Literary Criticism

After its start in 1910, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races magazine became the major outlet for works by African American writers and intellectuals. In 1920, Langston Hughes's poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers was published in The Crisis and W. E. B...

From poet, author, educator Nikia Chaney comes an experimental memoir of extreme poverty and schizophrenia, mothering and love. This is Inglewood, California, 1988, bright and loud, spilling brown colored kids out on the sidewalk, like butterflies or...

Mechanic Accents is a widely acclaimed study of American popular fiction and working-class culture. Combining Marxist literary theory with American labor history, Michael Denning explores what happened when, in the nineteenth century, working people...

This new edition gives an insight into Ken Saro-Wiwa's ideology, his own record of arrest in July 1993 and imprisonment, the story of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), the struggle against the multinational Shell, the Nigerian...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hair, a primary marker of our mammalian nature, is an extraordinary indicator of economic and social standing, political orientation, religious...

In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of...

Sensuous, spiritual, and ethereal, this selection of works by the prominent Andalusian Sufi mystic and poet Abū al-Hasan al-Shushtarī (1212-1269) will delight everyone, whether or not they are devotees of Islamic literature. +

Learning from Black voices means listening to more than snippets. It means attending to Black stories. Reading Black Books helps Christians hear and learn from enduring Black voices and stories as captured in classic African American literature.Pastor...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. How did the skateboard go from a fad like the hula-hoop to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark's Skateboard answers...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Recipe reveals the surprising lessons that recipes teach, in addition to the obvious instructions on how to prepare a dish or perform a process...

Free Black woman, poet, novelist, essayist, speaker, and activist, Frances Watkins Harper was one of the nineteenth century's most important advocates of Abolitionism and female suffrage, and her pioneering work still has profound lessons for us today...

This Iraq will reach the ends of the graveyard.It will bury its sons in open countrygeneration after generation, and it will forgive its despot...It will not be the Iraq that once held the name.--from "A Vision"Living his life in exile--a series of...

"Jefferson's candor, and the courage and rigor of her critic's mind, recall a number of America's greatest thinkers. --Tracy K. Smith, The New York Times Book Review The award-winning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What is silence? In a series of short meditations, novelist and playwright John Biguenet considers silence as a servant of power, as a lie, as a...