New Pages Winter 2023

Race in American Musical Theater
Bloomsbury, 2023
From the publisher: "While most discussions of race in American theater emphasize the representation of race mainly in terms of character, plot, and action, Race in American Musical Theater highlights elements of theatrical production and reception that are particular to musical theater. Examining how race functions through the recurrence of particular racial stereotypes and storylines, this introductory volume also looks at casting practices, the history of the chorus line, and the popularity of recent shows such as Hamilton. Moving from key examples such as Show Boat! and South Pacific through to all-Black musicals such as Dreamgirls...this foundational book prompts questions from how stereotypes persist to 'who tells your story?'”

Arabic Accounts of Mediterranean Captivity, 1517-1798
EBVerlag, 2023
Number 18 in the Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series at the University of Bonn and the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. From the publisher: "The history of captivity in the early modern Mediterranean has been studied exclusively through European and Ottoman/Turkish sources. But an extensive archive has survived in Arabic describing the experiences of Muslims, Eastern Christians, and Jews in European captivity. British and French fleets seized large numbers of captives. This study continues the research into the Arabic archive by introducing further accounts about captivity by European pirates and privateers, showing how the Mediterranean became the scene of Christian masters and Arabic-speaking slaves."

Live and Deal with Others Better: The Gift of Shakespeare's Romances
Hurley, 2023
From the publisher: "As a professor of English, McNaron believes that Shakespeare realized continuing to write tragedies or history plays about powerful men was a dead-end street. So he turned to a new form of drama that included egregious errors in judgment and behavior, serious losses, even deaths. But in the end, he allowed for the possibility of rejuvenation, repentance, and even rebirth. We now call these four plays romances. Live and Deal with Others Better explores those four plays as a sub-genre of Shakespeare’s work that might lead us to reassess how Shakespeare felt about his last contributions to the London stage."

Advanced Poetry: A Writer's Guide and Anthology
Bloomsbury, January 25, 2024
From the publisher: "Spanning decades and continents, and covering the rich field of poets writing today, this book shows how to read, explicate, and write poetry. Bringing together a comprehensive craft guide with a carefully collated anthology showcasing the (existing) limits of what is possible in poetry, this text explores how poetry since the 20th century has embraced traditional structures, borrowed from other disciplines, and invented wildly new forms. With close readings, writing prompts, excerpts of interviews from key figures in the field, and a supplementary companion website, this is the definitive text for any poet looking to continue their poetic journey."

The English Experience [fiction]
Doubleday, 2023
From Minnesota Monthly: "[The novel] takes readers to London with the 63-year-old English professor Jason Fitger and 11 very different Payne University undergrads for a three-week 'Experience Abroad.' Schumacher’s third novel focusing on academic misadventures features her melodic sentences and trademark witticisms. This is a character-driven novel, and Schumacher flexes her creative muscles in her creation of the undergraduates. It is the tours—and hijinks—as well as Fitger’s interactions with his ex-wife that move the plot.... Cloaked beneath this farce is a story about two people looking for companionship and 11 young adults finding their way in life."

Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere
Gallery, 2023
From the Washington Post: "The comedian Maria Bamford has always been willing to get uncomfortable while probing the deepest recesses of her psyche in search of laughs. Never simply joking at her own expense, she instead makes comic radical honesty part of her process of healing and recovery. Bamford draws on those strengths once again in her debut memoir [and] narrates her life story by chronicling her membership in the 'cults' of family, fame, and mental health care. Some of her misadventures feel like anything but laughing matters. But it’s a testament to Bamford that she’s able to fill these pages with stories that are relatable and consistently hilarious."

Dorothy Calthorpe: News from the Midell Regions and Calthorpe's Chapel
Iter, 2023
From the publisher: "This first print edition of two extant manuscripts by Dorothy Calthorpe (1648–1693) introduces a new seventeenth-century woman writer to the growing canon of early modern female authors. The edition provides transcriptions of the manuscripts and Calthorpe’s will, as well as a comprehensive introduction to Calthorpe, her family, and her work; a glossary of persons who figured in her writing and her life; and two genealogical charts. Calthorpe’s writings demonstrate the rich intellectual life of a previously unknown female writer and provide a compelling example of Restoration manuscript production."

Lou Reed: King of New York
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023
From Pitchfork: "Several strong Lou Reed bios were already out there by the time Will Hermes published The King of New York this fall. But Hermes tells the best story, finding the ideal mix of big-picture narrative sweep and intriguing details. The book frames Reed’s life in a way that speaks to our current cultural moment, revealing how the fluidness of sexuality and gender in Reed’s milieu hinted at the world to come, and it deepens your appreciation of his hugely varied recorded output. Hermes’ previous book, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, was a personal examination of New York’s influential downtown music scene in the ’70s, and the city is just as influential here, growing and changing alongside Reed while forever informing his art."

Near Enough [poetry chapbook]
Seven Kitchens, 2023
From the publisher: "The constricted sphere of life during southern Spain’s initial pandemic lockdown becomes a stage for history’s unfolding, which finds its expression on both local and global scales: the extractive accumulation of resources, the perpetuation of social injustice, the spatial arrangements arising from the threat of contagion, the reiterative excavation of cultural memory, and the wrenching, attenuated call of flamenco song. Ben Meyerson gathers these themes into an ensemble whose articulation demonstrates how distance and proximity mediate one another across space and time to produce fluctuations between intimate collaboration and violence. These poems explore the contours of a solidarity that is always being sundered and reconstituted all at once."

Seguiriyas [poetry]
Black Ocean, 2023
From the publisher: "In Seguiriyas—which derives its title from the flamenco palo of the same name—Ben Meyerson picks paths through the reverberations of diaspora, displacement, and transit. Meyerson's poems travel between his upbringing in an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Toronto and his time spent plumbing the historical tensions that animate Andalusian culture. Amid the pull of diaspora and dispersion, Meyerson assembles an array of reference points ranging from flamenco performance to the history of the Roma in Spain, medieval Iberian poetry, rock music, and the echoes of Jewish ritual practice. Seguiriyas does not seek to neatly arrange the pluralities that it observes; rather, it moves in their wake, offering a form of careful attention and vibrant song."

Habitual Rhetoric: Digital Writing before Digital Technology
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
From the publisher: "Digital writing has come to be defined by numbers and chips, not fingers and parchment. We therefore assume that digital writing began with the invention of the computer and created new writing habits, such as copying, pasting, and sharing. Habitual Rhetoric: Digital Writing before Digital Technology makes the counterargument that these digital writing practices were established by the handwritten cultures of early medieval universities, which codified rhetorical habits through repetitive classroom practices. These embodied habits have persisted across time and space to develop durable dispositions, or habitus, which have the potential to challenge computational cultures of disinformation and surveillance that pervade the social media of today."

Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires
Cornell University Press, 2022
Winner of the 2023 René Wellek Prize for best monograph from the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). From award citation: "From and beyond the disciplines of comparative literary studies and sociology, the critical work of Creolizing the Modern is framed by coloniality and inter-imperiality in the world-system. With the revelatory challenges in and contradictions of Romania’s first modern novel, Liviu Rebreanu’s 1920 Ion, as a touchstone, Parvulescu and Boatcă’s richly suggestive and theoretically informed analysis traverses the critical terrain of peasants and the land question; the world system and antisemitism; Romani music; the language question and Transylvanian interglottism; nationalism, women’s labor and violence against women.... Simultaneously, Creolizing the Modern formulates a rich methodological exemplar of looking again and differently at 'small places' to understand global movements."

That Other Life [poetry]
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023
From the publisher: "Poems that deftly draw on the sonnet form to follow the speaker’s romantic life. That Other Life is a narrative about how relationships fail and succeed—or rather, about how the narrator fares on the changeable course of love and domestic commerce. Most of the poems in Joyce Sutphen’s 12th book are sonnets, and each sonnet provides a glimpse of a swiftly moving life. In the same carefully crafted language as she uses to describe an oat binder, Sutphen surveys marriage and love."

The Waiting World [fiction]
MilSpeak Books, 2023
From the publisher: "Fall 1929: The mansion of larger-than-life business magnate Titus McAvoy hums with the energy of his servants Nessa and Aoife, two Irish maids bonded through their journey to America, and a dream of escape. When preparation for one of Titus's famous parties sends the pair to the beach, Aoife stumbles upon a strange find on the shoreline. She instinctively pockets it, unaware that the waxy, musky substance, ambergris, is the key to her and Nessa's freedom. Ounce for ounce, ambergris holds more worth than silver or gold. Amid this discovery, a young white-passing British World War I veteran named John enters the mansion's ranks, his history dragging behind him. When John's path intersects with Nessa and Aoife, the trio forms a quiet trust."