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Literature

Literature Book List

Cover of 'Secure the Shadow'

Secure the Shadow
A Novel
By Michael Henson

Set in an unnamed midwestern city and told from multiple perspectives, Henson’s latest novel about addiction and the power of community offers an unseen portrait of the far-reaching and sometimes tragic effects of the 1990s drug crisis.

Fiction | City Life · Literature

Cover of 'Fine Boys'

Fine Boys
A Novel
By Eghosa Imasuen

Set in Nigeria during the pro-democracy movement and told from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old Gen-Xer, Ewaen, this coming-of-age novel examines the violent university confraternities during the mid-1990s.

Fiction | World Literature | Africa | Nigeria · Literary Fiction · Nigeria · Literature · African Studies · Fiction

Cover of 'Allegiance'

Allegiance
Stories
By Gurney Norman

Spanning forty years of work, Allegiance is an autobiography told through stories—a rich personal journey into Norman’s life, place, and consciousness. In classic short stories, lyrical meditations, folktales, dreamscapes, and stream of consciousness writing, Norman imaginatively weaves together the threads of his life.

Short Stories (single author) · Appalachia · Fiction · Literature

Cover of 'Allegiance'

Allegiance
Stories
By Gurney Norman

Spanning forty years of work, Allegiance is an autobiography told through stories—a rich personal journey into Norman’s life, place, and consciousness. In classic short stories, lyrical meditations, folktales, dreamscapes, and stream of consciousness writing, Norman imaginatively weaves together the threads of his life.

Short Stories (single author) · Appalachia · Fiction · Literature

Cover of 'English Lit'

English Lit
Poems
By Bernard Clay

Affrilachian Poet Bernard Clay narrates his West-Side Louisville upbringing and the complexities of Black Appalachian identity in this debut collection of poems compiled from more than twenty years of work.

Poetry | American | African American · Social Science | Regional Studies · Poetry | Subjects & Themes | Places · Kentucky · Appalachia · Poetry · Literature

Cover of 'House of Incest'

House of Incest
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Allison Pease
· Foreword by Gunther Stuhlmann

Originally published in 1936,  House of Incest  is Anaïs Nin’s first work of fiction. Based on Nin’s dreams, the novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator’s subconscious as she attempts to distance herself from a series of all-consuming and often taboo desires.

Fiction | Psychological · American Literature · Literature · Anaïs Nin

Cover of 'Weedeater'

Weedeater
An Illustrated Novel
By Robert Gipe

Weedeater picks up six years after the end of Robert Gipe’s first novel, Trampoline, and continues the story of the people of Canard County, Kentucky, living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and battling with opioid abuse. The events it chronicles are frantic, but its voice is filled with humor and grace.

Fiction | Small Town & Rural · Appalachia · Literature

Cover of 'Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio'

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Sherwood Anderson
· Edited by Ray Lewis White

In 1919 a middle-aged Chicago ad man facing professional and personal crises published a modest book of stories intended to “reform” American literature. Against all expectations, it achieved what its author, Sherwood Anderson, intended: after Winesburg, Ohio, American literature would be written and read freshly and differently.

Fiction | Small Town & Rural · Short Stories (single author) · Ohio · Midwest · Literature

Cover of 'Good-bye, Son and Other Stories'

Good-bye, Son and Other Stories
By Janet Lewis

Lewis’ only collection of short fiction was first published in 1946, but remains as quietly haunting today as it was then. Set in small communities of the upper Midwest and northern California in the ’30s and ’40s, these midcentury gems focus on the quiet cycles connecting youth and age, despair and hope, life and death.

Literary Fiction · Short Stories (single author) · American Literature · Women Authors · Literature

Cover of 'Not Out of Hate'

Not Out of Hate
A Novel of Burma
By Ma Ma Lay
· Edited by William H. Frederick
· Translation by Margaret Aung-Thwin
· Introduction by Anna Allott
· Afterword by Robert E. Vore

Ma Ma Lay’s 1955 novel of the marriage between a rural teenager to a powerful Anglophile twenty years her senior, set in prewar Burma, is an engaging drama, finely observed work of social realism, and stirring rejection of Western cultural dominance by Burma’s foremost female author and one of its preeminent voices for change.

Fiction · Asian Literature · Burma · Southeast Asian Studies · Literature

Cover of 'Good-bye, Son and Other Stories'

Good-bye, Son and Other Stories
By Janet Lewis

Lewis’ only collection of short fiction was first published in 1946, but remains as quietly haunting today as it was then. Set in small communities of the upper Midwest and northern California in the ’30s and ’40s, these midcentury gems focus on the quiet cycles connecting youth and age, despair and hope, life and death.

Literary Fiction · Short Stories (single author) · American Literature · Women Authors · Literature

Cover of 'Literature and Resistance in Guatemala'

Literature and Resistance in Guatemala
Textual Modes and Cultural Politics from El Señor Presidente to Rigoberta Menchú
By Marc Zimmerman

What circumstances lead writers in a poor, multi-ethnic and largely illiterate country to produce a literature that both expresses and affects opposition to the regime? Who are these writers? This study examines these and other questions about the literature of resistance in Guatemala, from the days of Estrada Cabrera up to the events of May and June of 1993.Zimmerman

Literary Criticism, Latin America · Latin American Studies · Literature

Cover of 'Lyrical Liberators'

Lyrical Liberators
The American Antislavery Movement in Verse, 1831–1865
Edited by Monica Pelaez

Before Black Lives Matter and Hamilton, there were abolitionist poets. In Lyrical Liberators, Monica Pelaez draws on unprecedented archival research to recover, collect, and annotate works by critically acclaimed writers, commercially successful scribes, and minority voices including those of African Americans and women.

Literary Criticism, US · Slavery and Slave Trade · American Civil War · African American Studies · Literature

Cover of 'Writing an Icon'

Writing an Icon
Celebrity Culture and the Invention of Anaïs Nin
By Anita Jarczok

Before Madonna and her many imitators, there was Anaïs Nin, the diarist, novelist, and provocateur. Jarczok reveals how Nin crafted her personae, which she rewrote and restyled to suit her needs, and how she occupied a singular space in 20th-century culture, as a literary figure, a voice of female sexual liberation, and a celebrity.

Literary Criticism, US · Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Women’s Studies · Literature · Anaïs Nin

Cover of 'Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century'

Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century
Abstracting Economics
Edited by Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp

Grounded in literary studies and spanning the Americas, India, England, and Scotland, this book explores the relationship between economic concepts and culture in the period, focusing on how economic tropes were abstracted into other discourses in fields as diverse as evolutionary science, business, and literary narrative.

Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Economic History · Literature · Victorian Studies

Cover of 'Reading for Health'

Reading for Health
Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
By Erika Wright

In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health.

Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · Literature · Social Science | Disease & Health Issues

Cover of 'Trampoline'

Trampoline
An Illustrated Novel
By Robert Gipe

When Dawn Jewell—fifteen, restless, curious, and wry—joins her grandmother’s fight against mountaintop removal mining in spite of herself, she has to decide whether to save a mountain or save herself; be ruled by love or by anger; remain in the land of her birth or run for her life. Inspired by oral tradition and punctuated by Gipe’s raw and whimsical drawings Trampoline is a powerful portrait of a place.

Fiction | Small Town & Rural · Appalachia · Literature

Cover of 'Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean'

Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean
Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia
Edited by Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray

In essays that take wide-ranging forms—ideal for creative nonfiction classes—established and emerging writers with roots in Appalachia take on the theme of silencing in Appalachian culture. They write about families left behind, hard-earned educations, selves transformed, identities chosen, and risks taken.

American Literature · Appalachia · Literature · Creative Nonfiction

Cover of 'The Victorian Novel of Adulthood'

The Victorian Novel of Adulthood
Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity
By Rebecca Rainof

In The Victorian Novel of Adulthood, Rebecca Rainof confronts the conventional deference accorded the bildungsroman as the ultimate plot model and quintessential expression of Victorian nation building. The novel of maturity, she contends, is no less important to our understanding of narrative, Victorian culture, and the possibilities of fiction.Reading

Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literature · Victorian Studies

Cover of 'Mirages'

Mirages
The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1947
By Anaïs Nin
· Edited by Paul Herron
· Introduction by Kim Krizan
· Preface by Paul Herron

Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,” during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love.

Literary Collections | Diaries & Journals · Anaïs Nin · Literature

Cover of 'Every River on Earth'

Every River on Earth
Writing from Appalachian Ohio
Edited by Neil Carpathios
· Foreword by Donald Ray Pollock

Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio includes some of the best regional poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from forty contemporary authors such as David Baker, Don Bogen, Michelle Burke, Richard Hague, Donald Ray Pollock, and others.

American Literature · Social Science | Regional Studies · Appalachia · Literature

Cover of 'Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time'

Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time
Edited by Christine L. Krueger

We are a century removed from Queen Victoria’s death, yet the culture that bears her name is alive and well across the globe. Not only is Victorian culture the subject of lively critical debate, but it draws widespread interest from popular audiences and consumers.Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time addresses the theme of the Victorians’ continuing legacy and its effect on our own culture and perception of the world.

Literature · Victorian Studies · British Literature · Literary Criticism

Cover of 'Haunted by Waters'

Haunted by Waters
Fly Fishing in North American Literature
By Mark Browning

Four essential questions: Why does one fish? How should one properly fish? What relations are created in fishing? And what effects does fishing have on the future? Haunted by Waters is a self-examination by the author as he constructs his own narrative and tries to answer these questions for himself. But it is also a thorough examination of the answers he uncovers in the course of reading what’s been written on the subject.As

Nature · Literature · American Literature · Literary Criticism

Cover of 'The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature'

The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature
By Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women’s rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry.

American Literature · Women’s Studies · Social Science | Regional Studies · Gender Studies · Ohio and Regional · Literature · Appalachia

Cover of 'The Novel of the Future'

The Novel of the Future
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Deirdre Bair

In The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin explores the act of creation—in film, art, and dance as well as literature—to chart a new direction for the young artist struggling against what she perceived as the sterility, formlessness, and spiritual bankruptcy afflicting much of mid-twentieth-century fiction.

Literary Criticism · American Literature · Anaïs Nin · Creative Nonfiction · Literature

Cover of 'Mirages'

Mirages
The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1947
By Anaïs Nin
· Edited by Paul Herron
· Introduction by Kim Krizan
· Preface by Paul Herron

Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,” during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love.

Literary Collections | Diaries & Journals · Anaïs Nin · Literature

Cover of 'Shake Terribly the Earth'

Shake Terribly the Earth
Stories from an Appalachian Family
By Sarah Beth Childers

In a thoughtful, humorous voice born of Appalachian storytelling, Childers brings to life family tales that affected the entire region to make sense of her personal journey and find the joy and clarity that often emerge after the earth shakes terribly beneath us.

Memoir · Creative Nonfiction · Appalachia · United States · North America · Americas · Literature · Social Science | Regional Studies · Ohio and Regional

Cover of 'A Spy in the House of Love'

A Spy in the House of Love
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Anita Jarczok

Although Anaïs Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate record of her own experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she turned to fiction, where her stories and novels became artistic “distillations” of her secret diaries.

Literary Fiction · American Literature · Women Authors · Anaïs Nin · Literature

Cover of 'Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913'

Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913
A Critical Anthology
Edited by Mary Ellis Gibson

Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Mary Ellis Gibson establishes accurate texts for such well-known poets as Toru Dutt and the early nineteenth-century poet Kasiprasad Ghosh.

Poetry Anthology · British Literature · 19th century · India · Literature · Victorian Studies

Cover of 'The Trial of Sören Qvist'

The Trial of Sören Qvist
By Janet Lewis
· Introduction by Kevin Haworth

Originally published in 1947, The Trial of Sören Qvist has been praised by a number of critics for its intriguing plot and Janet Lewis’s powerful writing. And in the introduction to this new edition, Swallow Press executive editor and author Kevin Haworth calls attention to the contemporary feeling of the story—despite its having been written more than fifty years ago and set several hundred years in the past.

Literary Fiction · Historical Fiction · Women Authors · American Literature · Literature