New Books in Literary Studies

When Virginie Despentes (1969) published her provocative debut novel Baise-moi in 1994, no one could have anticipated how she would gradually become a literary, feminist, and punk icon. This book is the first holistic, interdisciplinary approach to Despentes's novels and evolution as an author. Using feminist, queer, literary, and punk theories, the book examines how Despentes has developed and refined her Grrrl writing in Baise-moi, Les Chiennes savantes, and Les Jolies choses. Michèle Schaal's Grrrl Writing: Virginie Despentes's Authorial Politics (Peter Lang, 2026) specifically illustrates how her unique authorial politics, infused with punk, genre- and genderbending praxes, have provided an acerbic critique of still largely heteropatriarchal French society. Despentes's Grrrl writing denounces how this system engenders and thrives on injustice and social inequities, but also how conventions at play in classic or populist literary genres can perpetuate oppression as well
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Wednesday, February 18—Called “the greatest American diary of the nineteenth century,” the journal of the patrician New York City lawyer George Templeton Strong stands as a remarkable documentary record of the Civil War and a captivating literary accomplishment in its own right. Unfolding like an epic historical novel, Strong’s precise and colorful account plunges readers into the midst of an unprecedented national crisis like nothing else in American letters.

Join historian Brenda Wineapple and Geoff Wisner, editor of the just-published Library of America edition of Strong’s Civil War Diaries, for a discussion of this extraordinary work, long out of print and now updated with never-before-published entries transcribed from the original manuscript at The New York Historical.

Max Rudin is President & Publisher of Library of America.
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In the wide realm of Shakespeare worship, the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 – known colloquially as the 'Birthplace' – remains the chief shrine. It's not as romantic as Anne Hathaway's thatched cottage, it's not where he wrote any of his plays, and there's nothing inside the house that once belonged to Shakespeare himself. So why, for centuries, have people kept turning up on the doorstep? In Shakespeare’s House: A Window onto his Life and Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2023) Dr. Richard Schoch answers that question by examining the history of the Birthplace and by exploring how its changing fortunes over four centuries perfectly mirror the changing attitudes toward Shakespeare himself.
Based on original research in the archives of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and featuring two black and white illustrated plate sections which draw on the wide array of material available at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, this book traces the history of Shakespeare's birthplace over four centuries. Beginning in the 1560s, when Shakespeare was born there, it ends in the 1890s, when the house was rescued from private purchase and turned into the Shakespeare monument that it remains today.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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.
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In this RTB and Novel Dialogue episode from 2021, Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency to accumulate scraps, bits and pieces of life. She relates her father’s restlessness to her own life-total of houses inhabited (27). “Why wouldn’t I write about households?” asks Helen, “They’re just so endlessly interesting.”

Who shaped her writing? Raymond Carver: packed with power, but the pages white with omissions and excisions. Helen offers an anecdote about her own pruning that ends with her “ankle-deep in adverbs.” That’s how to escape the “fat writing” that stems for distrust of the reader. She thoughtfully compares the practical virtues of keeping notebooks for the “music” of everyday life to the nightly process of diary-writing (more analytical). John raises the question of pervasive musical metaphors in Helen’s writing, and she reports her passion for “boring pieces” and the “formal” side of Bach, which makes a listener feel that there is such a thing as meaning. “There’s something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical.”

Mentioned in the Episode


Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (the fixed people and the wandering people), Gilead, Home,


The West Wing (yes, the TV show! Helen watched it during lockdown when she couldn’t bear fiction…)


Raymond Carver‘s minimalist fiction (his first collection)


Tess Gallagher (as writer and as Carver’s editor)


Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922; on how to un-furnish fiction, leaving it an empty room)


Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast


Sigmund Freud on “the day’s residue” (e.g. in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900)


George Eliot, Quarry for Middlemarch

Listen to Episode
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Sapphic Adolescent Girls in Irish Young Adult Fiction: Queering Girlhood (Routledge, 2025) is the first sustained critical analysis of the representation of sapphic adolescent protagonists in contemporary Irish Young Adult (YA) literature. Ten YA novels published between 2017 and 2023 by both well-established and emerging Irish female authors are examined, analysing sapphic characters to demonstrate how Irish YA literature can transform and re-imagine sapphic literary representations. This book offers a critical evaluation of how lesbianism and bisexuality have been introduced into Irish YA literature, while also addressing the significance of racism, religion, violence against women and girls, friendships, and parental abandonment in shaping queer identities. This study is ideal for postgraduates and academics in the fields of Irish Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Queer Studies, as well as students interested in YA literature, comparative literature, and contemporary literature.
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