American Book Research Articles

Early American Literature Book Prize for 2016

Early American Literature Book Prize for 2016

Teaching Stevens in and beyond the Book

Teaching Stevens in and beyond the Book Juliette Utard The point is that the hypertext, unlike the book, encourages greater decentralization . . . —Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality GIVEN THE BREVITY of my experience in teaching Wallace Stevens, and the straightforward conclusion it produced that I have learned much more from bringing his poetry into the classroom than I have actually taught, my thoughts will be less prescriptive than descriptive. Teaching Stevens today outside of the United States necessarily means reflecting on our position both as twenty-first-century readers casting a “backward glance” upon the past century’s literature and as European readers glancing across the Atlantic—something in the vein of D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature yet wary of its exceptionalist underpinnings.1 The course I designed focused on “The Poetics and Politics of the American Poetry Book,” with Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Stevens’s Harmonium, and A. R. Ammons’s Garbage as the three core readings—three distinct poetry collections deploying their titular imagery around one governing metaphor for the book, architectural (with Crane), musical (with Stevens), and environmental (with Ammons). Can One Teach Stevens? My first serious experience in “Teaching Stevens” was a third-year elective course for a handful of English majors that was marked in the undergraduate syllabus as the “Poetry Option.” It took place two years ago in the Fall of 2015. Apart from the mandatory readings, students were asked to build their own individual research projects around one American poetry book not already on the syllabus: week after week they would deliver a brief update on their research, making (then defending) their final choice in a way that created a dynamic sense of unity within an otherwise miscellaneous group. I had, of course, previously exposed larger groups of students to individual poems by Stevens, each time with (relative) success—I remember the odd translation class in which students gleefully translated “The Snow Man” into French while I stood anxiously awaiting their [End Page 245] verdict, and one hour-long session of explication de texte (a highly structured form of close reading) entirely devoted to “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” both of them in the first years after I obtained my current position at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Never before 2015, however, had I been granted the opportunity of devoting more than an occasional class to my “favorite writer,” as Marielle Macé and Christophe Pradeau recently named those special literary figures who, for reasons often unaccountable or unavowed, accompany us through life. “‘The favorite writer,’” Macé and Pradeau write, “is a proper name that, for any period of time, any individual, or individuals, is simply enough, is fully satisfactory, amounts to literature, makes it possible to think about literature, and ultimately keeps alive a connection with literature that is at once sensitive, continuous, and recognized as entirely idiosyncratic.”2 Until recently, then, my encounters with Stevens in the classroom had been brief, improvised, and guilt-ridden. In part, this had to do with the kind of academic environment I was lucky enough to stage them in, one that privileges a core curriculum built around collegially approved literary works that students in years one, two, or three of their undergraduate English degree need to study before they can take the final examination—a mass ritual involving some three hundred students gathered in an amphitheater, pondering over the same text or essay question for several hours. In that context, adding one’s “favorite writer” to the common reading list just isn’t something any “one” can singlehandedly decide to do. Presumably, however, my anxiety also arose from what Jacqueline Vaught Brogan once identified as a quality of Stevens’s poetry that makes it unteachable or, to take up her words, “resistant to being taught”: “We can teach Yeats,” Brogan writes, “and we can teach Stein. . . . But I still believe it’s impossible to teach Wallace Stevens” (51). The “terror” that Milton Bates described in the same volume of essays seized me when at last I added Stevens to the reading list for my third-year American poetry class, an optional course designed as a stepping-stone toward graduate...

From APOCALIPSIXTLÁN: A DYSTOPIAN LONG POEM

from APOCALIPSIXTLÁN: A DYSTOPIAN LONG POEM Rigoberto González (bio) There’s a woman who squats on the sand the color of midnight, we don’t dare call itash. Instead, we marvel at how midnight comes and the woman appears to floatlike a boat. Her white tunic a sail blowing with the hot winds from the north, whereit is rumored water still flows. We know about boats, we broke them down to bones—a mercy killing. Since they wailed the loudest in the drought they had to be the first to go. We tossed the priests into the fire pit next for filling us with false hope. And thenthe politicians for telling us their lies. They told the truth finally but much too late tochange our minds about burning them alive. We tossed the teachers and the scholarsinside the barren wells, then dropped their wretched books on top of them and watchedthe pages swell with piss and sweat. Steam hissed as they cooked beneath the bubbling paper. We heard them boil and blister day and night until their bodies softened into mushand then hardened once again like plaster— a pool turned frieze with jaws and fingersjutting out. Those who held such wisdom and refused to use it were the guiltiest of all,and thus they earned the cruelest penance: to melt into the pulp of what they prizedthe most—worthless words, incompetent ideas. Despite our better judgment, we let the poet [End Page 26] live though with his mouth sewn shut. He alone keeps the story of our insurrection. Eachnight before we sleep we whisper in his ear our precious secrets and stick a pin into his fleshto keep them safe in case we die. If we awake we repossess what’s ours by pulling all the needles out.His eyes dart left and right in panic during visitations. We scurry down the dunes on firelike a colony of scorpions. We are legion. We are condemnation—promise land turned purgatory. [End Page 27] Rigoberto González Rigoberto González, a multifaceted creative writer, is author of four books of poems: Unpeopled Eden (Four Way Books, 2013), Black Blossoms (Four Way Books, 2011), Other Fugitives and Other Strangers (Tupelo Press, 2006), and So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks (University of Illinois Press, 1999). His numerous other books include such novels and nonfiction prose as The Mariposa Club trilogy, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, and Red-Inked Retablos: Essays. The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, American Book Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2014 USA Rolón Fellowship, and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement (The Publishing Triangle) are some of the honors his work has garnered for him. He is Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, and a member of the Executive Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle. Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

Moving to a New Classroom

48 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2017 Moving to a New Classroom by Laura Da’ That slick envelope of developed film is tumbled in a storage closet next to old seating charts and a stale granola bar in foil. In one of the frames, faces are locked in astonishment. Having sighted a Killer Whale, Neah Bay June 2004 is written on the back of the photograph in the tender filigree of eighth-grade cursive. My first year teaching, on a field-trip nature hike, I pointed down between two cedar-spiked sea stacks. An orca’s black-and-white silhouette sashayed across the waves, looking buoyant and playful as a toddler in bathwater. Whale-skin erudition; mathematical wonder of the united gaze. Juvenile orca floating under Cape Flattery. Laura Da’ is a poet and public schoolteacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her first book, Tributaries, won the American Book Award. Still Life Morrow by Tacey M. Atsitty I think they know – about every leaf I’d catch to peel from my tongue. It spoke to how good I was at being alone. This morning I sit in the still kitchen, rued by autumn passing me outside. Still, I cut into my omelet. “Turn off the static,” my therapist says. “Taste what you swallow.” Inside, I feel water burst from the baby bellas. I wish I were staring at a still life, a bowl of cactus fruit maybe, or rotted watermelon, and not this wintry scene of the road I’ve just taken. In it, rises our breath to the lone mountains, as layers of rain gloss us abundantly. Tacey M. Atsitty, Diné, is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People) from Cove, Arizona. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. Her work has appeared in many publications. Her first book is Rain Scald (UNM Press, 2018). cover feature new native writing ...

Reading Henry Miller in the New Millennium

Reading Henry Miller in the New Millennium Daniel Manuel Mendoza (bio) Sit in on any creative writing course and you are likely to see a lot of unwarranted praise. The writing workshop as it exists today is equivalent to group therapy, where the professor—instead of reading every MFA candidate’s work with a critical eye—applauds even the most embarrassing attempts as works of creative genius. The issue is that writers in the MFA programs rarely read the greats. How could they? The MFA workshops typically consist of a three-hour weekly meeting where we get to hear embarrassing attempts at memoir or poor imitations of Alice Munro. The MFA reading lists I have seen have two primary texts: some kind of writer’s handbook full of silly exercises more appropriate for old ladies and works of contemporary fiction—provided by the professor’s friends. Professors, critics, editors, and writers feel the overwhelming necessity to give lip service to the “concerns” of authors who are a racial minority or who identify with an alternative lifestyle. The politically correct environment of contemporary arts has brought on this necessity. Today, every genre has a community that serves as a “safe space” for these groups. They all come complete with a university funded journal, a small press, and a set of conferences at AWP every year. Even the parties at AWP are designated by genres. If you do not fulfill the aesthetic or moral aspects of any such genre, you are unwelcome. Me and Joe Haske—another working-class writer—accidentally walked into a party sponsored by a big east coast writer’s retreat one night in LA. We were quickly made aware of our mistake when an older man in a camel hair jacket turned to us and said, “Well young men, you certainly look like you have a few tragic stories to tell.” The rest of the crowd snickered and we finished our drinks, drank a few more, and then headed back to our bar on skid row. I don’t take issue with the growing diversity of contemporary literary fiction. If it weren’t for the encouragement of diversity, I wouldn’t have had the opportunities to study where I have and then work with American Book Review, Pleiades, or Boulevard. I do take issue with the vacuum it has created. We have become a culture that is afraid of stepping out of our groups. We no longer challenge our assumptions and we have failed at creating a more complex body of literary work. In the world of literary fiction today—both in MFA programs and in the journals—the works of Miller would have no place because they challenge the politically correct assumptions we have come to accept as fact. When Miller is talked about it’s usually in the context of his antifeminist and hyper-misogynistic attitude. One recent critic of Tropic of Cancer (1934) asserts if it “has traveled from banned book to spiritual classic that tells us ‘who we are’? A reasonable objection is that ‘we’ cannot include women, unless a woman is comfortable with her identity as a half-witted ‘piece of tail.’” Is it reasonable to object to Miller’s work as one that is unacceptable for contemporary readers—particularly female readers? And what do we make of the female readers that find other valuable aspects of Miller’s “spiritual classic”? Further, should we ban all books that portray women in a negative way? Perhaps the Old Testament and Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) should be off the shelves, as well? When we evaluate a work of art we should keep in mind the importance of analyzing it with the complexity it deserves. To consider any work of art from any time period with one-sided judgments does a great disservice to our culture. When we threaten the legitimacy of Miller’s art because of one narrow aspect of his work, then we risk making the same mistake this country has made in its attempts to ban the works of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Like Whitman, Melville, Twain, and countless other American writers, Miller’s work provides a wealth of philosophical and...

Transatlantic Puritanism and American Singularities

The taunting question posed in the 1820s by the English critic Sidney Smith, ‘Who reads an American book?’, has long since tumbled into the dustbin of literary history. Yet it continues to reverberate in how Americanists describe the workings of Puritanism in their own country, its presence felt in two respects. One of these is resentment at the indifference to their own work of historians of the Puritan movement in Britain. Another is the assumption among Americanists that the Puritanism of the colonists who arrived in the early seventeenth century was singular in certain respects, be it their sense of ‘errand’, their modifications of Reformed orthodoxy, or perhaps their daring experiment with a congregation-centred polity, the ‘New England Way’. Whenever historians turn to the larger project of Church and State in colonial and modern America, assertions of singularity dominate the telling of our religious history. Do these endeavours warrant returning to Sidney Smith's question and rephrasing it to ask whether Americanists are making the most of European studies of Reformed theology, Puritanism in Britain, and conformity or dissent?

Excerpt from Dissolve

As much as Managing Editor Michelle Johnson loves traveling, she also loves returning home. Her summer reading list reflects a similar course this year. Elif Batuman The Idiot Penguin Even a fragment of the Boston Globe’s review of Elif Batuman’s debut novel would have hooked me: “At once a cutting satire of academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature.”This summer I’ll travel to the Hungarian countryside (through Paris) with Selin, Batuman’s heroine. And because she is universally hailed for her sense of humor, and because I like to balance reading fiction and essays, I’ll order her essay collection as well—The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. (I’m one of those people.) Omar El Akkad American War Knopf This dystopian debut novel imagines a second American Civil War in 2074. An award-winning journalist born in Cairo who now lives in Canada, Akkad looks into the US and asks, according to the publisher’s website, “what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.” Rilla Askew Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place University of Oklahoma Press Geographically speaking, these notes from a wounded place are, to some extent, notes from my wounded place—Oklahoma. Novelist and essayist Rilla Askew moved from Oklahoma to New York as a young woman and recently returned. Now in nine essays, Kirkus Reviews writes that “Askew considers her life in relation to the question of what it means to be Oklahoman and American.” Excerpt from Dissolve by Sherwin Bitsui A bottom-lit sea ponders the lake’s questions, their secret conversations thatch howls to whimpers exhaled from an isthmus of drowned wolves. Its glossary’s cataclysms smoothed over the hatchet tucked into a sheath of starlight locates fractures potted in cisterns of smog. The stitching then unthreads to muzzled worms pulsing where an arsonist begins to lather heat over his neck. Backlit by a caravan of wailing fathers he silences their smeared faces while kneeling in an arbor of mesh and steel. Nowhere streams in blips and beeps under them. Sherwin Bitsui (Diné) is the author of Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press) and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press). He is of the Bįį’bítóó’nii’Tódi’chii’nii clan and is born for the Tlizilłani’ clan. He is from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. His honors include the 2011 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts & Culture Foundation Fellowship for Literature, a PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. Bitsui lives in Missoula, Montana, and teaches for the MFA writing programs of the University of Montana and the Institute of American Indian Arts. summer reads WORLDLIT.ORG 63 ...

London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 by Joseph Rezek

Reviewed by: London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 by Joseph Rezek Melissa J. Homestead (bio) London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850. By Joseph Rezek. ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 286. Cloth, $59.95.) Like Meredith McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (Philadephia, 2003) and Trish Loughran's The Republic in Print: Print Culture and U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York, 2007), London and the Making of Provincial Literature is ambitious in its scope and argument and fundamentally challenges our understanding of the nation as a category of analysis in American book history of the first half of the nineteenth century. Joseph Rezek offers a bracing reorientation of the literary market in the early nineteenth century, arguing that the United States shared with Scotland and Ireland a provincial orientation toward London as a center of English-language publishing. In The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA, 2004), Pascale Casonova uses Pierre Bourdieu's literary sociology to argue that Paris's dominance in the early twentieth century set an aesthetic program for modernism across the globe. Rezek, also relying on Bourdieu, similarly focuses on how an orientation toward London in the "Anglophone Atlantic" by Irish, Scottish, and American authors registered at the level of aesthetics; he also argues, however, that these authors embraced the market in a search for aesthetic prestige, rather than disavowing commercial success (13). Rezek's introduction situates the dilemma of the provincial author in relation to Enlightenment aesthetic theories and defines the "aesthetics of provinciality" as a "range of representational modes" that "vacillate [End Page 555] between national and universal conceptions of art" but ultimately "takes refuge in the belief that literature enjoys an exalted role in human affairs" (15). Chapter 1 synthesizes published scholarship on the history of the book in Ireland, Scotland, the United States, and England in order to recast these histories as a heretofore unrecognized "interconnected system" with London at its center (25). After this sweeping, rapid, and highly persuasive survey of half a century in fifteen pages, in Chapter 2 Rezek zooms in for a finely grained archival case study of the complex negotiations between Edinburgh, London, and American publishers over the circulation of Walter Scott's historical novels (a version of this chapter appeared in Early American Studies in 2013). Notably, as a literary historian Rezek close reads "the language of the book trade" as "an expressive form, a means of establishing credit in business negotiations, and a performative rhetoric of the marketplace" (41). His third chapter reads novels by Irish authors Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson in light of London's centripetal pull in the book trade, arguing that these authors' developing literary strategies (namely the marriage plot, travel narratives, and paratextual apparatuses) enabled them to "project an ideal relationship with English readers that downplays the otherwise vexed political intercourse between Ireland and England" (63). He turns in Chapter 4 to Washington Irving, first analyzing Irving's engagement with reprinted British texts during his two years editing the Analectic Magazine (1813–1815), and then analyzing how being taken up by London publisher John Murray for the second volume of his Sketch Book (1819–1820) spurred Irving to undertake a transformative revision of individual stories and to add and revise materials he had first written for the Analectic. The result, as Rezek argues through a fascinating close reading of revisions both large and small, is a version of the Sketch Book that differs fundamentally from Irving's initial nationalist conception in its "promot[ion of] Anglo-American literary fellowship" (102). In a somewhat disorienting move chronologically, Rezek's next chapter juxtaposes the London editions of James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823) and Walter Scott's The Heart of the Midlothian (1818). Rezek locates in Scott's novel an allegory of its "relation to the marketplace" through the "pilgrimage from Edinburgh to London" by a central Scottish character; her journey doubled "the journey most copies of a Waverley novel took from Scott's Edinburgh printers to England for distribution" (116). Rezek finds Cooper's address to English...

Charles B. Harris, 1940–2017

Charles B. Harris, 1940–2017 Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Publisher and Editor In early 1996, Charles B. Harris became co-publisher of the American Book Review, joining forces with a titan of postmodern literature: journal founder and publisher Ronald Sukenick. Charlie worked with Sukenick as co-publisher until Ron’s passing in 2004, then served as sole publisher until late 2006, when I joined him as co-publisher. We worked together closely on the transition, after which he stepped back and served as Publisher Emeritus. I was honored to take up the position and determined to build up the work of my predecessors. Over the years, I spoke frequently with Charlie and got to know him very well not only as a fellow editor, but as a gifted and committed scholar, teacher, and administrator. From 1968 through 2004, he was a faculty member in the English department at Illinois State University, where he inspired generations of students with his passion for contemporary literature. From 1979 through 1994, he served as department chair, founding its Publishing Unit. From 1994 through 2004, he served as director of its highly-regarded Unit for Contemporary Literature. Evidence of his administrative vision is most manifest to the wider world in the hiring of David Foster Wallace, who created works in Normal that are generally regarded as among the most important of his generation. Click for larger view View full resolution Charlie Harris’s contributions to the institutionalization of contemporary literature in the university run deep. Publisher’s Weekly dubbed his Publishing Unit the “center for avant-garde publishing” in America. In higher education, he has few peers to match his success in nurturing and furthering contemporary literature in the university setting. To continue a small part of his legacy through the publication of ABR is an honor and privilege. The loss of his unique wisdom regarding the administration of the institutions of contemporary literature within the university cannot be replaced. Charlie was a true master, and a man both modest and generous with his wisdom. Academe has lost a giant, and contemporary literature one of its most gifted advocates. [End Page 25] Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Publisher and Editor American Book Review Copyright © 2017 American Book Review

The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers ed. by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker

Reviewed by: The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers ed. by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker Margaret Mackey (bio) The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers. Edited by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker. New York: Routledge, 2016. Routledge’s long-standing Children’s Literature and Culture series was begun under the aegis of Garland Publishing and initially edited by Jack Zipes. Now ably vetted by Philip Nel, the series provides a major resource for the study of children’s literature in English. (Obligatory conflict notice here: Like many other contributors to this journal, I published an early title in this series myself, in the days of Zipes and Garland.) Everything about this series is useful and attractive except for its horrible hardback prices. No doubt Routledge can make a commercial case for these charges, but they are discouraging to interested scholars, and few libraries have bottomless pockets either. Just as this series answers a significant need in the field, so does this particular title in the series settle into a niche that was surprisingly empty before its arrival. In 2013, Katharine Capshaw Smith, then the editor of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, pointed out a shortage of serious scholarship on the subject of books designed for children just mastering the act and art of reading. Jennifer Miskec and Annette Wannamaker took up the challenge, with impressive results. Their book contains fifteen chapters organized into four sections, plus the editors’ introduction. It addresses a fascinating range of titles aimed at attracting and supporting children as they learn to read. By accident a few years ago, I encountered a term some might consider contradictory: “exciting yet safe” (see Mackey for a fuller account of this label). Nowhere is such a paradox more fully engaged than in the world of first titles for fledgling readers, who tend to require security in order to reinforce their interpretive confidence, yet relish novelty that entices them onward into the text. This complex need is often successfully met by a series of titles, wherein the characters and setting are known but the adventures are new. Many of the books under consideration here, therefore, are part of a sequence of multiple titles involving the same characters, and many of them are, indeed, “exciting yet safe.” Some, however, appeal to new readers by being scary and/or subversive, and it is worth remembering that reading also offers the pleasures of risk. In their introduction, Miskec and Wannamaker set out the parameters of their project with a list of stimulating questions about what many might see as very small and unassuming texts: [End Page 106] What is it about these works of literature, which, on the surface at least, appear to be simple texts, that makes the best of them so appealing to beginning readers just learning to navigate the written word? What sorts of aesthetic and literary repertoire do these books require and engender? Because these books are often sold in series meant to be collected, how do these material and economic conditions shape readership and content? How do gender-specific marketing strategies hail imagined readers? How is the world being presented to the newly independent reader, and how is this reader being constructed in and by these texts? (2) The editors move on to define their territory: “the group of loosely affiliated texts that most often (though not always) are published in series; contain an extended narrative that is likely to be broken into episodes; and that feature repetitive, sometimes formulaic, plots featuring the same characters” (4). I will follow their lead by referring to the books with the capitalized term Early Readers, while referring in the lower case to the young humans who peruse them, early readers. The first section of the book, “History,” contains three chapters. Ramona Caponegro explores the line of descent of American books aimed at beginning readers from the New England Primer to The Cat in the Hat. She points out that while simple and accessible content has frequently been taken as the core identifier of such works, the role of design is also crucial; her...

Still Life Morrow

48 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2017 Moving to a New Classroom by Laura Da’ That slick envelope of developed film is tumbled in a storage closet next to old seating charts and a stale granola bar in foil. In one of the frames, faces are locked in astonishment. Having sighted a Killer Whale, Neah Bay June 2004 is written on the back of the photograph in the tender filigree of eighth-grade cursive. My first year teaching, on a field-trip nature hike, I pointed down between two cedar-spiked sea stacks. An orca’s black-and-white silhouette sashayed across the waves, looking buoyant and playful as a toddler in bathwater. Whale-skin erudition; mathematical wonder of the united gaze. Juvenile orca floating under Cape Flattery. Laura Da’ is a poet and public schoolteacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her first book, Tributaries, won the American Book Award. Still Life Morrow by Tacey M. Atsitty I think they know – about every leaf I’d catch to peel from my tongue. It spoke to how good I was at being alone. This morning I sit in the still kitchen, rued by autumn passing me outside. Still, I cut into my omelet. “Turn off the static,” my therapist says. “Taste what you swallow.” Inside, I feel water burst from the baby bellas. I wish I were staring at a still life, a bowl of cactus fruit maybe, or rotted watermelon, and not this wintry scene of the road I’ve just taken. In it, rises our breath to the lone mountains, as layers of rain gloss us abundantly. Tacey M. Atsitty, Diné, is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People) from Cove, Arizona. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. Her work has appeared in many publications. Her first book is Rain Scald (UNM Press, 2018). cover feature new native writing ...

Introduction to Focus: Erotic Poetry

Introduction to Focus:Erotic Poetry Anthony Madrid (bio) My guest editorship of this issue of American Book Review began with a modest piece called "Porn Poetry" posted on Paris Review Daily, 16th of August, 2016. There, I complain that we English-speakers have no substantial tradition of erotic poetry in our own language, if we define "erotic poetry" as poetical works whose primary aim is to sexually arouse the reader. My claim was that what we have instead is a small hill of material that might turn somebody on accidentally—merely because sexual themes are touched upon—but whose primary purpose is aggressive, satiric. This line of thought is not easily resisted, I think. Almost all the famous not-safe-for-work poetry in English treats sex as an inherently humbling business, and the nastiness and heartlessness with which the theme is handled reveals—so I asserted—a desire for a kind of revenge on sex itself. Most of my favorite writers are like this. Rochester, Swift, Beckett. I'll put it this way: For most Anglophone writers, "sex" and "piggishness" are near-synonyms. Naturally there are exceptions; I'm saying they're few. In 2002, a friend of mine brought a very special book to my attention. At the time, I was self-medicating with poetry a great deal, as I was preparing for my English Lit oral exams at the University of Chicago. I had a lot of reading to do, and my way of playing hooky from doing it was to type up poems I admired and e-mail them to my friends. The subject line always read "POETRY CHANNEL," along with the poem's title and the author's name and that of the translator (if applicable). Also the date when the piece was written. My admittedly flexible ideal was to send my friends poems they could not possibly have seen otherwise, because the works were, for example, buried in hundred-year-old publications of ethnographic societies, or scholarly books about the place of Buddhism in the poet's life, and so on. Erotic material was not common, but I do remember sending a provocative selection from a book called The Bedbugs' Night Dance and Other Hopi Tales of Sexual Encounter (1995). Somebody might imagine this latter item, drawn from a particularly rich fund of traditional Native American storytelling, would escape my objection about sexually themed literature being so frequently a way of processing anxiety. But that person would be about as wrong as wrong could be. The stories, told in beautiful deadpan, are hilarious precisely because of the ways they make the audience squirm with discomfort. I urge anyone who doubts what I am saying to order the book—it costs nothing, online—and read the story called "Horned Lizard Family." But to get back to the special book my friend recommended. It's called Not Far from the River: Poems from the Gāthā Saptaśati (1990), translated by David Ray. Ian told me about it, not as a remedy for any of the concerns I'm talking about here, but rather simply as a good read for anybody with a lively interest in foreign poetry. The book is a free translation of more than 300 erotic epigrams, originally composed in Mahārāṣṭri Prākṛt, the ancestor of modern Marathi. All the poems are four lines long. They are all about situations and body parts and taxonomy and longing. But mainly situations and body parts. The book fucked me up for life. Over and over I tell young poets: "Please write this book. Or something just like it. Write a book that will do people some actual good. . . ." The main thing is the angle. It's not satirical. The poems are not a way of processing fear and disgust. Instead, each one is simply a generous hand-off to the reader, from the poet, of some gem of erotic imagination. There is no way to do it justice with a few snippets, but I have to give you something: Rare sight, a woman lost in the trance,making love. Beautiful—so long as her eyesremain open, like blue of...

Summer Reads

As much as Managing Editor Michelle Johnson loves traveling, she also loves returning home. Her summer reading list reflects a similar course this year. Elif Batuman The Idiot Penguin Even a fragment of the Boston Globe’s review of Elif Batuman’s debut novel would have hooked me: “At once a cutting satire of academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature.”This summer I’ll travel to the Hungarian countryside (through Paris) with Selin, Batuman’s heroine. And because she is universally hailed for her sense of humor, and because I like to balance reading fiction and essays, I’ll order her essay collection as well—The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. (I’m one of those people.) Omar El Akkad American War Knopf This dystopian debut novel imagines a second American Civil War in 2074. An award-winning journalist born in Cairo who now lives in Canada, Akkad looks into the US and asks, according to the publisher’s website, “what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.” Rilla Askew Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place University of Oklahoma Press Geographically speaking, these notes from a wounded place are, to some extent, notes from my wounded place—Oklahoma. Novelist and essayist Rilla Askew moved from Oklahoma to New York as a young woman and recently returned. Now in nine essays, Kirkus Reviews writes that “Askew considers her life in relation to the question of what it means to be Oklahoman and American.” Excerpt from Dissolve by Sherwin Bitsui A bottom-lit sea ponders the lake’s questions, their secret conversations thatch howls to whimpers exhaled from an isthmus of drowned wolves. Its glossary’s cataclysms smoothed over the hatchet tucked into a sheath of starlight locates fractures potted in cisterns of smog. The stitching then unthreads to muzzled worms pulsing where an arsonist begins to lather heat over his neck. Backlit by a caravan of wailing fathers he silences their smeared faces while kneeling in an arbor of mesh and steel. Nowhere streams in blips and beeps under them. Sherwin Bitsui (Diné) is the author of Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press) and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press). He is of the Bįį’bítóó’nii’Tódi’chii’nii clan and is born for the Tlizilłani’ clan. He is from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. His honors include the 2011 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts & Culture Foundation Fellowship for Literature, a PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. Bitsui lives in Missoula, Montana, and teaches for the MFA writing programs of the University of Montana and the Institute of American Indian Arts. summer reads WORLDLIT.ORG 63 ...

Introduction to Focus: Genius

Introduction to Focus:Genius Gina Masucci MacKenzie (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: "I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor." Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it. My interest in Photography took a more cultural turn. I decided I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it. This question grew insistent. I was overcome by an "ontological" desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was "in itself," by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images. Such a desire really means that beyond the evidence provided by technology and usage, and despite its tremendous contemporary expansion, I wasn't sure that Photography existed, that it had a "genius" of its own. —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1981) The intangible, ineffable qualities of genius are those which compel us to ponder its nature and presentation. Genius, as a figural concept, stands hand in hand with the muse, as she is often capricious and cursed. One's genius and society's bestowal of that title upon someone comes and goes, fleeting, sometimes, as a Snapchat. And yet, the new book by Kay Redfield Jamison, best-selling author and chaired professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is boldly entitled and oriented to popular and credentialed audiences alike, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character. Like the poor as Jesus said, genius appears to be always with us. Similarly, as with the hero, genius, as a title, gets over-used and hence diluted. We call sports figures geniuses for the way they pass a ball or manage their media presence. We call our politicians geniuses when they say anything potentially deemed to make practical sense. Genius is the opposite of those things. It can't be held, caught, or simply spoken. It is the essence of a person. In this issue of the American Book Review, we have assembled the advanced work of literary critics focused on genius. The result is a multi-faceted contemporary exploration of the term. Robert Tally's piece, "An Anagogical Education" advocates for the need of critical genius in light of the drive toward "utility" in liberal arts education. He fights this Benthemesque initiative by advocating for criticism as a vocation, acknowledging the religious overtones of the word. Using Dante, Tally revitalizes the term "anagoge" as a form of genius and ends by endorsing the necessary inclusion of utility in the liberal arts to produce the type of genius of mind that is needed for critical inquiry in the contemporary world. Jeffrey Di Leo, in his piece, "Publishing Genius," also looks at a somewhat utilitarian function of genius, publishing. Di Leo's piece explores two films: The Scoundrel (1935) about the life of Modernist publisher Horace Liveright, and Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (2016) about Tom Wolff's famous editor. Di Leo makes the point that neither film is able to capture the true geniuses of the men on whom the films focus. His comparison of editors and publishers to the under-appreciation "stage crew" of a theatrical production calls us to question the very nature of art making and genius. Is there really only one genius or is true genius a kind of artistic teamwork? Daniel T. O'Hara's "The Stakes of Genius" also explores the idea of genius in contemporary society, by applying the theory set forth by Catherine Malabou in her latest book, Before Tomorrow: Epigensis and Rationality. As O'Hara explains, according to Malabou, epigenesist is the means through which reason takes shape in twentieth century philosophy, criticism and even neuroscience. O'Hara deftly uses Malabou's argument to prove the genius of Kant and then makes the leap to show the concept at...

Introduction to Focus: Corporate Fictions

Introduction to Focus:Corporate Fictions Joseph Tabbi (bio) Toward the end of William Gaddis's novel of American capitalism, J R (1975), a truck passes by on a Manhattan Street displaying five dwarves who are house painters and the words, "None of Us Grew but the Business." At the time of publication, readers might have taken this phrase and Gaddis's novel itself, as a corporate satire: one that traces (in grueling detail), the construction of a multi-billion-dollar empire by a solitary pre-adolescent, J R van Sant, who owns and operates a conglomerate from his grade school payphone. A handkerchief that he'd put over the mouthpiece makes him sound 'bigger,' or so he'd imagined—even as our handheld devices today allow us to continually update and reconstruct our own corporate identities, or to have them constructed for us by platforms and algorithms to which we freely subscribe. Gaddis's novel, however, is not so much a satire or ideological critique of the out of control "growth" of a worldwide corporate enterprise; it's more an enactment of the structures of belief that channel our energies—and our imaginations—toward this one for-profit model exclusive of all others. The book's 700-plus pages of mostly dialogue in a mostly uneventful narrative take things well beyond satire. And the capitalist system in America at the time is not subjected to critique so much as its imaginary communities are inhabited and its spoken languages reproduced in print. As John Dos Passos had written in his preface to the USA Trilogy (1919-1941), "mostly USA is the speech of the people." The same can be said of David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel of the American income tax system, The Pale King (2011). Neither Wallace nor Gaddis have much to say about "large scale" explanations or "the cultural logic of capitalism" and what that can mean for society, democracy, modernity and the rise of neoliberal ideology. What we have instead, as Kieran Smith notes in his piece for this issue of American Book Review devoted to Corporate Fictions, are scenes depicting the day in, day out boredom of filing (for example) tax returns. Even as Dos Passos in The Big Money (1936) and Gaddis in J R conveyed the operations of capital through the everyday speech of Americans, Wallace "shows," by tracing the day in day out, moment by moment construction of mind numbing accounting details, "that this 'laborious' method can yield 'values' that are not determined by neoliberal 'bottom-line thinking.'" Kieran Smith's comments appear in his review of After Critique (2016) by Mitchum Huehls. What's new here, and important, is the implicit assumption by Wallace and so many others that "value" is not something to be found after hours, in our time off and away but right here and now in the daily grind. Any alternative to The Official World (2016) (in Mark Selzer's compelling title) is likely to emerge not in opposition to corporate power but from within—for so long as we're in. The corporate fictions of our current generation of literary authors, like many of the pieces in this issue, might be said to offer something other than critique and something more interesting than satire. As Smith remarks: "Mitchum Huehls's erudite close-readings successfully demonstrate that contemporary authors have utilised the unique aesthetic attributes of literature to consider new, post-critical ways to challenge neoliberal ontology." Those post-critical ways, more likely than not, are given to us by the corporate structures and ontologies of the present—and not a few that have persisted from the past. America, love it or leave it? Where today would one go? Henry Turner's advice, to "Love Your Corporation," is again anything but satirical. In his analysis, Turner never rests with critique; he seeks rather to isolate earlier corporate entities—in churches and in kingdoms, for example, in towns, and in guilds whose purpose was to sustain specific, closely guarded trade interests that could only be performed collectively, through carefully communicated knowledge among fellow professionals not through individual initiative primarily. And not out in the open for all to see...

A History of American Civil War Literature ed. by Coleman Hutchison

Reviewed by: A History of American Civil War Literature ed. by Coleman Hutchison Stephen Cushman (bio) A History of American Civil War Literature. Edited by Coleman Hutchison. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 357. Cloth, $89.99.) A History of American Civil War Literature consists of twenty-two essays written by different hands, and each of the essays has something to recommend it. Editor Coleman Hutchison has divided the essays into three groups, “Contexts,” “Genres,” and “Figures,” followed by an afterword. In the first group, Michael Winship’s “The American Book Trade and the Civil War” and Christopher Hanlon’s “The Transatlantic History of Civil War Literature” serve up fresh material on subjects not as familiar as those treated by neighboring essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American Renaissance, and realism, though each of these neighbors has virtues, too. In the genres group, the not-so-predictable topics include periodical fiction, ably discussed by Kathleen Diffley, and children’s literature, deftly managed by James Marten, while other essays look fruitfully at poetry and song, diaries, memoirs, and narrative histories. The third group, devoted to individual figures, roll-calls many of the usuals—Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Mary Chesnut, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren—but concludes with a newcomer, Natasha Trethewey, whose volume Native Guard (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007. It is not easy to say new things about many of these giants, but—to cite just two worthy examples, and one could cite others—Shirley Samuels on Lincoln and John Burt on Warren do exactly that, and they do it well. The volume is handsomely produced; each of the essays, with one exception, comes in at between twelve and seventeen pages, including endnotes, so that the rhythm of reading the whole suggests a series of short jogs or sprints, depending on a reader’s speed; there are six useful pages of recommendations for further reading at the end; and obvious mistakes—such as the identification of Eudora Welty’s story “The Burning” with the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, in February 1865, instead of the burning of Jackson, Mississippi, in July 1863—are rare. If Coleman Hutchison or his editors at Cambridge had let the sum of its parts speak for itself and given the volume a more modest title, such as A Companion to American Civil War Literature or New Perspectives on American Civil War Literature, this review could devote the rest of its space to more praise and celebration of individual essays. But Hutchison insists that the whole of this book amounts to more than the sum of its admirable parts. Proclaiming priority, and inclusiveness, is [End Page 143] important to him. In his preface he declares the book “the first omnibus history of the literature of the American Civil War.” (Likewise, the back cover announces that Hutchison is “the author of the first literary history of the Civil War South.”) Hutchison nods to and quickly dismisses well-known precursors, such as Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), George M. Frederickson’s The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965), and Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), asserting that whereas these books “give disproportionate attention to northern writers,” his own substantially beefs up “representation of southern literary cultures” (xviii). But how different is Hutchison’s book? And how inclusive? Like Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, it begins with Harriet Beecher Stowe. If Hutchison wanted to stamp his history as not-so-northern right from the outset, he could have started with, say, William Gilmore Simms, who makes only a few brief, scattered appearances. Essays on the Bible or Sir Walter Scott in mid-nineteenth-century American literary imaginations also could have established wide-ranging pre-Stowe contexts. And how much more comparatively northern is Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, which firmly rejects all myths of northern moral superiority? Wilson devotes substantial space to writings by Kate Stone, Sarah Morgan, Richard Taylor, John S. Mosby, Robert E. Lee, William J. Grayson, George Fitzhugh, and Hilton R. Helper...

American Books to the Rescue: The American Library Association (ALA) and the Postwar Restoration of Polish Libraries, 1944–1948

Abstract The American Library Association (ALA)’s role in the postwar cultural restoration of Polish libraries remains relatively unknown. This article discusses the ALA’s efforts at sharing the works of American cultural and research institutions with war devastated libraries in the context of war losses suffered by Polish libraries. Special attention is given to individual requests for American books and journals as they offer insight into various needs of Polish libraries. The ALA’s collaboration with the Kosciuszko Foundation and the American Book Center for War Devastated Libraries with respect to Polish libraries is also examined.

Two Losses in the American Slavic Book World, Irena Szwede and Charles Gribble

ABSTRACTThe piece is a brief obituary for two American Slavic book people, Irena Szwede and Charles Gribble. Irena Szwede co-founded and managed Szwede Slavic Books, a bookstore that was also a library vendor. Charles Gribble founded and directed Slavica Publishers, a major publisher of scholarly monographs and journals in Slavic studies.

Confucian Principles: A Study of Chinese Americans’ Interpersonal Relationships in Selected Children’s Picturebooks

There has not been enough critical analysis of children’s literature by and about Chinese Americans, especially when compared to other minority groups in the United States. In particular, Chinese American historical books lack extensive analysis. It is important to reflect cultural accuracy in literature and to help children develop clear concepts of self and others by providing precise cultural and physical characteristics of people. While cultural authenticity allows children the opportunity to see a reflection of real experiences within a book instead of seeing stereotypes or misrepresentations, obtaining correct information about a certain time period can help children to see images of immigration accurately represented in literature. Using the Confucian delineation of interpersonal relationships as the major criterion of cultural authenticity, this article examines three currently available children’s picturebooks set in the historical period between 1848 and 1885. In addition to exploring how Chinese Americans’ interpersonal relationships are portrayed in these children’s historical books, this article argues for more proactive inclusion of the diversity in selection of picturebooks.

Portrayals of Immigrants in Trade Books (1880-1930s & 1980-2010s)

Immigrants are a part of America’s founding and history. Until this study, it was unclear how immigrants have been historically portrayed in youth American trade books. Utilizing a discourse analysis approach, this study offered a critical and comparative examination of the portrayal of first-generation immigrants, the authors’ perspectives, and the historical evolution of American trade books written during two peak United States immigration eras (1880-1930s and 1980-2010s). After examining 98 books written over 100 years, findings indicated in both peak immigration eras, immigrants faced similar problems; first-generation immigrants were insensitively criticized and viewed as subpar individuals by Americans. As a whole, books were mostly tales of assimilation and mistreatment in the United States. Since youths’ ideas of people and cultural groups are formed by what they learn from not only social interaction but also the media, it is important for books to provide meaningful representations of immigrants.