Faculty - Literature
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by
This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.
I don't think I've ever seen such a euphoric reaction to the announcement of the National Book Award winners than I have this year. Imani Perry's speech is already an online legend, and I'm going to start my FWT reading with "South to America," which was inspired, at least in part, by Albert Murray’s 1971 travelogue “South to a Very Old Place.” Good preparation for my spring term class on Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man."
The Rabbit Hutch by This year's winner in the fiction category.
Seven Empty Houses by
The seven houses in these seven stories are empty. Some are devoid of love or life or furniture, of people or the truth or of memories. But in Samanta Schweblin's tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back in: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child's first encounter with a dark choice or the fallibility of parents. This was the collection that established Samanta Schweblin at the forefront of a new generation of Latin American writers.
This year's winner in the literature in translation category.
Punks: New and Selected by
A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New & Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love.
And the winner in poetry.
Faculty - Writing
A Girlhood: A Letter to My Transgender Daughter by
A parent’s love letter to a daughter who has always known exactly who she is.
I've Had to Think up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton by
When everything fell apart for Lynn Melnick, she went to Dollywood. It was perhaps an unusual refuge. The theme park, partly owned by and wholly named for Dolly Parton, celebrates a country music legend who grew up in church and in poverty in rural Tennessee. Yet Dollywood is exactly where Melnick—a poet, urbanite, and daughter of a middle-class Jewish family—needed to be. Because Melnick, like the musician she adores, is a survivor.
Tomb of Sand by
An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention including striking up a friendship with a hijra (trans) woman confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more modern of the two.
Winner of the International Booker Prize 2022!
Associate Director of Academic and International Student Services.
Girlhood: Essays by
Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.
This book made me think and feeling deeply about what it means to come of age. It rattled by brain and my heart in the best way.
The Hurting Kind: Poems by
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness--between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves--from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón.
I'm grateful Ada Limon recently became Poet Laureate. Her poems do all the things the best poems do, and this book is lovely.
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by
Amy and Brian's world was changed forever with his diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer's. Forced to confront the daily frustrations and realities of the disease and its impact on their lives and marriage, Brian resolved not to let it dictate his life and instead asked himself: What makes life meaningful, and how do I want to live the rest of mine? His decision led them to learn about Dignitas and to fly to Zürich for a peaceful ending of Brian's life.
I listened to the audiobook version of this book and it made me sob in my car. I've loved Amy Bloom's books for decades, and I'm so grateful she gave voice to this story.
Inciting Joy: Essays by
Prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it.
Ross Gay gives voice to gratitude, joy, and abundance like no one else and I am fully here for it.
Ornamentalism by
Focusing on the cultural and philosophic conflation between the "oriental" and the "ornamental," Ornamentalism offers an original and sustained theory about Asiatic femininity in western culture. This study pushes our vocabulary about the woman of color past the usual platitudes about objectification and past the critique of Orientalism in order to formulate a fresher and sharper understanding of the representation, circulation, and ontology of Asiatic femininity.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by
A modern love story about two childhood friends, Sam, raised by an actress mother in LA's Koreatown, and Sadie, from the wealthy Jewish enclave of Beverly Hills, who reunite as adults to create video games, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives.
Blockchain Chicken Farm by
In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today.
FORTHCOMING 2023 Selections to look forward to...
Raving (Practices) by 
BTS: A Critical Reader by Faculty - Visual Arts
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by
A work of nonfiction by philosopher Amia Srinivasan that upends the way we discuss-or avoid discussing-the problems and politics of sex.
Brown Neon: Essays by
Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection, Brown Neon, gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds.
Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture by
A history of the relationship between architecture and mathematics, with a special focus on the transition in the postwar period between analogue to digital design.
Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation by
Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied.
Faculty - Drama and Visual Arts
The Long Song by
The Long Song is a historical novel by Andrea Levy published in 2010 that was the recipient of the Walter Scott Prize.
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability--at the level of literature, history, and politics--to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
The Trial by
The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.
Faculty - Music
Dead-End Memories: Stories by
Dead-End Memories collects the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, quietly discover their ways back to recovery.
Reading these spare, unexpected stories you start to forget you are reading at all. You simply start to experience the things Banana Yoshimoto's characters experience, and become one with her exceptionally subtle outlook on life. You close the last page with regret, realizing you were very lucky to have found this book.
Dean of the Library
The Island of Missing Trees by
A beautifully written story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness.
Cloud Cuckoo Land by
Set in Constantinople in the fifteenth century, in a small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now, Anthony Doerr's third novel is a story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope--and a book. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship--of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart.
Visiting Faculty - Drama
The Art Spirit by
The Art Spirit represents the collected words, teachings, and letters of inspired artist and teacher Robert Henri.
Offers valuable self-defense advice for artists navigating educational institutions.
The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood by
The Empire of Trauma tells the story of how the traumatic victim became culturally and politically respectable, and how trauma itself became an unassailable moral category. Revealing how trauma has come to authenticate the suffering of victims, The Empire of Trauma provides critical perspective on some of the moral and political issues at stake in the contemporary world.
Traces the idea of psychic trauma from its emergence in the late 19th century to current day uses and abuses.
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by
For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless.
Presents history from the perspective of stateless people, explores the pliability of ethnic identities and looks at state-making as a form of internal colonialism.
Director of Library Services
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by
Amy and Brian's world was changed forever with his diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer's. Forced to confront the daily frustrations and realities of the disease and its impact on their lives and marriage, Brian resolved not to let it dictate his life and instead asked himself: What makes life meaningful, and how do I want to live the rest of mine? His decision led them to learn about Dignitas and to fly to Zürich for a peaceful ending of Brian's life.
Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by
Eight interconnected stories follow the tenants in the Banneker Homes, a low-income high rise in Harlem where gentrification weighs on everyone's mind, as they weave in and out of each other's lives, endeavoring to escape from their pasts and forge new paths forward.
1971: a Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh by
The war of 1971 was the most significant geopolitical event in the Indian subcontinent since its partition in 1947. At one swoop, it led to the creation of Bangladesh, and it tilted the balance of power between India and Pakistan steeply in favor of India. The Line of Control in Kashmir, the nuclearization of India and Pakistan, the conflicts in Siachen Glacier and Kargil, the insurgency in Kashmir, the political travails of Bangladesh--all can be traced back to the intense nine months in 1971.
Provost
The Dragon Can't Dance by
This novel, centered on the life of Aldrick Prospect, a man in Port of Spain who spends the entire year recreating his dragon costume for Carnival, lead the reader on a journey through the colonial psyche, and expose the deep-seated problems of a society that still has not reconciled itself with its colonial past and racial divisions.
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization by
Senge describes the strategies of learning organizations, in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create the results they truly desire.
Faculty - Visual Arts
Japanese Science Fiction: The eponymous heroine of Tsutsui's novel is the alter ego of brilliant and beautiful psychotherapist Atsuko Chiba, one of the leading brains in the Institute for Psychiatric Research. When treating private patients, Atsuko transforms herself into the guise of Paprika to mask her true identity. Components in the academic field of Psychology in this novel is fantastic, which is not captured in its Anime version.
Paprika パプリカ by
Centers on a revolutionary machine that allows scientists to enter and record a subject's dream. After it is stolen, a fearless detective and a brilliant therapist join forces to recover the device before it falls into the hands of a 'dream terrorist'.
The DVD to go with the novel recommended.
Visiting Faculty - Visual Arts
Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic by
An anthology of Black resilience and reclamation, bringing together the voices of those most harshly affected by the intersecting pandemics of Covid-19 and systemic racism, Bigger Than Bravery explores comfort and compromise, challenge and resilience.
Abandon Me: Memiors by
In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family, lovers, and oneself.
If you know me, you know I think this exquisitely crafted, hard-won, heartening, and profoundly queer memoir is all that writing a life can be.
Groundglass by
Groundglass takes shape atop a polluted aquifer in Minnesota, beside trains that haul fracked crude oil, as Kathryn Savage confronts the transgressions of U.S. Superfund sites and brownfields against land, groundwater, neighborhoods, and people.
Poet Savage, a Minnesota daughter, writes of entwined environmental and personal tragedies, living and losing on stolen land catastrophically desecrated by Superfund pollution. If it sounds heavy, it is, but also brave and full of beauty; a book to mourn and learn with.
The Best American Essays 2022 by
Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.
With Chee editing, this year's collection is jaw-droppingly un-put-downable. It's also diverse in the many ways anything "American" should be. If you don't think essays are for you, something, and probably many somethings, in these pages will change your mind and stay with you forever.
Faculty - Visual Arts
Girlhood: Essays by
Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.
Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces by
An archival dive with fresh interpretations of the legendary New York gallery and cultural laboratory that catalyzed collaboration among Black artists and their counterparts of diverse backgrounds.
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by
In this book, the author shares her philosophy of the classroom, offering ideas about teaching that fundamentally rethink democratic participation. She writes about education as the practice of freedom. She advocates the process of teaching students to think critically and raises many concerns central to the field of critical pedagogy, linking them to feminist thought.
Technical Instructor in Printmaking
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by
Living at the border between life and non-life, fungi help create soil, they send out networks of tubes that enmesh roots and link plants together in the "Wood Wide Web." Fungi also drive many long-standing human fascinations: from yeasts that cause bread to rise and orchestrate the fermentation of sugar into alcohol; to psychedelic fungi; to the mold that produces penicillin and revolutionized modern medicine.
Underland: A Brief Time Journal by
An exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself - from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by
A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World. This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba.
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by
Macfarlane’s journeys take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. He matches strides with the footprints made by a man five thousand years ago near Liverpool, sails an open boat far out into the Atlantic at night, and commingles with walkers of many kinds, discovering that paths offer a means not just of traversing space but also of feeling, knowing, and thinking.
Faculty - Visual Arts
The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History by
Examines the history and culture of eighteenth-century France as it provides a view of the people of the cities, towns, and countryside during the Age of Enlightenment.
Chapter 1, "The Meaning of Mother Goose" is remarkable.
Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories by
A collection of darkly comic stories united by their obsession with obsession.
Short Stories, a section titled "Impossible Architectures" especially "The Other Town"
Registrar's Office Assistant
North by
A novel about the intertwined lives of a Vermont monk, a Somali refugee, and an Afghan war veteran.
The story of a young refugee woman who left Somalia and traveled through South and Central America and the US, eventually reaching a remote monastery in Vermont. She requests sanctuary during a blizzard, before going on to Canada. The intersection of the lives of Sahro, Brother Christopher, and Teddy, an Afghan War veteran, and how each struggles to respond to this situation, makes a fascinating, memorable read. Although fiction, the book relies on extensive personal research conducted by the author into the lives of refugees in Vermont.
Director of the Prison Education Initiative
Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle that Made England by
Drawing upon a wide range of sources, eminent scholar Juliet Barker casts aside the legend and shows us that the truth behind Agincourt is just as exciting, just as fascinating, and far more significant. She paints a gripping narrative of the October 1415 clash between outnumbered English archers and heavily armored French knights. But she also takes us beyond the battlefield into palaces and common cottages to bring into vivid focus an entire medieval world in flux.
Director of Poetry at Bennington, Faculty - Literature
Summer by
The sequence is an exploration of the fantasy of home as well as an exploration of the deep-seated Swedish mythology of summer.
A singular tour de force collection of epistemological, metaphysical poems about summers and daughters and being and despair that seamlessly navigates between English and the poet’s native Swedish.
The Breathing Body of This Thought by
Genya Turovskaya is an American poet, born in Ukraine. This is the first full-length collection of Turovskaya's poetry.
An exceptional highly lyrical and philosophical, deeply questioning debut poetry collection by the Kyiv-born poet and translator.
Triptychs by
Sandra Simonds's TRIPTYCHS is an intersection of poetic form and the passage of time.
This is an amazing, formally innovative new book of wild, discursive post-confessional poems, each written in three skinny adjacent columns juxtaposed on each page. Sandra is visiting faculty at Bennington this year.
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by
Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal.
I am personally so excited to read this latest, brilliantly titled book of poems by the always engaging, startling, and audacious poet and new Bennington literature faculty member Franny Choi!
Faculty - Drama
Bad Actors by
Bad Actors is the eighth book in the Slough House/Jackson Lamb MI5 spy series by British author, Mick Herron.
The latest in the Slow Horses Series which is just plain fabulous and addictive and laugh out loud funny.
Horse by
Despite the simplicity of the title, Geraldine Brooks’ latest novel is a heart-pounding American epic that gallops backward and forward in time to tell a story about race and freedom, horses and art, and the lineage of not just ancestors but actions.
Fascinating historical fiction that is as usual, brilliantly crafted by a true master.
The Marriage Portrait by
Fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de' Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court in Renaissance Italy.
Great characters, great story- interesting premise and much fun.
The Lying Life of Adults by
Giovanna is searching for her reflection in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and Naples of the depths, a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves from one to the other in search of the truth, but neither city seems to offer answers or escape.
Well- so beautifully written as always investigating such intimate and internal lives lived.
Half of a Yellow Sun by
Re-creates the 1960s struggle of Biafra to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, following the intertwined lives of the characters through a military coup, the Biafran secession, and the resulting civil war. Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade.
The God of Small Things by
A story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" prevalent in 1960s Kerala, India.
Faculty - Science and Mathematics
The Theory of Almost Everything: The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics by
There are two scientific theories that, taken together, explain the entire universe. The first, which describes the force of gravity, is widely known: Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. But the theory that explains everything else—the Standard Model of Elementary Particles—is virtually unknown among the general public.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by
With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed. Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest.
Piranesi by
Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
This book made me feel like a child engrossed in a fantasy novel.
Gideon the Ninth by
Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won’t set her free without a service.
This book has everything! Necromancers, lesbians, comedic narration, swordfighting, and more!
Annihilation by
Area X has claimed the lives of members of eleven expeditions. The twelfth expedition consisting of four women hopes to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
This and the other two books in the Southern Reach trilogy are really amazing works of weird ecofiction. Come for things like the dolphin with human eyes and stay for the rather beautiful commentary on being human in a rapidly changing environment.
Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Fantastic book on the phenomenon of autistic "masking" (subconsciously or consciously hiding one's autistic traits). An enlightening read for autistic and allistic people alike.
Associate Registrar
The Penelopiad by
In The Penelopiad, Penelope reminisces on the events of the Odyssey, life in Hades, Odysseus, Helen of Troy, and her relationships with her parents. A Greek chorus of the twelve maids, who Odysseus believed were disloyal and whom Telemachus hanged, interrupt Penelope's narrative to express their view on events. The novella's central themes include the effects of story-telling perspectives, double standards between the sexes and the classes, and the fairness of justice.
This book is so fun and innovative; it takes a look at tale of the Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus' wife. I'm not a huge Atwood fan, but I really enjoyed this - it's a quick and easy read, and very entertaining.
Men We Reaped by
A memoir dealing with history, racism, poverty, and the haunting deaths of young black men, all before the age of 30, in southern Mississippi, told by a woman who had to speak to this loss.
Non-fiction memoir from an incredible author that chronicles the deaths of five young men, including her brother. Ward tackles identity, and how the places we are from ultimately affect the choices and opportunities we have in life.
The Good Nurse by
After his December 2003 arrest, registered nurse Charlie Cullen was quickly dubbed "The Angel of Death" by the media. But Cullen was no mercy killer, nor was he a simple monster. The author, a journalist, presents the whole story for the first time- chronicling Cullen's deadly career and efforts to stop him; it paints a vivid portrait of madness and offers a penetrating look inside America's medical system.
Harrowing true story of a nurse in NJ/PA that messed with patients' drugs and eventually ended up implicated in the deaths of more than 400 people. It's fascinating and frustrating to learn how he continued to get hired at hospital after hospital, and the bureaucracy that prevented him from being caught far earlier than he was.
