New Books in Literary Studies

Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do - and fail to do - about actually getting them? In The Life You Want Adam Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to show that we are obsessed by the idea of our lives being ones we want and enjoy rather than merely endure, tolerate or make the most of. Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the difficulties we have around the whole idea of enjoying - and fashioning - our lives in cultures that insistently promote enjoyment while making it very difficult for so many people. Exploring the personal and political overlap in the issue of our lives, The Life You Want (FSG, 2026) is a profound examination of our ambivalence about enjoyment, and indeed, wanting.

Adam Phillips, formerly a principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including Missing Out, Unforbidden Pleasures, In Writing, Attention Seeking, On Wanting to Change, On Getting Better, and On Giving Up. He is also the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).
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Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2022) sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of
futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information
and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive
narratology, questions related to the criticism of post-humanity, and,
more broadly, contemporary French and Francophone literature. It
examines the fictional minds of characters and their conceptions of
resistance to the anticipated worlds they inhabit, particularly in
novels by Pierre Bordage, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Houellebecq, Amin
Maalouf, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Antoine Volodine, and Élisabeth
Vonarburg. It also explores how corporal postures serve as a matrix for
philosophical quests in novels by Amélie Nothomb, Alain Damasio, and
Romain Lucazeau. More specifically, from the fictional readers’ points
of view, it provides a critical approach to the mythologies of writing,
in the wake of the French philosophical tales by authors including
Cyrano de Bergerac and Voltaire, to question the traditionally expressed
formulations of the mythologies of writing, that is, of the metaphors
of the book (the book of life, nature, and the world), to rethink the
idea of a humanity within its limits.

Guest Emmanuel Buzay is currently working as an international
technical expert for the Modern Language Association and the French
Embassy in the US, having previously held appointments at UMass Amherst
and the University of Connecticut. In addition to this monograph, he has
published book chapters on topics from Frankenstein to Michel Houellebecq, and his articles have appeared in Nouvelles Études Francophones, Res Futurae, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of
Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and
speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism
to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan
France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under
review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.
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Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership.
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A Praxis of Persistence: Central American Feminist Testimony and Sustainable Activism (SUNY Press, 2026) by Dr. Kenna Neitch establishes persistence as a framework for understanding methods of feminist activism in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Blending literary and ethnographic approaches, Dr. Neitch analyzes texts produced by activist movements from the 1980s to 2020—from collective testimonio to institutional publications (encuentros) to social media—and connects them to the movements' cultural impact and organizing practices, such as generative conflict, horizontal cross-border networks, and what she terms strategic adaptability. What these texts and practices have in common, Dr. Neitch argues, is feminist persistence—a balance of action, preservation, and creation adaptable across contexts.

A Praxis of Persistence provides one of the first scholarly accounts of #MeToo in Central America while remaining grounded in the region's lineage of activism against sexual violence. Through the framework of persistence, this book highlights the vitality of Central American women's activism and offers a repertoire of methods for reckoning with the realities of uneven progress in feminist struggle.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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In The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black (Temple University Press, 2026), Michael E. Sawyer presents a bold work of speculative theory and philosophy that explores how Black people bring the future into being—and what existence in that future looks like. He considers what people of African descent face and the proper response to the situation. He introduces the idea of Being-As-Black as a response and questions the overarching ethos that will be the guide to a beneficial resolution.

Using critical theory and philosophy, Sawyer decouples Black identity and Black philosophy from White and Western frames by building on Toni Morrison’s ideas of Black Thought and encouraging an understanding of Black Self-Consciousness and Black Self-Identity on Black terms. The Door of No Return uses music, literature, visual art, and a variety of physical disciplines to imagine a world that differs from one that confounds the positive formation of Black Self-Consciousness under the coercive regime of white supremacy and Anti-Black racism.

Michael E. Sawyer is Professor with Tenure of African American
Literature & Culture, and Director of Graduate Studies in the
Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Brigid Wallace is a graduate student at Lehigh University whose research focuses on the French Atlantic and Latin American world during the 18th and 19th centuries.
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