Essential Reads for January

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


Creature Needs

A kaleidoscopic literary exploration of extinction and conservation, inspired by the latest scientific research

Creature Needs is a significant contribution to contemporary literature as well as a key volume origin the gap between the worlds of science and art.”

Library Journal Reviews

Read the review in Library Journal Reviews


The Botanic Age

How and why did humans get to be so clever and thoughtful? 

Leading evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk takes readers millions of years into the past to a time before our relatives began living full-time on the ground.


Nonbinary Jane Austen

A bold and provocative analysis of Jane Austen as an early gender abolitionist

Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently than we have classically understood her: rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, the author theorizes how Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century.