Recommended Reading

David Mura’s “A Stranger’s Journey” is a new kind of literary criticism—personal, postcolonial, analytic and dramatic—his insights into the situation of the writer of color amidst centrist assumptions and prohibitions open a new field of critical and creative thinking woven together in a book that could have been called “Castiglione’s The Courtier Meets Sun-tzu’s Art of War.” — Garrett Hongo, ALSCW Council member

ALSCW Executive Director Ernest Suarez highly recommends Frederick Seidel’s new book Peaches Goes It Alone: Poems and Mark Edmundson’s new book, The Heart of the Humanities: Reading, Writing, Teaching.

At Women’s Voices for Change, Rebecca Foust introduces and explicates A.E. Stallings’ poem, “Empathy,” first published in Literary Matters 9.1.

“The Wholehearted Poet: A Conversation about Margaret Avison” by Barbara Nickel and Elise Partridge.

“Bracing for Impact: Trauma, Triggers & the Saving Power of Literature” by Cassandra Nelson in Commonweal Magazine.

“I recommend the forum on Caroline Levine’s book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, 2015), in the October 2017 issue of PMLA. Langdon Hammer’s essay ‘Fantastic Forms‘ and Sandra MacPherson’s essay ‘The Political Fallacy‘ are especially interesting discussions of the new ‘political formalism.'” – Rosanna Warren

“How Not to Defend the Humanities,” a recent article by James Hankins about the humanities that appeared in the most recent issue of American Affairs. (Recommended by Past President Ernest Suarez)

“Crossing Borders” on A. E. Stallings’ poetry and work with refugees in Greece, concluding with excerpts from “Empathy,” Stallings’ poem which ran in Literary Matters 9.1. (Recommended by LM Editor Ryan Wilson)

“Tokens of Ruined Method,” an article by Marco Roth in N+1 on Joseph North’s new book about literary criticism: Literary Criticism, A Concise Political History (Harvard 2017). North’s book confronts squarely the fact that in the last quarter century literary criticism in the English-speaking world has abjured aesthetics in favor of political and sociological analysis. Roth’s review is subtle, intelligent, and serious, and goes right to the heart of the problem that ALSCW exists to remedy–the failure of attention to literary art, as art. Roth writes with splendid clarity and force. (Recommended by Rosanna Warren)

Recommended Viewing