New Books in Literary Studies

With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026),
Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life,
an ambition long regarded as foundational to the European historical
avant-gardes. She reveals how many early twentieth-century artists saw
their own everyday lives—their bodies, identities, and relationships—as a
type of creative material and a central component
to their avant-garde practice. These artists abandoned traditional
forms of artmaking and venues of art viewing, instead aspiring to
integrate art with everyday life, creating an “art of living.” 

Considering
Tristan Tzara’s performances of Dadaist identity, Sonia Delaunay’s
simultaneous fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to
open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, Silveri offers a new
narrative about how the artists of interwar Paris developed experiential
life practices that resisted dominant forms of “lifestyle” and
normative discourses surrounding gender, ethnicity, and office work.
This book argues that ethical questions of “How should I live?” and “How
should I relate to others?” were as important to the avant-garde as
politics, and that aspirations to change the world played out in daily
practices of self-making.

Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is the author, most recently, of Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons.
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In 2006 poet Amanda Johnston went in search of community and, when she didn’t find what she was looking for, Amanda built her own. Today, Torch Literary Arts is a resource and a destination for Black women writers and readers across the diaspora. Fueled by wisdom and writings from poets, novelists, and screenwriters, the organization’s exceptional programming and award-winning magazine amplify Black women’s voices, and has featured work from poets like Patricia Smith, Yona Harvey, and Toi Derricotte, screenwriters and playwrights like Jonterri Gadson, Charla Lauriston, and Lisa B. Thompson, and novelists like Tayari Jones, Crystal Wilkinson, and Sapphire.

And at a time when Amanda is preparing for Torch’s 20th Anniversary celebration, “A Gathering of Flames,” she is also celebrating the publication of a new book in her capacity as the 61st Texas Poet Laureate, Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas (Host Publications, 2025), showcasing original praise poems commissioned from poets across the state, and seeking to uplift diverse and intersecting populations across age, gender, and BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, differently-abled, and immigrant communities.

You can find Amanda at her website, on Instagram, and on Threads. And check out Torch Literary Arts, Torch Magazine, and follow the organization on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.

Want to hear more from Amanda about the journey to Torch’s 20th Anniversary? Check out our continued conversation on Substack.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Kevin P. Reilly is President Emeritus and Regent Professor with the University of Wisconsin System, having served as President from 2004-13. Kevin grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx, and went on to earn his B.A. at the University of Notre Dame, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, all in English. He has published on higher education policy and accreditation, autobiography and biography, and in Irish Studies.

In this interview he discusses his most recent book, Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness (Peter Lang, 2026), a creative non-fiction intervention into Irish literary studies.

This book is a kind of Irish ghost story. In it the ghosts of Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) and eight of her family members and colleagues look back over their lives—and sometimes forward beyond them—to try to make sense of them, their times, and one another. Theirs were all turbulent lives played out on the western edge of Europe at a time of great change.Lady Gregory helped shape that change at a pivotal moment in Ireland’s development into a modern nation state. The author’s fresh approach questions and complicates the image of her as a prim Victorian workhorse. Setting her in the midst of the personal chatter of her departed family, lovers, friends, and collaborators brings home how the historical Irish moment found her just when it needed her.

Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness is published with Peter Lang, as part of their Re-imagining Ireland series

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University and the President of the American Conference for Irish Studies

Transcript here
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Monday, June 22—William Kennedy is to Albany what Joyce is to Dublin and Faulkner to Mississippi, a fictional alchemist who transforms his native place into novels at once deeply evocative of their setting and movingly universal in their human resonances. In The Albany Trilogy, just out from Library of America, three of Kennedy’s masterpieces—including his beloved novel Ironweed—take readers from the gutter to the statehouse in narratives of brokenness, resilience, and unexpected grace set against the backdrop of one of America’s most storied underdog cities.

Join Kennedy himself, one of only a handful of living authors in the LOA series, and his longtime friend Paul Grondahl, editor of the LOA edition, for a special, intimate, and wide-ranging conversation about craft, Albany as a protagonist, and what’s next for this titan of American letters, at work on his next book at ninety-eight years old.
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The American Dream at its best is an ethical ideal and a moral
compass. If respected and sustained, it can guide the United States
through Trump 2.0. Anchored in the US Constitution, Saving the American Dream: Meditations for Dark Times (Wipf and Stock, 2026) features
meditations for dark times. Meditations are intentional acts of focused
attention.Its fundamental premise is that individuals moved to communal
action by warned awareness and committed resistance are indispensable
to meet challenges that grow by the day. Guidance from reliable American
writers—philosophers, historians, novelists, poets, essayists,
religious thinkers—maps the way.
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