Our Essential Reads selection include new releases that offer a general audience a depth of understanding and some fresh approaches across a wide range of important subjects. These titles also represent the unique and diverse output our University Presses offer. Read on to find out which books we’ve chosen this month.
Use the code ERF24 for 20% discount on any of our essential picks
Telling the Bees
Fordham University Press
Could an ancient tradition replace social media? What if we shared our thoughts with the bees, rather than the hive mind of the Internet?
“Insects as a companion species? In Pettman’s engaging and beautifully composed bestiary, writing for animals is writing with animals and composing a monologue that already consists of more than one voice. The covid years articulate the stretch of time between 2019-2023 into a particularly weighted temporality comes to feature observations, lists, affects, violence, films, and light. Telling the Bees is a smart, at times bitterly funny, and persistently contagious read.”
Jussi Parikka, author of Insect Media and Operational Images
The Irish Revolution
New York University Press
How the Irish Revolution was shaped by international actors and events.
“A truly groundbreaking volume whose international contributions force a great reimagining of the Irish Revolution. A must-read for anyone interested in Irish history.”
Timothy McMahon, Marquette University
Twenty-Nine Goodbyes
Fordham University Press
An engrossing, witty introduction to classical Chinese poetry through twenty-nine translations of a single poem.
“Critically acute and compulsively readable, Twenty-Nine Goodbyes offers an illuminating introduction to Chinese poetry and poetics through the shifting lens of translation. Billings’s ‘cubist collage’ of renderings of a famous parting poem by Li Bai is equally a meditation on the challenges—and the pleasures—of translating the untranslatable, all conveyed in a vibrant, colloquial teacherly voice. Readers will close this book with a sense of parting from a newly found old friend.“
David Damrosch, author of Around the World in 80 Books
The Agency of Access
Temple University Press
How disabled artists engage in institutional critique and demand agency, voice, empowerment, and social justice.
Showcasing artwork by contemporary disabled artists Corban Walker, Christine Sun Kim, and Carmen Papalia, among others, The Agency of Access inscribes contemporary disability art in the broad canon of contemporary art, where the artistic past is regarded differently.
