Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

Dangerous Children: On Seven Novels and a Story by Kenneth Gross ’76

February 15, 2023

Tags Alumni Book

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
The author, a professor of English at the University of Rochester, provides what Publishers Weekly calls “an original spin on literary criticism” by exploring readers’ complex fascination with uncanny children in works of fiction — children who present odd, even frightening visions of innocence. The publisher notes, “Ranging from Victorian to modern works — Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, Franz Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man,” Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — Kenneth Gross’s book delves into stories that center around the figure of a strange and dangerous child.”