New Books in Literary Studies

For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfield, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer.

Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches.

Liz is in and of and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration?

Mentioned in the episode:


Eavand Boland, “Quarantine” (from Against Love Poetry; read her NY Times obituary here)

Maeve Binchy, “Circle of Friends“

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

Louise Gluck Averno and Wild Iris

Brian Teare, Doomstead Days

Derek Walcott, “Omeros“

W. S. Merwin, “The Folding Cliffs”

Natasha Trethewey, “Belloqc’s Ophelia“

Yeats, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”


Nest, Eggs and Nestlings of North American Birds (Princeton Field Guides)

Trixie Belden

Shel Silverstein

Lois Lowry, “The Giver“

Liz equates poetry and Tetris

Leanne Simpson, “This Accident of Being Lost“

Elizabeth Bradfield, “We all want to see a mammal“

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“I am haunted by history: the history of dictatorship, the history of empire, history as a whole,” declares the Iraqi novelist, poet, scholar, and literary translator Sinan Antoon near the start of this conversation about his most recent novel, Of Loss and Lavender. Sinan, speaking with Magalí and critic Michael Allan, goes on to say that “the novel allows for a more wholesome, in-depth confrontation with history.” That confrontation, in turn, requires narrative forms that are complex, sometimes fractured, and often non-linear in order to braid together a range of different perspectives on a particular moment or event.

As Sinan observes in a discussion of the Arabic term nisyān—“forgetting” or “forgetfulness,” although its nuances in Arabic are not easily rendered in English—even memory itself is not static. And yet, shared histories of empire and imperialism make it possible to draw connections between far-flung locations, as Sinan does in Of Loss and Lavender by drawing together Iraq and Puerto Rico. From here, the conversation turns to the pleasures and challenges of translation, including some of Sinan’s choices when translating his own work into English. This includes the effort to make legible the nuances of race, class, and other forms of difference across contexts; although, as Sinan notes, much of his younger readership in the Arab world today is often well-versed in US culture. The conversation concludes with a discussion of Sinan’s frequent use of poems and songs in the novel, a device that points back to the multi-genre experiments of the premodern Arabic tradition, and a moving portrait of a teacher who transmitted to his students ideas about justice and equality despite the dictatorship under which he worked.

Mentioned in this episode:

About Baghdad

The Baghdad Eucharist

Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness” (on nisyān)

The Book of Collateral Damage


Elias Khoury and the use of dialect in contemporary Arabic fiction

Quebecois literature

Breaking Bad


Um Kulthoum

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Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Liverpool UP, 2026) is about the way the Romantic National Tale exercises power and defines the boundaries of citizenship through the categories of health, illness, and disability. When we see these categories at work in these novels, we understand how socio-political belonging is premised on the conception of the healthy body, to the exclusion of bodies deemed otherwise. Employing the medical humanities and, especially, the social determinants of health, this book shows that the National Tale achieves its consolidation of the nation through its enforcement of a rigorous politics of health that polices its characters' and citizens' bodies. Focusing on novels from Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, Germaine de Staël, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen allows this argument to show that the imbricated concerns of health and citizenship extend well beyond the immediate anxiety roused by the implementation of the 1800 Act of Union. This book argues that, by prioritizing the categories of health, illness, and disability, we better understand how power and citizenship function in this widely influential early nineteenth-century genre of Romantic fiction and, thus, how we continue to envision citizenship as an extension of bodily characteristics.

Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature to explore the impact of social, historical, and cultural factors in the experience of medicine and health.

Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th- and 21st-century Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies.
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Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers’, looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose’s scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today?

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University
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Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Marissa Nicosia asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.

Dr. Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapters include both analysis of plays and poems, as well as updated historical recipes ready for cooking. Nicosia prepares the recipes that permeate the canon—from Falstaff’s beloved capons to the cakes that invite festivity in Twelfth Night—demonstrating how the physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts, and asking what we can learn about food history by recreating historical recipes with twenty-first-century ingredients and tools.

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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