Faculty Bookshelf

English Faculty Publications

Listed by Publication Date

Michael Cunningham
April 2006
In each section of Michael Cunningham’s bold new novel, his first since The Hours, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. “In the Machine” is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial revolution, as human beings confront...
James Surowiecki
August 2005
In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future. With...
Michael Warner
August 2005
An investigation of how the idea of a public as a central fiction of modern life informs our literature, politics, and culture. Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to...
Mark Oppenheimer
June 2005
A striking look at the Jewish rite-and at American Jews in all their diversity Since its emergence here a century ago, the bar or bat mitzvah has become a distinctively American rite of passage, so much so that, in certain suburbs today, gentile families throw parties for their thirteen-year-olds,...
Alan Burdick
May 2005
A stunning work of narrative nonfiction that asks: what is natural? Now as never before, exotic animals and plants are crossing the globe, borne on the swelling tide of human traffic to places where nature never intended them to be. Bird-eating snakes from Australia hitchhike to Hawaii in the...
Amity Gaige
May 2005
The external lives of Clark, a high school guidance counselor, and Charlotte, a bookkeeper, are utterly ordinary, but their interior lives are as bold and complex as abstract paintings colored by imagined possibilities, childhood joys and, more darkly, by deeply buried fears. When Clark rescues a...
John Durham Peters
April 2005
Courting the Abyss updates the philosophy of free expression for a world that is very different from the one in which it originated. The notion that a free society should allow Klansmen, neo-Nazis, sundry extremists, and pornographers to spread their doctrines as freely as everyone else has come...
Donald Margulies
April 2005
“A terrific production … American playwright Donald Margulies’ self-reflective, dream reverie comedy drama Brooklyn Boy is tough, insightful, bittersweet, funny and ultimately wise.”—The Hollywood Reporter “Those who know Margulies’ plays will find his familiar themes here: the inevitable...
Marc Robinson
April 2005
The Other American Drama proposes an alternative to the received history of American drama, the Eugene O’Neil/Arthur Miller/August Wilson line of development so familiar to readers of standard drama surveys. Robinson’s book discusses Gertrude Stein, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy and Richard...
Edward Ball
March 2005
Peninsula of Lies is nonfiction mystery, set in a haunting gothic locale and peopled by fascinating and eccentric characters. Its hero and heroine is Dawn Langley Simmons, a British writer who lived in Charleston, South Carolina, during the 1960s and became the center of one of the most unusual...
Joseph Cleary
February 2005
This Companion provides an authoritative introduction to the historical, social and stylistic complexities of modern Irish culture. Readers will be introduced to Irish culture in its widest sense and helped to find their way through the cultural and theoretical debates that inform our understanding...
R. Clifton Spargo
November 2004
The Ethics of Mourning dramatically shifts the critical discussion of the lyric elegy from psychological economy to ethical responsibility. Beginning from a reevaluation of famously inconsolable mourners such as Niobe and Hamlet, R. Clifton Spargo discerns the tendency of all grief to depend at...
Bob Woodward
October 2004
Plan of Attack is the definitive account of how and why President George W. Bush, his war council, and allies launched a preemptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq. Bob Woodward’s latest landmark account of Washington decision making provides an original, authoritative...
Claudia Rankine
September 2004
In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the...
Susan Choi
September 2004
In 1955, a new student arrives at a small college in the Tennessee mountains. Chuck is shy, speaks English haltingly, and on the subject of his earlier life in Korea will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine, a solitary young woman haunted by an episode in her past. Without knowing why, these...
Susan Choi
September 2004
On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, 25-year-old Jenny Shimada agrees to care for three younger fugitives whom a shadowy figure from her former radical life has spirited out of California. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San...
John Durham Peters
August 2004
This anthology of hardtofind primary documents provides a solid overview of the foundations of American media studies. Focusing on mass communication and society and how this research fits into larger patterns of social thought, this valuable collection features key texts covering the media studies...
Braving Home book cover
Jake Halpern
June 2004
Funny, moving, and utterly unique, Braving Home introduces us to five unforgettable modern American pioneers. When Jake Halpern was a cub reporter, he became obsessed with stories about “some outlandish and often hellish place inhabited by a handful of stalwarts who refused to leave.” His fellow...
Richard Brodhead
May 2004
This collection of essays and speeches by Richard H. Brodhead addresses issues of importance to institutes of higher learning and to those who participate in them. As the popular Dean of Yale College from 1993 to 2004, Brodhead was involved in every aspect of undergraduate education - curriculum,...
Verlyn Klinkenborg
April 2004
By turns, an elegy, a celebration, and a social history, The Last Fine Time is a tour de force of lyrical style. Verlyn Klinkenborg chronicles the life of a family-owned restaurant in Buffalo, New York, from its days as a prewar Polish tavern to its reincarnation as George & Eddie’s, a...
James Berger, Editor
March 2004
  The Story of My Life, a remarkable account of overcoming the debilitating challenges of being both deaf and blind, has become an international classic, making Helen Keller one of the most well-known, inspirational figures in history. Originally published in 1903, Keller’s fascinating memoir...
Harold Bloom
March 2004
In Harold Bloom’s New York Times bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the world’s foremost literary critic theorized on the authorship of the historic play Hamlet. In this engaging new stand-alone work, he offers a full and warmly personal account of the play itself,...
Janice Carlisle
February 2004
Who smells? Surveying nearly eighty novels written in the 1860s to answer that impolite question,Common Scents provides a new reading of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative merits of men and women, spirit and matter. In depictions of comparative encounters, the commonplace...
Cynthia Zarin
January 2004
Always Albert hopes for rain. On rainy days Mrs. Crabtree takes him with her for taxi rides. So much better than walks.  One day – brilliantly sunny, for a surprise – Albert hops a taxi alone. More than one taxi, actually.  You will never guess where he goes!
Michael Warner
December 2003
A comprehensive collection of Whitman’s most beloved works of poetry, prose, and short stories When Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 it was a slim volume of twelve poems and he was a journalist and poet from Long Island, little-known but full of ambition and poetic fire. To...
Mark Oppenheimer
October 2003
Introducing us to America’s first gay ministers and first female priests, hippie Jews and folk-singing Catholics, Oppenheimer demonstrates that this was an era of extraordinary religious vitality. Drawing on a rich range of archival material as well as interviews with many of the protagonists...
Steven Brill
September 2003
The critics unanimously agree that brilliant, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Steven Brill has written a powerful and sweeping narrative of the country in the first year of the September 12 era. As “the pages flutter” – marvels one critic – “in a race to learn the rest of...
Marie Borroff
August 2003
Literary critic, poet and philologist as well as medievalist, with a particular interest in the powers and effects of poetic language, Marie Borroff brings the full range of her expertise to bear on problems of central importance in the poetry of Chaucer and his nameless contemporary, the Gawain...
Bob Woodward
July 2003
Bush at War reveals in stunning detail how an untested president with a sweeping vision for remaking the world and war cabinet members often at odds with each other responded to the September 11 terrorist attacks and prepared to confront Iraq. Woodward’s virtual wiretap into the White House...
John Crowley
March 2003
A novel of tremendous scope and beauty, The Translator tells of the relationship between an exiled Russian poet and his American translator during the Cuban missile crisis, a time when a writer’s words – especially forbidden ones – could be powerful enough to change the course of...
Caryl Phillips
March 2003
Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And yet each harbors secrets that may make attaining it impossible. With breathtaking assurance...
Amy Hungerford
January 2003
Why do we so often speak of books as living, flourishing, and dying? And what is at stake when we do so? This habit of treating books as people, or personifying texts, is rampant in postwar American culture. In this bracing study, Amy Hungerford argues that such personification has become pivotal...
Verlyn Klinkenborg
December 2002
The hugely admired author of “The Last Fine Time” preserves and makes new the sights, smells, sounds, and poetry of country living. Klinkenborg reveals the beauty of the American landscape, not from a scenic overlook, but through a screened-in porch or from the window of a pickup driving down an...
Edward Ball
November 2002
The Sweet Hell Inside is the four-generation saga of the fascinating Harleston family of South Carolina, the progeny of a Southern gentleman and his slave, who rise from the ashes of the Civil War, cast off their blemished roots, and create a cultural dynasty during the 1920s Jazz Age. Charter...
Harold Bloom
October 2002
“If readers are to come to Shakespeare and to Chekhov, to Henry James and to Jane Austen, then they are best prepared if they have read Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling,” writes Harold Bloom in his introduction to this enchanting and much-needed anthology of...
Harold Bloom
October 2002
What is genius? It is the trait, says Harold Bloom, of standing both of and above an age, the ancient principle that recognizes and hallows the God within us, and the gift of breathing life into what is best in every living person. Now, in a monumental achievement of scholarship, America’s...
Claude Rawson
August 2002
We are obsessed with ‘barbarians’. They are the ‘not us’, who don’t speak our language, or ‘any language’, whom we depise, fear, invade and kill; for whom we feel compassion, or admiration, and an intense sexual interest; whose innocence or vigour we aspire to, and who have an...
Michael Cunningham
August 2002
In this celebration of one of America’s oldest towns (incorporated in 1720), Michael Cunningham, author of the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hours, brings us Provincetown, one of the most idiosyncratic and extraordinary towns in the United States, perched on the sandy tip at the...
Stephanie Newell
July 2002
“… a book that will break new ground in African cultural studies…. [it] will appeal not only to literary scholars but also to social historians and cultural anthropologists.” ―Karin Barber Focusing on the broad educational aims of the colonial administration and missionary societies,...
Louise Glück
March 2002
Louise Glück has long practiced poetry as a species of clairvoyance. She began as Cassandra, at a distance, in league with the immortal; to read her books sequentially is to chart the oracle’s metamorphosis into unwilling vessel, reckless, mortal, and crude. The Seven Ages is Glück’s...
Stephanie Newell
February 2002
Readings in African Popular Fiction explores the social, political, and economic contexts of popular narratives by bringing together new and classic essays by important scholars in African literature and eight primary texts. Excerpts from popular magazines, cartoons, novellas, and moral and...
Cynthia Zarin
February 2002
In her third book of poetry, her first in eight years, Cynthia Zarin, one of the finest poets of her generation, has turned her art to fresh purposes. Taking up the subject of divorce and the splintering and re-forming of family that follows it, Zarin, whose work has been compared to that of...
Ardis Butterfield
February 2002
Ardis Butterfield examines the relationship between the poetry and music of medieval France. Beginning when French song was first set into writing in the early thirteenth century, Butterfield describes the wide range of contexts in which secular songs were quoted and copied. Including narrative...
John Durham Peters
December 2001
Communication plays a vital and unique role in society-often blamed for problems when it breaks down and at the same time heralded as a panacea for human relations. A sweeping history of communication, Speaking Into the Airilluminates our expectations of communication as both historically specific...
Joseph Cleary
December 2001
The history of partition in the twentieth century is one steeped in controversy and violence. Literature, Partition and the Nation State offers an extended study of the social and cultural legacies of state division in Ireland and Palestine, two regions where the trauma of partition continues to...
Donald Margulies
December 2001
Award-winning playwright Donald Margulies is “literate and intellectually stimulating” (New York) and “a playwright of the most unusual imaginative power” (New York Post). Luna Park: Short Plays and Monologues collects Margulies’s best short plays and monologues spanning three decades. Taken as a...
David Kastan
October 2001
This book is a authoritative account of Shakespeare’s plays as they were transformed from scripts to be performed into books to be read, and eventually from popular entertainment into the centerpieces of the English literary canon. Kastan examines the motives and activities of Shakespeare...
Harold Bloom
October 2001
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?” is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into...
Alastair Minnis
June 2001
The Roman de la Rose was a major bestseller–largely due to its robust treatment of “natural” sexuality. This study concentrates on the ways in which Jean de Meun, in imitation of Ovid, assumed the mock-magisterium (or mastership) of love. Alastair J. Minnis considers allegorical versus ...
Claudia Rankine
April 2001
In her third collection of poems, Claudia Rankine creates a profoundly daring, ingeniously experimental examination of pregnancy, childbirth, and artistic expression. Liv, an expectant mother, and her husband, Erland, are at an impasse from her reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering world...