New Books in Literary Studies

Jaksot

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  Aarthi Vadde has a Platform (JP) 01.10.2026 45min

  It is fair to say Aarthi Vadde's wonderful new book, We The Platform, demostrates "how literature changes our perspective on the internet." But you also need to add that it "respond[s] to decline narratives about literature and literary study and to offer an alternative to prevailing sense of defeat and nostalgia that guides them.” Her conversation with John, like the book itself, aims to narrate the history of Web 2.0 from about 2004 to the present and to explore how writers themselves have responded since 2008. (That means compression" so please Google Aarthi to learn more about her Duke professorship, earlier Levin-prize winning Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 , role as President of the Society for Novel Studies; and forthcoming co-edited Columbia University Press collection of conversations from podcast she co-founded, Novel Dialogue.) Aarthi is brimming with unexpected insights about writers responding in varied and unpredictable ways to textual production under digital conditions: Patricia Lockwood, Lauren Oyler, Tao Lin and even Sheila Heti, who early on experimented with LLM conversations in the New Yorker. She sees a new range of writers (Vauhini Vara, Meghan O'Gieblyn) maintaining a commitment to experimental writing, while engaging the power dynamics befalling them with this new tool, what she calls a new case of the "writer's hand at a distance." Finally, when it comes to defining the "multi-front battle" university English departments will have to fight for their survival, Aarthi also wants to respond generously to students whose desire to write is as strong as their desire to read: why should we condemn that as a narcissistic impulse? Mentioned in the episode Karen Hao, Empire of AI Sarah Wynne-Williams, Careless People Laurence Lessig Free Culture Xu Bing's Book from the Ground Fred Bennison's Emoji Dick. “glitch art” Recallable Books  Elizabeth Eisenstein's 1970 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, as well as this AHR debate between Eisenstein and Adrian Johns. Ben Mangrum, The Comedy of Computation: also this excellent Recall this Book conversation about the feared obsolsence of the human knolwedge worker).
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  Ilan Stavans on Building Restless Books and Publishing in Translation 30.09.2026 29min

  How does an independent press survive by publishing the books the Big Five overlook? Amherst College professor and Spanglish scholar Ilan Stavans joins Sarah Russo to talk about Restless Books, the press he founded to champion immigrant writers, literature in translation, and the books that live between languages.
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  Wastelands and Wonderlands: Utopias and Dystopias in Film and Literature with Matthew Leggatt (SUNY Press, 2026) 27.09.2026 50min

  Wastelands and Wonderlands: Utopias and Dystopias in Film and Literature with Matthew Leggatt (SUNY Press, 2026) is an edited collection exploring utopias ad dystopias in films and literature. It challenges readers, in these uniquely dystopian times, to reevaluate their ideas about utopia and dystopia. The book brings together film, literary, and utopian studies scholars from across the world. As an interdisciplinary collection, it covers a wide range of utopias and dystopias, from those of visionaries as varied as William Morris and George Lucas to such fresh new and distinctive voices like Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and N. K. Jemisin. Contributors dismantle myths about utopian and dystopian film, literature, and television. Several chapters analyse the nature of utopian and dystopian fiction and its important relationship to our present moment. What's the future of utopia? What does it mean to be a utopia today? Do we still need the warnings of dystopia? Whether through ecocritical work, work aimed at decolonizing utopian studies, debates about our relationship with technology and the nonhuman, forms of utopian hope and pessimism, or new thinking about cinematic and literary techniques and production, the essays offer fresh insight into the subject area and something to interest any reader.
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  Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing with Marion Quirici (Syracuse UP, 2025) 27.09.2026 50min

  Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing (Syracuse UP, 2025) explores the legacy of intersectional stereotypes of disability, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion that justified imperial rule in Ireland and the forms of oppression that continued after independence. Marion Quirici identifies models of citizenship and creative autonomy in Irish modernist literature that valorize vulnerability over ability and interdependence over independence. She uncovers a history in which an entire nation, Ireland, was characterized as disabled and therefore “not fit for freedom.” Beyond symbolism, the Famine and decades of emigration led to a perception that Ireland’s racial stocks were depleted, and that those who remained were feeble and few. The fraught relationship between disability and Irishness provides context for Quirici’s analysis of modernist Irish literature. Revivalists such as William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Pádraic Pearse, and the Gaelic Athletic Association created new mythologies of Irish ability to counter imperial stereotypes, tacitly reinforcing the idea of disability as a disqualification for sovereignty. Certain Irish modernists, however—James Joyce, Edna O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, Brian O’Nolan, and Christy Brown—called the “fitness for freedom” ideology into question. These authors allow us to disentangle disability from unfitness and scrutinize its relationship to liberation. In their work, disability becomes an avenue for exploring the human experience and discovering the inherent creativity and collaborative potential of an interdependent life.
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  Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities with yasser elhariry and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (U Virginia Press, 2026) 26.09.2026 46min

  Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (U Virginia Press, 2026) examines the epistemological adjustments that take place when we make water the source and medium for thinking about the world. Eschewing metaphorical readings of rivers, seas, and oceans, it brings together leading voices from across the social sciences and the humanities to argue rather for a distinct focus on materiality, engaging posthumanism, biotheory, and other cutting-edge theoretical approaches. From the Caribbean Sea to the Indian Ocean, this rich collection is inhabited by migrants, port cities, and coral reefs. It explores the fruitful potential of water for literary, anthropological, and ethical studies, bringing both cohesive transdisciplinarity and fresh comparative perspectives to hydro-criticism. Taken together, the wide range of critical interpretative practices constitutes a signal contribution to the blue humanities. Guest yasser elhariry is Associate Professor of French Studies and Chair of the Department of French & Italian Studies at Dartmouth College, where he is affiliated with the Programs in Comparative Literature, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. He is the author of This Book Is Full of Holes: Literary Bodies & the Invention of an Idiom and Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation & the Postfrancophone Lyric. He has published dozens of essays on Arabic and French lyric, translation, and postcolonialism. Along with Water Logics, he is coeditor most recently of Literature as Sound Studies, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean, Abdelkébir Khatibi: Literature & Theory, and The Postlingual Turn. Guest Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University where she also holds affiliations with the Environmental Studies Program and the Middle East and North African Studies program, which she founded in 2022. Talbayev recently joined the faculty advisory board for the newly established Tulane Global Humanities Center. She concurrently serves as Professor Extraordinarius at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and as a member of the advisory board for the Center for Francophone Research at the University of Leipzig. She is the long-time Editor of Expressions maghrébines and a co-editor of the “Passagen” book series at Georg Olms Verlag (Germany). Talbayev is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean with Fordham UP and the co-editor of several edited collections; in addition to Water Logics and Rethinking Hospitality in the Mediterranean (both with our other guest today) these include a roundtable entitled “Ecocritical Terrains: Rethinking Tamazghan and Middle Eastern Environments” published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 2025. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press.
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  Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies with Yinghui Wu (Brill, 2025) 25.09.2026 1t 9min

  How was drama experienced in early modern China? It was not tied to a single medium such as the page or the stage, but operated in a media ecology—an environment in which it integrated other arts and media while being refashioned in a variety of arts and media. Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies (Brill, 2025) explores a wide range of cultural experimentation, collectively termed “playing with plays:” the theatricality embedded in commentary, the poetic and visual imagination arising from drama illustrations, the interactions between reading and singing arias, the imbrication of reading plays and practicing religion, and the ludic act of writing playful essays on drama. Through engaging these disparate phenomena with media studies, the book advances a new model for thinking about drama history, and shows the entwinement of plays and different forms of media in shaping perception, molding experience, and enabling new subject positions to emerge in early modern China.
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  Emmy Waldman, "Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form" (Cambridge UP, 2026) 24.09.2026 43min

  Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form (Cambridge UP, 2026) by Dr. Emmy Waldman is the first book to place the autobiographical projects of canonical comics authors Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel alongside each other, focusing on new and neglected works (and with an epilogue on the Pulitzer Prize-winning tour-de-force debut of Tessa Hulls). The book offers a lively cast of five formal tropes-boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs-through which to model fundamental elements of the comics grammar and its material processes. Built around rich close readings, it shows what makes the comics form particularly suited to negotiate complex familial and creative inheritances and manage layered, relational identities. Interweaving accounts of Jewish identity, female embodiment, legacies of modernism, and feminist practice, the book traces how contemporary graphic memoirists visually work and rework their filiations and affiliations through form, situating the medium as a privileged site and staging ground for arguments about the enabling possibilities of form now. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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  Tess Chakkalakal, "A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt" (St. Martin's Press, 2025) 23.09.2026 1t

  In A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered “mixed race.” He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing. He went on to become the first Black writer whose stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and whose books were published by Houghton Mifflin. Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion, Chakkalakal pens the biography of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry. Tess Chakkalakal, PhD, teaches African-American and American Literature at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America and co-editor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs and Imperium in Imperio: A Critical Edition. Hosted by: Raymond Williams, PhD, is a political scientist, blogger, and book club administrator with an interest in American history, biographies, and politics. You can find Raymond at Ballasts for the Mind, Instagram, and Threads.
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  Nathan Wainstein, "Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel" (JHU Press, 2026) 23.09.2026 57min

  What does it mean for a modernist novel to fail? Modernism famously celebrates rupture, difficulty, and deviance from literary norms—but that very embrace of formal experimentation creates a paradox: how can we tell the difference between daring innovation and genuinely bad writing? Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel (JHU Press, 2026) takes up this long-overlooked question and argues that modernist aesthetics have made artistic failure uniquely difficult to recognize, both in fiction and in literary criticism itself. Through incisive close readings of D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, Mina Loy, and James Joyce, Nathan Wainstein shows how moments that appear to be mistakes—awkward repetitions, temporal glitches, excessive prose, or stylistic lapses—often hover ambiguously between error and experiment. These moments, he argues, have become privileged objects of interpretation for critics trained to find meaning precisely where form seems to break down. Wainstein situates these textual breakdowns within debates about intentionality, authorial control, and critical authority, showing how modernist fiction unsettles long-standing assumptions about craft and competence. In doing so, the book clarifies why modernist novels continue to generate intense critical attention—and why questions of value and judgment remain so difficult to resolve. At once a work of modernist literary criticism and a searching reflection on the practice of close reading, Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel rethinks how aesthetic judgment operates in a field shaped by modernism's legacy. By confronting the possibility of genuine failure head-on, Wainstein offers a fresh account of the novelistic form and the pleasures and limits of interpretation. Nathan Wainstein is an assistant professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Grant Us Eyes: The Art of Paradox in Bloodborne. He is also the cohost of the podcast Authors Die Twice. Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found.
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  Randal Maurice Jelks, "My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy" (Broadleaf Books, 2026) 22.09.2026 42min

  Celebrated poet, essayist, playwright, and American artist Langston Hughes is one of the few American writers who consistently wrote about democracy from a joyous perspective, and My America explores how his work speaks to the political anxieties and crises we face today. Randal M. Jelks deftly examines the themes in Hughes’s work, including creative expression, communal dignity, class struggle, and human suffering, and what they mean for our inner well-being as democratic persons and political participants. With care and no-holds-barred insight, My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy (Broadleaf Books, 2026) removes the veneer of respectability often placed on Hughes’s work and life to reveal his political adeptness. In a world threatened by fascism, Hughes’s writing wasn’t afforded the luxury of subtlety. He made a spiritual and political decision to stand on the side of the oppressed. He believed art should be practiced for the sake of justice. And democracy can be practiced with joy. Dr. Randal Maurice Jelks is an award-winning author, documentary film producer, and professor. He is the author of four books. His writings have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, blogs, journals, and periodicals. You can learn more about him and his work at his website. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.
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  Exploring Earthsea: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Fantasy Masterpiece 20.09.2026 57min

  Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea saga has enchanted generations of readers and stands as a foundational classic of the fantasy genre. To mark publication of the definitive Library of America edition, acclaimed writers Karen Joy Fowler and Nghi Vo join volume editor Brian Attebery to kick off the fall LOA LIVE season with a fascinating plunge into these beloved novels of magic, dragons, nature, naming, and identity. LOA associate editor Stefanie Peters moderates.
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  Tamara Hundorova, "Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma" (Academic Studies Press, 2026) 19.09.2026 46min

  Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma (Academic Studies Press, 2026) explores transitional post-Soviet cultural consciousness in Ukraine at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The main themes in the book are postcolonial traumas in relation to past empires and old historiographical narratives; post-totalitarian consciousness, which is characterized by sociocultural ruptures, postcolonial resentment, and intergenerational crises; and post-memory as a means of overcoming historical and familial traumas. Against the backdrop of the Chornobyl catastrophe, the book examines the meeting of different generations and views the clown Verka Serduchka as a mediator between the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet world. The book focuses on three significant Ukrainian novels written between the two Maidans: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko (2009), Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan (2010), and Notes of a Ukrainian Madman by Lina Kostenko (2010).
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  Xiaofei Tian, "Writing Empire and Self: Poetic and Cultural Transformation in Early Medieval China" (Columbia UP, 2026) 19.09.2026 57min

  China’s early medieval period, from the fifth through the early seventh century, from the Northern and Southern Dynasties through the unified Sui, was a time of political fragmentation, military strife, and ethnic conflict. It also witnessed brilliant artistic creations as well as a full flowering of court culture, with poetry at its heart. How did poetry come to be regarded as the most potent form of cultural capital, a privileged literary genre, and a foundational skill for members of the elite? How was poetry transformed from an instrument of empire building to a venue for articulating personal trauma and voicing critique of the state? Tracing the evolution of poetry’s role in Chinese society, Writing Empire and Self: Poetic and Cultural Transformation in Early Medieval China (Columbia University Press, 2026) uncovers the profound cultural changes that took place in the early medieval era. Dr. Xiaofei Tian argues that in this period, a social community, eventually known as the “scholar elite” and treated as if it had always been a permanent fixture of the Chinese social order, came into being. She investigates the formation of this community, which left its mark on all later Chinese arts and letters, through a careful account of its history and textual production. Combining meticulous readings of numerous previously untranslated texts with a long-term, large-scale view of social and cultural history, Writing Empire and Self offers a fresh perspective on poetry’s intricate relationship with the state. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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  Catherine A John, "Afroindigenization: A Theory of Grassroots Cultural Practice" (Duke UP, 2026) 15.09.2026 45min

  In Afroindigenization: A Theory of Grassroots Cultural Practice (Duke University Press, 2026), Catherine A. John addresses the underbelly of spiritual resilience shaping a range of African diasporic institutions, traditions, and practices. John argues that repressed forms of indigenous African knowledge systems manifest in a myriad of culturally embodied ways in African diaspora spaces and places. From mermaid lore in rural Jamaica to hip-hop trance-induced dance in Los Angeles to the stories of two debaters-turned-social-media-influencers, John shows how the descendants of enslaved Africans express the signs and substance of their afroindigenous power through collective creativity. Drawing from scholars such as Vèvè Clark, Hortense Spillers, Dianne M. Stewart, and Sylvia Wynter, Afroindigenization exposes the cultural and spiritual ancestries that lie at the heart of modern Black identities and practices. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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  Christopher Freeburg, "Soul: A Brief History of Black Cultural Life" (Yale UP, 2026) 11.09.2026 49min

  Today’s guest, Christopher Freeburg, is the author of Soul: A Brief History of Black Cultural Life (Yale University Press, 2026). This book explores the US history of black cultural life as a history of soul – a spiritual lived practice rooted in communally fostered music, religion, and politics. It makes the case that soul is forged through black community connections and that it’s sustained by moral principles, or pillars, which define how it is lived. The book’s four chapters are organized around four of these pillars: resonance, revelation, resilience, and transcendence. A number of black individuals are foregrounded in these discussions: they include Phillis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nina Simone, Jewel Thais-Williams, Barack Obama, and others. By telling their stories, and by honoring the weight of the trauma and violence that has long befallen the black community, Christopher Freeburg’s Soul invites its readers to commune with the soul power of people who brought about transformation in the face of seeming impossibility. Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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  A Nation Wrestles With God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands 10.09.2026 1t 10min

  Spanning more than 400 years of spiritual transformation and imagination, A Nation Wrestles With God (Restless Books, 2026) collects diverse writers—poets, novelists, theologians, scientists, musicians, politicians, comedians, artists, mavericks, naturalists, futurists, and more—whose daring texts incited change and continue to influence a growing nation. In this anthology, you will find the stories, poems, letters, speeches, sermons, essays, song lyrics, comic strips, newspaper columns, and commentaries that have awoken new generations to free religious thought, from the precolonial to the present day. A landmark collection of the philosophers and firebrands that sparked a country’s journey through divinity—praising, challenging, and redefining the sacred. Guest: Ilan Stavans is the publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. His work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast “In Contrast.” Host: Dr. Christina Gessler holds a Ph.D. in history, which she uses to explore which stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. She is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast and newsletter. She works as a writing coach and developmental editor for academics. Listeners may also be interested in: What Do You Want Out Of Life? How To Human The Good-Enough Life Make A Meaningful Life Meditation for Beginners Try To Love The Questions Gay on God's Campus Womanist Bioethics Fierce Preparing for War Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 325+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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  Leonhard Emmerling, "The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus" (Seagull Books, 2026) 09.09.2026 1t 2min

  In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society. In this interview, Morteza Hajizadeh interviews Leonhard Emmerling about his book The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus (Seagull Books, 2026) Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world. Leonhard Emmerling has worked as an art historian in different capacities: as curator and director of art institutions in Germany and New Zealand; as teacher at art academies in Auckland, Düsseldorf, and Munich; and as advisor and director for the Goethe-Institut. His most recent publication is Aesthetics: What For?. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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  Lucas L. Johnson II, "Remembering Roots: How an American Classic Transformed the World" (Broadleaf Books, 2026) 08.09.2026 44min

  As we approach the 50th anniversaries of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots (1976) and its landmark television adaptation (1977), journalist and storyteller Lucas L. Johnson II reflects on the enduring legacy of Haley’s work through the voices of those it continues to move, including scholars, artists, genealogists, students, and original cast members like LeVar Burton and Ben Vereen. With vivid personal anecdotes, emotional tributes, and probing reflections, Remembering Roots: How an American Classic Transformed the World (Broadleaf Books, 2026)shows how Haley’s vision gave birth to a genealogy movement, inspired generations to reclaim their identities, and challenged America to confront its past. From a sixth-grader who became the first lawyer in her family, to a blind musician empowered by his father’s retelling of Roots’ most iconic scene, Johnson traces the ripple effects of Haley’s griot storytelling across time and culture. As debates rage over which histories get told, Remembering Roots boldly asserts the necessity to remember and retell our stories. A call to action, this book reaffirms that storytelling is not just an art — it’s a path to healing. A companion reading and viewing guide to the book and film is available here. Lucas L. Johnson II is a former reporter for the Associated Press, where he worked for more than twenty years mainly covering politics, education, and religion. He is the author of Finding the Good and coauthor of Youth Change Agent. Lucas works in higher education and has taught high school and college students. A freelance writer and communications strategist, Lucas lives in Nashville, Tennessee. You can find him at his website. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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  Jonathan Swift and David Womersley ed., "Gulliver's Travels: Cambridge Anniversary Edition" (Cambridge UP, 2026) 07.09.2026 45min

  Gulliver's Travels is one of the landmarks of world literature. Gulliver's adventures with the tiny but spirited Lilliputians, the giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag, the flying island of Laputa, and the rational horses of Houyhnmhnmland have become globally famous for their satirical wit and visionary creativity. Early editions credited Gulliver himself as the author, and many readers believed him to be a real person. Later commentators have variously described the work as proto-science fiction, as inspired children's literature and as a forerunner of the modern novel. The editor's introduction to this celebratory anniversary edition contextualises Gulliver's Travels in Swift's life and work as a whole while exploring its rich and remarkable afterlife. All the original illustrations and maps are included, as are the frontispiece portraits. Generous annotation explains textual details which might now seem obscure, and appendices contain additional documents and images to enhance contemporary understanding and enjoyment. David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His books include Divinity and State, Gibbon and the “Watchmen of the Holy City” and The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He is also the editor of many books, including the Penguin Classics editions of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and David Hume’s complete essays. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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  Agnes Mueller, "Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures" (Cambridge UP, 2026) 05.09.2026 55min

  In Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026), analysing the past two decades of literature on Holocaust memory and migration stories, Agnes Mueller engages with writers such as W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Edgar Hilsenrath, Benjamin Stein, Mirna Funk, Fred Wander, Barbara Honigmann, Julia Franck, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Olga Grjasnowa, and Kat Kaufmann to explore current debates on Israel, the German Democratic Republic, gender, Jewish and Muslim identity, and antisemitism. Her new readings of German-language texts by younger authors present robust challenges to entrenched ideas concerning the singularity of the Holocaust, multidirectional memory, and a range of other memory debates. Jewish identity and Muslim identity are shown in direct conversation with other migrants' experiences, and literature is revealed to be a brave space where Holocaust memory is newly imagined. Mueller's study invites a radically new way to think about the Holocaust and sheds new and valuable light on adjacent contemporary discourses. Agnes Mueller (M.A., LMU Munich, Germany; Ph.D., Vanderbilt U), Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, is an expert on recent and contemporary German literature. She is core faculty in Jewish Studies and affiliated with Women's and Gender Studies. Her essay publications are on German American relations, contemporary literature, German Jewish studies, and Holocaust memory. Her 2004 anthology German Pop Culture: How "American" Is It? (U of Michigan P) is still widely used for teaching and research. Her 2015 monograph is entitled The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature, (Northwestern UP), available in German translation as Die Unfähigkeit zu lieben (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017). With Katja Garloff she edited German Jewish Literature After 1990 (Camden House, 2018). In Spring of 2025 she was the Carol Kahn Strauss Fellow in Jewish Studies at the American Academy in Berlin. Her new book, Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026) reveals how, in recent German Jewish literature, Jewish and Muslim migration stories converge to shape the future of Holocaust memory. She is currently at work on a new monograph entitled The Family’s Fight: Resisting State Control, where she investigates how families deal with loved ones who are or were political prisoners, and how that relationship reflects back on authoritarian regimes. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies