Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s "Jim" is an encyclopedic work of literary criticism that celebrates Mark Twain’s classic. "Jim" contends that readings of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as racist have missed Twain’s use of irony to... Read More

Natalie Lawrence’s work of cultural inquiry, "Enchanted Creatures", analyzes fabled and mythical beasts across human history, folklore, and literature, asking why monsters persist in human imaginations. Organized into sections on... Read More

Memoirist Elissa Altman’s encouraging writer’s guide is about pushing beyond doubt, fear, repression, and shame to craft stories of relevance and truth. A teacher of memoir writing, Altman details the integral concept of... Read More

The Book Lover’s Almanac is a delightful daily compendium of literary facts and anecdotes. The monthly sections open with a rundown of prominent authors’ births and deaths and the dates when famous works were first issued or... Read More

Ella Buchan and Alessandra Pino’s "A Gothic Cookbook" combines recipes with food-based literary critiques of the Gothic stories that inspired them. These meals, snacks, and beverages are either direct recreations from the source texts,... Read More

Spanning literary criticism, social science, and the study of the fairy tale, Kimberly J. Lau’s "Specters of the Marvelous" foregrounds race in often whitewashed European fairy tales. Prior to cinema, fairy tales were collected,... Read More

A mix of memoir with literary criticism, Lawrence Wells’s "Ghostwriter" dives into the Shakespeare authorship debate from the perspective of a skeptic working alongside a staunch believer. Wells was approached to ghostwrite a book for... Read More

Literature professor Michael Bérubé’s "The Ex-Human" delves into science fiction works that envision postapocalyptic worlds and the possible extinction of the human race. The book focuses on an intriguing range of authors, including... Read More