LSU Faculty Published Books

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The Best American Short Plays, 2014-2015

2016
William W. Demastes

For more than 70 years, The Best American Short Plays has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. From its inception, it has identified cutting-edge playwrights Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and others who have gone on to establish award-winning careers.

The Best American Short Plays 2014-2015 is the next installment from series editor William W. Demastes.This volume takes a look at the trinity Shakespeare coined as “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet.” The works in this volume explore whimsical, imaginative, humorous, and romantic themes.
The Best American Short Plays: 2015-2016

2016
William W. Demastes

Now in its seventh decade, the annals of The Best American Short Plays series now boasts hundreds of groundbreaking one-acts and an alumni list the likes of which other anthologies can only dream. From luminaries like Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee to the brightest stars of today, such as Murray Schisgal, James Armstrong, Billy Aronson, Jules Tasca, Neil LaBute, and Daniel Gallant, TBASP established itself as the standard bearer for its genre by presenting materials that offer a forthright annual reading of our nation's pulse. If The Best American Short Plays 2015-2016, co-edited by William Demastes and John Patrick Bray, proves as portentous as its forebears, suffice it to say that our hearts are pounding. In this volume, Demastes and Bray have assembled a collection of plays centered on the notion of "Starting Over." Following the 2016 election cycle, which turned centuries-old political mores and traditions on their heads, many Americans especially those in the theatre community feel as though the incoming presidential administration and congress will require our nation to start anew. The feeling that we are beginning again (for better or for worse) has crept into the consciousness of this year's crop of writers. These playwrights individually and collectively demonstrate the vitality and necessity of the theatre as a space where we can ask questions about character and identity on both personal and national scales. Although answers aren't easily forthcoming, the ensuing silences provides a vacuum of sorts an ideal but ephemeral space where any citizen, regardless of persuasion or belief, can stop, sit, and think.
Commutative Algebra: An Introduction

2016
Jerome William Hoffman

The purpose of this book is twofold: to present some basic ideas in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry and to introduce topics of current research, centered around the themes of Gröbner bases, resultants and syzygies. The presentation of the material combines definitions and proofs with an emphasis on concrete examples. The authors illustrate the use of software such as Mathematica and Singular .

The design of the text in each chapter consists of two parts: the fundamentals and the applications, which make it suitable for courses of various lengths, levels, and topics based on the mathematical background of the students. The fundamentals portion of the chapter is intended to be read with minimal outside assistance, and to learn some of the most useful tools in commutative algebra. The applications of the chapter are to provide a glimpse of the advanced mathematical research where the topics and results are related to the material presented earlier. In the applications portion, the authors present a number of results from a wide range of sources without detailed proofs. The applications portion of the chapter is suitable for a reader who knows a little commutative algebra and algebraic geometry already, and serves as a guide to some interesting research topics.

This book should be thought of as an introduction to more advanced texts and research topics. Its novelty is that the material presented is a unique combination of the essential methods and the current research results. The goal is to equip readers with the fundamental classical algebra and geometry tools, ignite their research interests, and initiate some potential research projects in the related areas.
The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies

2016
Blake Howe

The Oxford Handbook of Disability Studies represents a comprehensive state of current research for the field of Disability Studies and Music. The forty-two chapters in the book span a wide chronological and geographical range, from the biblical, the medieval, and the Elizabethan, through thecanonical classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to modernist styles and contemporary musical theater and popular genres, with stops along the way in post-Civil War America, Ghana and the South Pacific, and many other interesting times and places.Disability is a broad, heterogeneous, and porous identity, and that diversity is reflected in the variety of bodily conditions under discussion here, including autism and intellectual disability, deafness, blindness, mobility impairment often coupled with bodily difference, and cognitive andintellectual impairments. Amid this diversity of time, place, style, medium, and topic, the chapters share two core commitments. First, they are united in their theoretical and methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its central idea that disability is a social and culturalconstruction. Disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical culture. Second, these essays individually and collectively make the case that disability is not something at the periphery of culture and music, but something central to our art and to our humanity.
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

2016
Nancy Isenberg

In White Trash, Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society and shows how poor whites have been deeply ingrained in the country's history for the past 400 years. They were central to the both the Civil War itself and the rise of the Republican Party, and still today feature in reality TV as entertainment. White trash have always been an integral part of the American identity, and here their history in both culture and politics in explored in depth. A fascinating work that's timely to today's public debate about rich and poor.
Heinrich Kaan's "Psychopathia Sexualis" (1844): A Classic Text in the History of Sexuality

2016
Benjamin Kahan

"With Heinrich Kaan's book we have then what could be called the date of birth, or in any case the date of the emergence, of sexuality and sexual aberrations in the psychiatric field." Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975 .

Heinrich Kaan's fascinating work--part medical treatise, part sexual taxonomy, part activist statement, and part anti-onanist tract--takes us back to the origins of sexology. He links the sexual instinct to the imagination for the first time, creating what Foucault called "a unified field of sexual abnormality." Kaan's taxonomy consists of six sexual aberrations: masturbation, pederasty, lesbian love, necrophilia, bestiality, and the violation of statues. Kaan not only inaugurated the field of sexology, but played a significant role in the regimes of knowledge production and discipline about psychiatric and sexual subjects.

As Benjamin Kahan argues in his Introduction, Kaan's text crucially enables us to see how homosexuality replaced masturbation as the central concern of Euro-American sexual regulation. Kaan's work (translated into English for the first time here) opens a new window onto the history of sexuality and the history of sexology and reconfigures our understanding of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's book of the same name, published some forty years later.
Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe

2016
J. Gerald Kennedy

After the War of 1812, Americans belatedly realized that they lacked national identity. The subsequent campaign to articulate nationality transformed every facet of culture from architecture to painting, and in the realm of letters, literary jingoism embroiled American authors in the heatedpolitics of nationalism. The age demanded stirring images of U.S. virtue, often achieved by contriving myths and obscuring brutalities. Between these sanitized narratives of the nation and U.S. social reality lay a grotesque discontinuity: vehement conflicts over slavery, Indian removal,immigration, and territorial expansion divided the country.Authors such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine M. Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lydia Maria Child wrestled uneasily with the imperative to revise history to produce national fable. Counter-narratives by fugitive slaves, Native Americans, and defiant women subverted literary nationalism by exposing the plight of the unfree and dispossessed. And with them all, Edgar Allan Poe openly mocked literary nationalism and deplored the celebration of "stupid" books appealing to provincial self-congratulation. More than any other author, he personifies the contrary, alien perspective that discerns the weird operations at work behind the facade of American nation-building.
Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment

2016
Jeffrey M. Leichman

Acting concentrated both the aspirations and anxieties of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where theater was a defining element of urban sociability. In Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France, Jeffrey M. Leichman argues for a new understanding of the relationship between performance and self. Innovative interpretations of La Chauss e, Rousseau, Diderot, R tif, Beaumarchais, and others demonstrate how the figure of the actor threatened ancien r gime moral hierarchies by decoupling affect from emotion. As acting came to be understood as an embodied practice of individual freedom, attempts to alternately perfect and repress it proliferated. Across religious diatribes and sentimental comedies, technical manuals and epistolary novels, Leichman traces the development of early modern acting theories that define the aesthetics, philosophy, and politics of the performed subject. Acting Up weaves together cultural studies, literary analysis, theater history, and performance studies to establish acting as a key conceptual model for the subject, for the Enlightenment, and for our own time.
The Maillard Reaction Reconsidered: Cooking and Eating for Health

2016
Jack N. Losso

Cooking involves chemical reactions that can make food smell and taste better. However, the same process that is responsible for creating the aroma, flavor, palatability, color, and taste of grilled and seared foods has also been linked to the development of chronic degenerative diseases. The Maillard reaction produces advanced glycation end products (AGEs) which are associated with diabetes complications and several other chronic degenerative diseases including obesity, chronic inflammation, erectile dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

Regardless of whether you are a chef, a food scientist, a dietician, a culinologist, or simply a home cook, The Maillard Reaction Reconsidered: Cooking and Eating for Health will help you understand the link between the Maillard reaction, the AGEs, and resulting physiological conditions. Written in nontechnical terms, it elaborates on dietary factors that can help you prevent the development of chronic degenerative diseases as well as the factors that pose dietary risk.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I describes the Maillard reaction in layman’s terms to help you understand the chemistry that takes place when food ingredients are mixed in the presence of heat. Part II links the Maillard reaction products to chronic inflammatory degenerative diseases and discusses the consumption of protective foods. Part III covers champagne, caviar, good cuisine, and ice wine, and shows you how to develop a healthy pantry both at home and away from home. The author also gives you some healthy cooking and eating strategies and discusses the advantages associated with each strategy.
Recent Results on Nonlinear Delay Control Systems: In Honor of Miroslav Krstic

2016
Michael Malisoff

This volume collects recent advances in nonlinear delay systems, with an emphasis on constructive generalized Lyapunov and predictive approaches that certify stability properties. The book is written by experts in the field and includes two chapters by Miroslav Krstic, to whom this volume is dedicated. This volume is suitable for all researchers in mathematics and engineering who deal with nonlinear delay control problems and students who would like to understand the current state of the art in the control of nonlinear delay systems.
After the Storm: Militarization, Occupation, and Segregation in Post-Katrina America

2016
Lori Latrice Martin

This book examines the state of race relations in America 10 years after one of the worst natural disasters in American history, Hurricane Katrina, and looks at the socioeconomic consequences of decades of public and private practices brought to light by the storm in cities throughout the Gulf Coast as well as in America more broadly.More than a decade ago, Hurricane Katrina served to expose a well-engineered system of oppression, one which continues to privilege some groups and disadvantage others. In the wake of the natural disaster that hit New Orleans, it became clear that institutions such as residential segregation, mass incarceration and unemployment, police brutality, political disenfranchisement, racial profiling, gentrification, community occupation, discrimination, and a prison-to-school pipeline are expressly intended to work against people of color and individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Unfortunately, very little has improved in the lives of people living in majority-minority communities since Katrina. After the Storm uses Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of the natural disaster as a point of departure for understanding enduring racial divides in asset ownership, academic achievement, educational attainment, and mass incarceration in New Orleans and beyond. The book explores the many specific aspects of the widespread problem and considers how to move toward achieving a state where all can thrive. Readers will better appreciate the key roles of race, inequality, education, occupation, and militarization in understanding the failures in the responses to this disaster and grasp how institutionalized inequity continues to plague our nation.
Comorbid Conditions Among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

2016
Johnny L. Matson

This book presents the similarities and intersections between Autism Spectrum Disorders and comorbid conditions in children. It describes the prevalence and magnitude of comorbid conditions occurring in conjunction with ASD that complicate diagnosis and can potentially lead to inappropriate treatment and negative outcomes. It addresses the strengths and limitations of age-appropriate assessment measures as well as activity and motor skill measurement methods. Specific comorbid disorders are examined through the review of core symptoms, prognostic and diagnostic issues and treatment options for children on the ASD spectrum.

Featured topics include:

Challenging behaviors in children with ASD. Conditions ranging from feeding and gastrointestinal disorders to epilepsy. Developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Intellectual disability (ID). Methods and procedures for measuring comorbid psychological, medical and motor disorders.

Comorbid Conditions Among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders is a must-have resource for researchers, clinicians and professionals and graduate students across such fields as clinical child, school and developmental psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry and social work as well as rehabilitation medicine/therapy, behavioral therapy, pediatrics and educational psychology.
Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination: Spinoza, Blake, Hugo, Joyce

2016
Patrick McGee

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies.
Ghosts in Popular Culture and Legend

2016
June Michele Pulliam

With entries that range from specific works to authors, folklore, and popular culture (including music, film, television, urban legend, and gaming), this book provides a single-volume resource on all things ghostly in the United States and in other countries. The concept of ghosts has been an ongoing and universal element in human culture as far back as recorded history can document. In more modern popular culture and entertainment, ghosts are a popular mainstay--from A Christmas Carol and Casper the Friendly Ghost to The Amityville Horror , Ghostbusters , Poltergeist , The Sixth Sense , and Ghost Whisperer . This book comprehensively examines ghost and spirit phenomena in all its incarnations to provide readers with a holistic perspective on the subject. It presents insightful information about the contribution of a specific work or author to establish or further the evolution of ghost lore, rather than concentrating solely on the film, literature, music, or folklore itself.The book focuses on ghosts in western culture but also provides information about spirit phenomena and lore in international settings, as many of the trends in popular culture dealing with ghosts and spirits are informed by authors and filmmakers from Germany, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom. The writers and editors are experts and scholars in the field and enthusiastic fans of ghost lore, ghost films, ghost hunting, and urban legends, resulting in entries that are informative and engaging--and make this the most complete and current resource on ghost and spirit lore available.
Richard Matheson's Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes

2016
June Michele Pulliam

Richard Matheson was one of the leading writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in the twentieth century. Matheson's most famous early works, the novels I Am Legend (1954) and The Shrinking Man (1956), both depict traditionally masculine figures thrust into extraordinary situations. Other thought-provoking novels, including Hell House (1971), Bid Time Return (1975), and What Dreams May Come (1978)--as well as short stories and screenplays--convey the ambiguous status of masculinity: how men should behave vis- -vis women and what role they should occupy in the family dynamic and in society at large. In Richard Matheson's Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels and Twilight Zone Episodes, June M. Pulliam and Anthony J. Fonseca examine how this groundbreaking author's writings shed light on society's ever-shifting attitudes on masculinity and domesticity. In this first full-length critical study of Matheson's entire literary output, the authors discuss how I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, and other works question traditional male roles. The authors examine how Matheson's scripts for The Twilight Zone represented changing expectations in male behavior with the onset of the sexual and feminist revolutions, industrialization and globalization, and other issues. In a society where gender roles are questioned every day, Matheson's work is more relevant than ever. Richard Matheson's Monsters will be of interest to scholars of literature, film, and television, as well those interested in gender and masculinity studies.
Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites

2016
Julia Rose

Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites is framed by educational psychoanalytic theory and positions museum workers, public historians, and museum visitors as learners. Through this lens, museum workers and public historians can develop compelling and ethical representations of historical individuals, communities, and populations who have suffered. It includes various examples of difficult knowledge, detailed examples of specific interpretation methods, and will give readers an in-depth explanation of the psychoanalytic educational theories behind the methodologies. Audiences can more responsibly and productively engage in learning histories of oppression and trauma when they are in measured and sensitive museum learning environments and public history venues. To learn more, check out the website here: http: //interpretingdifficulthistory.com/
Thinking About Landscape Architecture: Principles of a Design Profession for the 21st Century

2016
Bruce Sharky

What is landscape architecture? Is it gardening, or science, or art? In this book, Bruce Sharky provides a complete overview of the discipline to provide those that are new to the subject with the foundations for future study and practice. The many varieties of landscape practice are discussed with an emphasis on the significant contributions that landscape architects have made across the world in daily practice.

Written by a leading scholar and practitioner, this book outlines the subject and explores how, from a basis in garden design, it 'leapt over the garden wall' to encapsulate areas such as urban and park design, community and regional planning, habitat restoration, green infrastructure and sustainable design, and site engineering and implementation.

Coverage includes:

The effects that natural and human factors have upon design, and how the discipline is uniquely placed to address these challenges Examples of contemporary landscape architecture work - from storm water management and walkable cities to well-known projects like the New York High Line and the London Olympic Park Exploration of how art and design, science, horticulture, and construction come together in one subject

Thinking about Landscape Architecture is perfect for those wanting to better understand this fascinating subject, and those starting out as landscape architecture students.
Meaning-Making, Internalized Racism, and African American Identity

2016
Jas M. Sullivan

Focusing on the broad range of attitudes Black people employ to make sense of their Blackness, this volume offers the latest research on racial identity. The first section explores meaning-making, or the importance of holding one type of racial-cultural identity as compared to another. It looks at a wide range of topics, including stereotypes, spirituality, appearance, gender and intersectionalities, masculinity, and more. The second section examines the different expressions of internalized racism that arise when the pressure of oppression is too great, and includes such topics as identity orientations, self-esteem, colorism, and linked fate. Grounded in psychology, the research presented here makes the case for understanding Black identity as wide ranging in content, subject to multiple interpretations, and linked to both positive mental health as well as varied forms of internalized racism.
In the City of Falling Stars

2016
Chris Tusa

Fiction. Dead birds are falling out of the sky and Maurice Delahoussaye suspects the air in New Orleans may be unsafe. The Department of Wildlife and Fisheries claims the birds were poisoned, while meteorologists suggest they were killed by a sudden change in temperature. There's even talk of terrorism, Bird Flu, West Nile Virus, or high levels of mold spores left over from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Gradually, Maurice becomes increasingly fearful that the government is hiding an ominous secret, and when he begins having strange religious premonitions suggesting that his wife is pregnant with Jesus Christ, he becomes convinced that the dead birds are a sign from God. IN THE CITY OF FALLING STARS is a tragicomedy that examines the increasing paranoia following the September 11th attacks, as well as a commentary on the devastating psychological scars that the storm left on the city of New Orleans.
Margaret Thatcher: Shaping the New Conservatism

2016
Meredith Veldman

Part of The World in A Life series, this brief, inexpensive text provides insight into the life of Margaret Thatcher. The second daughter of a provincial grocer, Margaret Roberts Thatcher was not born to privilege or power. She was not an original thinker; few of her teachers regarded her asparticularly clever. What she did possess, however, was a remarkable physical constitution (she needed little sleep and was never ill), a phenomenal capacity for hard work, and a resolute ideological certainty alloyed with political adaptability and a populist sensibility. As one of the centralfounders of New Conservatism, Thatcher fought to shatter the post-World War II political consensus, the mainstream agreement that the central state must regulate national economic and social life in order to ensure full employment and the citizen's welfare from cradle to grave. Thatcher came of agewhen the postwar consensus was at its strongest. By the time she walked onto the world stage as leader of Britain's Conservative Party in 1975, however, the ideals of social citizenship forged in the tumult of World War II had begun to break down under the pressure of economic crisis. The resultingpolitical confusion gave Thatcher the chance she needed. As prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, she initiated the move of vast areas of the economy from public or state control to private ownership. More generally, Thatcherism both fed and fed upon a growing skepticism about state activismand governmental power - although, paradoxically, under Thatcher's guidance the power of Britain's central state grew, in some areas enormously. We live in a global age where big concepts like "globalization" often tempt us to forget the personal side of the past. The titles in The World in A Life series aim to revive these meaningful lives. Each one shows us what it was like to live on a world historical stage. Brief, inexpensive, and thematic, each book can be read in a week, fit within a wide range of curricula, and shed insight into a particular place or time. Four to six short primary sources at the end of each volume sharpen the reader's view of an individual's impact on world history.
The Crisis of Campus Sexual Violence: Critical Perspectives on Prevention and Response

2016
Sara Carrigan Wooten

Although awareness of campus sexual assault is at a historic high, institutional responses to incidents of sexual violence remain widely varied. In this volume, a diverse mix of expert contributors provide a critical, nuanced, and timely examination of some of the factors that inhibit effective prevention and response in higher education. Chapter authors take on one of the most troubling aspects of higher education today, bridging theory and practice to offer programmatic interventions and solutions to help institutions address their own competing interests and institutional culture to improve their practices and policies with regard to sexual violence. The Crisis of Campus Sexual Violence provides higher education scholars, administrators, and practitioners with a necessary and more holistic understanding of the challenges that colleges and universities face in implementing adequate and effective sexual assault prevention and response practices.
Oil Spill Impacts: Taxonomic and Ontological Approaches

2016
Yejun Wu

Starting with the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill incident, Oil Spill Impacts: Taxonomic and Ontological Approaches chronicles a timeline of events that focus on the impact of oil spills and provides an understanding of these incidents using a number of approaches. The book includes an interdisciplinary oil spill taxonomy, an oil spill topic map, and highlights information-organization tools, such as indexes, taxonomies, and topic maps that can be used to connect information resources with concepts of interest.

The topic map combines the function of ontology with the function of organized information resources, and contains thousands of concepts and their relationships extracted from approximately 300 documents stemming from various academic conference presentations, journal articles, news reports, and web pages.

Divided into four parts, the book begins with a brief introduction of the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill events followed by a breakdown of the taxonomy concepts distributed into categories and their subcategories. The book then describes the oil spill topic map separated by concepts, relationships, and references.

This interdisciplinary reference provides to its readers:

The perspective of multiple disciplines instead of just one discipline An indication of the most important topics in the oil spill domain Developed research in the oil spill and oil drilling areas A broad and detailed view of oil spill issues

The book serves students, teachers, and researchers interested in oil spill issues, oil spill incidents, and addresses their impacts that involve coastal and marine environmental sciences, biological sciences, chemistry, disaster management, geology, sociology, and government policy.
Priorities of the Professoriate: Engaging Multiple Forms of Scholarship Across Rural and Urban Institutions

2015
Fred A. Bonner II, Rosa M. Bander, Petra A. Robinson, Chance W. Lewis, and Barbara Lofton

Established in 2006, the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education (AABHE), formerly constituted as the Black Caucus (American Association of Higher Education), has been the consistent voice of Black issues in academe. According to the stated mission, the AABHE pursues the educational and professional needs of Blacks in higher education with a focus on leadership, equity, access, achievement and other vital issues impacting students, faculty, staff, and administrators. AABHE also facilitates and provides opportunities for collaborating and networking among individuals, institutions, groups and agencies in higher education in the United States and internationally. This 2012 year will mark the beginning of the AABHE research consortium, an arm of the organization that will advance scholarly research and publications to highlight critical issues pertinent to the success and uplift of Black populations across the higher education diaspora. This book will explore important issues across multiple fields—fields represented by the scholars/members of AABHE. AABHE scholars will contribute chapters based on their disciplinary expertise. The work of Earnest Boyer as articulated in the book Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship will be used as the conceptual foundation to ground this important work. A particular focus on the elements of Boyer’s seminal work will include chapters devoted to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning; Scholarship of Engagement; Scholarship of Discovery; and Scholarship of Integration. This scholarly book is unique in that it provides essential insight on how not only faculty, but also administrators who are invested in insuring that the priorities of the professoriate are aligned with the mission and vision of urban postsecondary institutions.
Conversations with Michael Chabon

2015
Michael Chabon

Since the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, launched him to fame, Michael Chabon (b. 1963) has become one of contemporary literature's most acclaimed novelists by pursuing his singular vision across all boundaries of genre and medium. A firm believer that reading even the most challenging literature should be a fundamentally pleasurable experience, Chabon has produced an astonishingly diverse body of work that includes detective novels, weird tales of horror, alternate history science fiction, and rollicking chronicles of swashbuckling adventure alongside tender coming-of-age stories, sprawling social novels, and narratives of intense introspection. Uniting them all is Chabon's utterly distinct prose style--exuberant and graceful, sometimes ironic but never cynical. His work has earned accolades ranging from the Pulitzer Prize to science fiction's Hugo and Nebula Awards. Conversations with Michael Chabon collects eighteen revealing interviews with the renowned author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and other much-admired works. Spanning nearly twenty years and drawn from science fiction fan magazines and literary journals alike, these interviews shed new light on the central concerns of Chabon's fiction, including the importance of dismantling the false divide between literary and lowbrow, his evolving relationship to Jewish culture and literature, the unique properties of male friendship, and the complexities of race in contemporary America. These interviews are essential reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of the life and work of an author who has been instrumental in defining the landscape of contemporary American fiction.
Citizens of the World: Adapting in the Eighteenth Century

2015
Kevin Lee Cope

Encounters, whether first or subsequent or whether cultural, economic, or ideological, mark the beginning of an acquaintance and measure both similarities and differences. What happens after an opening encounter is the topic of Citizens of the World: Adapting in the Eighteenth Century. Taking as its point of embarkation awareness of the mutuality of foreignness--of the unfamiliarity that characterizes all parties to a meeting of the minds, ways, or traditions--this exploratory volume considers the many approaches and strategies to adaptation in the Enlightenment and the long and complex process of reciprocal adjustment that created this enthusiastically outgoing era internationally. The eight essays of this volume examine four varieties of adaptation: the interdisciplinary, in which expanding realms of knowledge collide but cooperate; the transnational, in which longstanding traditions merge and hybridize; the gendered, in which personal identity and public pursuits negotiate; and the general, in which the adapting mentality energizes unprecedented efforts at ingenious recombination. Whether in cast-and-fired pottery or aboard imagined airships, adaptation, the authors in this volume demonstrate, all but defines a century in which the "all but" implies perpetual adjustment to everything else.