New Books in Literary Studies

"Herta Müller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Müller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts. Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community

The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, “the Archer,” was a mysterious but influential tenth-century Indian Buddhist tantric adept who expressed his spiritual realization in mystic songs (dohās) that are enlightening, shocking

Mine Is The Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets Of Immanuel Of Rome (Centro Primo Levi, 2023) contains the first known sonnets written in Hebrew. Their author is Immanuel of Rome, an intensely studied yet little-known 14th-century poet, who adapted the quantitative meter of Arabic and Hebrew poetry from al-Andalous to th

Have you ever wanted to protect your books from forgetful borrowers, merciless page-folders or outright thieves? Perhaps you have even wished harm on those who have damaged your books, but would you threaten them with hellfire, hanging or the plague? Book Curses (Bodleian, 2024) by Dr. Eleanor Baker contains a collecti

Political Theorist B.J. (Bernard J.) Dobski has a new book focusing on Mark Twain’s final published novel, Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc. As Dobski notes in his work and in our conversation, this is one of the more obscure texts by Twain, but Twain considered it his best work. Dobski’s book is a close reading of