New Books in Literary Studies

John Gerard’s natural history of plants, The Herball (1597), is considered a failure in the history of science. Despite this reputation, it has endured as an aesthetic resource. Its illustrations were used as needlework patterns, and strewn across its pages are extracts of classical poetry, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that delight and instruct. It is little wonder that early modern poets, like Shakespeare and Milton, gathered inspiration from this storehouse of plants.

In Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance, Vin Nardizzi offers a reparative reading of Gerard’s “failed” text, particularly its chapters on leeks, laurels, tulips, and potatoes. Through a series of experiments in speculative natural history, which require an analysis of both word and image, Nardizzi distills The Herball’s logic and poetics, its distinctions and infelicities, and demonstrates the entanglements of humans and plants at the core of Shakespeare’s plays. Exploring these “cross-kingdom” encounters, Nardizzi contributes to the burgeoning field of queer ecologies by treating plant natural history as a serious intellectual resource for writing a counter-history of embodiment at the turn of the seventeenth century. All we need do, Nardizzi proposes, is smell the flowers.
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Caroline Bicks became the first scholar granted extended access by Stephen King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writerʼs creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by a question millions of Kingʼs enthralled and terrified readers (including her) have asked themselves: What makes Stephen King’s writing stick in our heads and haunt us long after we’ve closed the book? Dr. Bicks focuses on The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, ʼSalemʼs Lot, and Night Shift—to reveal how he crafted his language, story lines, and characters to cast his enduring literary spells.

While tracking King’s margin notes and editorial changes, she discovered cut scenes and alternative endings that King is allowing her to publish now. The book also includes her interviews with King, that reveal new insights into his writing process and personal history. Part literary master class, part biography, part memoir and investigation into our deepest anxieties, Monsters in the Archive is unlike anything published about the master of horror. It chronicles what Dr. Bicks found when she set out to unearth how King crafted some of his scariest, most iconic moments. But it’s also a story about an English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.

Guest: Dr. Caroline Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. She is the author of Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England; co-author of Shakespeare Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas; and co-host of the Everyday Shakespeare Podcast.

Show Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Once Upon A Tome

The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker

Claire Myers Owens and the Banned Book

Before and After the Book Deal

Your Art Will Save Your Life

Becoming The Writer You Already Are

The Top 10 Struggles in Writing A Book Manuscript and What To Do About It

Do You Need A Developmental Editor?

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Many people think they know what fairies are, what a fairy looks like, and how a fairy is expected to behave. Dr. Francis Young's Fairies: A History (Polity, 2026) demonstrates that the truth about belief in fairies is far stranger than clichéd images of tiny figures with wings and wands.Before the rise of the 'small winged fairy' in the nineteenth century, the category of fairies included a vast range of supernatural human-like creatures, from the elves of Scandinavia and the aos sí of Ireland to the vilas of the Balkans and the fadas of Iberia. Dr. Young traces the ancient origins of belief in such creatures and how it adapted to the rise of Christianity and then flourished in medieval Europe, before being transformed – but not destroyed – by the upheavals of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and even European colonial expansion, which made fairies a global phenomenon. He concludes this uniquely wide-ranging history by reflecting on the surprising ways in which fairy belief endures in our apparently disenchanted contemporary world.No one who reads this brilliant tour through the enchanted pathways of fairyland will ever look at the winged creatures of contemporary popular culture – or the woods at the bottom of their garden – in the same way again.

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 their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live. Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works.

Interviewees: Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.
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In this episode of High Theory, Kim talks to Ben Mangrum about Generic. A curious term that denotes both the conventions and rules of genre, and the impersonal or nameless quality of things like generic drugs or generic devices; the generic structures many of our cultural codes. Ben uses both senses to talk about the history of computing. He tells us about the surprising role the genre of comedy has played in our interactions with computers.

Ben suggested that we reference Spike Jones’s 2010 short film I’m Here as an example of computational comedy. In the episode Ben references Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg’s Modern Romance (Penguin Books 2016), a book of comedy and social critique about online dating, as well as classics like Agatha Christie’s Muder on the Orient Express (Collins Crime Club 1934), William Gibson’s Neuromancer (Ace Books 1984), and the film You’ve Got Mail (1998). He also talks about David Schumway’s writing on screwball comedies, “Screwball Comedies: Constructing Romance, Mystifying Marriage” in Cinema Journal 30 no. 4 (Summer 1991): 7-23, doi: 0.2307/1224884, and Lauren Berlant’s on genre, “Genre Flailing” in Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1 no. 2 (2018).

If you want to learn more, check out Ben’s book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford 2025). In this cultural history of the computer, Ben shows that comedy has been central to how we've made sense of the technology's sweeping effects on public life and private experience. From the first Broadway play to include a computer in the 1950s to popular films and joke-telling digital assistants, many have used comedy to make the computer seem ordinary. Others have tried to stage the assimilation of computers within corporate life as a kind of comic drama. Mangrum describes these and many other ways in which comedy and computation have come together as a new genre of experience: the comedy of computation.

Ben Mangrum works as an Associate Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research examines topics ranging from the environmental humanities to twentieth-century “world literature” and the history of ideas and media underlying contemporary methods in the digital humanities. His first book, Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press.

The transcript of this episode lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. The image for this episode shows a happy computer, drawn in a few pixels on a blue background. It was made for High Theory by Lili Epstein.
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