Literary Criticism

The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones offers the first collection of scholarship on Jones’s ever-expanding oeuvre.

This original contribution to hemispheric American literary studies comprises readings of three important novels from Mexico, Canada, and the United States: Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Quebecois writer Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues, and Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.

The essays collected in this book, addressing both the original edition of Storyteller and the 2012 revision, use the growth in understanding of Native American literature in general and of Silko’s work in particular to unpack this fascinating work and its critical reception over the years.

A Bloody and Barbarous God investigates the relationship between gnosticism and the perennial philosophy and how these traditions have influenced the later novels of Cormac McCarthy, namely, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men, and The Road.

Monk examines the experience of engaging with McCarthy’s fiction in order to reveal why so many people report that “reading Cormac McCarthy changed my life.”

“An important contribution to the study of American life writing and an invaluable reassessment of the work of Richard Wright and Richard Rodriguez.”—Robert J. Butler, coeditor of The Richard Wright Encyclopedia

“What roles do literary and community texts and social media play in the memory, politics, and lived experience of those dispossessed?” Fitzgerald asks this question in her introduction and sets out to answer it in her study of literature and social media by (primarily) Native women who are writing about and often actively protesting against displacement caused both by forced relocation and environmental disaster.

In this book the poets, editors, writers, composers, and teachers who knew the couple consider their encounters and relationships with George and Mary Oppen.

Abbey in America, published forty years after Abbey’s popular novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, features an all-star list of contributors, including journalists, authors, scholars, and two of Abbey’s best friends, as they explore Abbey’s ideas and legacy through their unique literary, personal, and scholarly perspectives.

The first collection in twenty years of essays on Robinson Jeffers, one of the great American poets of the twentieth century, this work signals the sea change in Jeffers scholarship, as well as the increasing breadth and depth of criticism of the literature of the American West.