Bookshelf

(New York: Routledge, 2021)
Written for a general audience, this book proceeds in a sequence of 26 brief “riffs” on topics ranging from singing cowboys and pop songs to postmodern philosophers and climate-driven homelessness. The author argues that “wandering, as a primal and recurrent human experience, is basic to the understanding of certain literary texts. In turn, certain prominent literary and cultural texts (from Paradise Lost to pop songs, from Wordsworth to the blues, from the Wandering Jew to the film Nomadland) demonstrate how representations of wandering have changed across cultures, times, and genres.”

Morris is emeritus professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of two prize-winning books in 18th-century studies and is known for contributions in pain medicine.

(Yaoundé, Cameroon: Editions Ifrikiya, 2021)
In this collection of articles, the author describes Werewere-Liking as “a multitalented artiste … a novelist, a poet, a playwright, a dancer, a choreographer, a painter, a movie maker, and a singer.” One of the first female Francophone writers of African literature, she has taught at the University of Abidjan in West Africa and other universities around the world.

In honor of the 30th anniversary of Village Ki-Yi, a school of arts founded by Werewere-Liking that trains mostly underprivileged children, scholars around the world shared articles on various aspects of Werewere-Liking’s multifaceted work, which are gathered in this book.

(New York: Catapult Press, 2020)
The author of eight novels and three collections of stories brings us this tale of an American couple who travel to a snowy European city to adopt a baby. Complicating their mission is the wife’s increasingly debilitative illness, which makes them concerned that the orphanage will not release their child. During their stay at a once glorious but now fading grand hotel, they encounter a strange cast of characters. Publishers Weekly notes, “[A] dreamlike, resonant fable ... Cameron doles out the right amount of eeriness and eccentricity ... emotionally affecting.”

(University of California Press, 2021)
Best known for his experimental film about its own making, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, William Greaves was an influential independent documentary filmmaker who produced, directed, shot, and edited more than 100 films on a variety of social issues and on key African American figures ranging from Muhammad Ali to Ralph Bunche to Ida B. Wells.

MacDonald’s book offers the first comprehensive overview of Greaves’ career, bringing together a mix of essays from critics and scholars, Greaves’ own writings, an extensive meta-interview with Greaves, conversations with his wife and collaborator and his son. Together, they illuminate Greaves’ mission to use filmmaking as a tool for transforming the ways African Americans were perceived by others and the ways they saw themselves.

(Montgomery, Ala.: China Aerospace Studies Institute, 2021)

Garafola, a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corp., and Allen, a retired Air Force analyst, explore the evolution of China’s air force since its founding in 1949 and the directions it might pursue leading up to its 80^th anniversary. Topics considered include strategy and doctrine, organizational structure, personnel, education, training, and military diplomacy and exchanges.

(Virginia Beach, Va.: Köehler Books, 2020).
A thousand miles off course, a private plane strikes a lighthouse and crashes near snowy Lake Superior. The pilot’s body is found, but three VIP passengers are missing. Combine that with a deadly snowmobile accident, an upstart congressional candidate, and alarming discoveries in Isle Royale National Park, and local sheriff Sam MacDonald finds he has more than enough challenges as the solitude of the North Shore is disrupted by events that could have national and international repercussions.

(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2021)

Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of its Top Ten Books in Business and Economics for Spring 2021, this book employs tools of microeconomics to investigate how individual economic choices in response to climate change will transform the larger economy. The author, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economics and Business at Johns Hopkins University, “suggests new ways that big data can be deployed to ease energy or water shortages to aid agricultural operations and proposes informed policy changes related to public infrastructure, disaster relief, and real estate to nudge land use, transportation options, and business development in the right direction.”

(Louisville, Ky.: Sarabande Books, 2021)

Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and boasting a 2020 Pushcart-winning story, this collection of 13 tales is described as “part domestic horror, part flyover gothic.” Collins’ characters — including a young woman who must give birth to future iterations of herself; a widower who kills a horse en route to his grandson’s circumcision; a summer camper who is haunted by a glass eye and motorcycle crash — must choose to fight or flee the “big bad” that dwells within us all.

(Seattle: Marrowstone Press, 2020).
The prolific poet has given us another collection, this one described as one book of poems composed of two. According to the publisher: “Its epigraph is taken from the English Romantic poet, John Clare: to ‘turn the blue blinders of the heavens aside/To see what gods are doing.’ In Weltner’s book, the gods are such fundamental powers and presences as the past, memory, human existence in place and time, passion in all its senses, and what glimpses of transcendence humanity is allowed to see. It is a poetry of quest and questioning, of a late life looking back, of form and freedom pondering those essential things long pondered before us.”

(New York and London: Routledge, 2021).
This volume focuses on teaching classics in a prison setting and features articles that examine how incarcerated adults read and discuss classical texts and the best pedagogical practices for teaching within a prison.