"Attack of the 50 Foot Indian" by Stephen Graham Jones is now available through Saga Press!

About the book: 

A Tale of Two Moons.

Every government of every nation debates what to do when a fifty-foot tall man, dressed in a loincloth and dripping from the sea, appears off the Siberian coast. As the American people puzzle over how he came to be and what to do next, the news outlets start calling the titan “Two Moons,” social media abducts him into the memesphere, and the military, well, they have their own action-plan for dealing with threats to what they mistakenly consider their homeland.

With unapologetic honesty and wit, Stephen Graham Jones cuts to the bone of the stereotypes used for American Indians, showcasing his talent as a humorist and as one of our great American writers in this short story.

You can order "Attack of the 50 Foot Indian" .

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Dr. Nicole Mansfield Wright's book, Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel, is now available for purchase through Johns Hopkins University Press! 

A critique of attempts by conservative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors to appropriate the rhetoric of victimhood and appeals to "rights" to safeguard the status of the powerful.

As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject, valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of members of groups long considered inferior or subhuman. Yet at the same time, a group of conservative authors mounted a reactionary attempt to cultivate sympathy for the privileged. In Defending Privilege, Nicole Mansfield Wright examines works by Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and others to show how conservatives used the rhetoric of victimhood in attempts to convince ordinary readers to regard a privileged person's loss of legal agency as a catastrophe greater than the calamities and legally sanctioned exclusion suffered by the poor and the enslaved. In promoting their agenda, these authors resuscitated literary modes regarded at the time as derivative or passé—including romance, the gothic, and epistolarity—or invented subgenres that are neglected today due to widespread revilement of their politics (the proslavery novel).

Although these authors are not typically considered alongside one another in scholarship, they are united by their firsthand experience of legal conflict: each felt that their privilege was degraded through lengthy disputes. In examining the work of these eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors, Wright traces a broader reactionary framework in the Anglophone literary legacy. Each novel seeks to reshape and manipulate public perceptions of who merits legal agency: the right to initiate a lawsuit, serve as a witness, seek counsel from a lawyer, and take other legal actions. As a result, Defending Privilege offers a counterhistory to scholarship on the novel's capacity to motivate the promulgation of human rights and champion social ascendance through the upwardly mobile realist character.

Her book can be purchased .

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Jeffrey DeShell, faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, has had his newest novel released titled Masses & Motets: A Francesca Fruscella Mystery from the University of Alabama Press.

A crime novel loosely based on the masses and songs of the 17th century Flemish composer Pierre de la Rue Masses and Motets is a tale composed of four basic interwoven threads, corresponding to the four-part choral writing of Pierre de la Rue’s service music. The first thread comes from the diaries of a recently murdered priest, Father Andrea Vidal, former secretary to the notorious Father Marcial Maciel.

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Khadijah Queen's co-edited article "Make No Apologies for Yourself" appeared in the New York Times on May 19, 2019. Read .

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Sue Zemka, Department Chair, has been awarded a Kayden Research Award for her next book, The Embodied Hand: Essays on the Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. 

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Nan Goodman's essay "At the Time of that Look: The Problems of Simultaneity at the Testimony of Salem" has been published in the A Question of Time anthology by Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Order for purchase .

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Julie Carr's book Real Life: An Installation has been named a finalist for the 2019 Colorado Book Award in Poetry. More .

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Jason Gladstone's essay "Network Unavailable: Informal Populations and Literary Form" was published in American Literary History and can be read .

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