urgently calls for new forms that embody and convey the fractured nature of contemporary experience.
4. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age (Literature Now)
Author: by Jessica Pressman
Published at: Columbia University Press (December 1, 2020)
Twenty-first-century culture is obsessed with books. In a time when many voices have joined to predict the death of print, books continue to resurface in new and unexpected ways. From the proliferation of shelfies to Jane Austenthemed leggings and from decorative pillows printed with beloved book covers to bookwork sculptures exhibited in prestigious collections, books are everywhere and are not just for reading.
Writers have caught up with this trend: many contemporary novels depict books as central characters or fetishize paper and print thematically and formally. In Bookishness, Jessica Pressman examines the new status of the book as object and symbol. She explores the rise of bookishness as an identity and an aesthetic strategy that proliferates from store-window dcor to experimental writing.
Ranging from literature to kitsch objects, stop-motion animation films to book design, Pressman considers the multivalent meanings of books in contemporary culture. Books can represent shelter fromor a weapon againstthe dangers of the digital; they can act as memorials and express a sense of loss.
5. The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing
Author: by Margot Livesey
Published at: Tin House Books; 1st edition (July 4, 2017)
A masterclass for those who love reading literature and for those who aspire to write it. Read everything that is good for the good of your soul. Then learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinery, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice to comprehend.
Her essays range in subject matter from navigating the shoals of research to creating characters that walk off the page, from how Flaubert came to write his first novel to how Jane Austen subverted romance in her last one. As much at home on your nightstand as it is in the classroom, The Hidden Machinery will become a book readers and writers return to over and over again.
Author: by Timothy Larsen
Published at: IVP Academic (April 2, 2019)
Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist Marilynne Robinson is one of the most eminent public intellectuals in America today. In addition to literary elegance, her trilogy of novels (Gilead, Home, and Lila) and her collections of essays offer probing meditations on the Christian faith.
Many of these reflections are grounded in her belief that the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin still deserves a hearing in the twenty-first century. This volume, based on the 2018 Wheaton Theology Conference, brings together the thoughts of leading theologians, historians, literary scholars, and church leaders who engaged in theological dialogue with Robinson’s published workand with the author herself.
7. Lecture (Undelivered Lectures)
Author: by Mary Cappello
Published at: Transit Books (September 8, 2020)
“[Cappello’s] excellent new book-length essay, Lecture… At once defends the lecture and calls for holistic and creative improvements to the form.”The AtlanticIn twenty-first century America, there is so much that holds or demands our attention without requiring it. Imagine the lecture as a radical opening.
Mary Cappello’s Lecture is a song for the forgotten art of the lecture. Brimming with energy and erudition, it is an attempt to restore the lecture’s capacity to wander, question, and excite. Cappello draws on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin, blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history to explore the lecture in its many formsfrom the aphorism to the noteand give new life to knowledge’s dramatic form.
8. Inventing the Enemy
Author: by Umberto Eco
Published at: Mariner Books; F First Paperback Edition Used (September 24, 2013)
Underscores the writer’s profound erudition, lively wit, and passion for ideas of all shapes and sizes … Eco’s pleasure in such explorations is obvious and contagious. BooklistInventing the Enemy covers a wide range of topics on which Eco has written and lectured over the past ten years: from a disquisition on the theme that runs through his recent novel The Prague Cemetery every country needs an enemy, and if it doesn’t have one, must invent it to a discussion of ideas that have inspired his earlier novels (and in the process he takes us on an exploration of lost islands, mythical realms, and the medieval world); from indignant reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses by fascist journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, to an examination of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s notions about the soul of an unborn child, to censorship and violence and WikiLeaks.
These are essays full of passion, curiosity, and obsession by one of the world’s most esteemed scholars and critically acclaimed, best-selling novelists. True wit and wisdom coexist with fierce scholarship inside Umberto Eco, a writer who actually knows a thing or two about being truly human.
9. To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (Bagley Wright Lecture Series)
Author: by Terrance Hayes
Published at: Wave Books; 1st Edition (September 4, 2018)
Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air. NPRIn these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself. Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poet’s search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America.
The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography. Fathers who go missing and fathers who are distant will become the bones of the stories. There will be a fable about a giant who grew too tall to be kissed by his father.
My father must have kissed me when I was boy.I can’t really say…. By the time I was eleven or even ten years old I was as tall as him. I was six inches taller than him by the time I was fifteen.
My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache. Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; and three other award-winning poetry collections.
10. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
Published at: University of Chicago Press; Illustrated edition (August 10, 2016)
We are currently facing the sixth mass extinction of species in the history of life on Earth, biologists claimthe first one caused by humans. Activists, filmmakers, writers, and artists are seeking to bring the crisis to the public’s attention through stories and images that use the strategies of elegy, tragedy, epic, and even comedy.
Imagining Extinction is the first book to examine the cultural frameworks shaping these narratives and images.Ursula K. Heise argues that understanding these stories and symbols is indispensable for any effective advocacy on behalf of endangered species. More than that, she shows how biodiversity conservation, even and especially in its scientific and legal dimensions, is shaped by cultural assumptions about what is valuable in nature and what is not.
These assumptions are hardwired into even seemingly neutral tools such as biodiversity databases and laws for the protection of endangered species. Heise shows that the conflicts and convergences of biodiversity conservation with animal welfare advocacy, environmental justice, and discussions about the Anthropocene open up a new vision of multispecies justice.
Author: by Leah Price
Published at: Basic Books (August 20, 2019)
Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated Do you worry that you’ve lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you’re not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day’s news, the willingness to be alone.
The shelves of the world’s great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multitasked.
Print-era doctors even forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions. The evidence that books are dying proves even scarcer. In encounters with librarians, booksellers and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Price offers fresh hope to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike.
12. The Federalist Papers: Complete Collection of 85 essays Written in Favor of the New Constitution
Author: by Publius
Published at: Independently published (December 27, 2019)
The Federalist, commonly known as The Federalist Papers is a collection of 85 written essays. They appeared between October 1787 and May 1788 in various publications as a way to convince New Yorkers of the need to ratify the United States Constitution. The Federalist Papers was the mastermind of Alexander Hamilton well known for his multilayered works in establishing many of the principles of the United States.
Hamilton recruited the assistance of James Madison and John Jay to assist in the writings of the various 85 essays. Collectively they used the nom de plume “Publius” for various reasons. The principle reason was to avoid ad hominem attacks to and from Governor Clinton who pushed against the Constitution.
Hamilton’s methods and presentations within the Federalist Papers were considered superior to his own plans for the Constitution in the Philadelphia convention. These collective essays are largely considered some of the greatest contributions to the literature regarding federalism, democracy and Western political leanings of the late 1700’s.
13. Treatise on the Whole-World: by Édouard Glissant (The Glissant Translation Project)
Author: by Celia Britton
Published at: Liverpool University Press (July 31, 2020)
This exciting, challenging book covers a wide range of subject matter, but all linked together through the key ideas of diversity and ‘Relation’. It sees our modern world, shaped by immigration and the aftermath of colonization, as a multiplicity of different communities interacting and evolving together, and argues passionately against all political and philosophical attempts to impose uniformity, universal or absolute values.
This is the ‘Whole-World’, which includes not only these objective phenomena but also our consciousness of them. Our personal identities are not fixed and self-sufficient but formed in Relation’ through our contacts with others. Glissant constantly stresses the unpredictable, ‘chaotic’ nature of the world, which, he claims, we must adapt to and not attempt to limit or control.