
New Books in Literary Studies
Interviews with Scholars of Literature about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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The year 1925 was arguably the peak of literature's centrality. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since. Literature's rivals for cultural attention were on the rise-film was becoming a more significant part of people's media diet, radio was

Alex Vernon, "Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O'Brien" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
The first literary biography of Tim O'Brien, the preeminent American writer of the war in Vietnam and one of the best writers of his generation, drawing on never-before-seen materials and original interviews. "Vietnam made me a writer." —Tim O'Brien Featuring over one hundred interviews with family, friends, peers, and

Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
A wide-ranging study of the rich questions raised by speaking infants in medieval French literature.Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature, (U Chicago Press, 2025) Julie Singer explores the unsettling

Craig E. Bertolet and Susan Nakley eds., "The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer" (Routledge, 2024)
The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer (Routledge, 2024) offers 40 chapters by leading scholars working with contemporary, theoretical, and textual approaches to the poetry and prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) in a global context. This volume provides post-pandemic, twenty-first century readers a way to teac
Nightshining (Milkweed, 2025) Jennifer Kabat is the author of The Eighth Moon, her writing has also appeared in Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and The Believer. She teaches at the school of Visual Arts and the New School. An Apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural Upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire dep

Jade Elizabeth French, "Modernist Poetics of Ageing: The Late Lives and Late Styles of Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and H.D." (Oxford UP, 2025)
What happens when the 'modern woman' ages? Modernist Poetics of Ageing (Oxford University Press, 2025) answers this question by being the first book-length study of three late modernist women's writers. Drawing on their place within wider modernist networks, this monograph is primarily framed around work by Mina Loy, H