Class of 2025, December
A Golden Age
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"Tahmima Anam’s deeply moving debut novel about a mother’s all-consuming love for her two children, set against the backdrop of war and terror. Rehana Haque, a young widow transplanted to the city of Dhaka in East Pakistan, is fiercely devoted to her adolescent children, Maya and Sohail. Both become fervent nationalists in the violent political turmoil which, in 1971, transforms a brutal Pakistani civil war into a fight to the death for Bangladeshi independence. Fair-minded and intensely protective of her family, but not at all political, Rehana is sucked into the conflict in spite of herself.
A story of passion and revolution, of family, friendship and unexpected heroism, A Golden Age depicts the chaos of an era and the choices everyone—from student protesters to the country’s leaders, and rickshaw wallahs to the army’s soldiers—must make. Rehana herself will face a cruel dilemma; the choice she makes is at once heartbreaking and true to the character we have come to love and respect."
El Mar Y Las Campanas / The Sea and the Bells
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A complete English translation of Pablo Neruda’s El mar y las campanas (The Sea and the Bells) appears in a bilingual edition by noted Neruda translator William O’Daly. Sea salt, foam, ocean waves, the sound of bells carrying over the water, his love for his wife Matilde, the migratory birds and winter rain of southern Chile, the birth in gunfire of his country, the destiny of the Chilean people—all of these passions helped guide Neruda’s “flight of spirit” as he composed The Sea and the Bells, pulling “one dream out of another.” Longing to retreat from the noisy busyness surrounding him, the Nobel poet permits the rush of waves to carry him into meditative states. These poems, found on the poet’s desk at the time of his death, include his final poem—a love song to his wife, Matilde. Facing imminent death, he remarks in the past tense: “It was beautiful to live / When you lived!”
Una traducción completa de El mar y las campanas de Pablo Neruda aparece en esta edición bilingüe por el traductor notable, William O’Daly. La sal de mar, la espuma, las olas, el sonido de las campanas llevando a través del agua, su amor por su mujer Matilde, los pájaros migratorios y la lluvia del invierno del sur de Chile, el nacimiento de su país por disparos, el destino de la gente chilena—todas estas pasiones ayudaron a guiar al “vuelo de espíritu” de Neruda cuando él escribió El mar y las campanas. Con el deseo de retirarse de la actividad ruidosa de sus alrededores, el poeta del premio Nobel permite que la avalancha de olas llevarle a estados meditativos. Estos poemas, encontrados en su escritorio a la hora de su muerte, incluye su poema final, una canción de amor a su mujer, Matilde. Frente a la muerte inminente, él comenta: “Fue tan bello vivir / cuando vivías!”
A Case of Exploding Mangoes
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"Intrigue and subterfuge combine with bad luck and good in this darkly comic debut about love, betrayal, tyranny, family, and a conspiracy trying its damnedest to happen.
Ali Shigri, Pakistan Air Force pilot and Silent Drill Commander of the Fury Squadron, is on a mission to avenge his father's suspicious death, which the government calls a suicide.Ali's target is none other than General Zia ul-Haq, dictator of Pakistani. Enlisting a rag-tag group of conspirators, including his cologne-bathed roommate, a hash-smoking American lieutenant, and a mango-besotted crow, Ali sets his elaborate plan in motion. There's only one problem: the line of would-be Zia assassins is longer than he could have possibly known."
Life after God
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"We are the first generation raised without God. We are creatures with strong religious impulses, yet they have nowhere to flow in this world of malls and TV, Kraft dinners and jets. How do we cope with loneliness? Anxiety? The collapse of relationships?
How do we reach the quiet, safe layer of our lives? In this compellingly innovative collection of stories, bestselling author Douglas Coupland responds to these themes. Cutting through the hype of modern living to find a rare grace amid our lives, he uncovers a new kind of truth for a culture stuck on fast-forward. A culture seemingly beyond God."
Faculty - Visual Arts
Loved and Missed
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Ruth is a woman who believes in and despairs of the curative power of love. Her daughter, Eleanor, who is addicted to drugs, has just had a baby, Lily. Ruth adjusts herself in ways large and small to give to Eleanor what she thinks she may need—nourishment, distance, affection—but all her gifts fall short. After someone dies of an overdose in Eleanor's apartment, Ruth hands her daughter an envelope of cash and takes Lily home with her, and Lily, as she grows, proves a compensation for all of Ruth's past defeats and disappointment. Love without fear is a new feeling for her, almost unrecognizable. Will it last?
Love and Missed is a whip-smart, incisive, and mordantly witty novel about love's gains and missteps. British writer Susie Boyt's seventh novel, and the first to be published in the United States, is a triumph.
About love, addiction, and growing older -- you will probably cry, too, as you read the story behind the title.
My Body Is Paper: Stories and Poems
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"Since City of God (1994) by Gil Cuadros was published 30 years ago, it has become an unlikely classic (an "essential book of Los Angeles" according to the LA Times), touching readers and writers who find in his work a singular evocation of Chicanx life in Los Angeles during and leading up to the AIDS epidemic, which took his life in 1996. Little did we know, Cuadros continued writing exuberant prose and poems in the period between his one published book and his untimely death at the age of 34. This recently discovered treasure, My Body Is Paper, is a stunning portrait of sex, family, religion, culture of origin, and the betrayals of the body. Tender and blistering, erotic and spiritual—Cuadros dives into these complexities which we grapple with today, showing us how to survive these times, and beyond."
Gil Cuadros died at 34. Recollections and ruminations (essays, and poems) about love, religion, sex and LA leading up to the AIDS pandemic were published as a collection in 2024.
David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale
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Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion. One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had neatly laid them out in graduated rows and spent the day acting as obliging salesman. He called the evanescent and unannounced street action Bliz-aard Ball Sale, thus inscribing it into a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, has used a lexicon of ephemeral actions and self-consciously “black" materials to comment on the nature of the artwork, the art world, and race in America. And although Bliz-aard Ball Sale has been frequently cited and is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through a mix of eyewitness rumors and a handful of photographs. Its details were as elusive as the artist himself; even its exact date was unrecorded. Like so much of the artist's work, it was conceived, it seems, to slip between our fingers—to trouble the grasp of the market, as much as of history and knowability.
Unlike other iconic works by Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale is harder to read about and learn about because of the ephemeral nature of the work and performance. This study collects documents and images about this amazing thing that happened in 1983.
Marcel Breuer and the Committee of Twelve Plan a Church
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"Internationally renowned architect I. M. Pei commented that if Marcel Breuer’s church for Saint John’s Abbey had been built in New York instead of the north woods of Minnesota it would be world famous. Hamilton Smith, Breuer’s longtime associate, wrote that the completed church was that rare thing, an architectural design fully realized, and he regarded it as Breuer’s finest achievement. The junior member of the twelve-monk planning committee recounts in warm and frequently humorous detail how its members related to the Hungarian-born Bauhaus-trained architect who had no background in church architecture but shared their belief in the enduring quality of simple materials sympathetically used. How the strong architect-client relationship survived the strain of disagreement at a critical moment in completion of the church is the narrative high point in this informal record of four years in which the reader sees a masterpiece of modern church architecture take shape."
The conception and construction of Marcel Breuer's church for St John's Abbey in the north woods of Minnesota told, not by an architect but, a monk and priest who also taught Chaucer and Shakespeare. A rare and beautiful window into modernist ideologies from the perspective of a very particular client. The drama is mostly about the choice of lighting fixtures and concrete contractors etc. good bedtime reading.
Student, Class of 2026
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
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"It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, women's studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco - a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure."
Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal
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"Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal--an ode to the steadfastness of a nation. Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured--the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial. Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation. How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims, presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian."
Reservoir Bitches: Stories
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"A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival. “Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.” In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of dark humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers."
Paradise Logic
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"It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly. When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as 'Paradise,' Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest. At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality's quest grows ever complicated as the men in her life: Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world."
President, Beyond Plastics Program
The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late
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"The Problem with Plastic critically examines the paradox of this material, first celebrated for its innovations and now recognized for its devastating environmental and public health impacts. With clarity and urgency, the book reveals how plastic pollution contributes to poisoned oceans, polluted air, a warming planet, and overwhelming waste, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities who bear the brunt of petrochemical pollution.
Revealing the alarming extent of microplastics infiltrating both the natural world and the human body, this compelling narrative challenges the illusion that recycling alone will save us. It unpacks the mechanisms of environmental racism and the deceptive greenwashing strategies used by the plastics industry to maintain the status quo.
More than a critique, The Problem with Plastic emphasizes the urgent need for action against plastic’s toxic legacy. It highlights powerful stories of frontline resistance in places like Louisiana, Texas, and Appalachia, and equips readers with practical tools—including a “Household Waste Audit” to track and reduce plastic consumption, as well as model policy guides for driving legislative change.
Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately empowering, The Problem with Plastic reminds us: plastic is a problem—but together, we can be the solution."
Faculty - Writing
Amanda: A Novel
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"Post-WWI England is a nation in upheaval, its foundations shaken by the Great War and the collapse of genteel Edwardian society. The streets are haunted by shell-shocked men, runaways, mutilated veterans, damned poets, and revolutionaries.
Marion has fled Galway for Oxford after her elopement with a violent man ended violently. In the City of Dreaming Spires, where the cobbled streets, barely lit pubs, and underground book presses hum with restless energy, she meets Jamie, a damaged soul like her who is struggling to recover from his experiences at the front. He alone sees her scars. She alone knows his secret name. Their love is wild, anarchic, dangerous, absolute. Everything, it seems, is at stake. When the “talkers” in Marion’s head get too loud and the circumstances of her life too dire, she disappears, leaving Jamie bereft and without word. But their love is like gravity--an undeniable force pitted against the dark forces that would keep them apart.
At once an erotic drama, a formally inventive romantic epic, and a historical novel written with an emotional intensity that bears comparison to classics like Wuthering Heights, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, and Madame Bovary, Amanda is a poignant, atmospheric meditation on love, trauma, and redemption. H.S. Cross delivers an unforgettable novel on the infinite varieties of human experience."
2025 Residential Teaching Fellow at Bennington Writing Seminars and Student, MFA in Writing
The Descent of Alette
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"In 'The Descent of Alette', Alice Notley presents a feminist epic, a bold journey into the deeper realms. Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Traveling deeper and deeper, she is on a journey of continual transformation, encountering a series of figures and undergoing fragmentations and metamorphoses as she seeks to confront the Tyrant and heal the world. Using a new measure, with rhythmic units indicated by quotation marks, Notley has created a 'spoken' text, a rich and mesmerizing work of imagination, mystery, and power."
Dunce
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"In Dunce, Mary Ruefle returns to the poetic practice that has always been at her core. With her startlingly fresh sensibility, she enraptures us in poem after poem by the intensity of her attention, with the imaginative flourishes of her being-in-the-world, always deep with mysteries, unexpected appearances, and abiding yearning."
Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara
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An anthology of Frank O'Hara's poems selected by Donald Allen.
Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turn
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"Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns offers a road map for analyzing poetry through examination of poems structure, rather than their forms or genres. Michael Theune's breakthrough concept encourages students, teachers, and writers to use structure as a tool to see the fundamental affinities between strikingly different kinds of poetry and radically different literary eras. The book includes examination of the mid-course turn and the elegy, as well as the ironic, concessional, emblem, and retrospective-prospective structures, among others. In addition, 14 contemporary poets provide an example of and commentary on their own work."
Student, Class of 2028
Life Ceremony: Stories
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"With Life Ceremony, Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader’s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger."
This is a beautiful and intense collection of short stories. An entertaining cocktail of humor and horror keeps you engaged in the multiple fantastical realms of these worlds.
The Membranes
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"It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality. First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes―heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies―into a sensitive portrait of one young woman’s quest for self-understanding."
An explorative novel that analyzes familial structures, queer identities and an underwater utopia.
Wings of Starlight
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"It's been centuries since a warm-season fairy in Pixie Hollow has crossed into the Winter Woods, and while most fear the legends of monsters lurking in the frozen lands, Clarion, can't help being intrigued by Winter's stoic beauty. But under the watchful eyes of the current monarch and the court's seasonal ministers, Clarion has little time to dwell on daydreams while the days to her coronation dwindle away. That is, until reports of a monster crossing from Winter into Spring make their way to the palace. Clarion sees defeating this threat as an opportunity to prove that she is worthy of her new role. But instead of finding a monster at the edge of Winter, she finds Milori, a young guardian of the Winter Woods. Together, they form an unlikely bond as they race to save their lands. But as their alliance warms to something more, they will discover there is a reason a warm-season fairy and a winter fairy must not be together. And the cost could be just as deadly as the monsters that prowl the Winter Woods"
If you grew up on Disney’s fairies you’ll enjoy this. A mystical romance destined to go wrong, see where it all began for the Queen of Pixie hollow.
Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution
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"From award-winning author R.F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he'll enroll in Oxford University's prestigious Royal Institute of Translation--also known as Babel. Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working--the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars--has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire's quest for colonization. For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide ... Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?"
If you were a child that grew up reading classics and always struggled to get into fantasy novels this is the book for you. I’m obsessed with the relationships developed throughout and the world building.
Faculty - Cultural Studies and Languages
Forbidden Notebook
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"In this modern translation by acclaimed Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein, Forbidden Notebook centers the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome.
Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life—until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son. As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis’ facade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart.
An exquisitely crafted portrayal of domestic life, Forbidden Notebook recognizes the universality of human aspirations."
Fugitive Tilts: Essays
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"Ishion Hutchinson turns his poetic sensibility to questions of home, displacement, and memory in his beautiful and searingly brilliant prose debut.
In Fugitive Tilts, the poet Ishion Hutchinson turns to prose to create an incomplete biography of love: love of poetry, discovered in childhood; love of home, with its continual disconnections and returns; and love of the works and artists—from Treasure Island, to John Coltrane, to the Jamaican music of his youth—that look over him with an angel’s aura.
Drawing inspiration from Derek Walcott’s notion that “the sea is history,” Fugitive Tilts is suffused with the sea, present whether Hutchinson is recalling a trip to Senegal or memorializing his grandmother in a meditation on a painting by Édouard Vuillard. With this fresh, archipelagic sensibility Hutchinson confronts the fraught questions of inheritances and influences, “acknowledging,” in his words, “something outside our view.” These essays, varied in their forms and ranging across time and place, allow Hutchinson to build a space from which the suffering of the past and the present can be reckoned with and survived."
Pecore Nere: Racconti
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"La prima generazione di figlie di immigrati, nata o cresciuta in Italia, racconta la propria identità divisa, a cavallo tra il nuovo e la tradizione, una identità obliqua, preziosa, su misura. Quattro voci, Otto storie, molte culture. L'incrocio dei mondi e delle esperienze, tra integrazione e diversità, accoglienza e rifiuto. Tra noi e loro. La raccolta è stata curata da Flavia Capitani e Emanuele Coen."
Faculty and Associate Dean for Advising and First-Year Forum
What We Can Know: A Novel
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"2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.
2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.
What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost."
I haven't read it/listened to it yet, and I can't wait! It's in my Audible library. I've read only The Cement Garden by McEwan, back in college, and I remember vividly the atmosphere of that novel. here's what the publisher writes: "What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost."
Internee Number 6
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Internee Number 6 is the earliest known memoir written in a Fascist internment camp in Italy. First published in Rome in 1944 while war still raged in northern Italy, Maria Eisenstein’s intimate account captures life in a women’s concentration camp and the looming shadow of Nazi persecution. Written with such humor and remarkable literary grace in the author’s fourth language, Italian, that it was initially believed to be a work of fiction, this extraordinary document illuminates a little-known chapter of Holocaust history: internment in Fascist Italy.
Through a vivid cast of characters—her fellow internees—Eisenstein reveals life and humanity in imprisonment. The women play cards, philosophize, dream of men, scheme against their captors, and yearn for love and freedom. Amid moments of humor and occasional farce, they struggle with isolation, betrayal, and loss. Through it all runs the thread of Eisenstein’s biting irony and sharp observations.
Born in Vienna to Polish-Jewish parents in 1915, Eisenstein was studying literature in Florence when Mussolini ordered the arrest of all Jews without Italian citizenship. After her imprisonment in Lanciano from 1940 to 1941, she fled to the mountains following the 1943 armistice and eventually reached Allied-controlled territory. She later worked for the Allies’ Psychological Warfare Branch before emigrating to America in 1948, where she lived until her death in 1994.
This first English edition, translated by poet Will Schutt, features essays by historian Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, who rediscovered Eisenstein’s story in 1989, and Eric Feingersh Steele, the author’s son. Eighty years after its creation, this powerful work emerges as both a historical document and a brilliant work of literature.
This too I haven't read yet! It's the earliest known account of life in a Fascist internment camp in Italy. From the publisher Centro Primo Levi Editions: "Internee Number 6 is the earliest known memoir written in a Fascist internment camp in Italy. First published in Rome in 1944 while war still raged in northern Italy, Maria Eisenstein's intimate account captures life in a women's concentration camp and the looming shadow of Nazi persecution. Written with such humor and remarkable literary grace in the author's fourth language, Italian, that it was initially believed to be a work of fiction, this extraordinary document illuminates a little-known chapter of Holocaust history: internment in Fascist Italy."
Dean of the Library
Three debut novels that have me looking forward to future books.
The Hounding
by
"A richly atmospheric parable of the pleasures and perils of female defiance, The Hounding considers whether in any age it might be safer to be a dog than an unusual young girl. / Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on the riverbank to portentous ravens gathering on the roofs of people about to die. But when the villagers start to hear barking, and one claims to see the Mansfield sisters transform before his very eyes, the allegations spark fascination and fear like nothing has before." /
"Purvis’s debut is a wildly inventive riff on the Gothic form, with enough suspense and mounting dread to rival Shirley Jackson’s 'The Lottery.' Editors' Choice - New York Times"
Liquid: A Love Story
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"The unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid has always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. And from an early age, she and her best friend—a poet-turned-marketer named Adam—have turned their noses up at other peoples’ riches. But two years after earning a PhD from UCLA, the narrator is no closer to the middle-class comfort promised to her by the prestige of her fancy, scholarship-funded education and the successes of her immigrant parents. Jokingly, Adam suggests she just "marry rich."
But our protagonist, whose PhD thesis compared Eastern and Western views of marriage in film and literature, takes the idea seriously. She makes a spreadsheet and outlines a goal: 100 dates with people of all genders and a marriage proposal in hand by the official start of the fall semester. What follows is a whirlwind summer packed with dating: martinis sans vermouth with the lazy scion of an Eastside construction empire; board games with a butch producer who owns a house in the hills and a newly dented Porsche; a Venmo request from a “socialist” trust fund babe; and an evening spent dodging the halitosis of a maxillofacial surgeon from Orange County.
Only a tragedy in Tehran and an overdue familial reckoning can alter the narrator’s increasingly manic trajectory and force her to confront the contradictions of her life in Los Angeles. And as doubts begin to creep in about her marriage project, it suddenly seems possible that the eligible prospect she’s been looking for has been beneath her nose the entire time. A modern tale of romance, loss, and belonging like no other. Mariam Rahmani’s gorgeous high-wire satire explodes off the page with verve and originality in this riveting spin on the classic romantic comedy."
Monstrilio
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"Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses--though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care--threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life."
/
“At once heartbreaking and unapologetically strange, this is a cross-cultural, syncretic, folksy, razor-sharp narrative about the horrors of grief and the eternal debate over nature versus nurture. . . . It is at once dark and tender, at times bleak, but balanced with humor that borders on slapstick . . . an outstanding debut; for all the ground being broken in genre-bending horror, his is a distinctive, exciting new voice in fiction.”—Gabino Iglesias, Los Angeles Times"
And one from Murakami, whose writing I love—especially when he writes about libraries.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
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"A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parable for these strange times.
When a young man’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes, he is heartbroken – and determined to find the imaginary town where he suspects she has taken up residence. Thus begins a lifelong search that takes the man into middle age, to a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own, and on a journey between the real world and this otherworld: a shadowless city where unicorns roam and willow trees grow.
There he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together and, as the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he must decide what he is willing to lose."
"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn’t this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?" —Haruki Murakami, from the afterward.
Faculty - Science and Mathematics
Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity
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"David Bessis guides us on an illuminating path toward deeper mathematical comprehension, reconnecting us with the mental plasticity we experienced as children. With simple, concrete examples, Bessis shows how mathematical comprehension is integral to the great learning milestones of life, such as learning to see, to speak, to walk, and to eat with a spoon.
Focusing on the deeply human roots of mathematics, Bessis dispels the myths of mathematical genius. He offers an engaging initiation into the experience of math not as a series of discouragingly incomprehensible logic problems but as a physical activity akin to yoga, meditation, or a martial art. This perspective will change the way you think not only about math but also about intelligence, intuition, and everything that goes on inside your head."
A vision of the way in which mathematics is about intentionally developing a new kind of intuition, accessible to everyone. Inspiring!
Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes
by
"Drawing on a wealth of psychological research, Alfie Kohn points the way to a more successful strategy based on working with people instead of doing things to them. "Do rewards motivate people?" asks Kohn. "Yes. They motivate people to get rewards." Seasoned with humor and familiar examples, Punished By Rewards presents an argument unsettling to hear but impossible to dismiss."
How external rewards miss the point, and how intrinsic motivation—an essential part of the Bennington pedagogical model—works better for learning.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
by
"Allen's methods of stress-free performance at work and in life have a simple premise: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Now he has tweaked his original text with important perspectives on the new workplace and additional material to help build the mental skills needed in an age of multitasking and overload."Discover David Allen's powerful methods for stress-free performance at work and in life--now completely updated."
A guide for managing the business in your life, for people who don't like doing that, and who want to be free to experience and create.
Associate Director of Academic Services
Colored Television
by
"A brilliant dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity-industrial complex. Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she, her painter husband, Lenny, and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend's luxurious home high in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane's sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her "mulatto War and Peace," she'll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don't work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with a hot young producer with a seven-figure deal to create "diverse content" for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a "real writer" to create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy ever to hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane--until they go terribly wrong"
All the Way to the River: Love, Loss and Liberation
by
"An essential, universally resonant new memoir from the #1 bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and Big Magic"-- Provided by publisher."In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya Elias. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: The two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe. What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening? All the Way to the River is a landmark memoir that will resonate with anyone who has ever been captive to love -- or to any other passion, substance, or craving--and who yearns, at long last, for liberation."
Real Americans: A Novel
by
"Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.
In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.
In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.
Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?"
To Let the Sun
by
"John Allen Taylor’s debut poetry collection To Let the Sun opens with an invitation both generous and resolute: “take a walk with me . . . I hope you’ll come / though I am going anyway.” These poems peel back the layers of recovery as an adult from childhood sexual abuse, the myriad ways a body can change to protect itself from memory, and the difficulty of looking at abuse head-on. Taylor uses a poetics of reclamation to write the child-self from a perspective beyond trauma, to document the messiness of survival, the child’s flight from himself, and the uncertain path home—to a life filled with small and perfect things. Through hermit crabs and golden pothos, fungal gnats and beet seed, the speaker reclaims himself: “I am not lost . . . I know memory / is not healed by time, but / by the oddities / with which we adorn our lives, / the fragilities we need to know / we’re needed by."
Associate Director, Center for the Advancement of Public Action and Faculty - Advancement of Public Action
The Smoke and the Spoils: Anti-Environmentalism and Class Struggle in the United States
by
"Traces anti-env. from the 19th-c frontier to the 1950s suburb, from the shuttered shops of Main St to Trump Country and presents a political theory of anti-env. grounded in class struggle"-- Provided by publisher."The future of our environment lies in the hands of the working class, but what if the future of the working class also lies in environmental political struggles?... Placing environmental politics within a broader context of class struggle, this book makes the case that the environmental crises of our time will only be mitigated by a resurgent working class."
Sharp environmental history of the neo-fascist resurgence in America. It is happening here. Neglecting the environmental dimensions of our dismal politics -- and the class dimensions of the environment -- impoverishes our understanding of what is wrong and what must be done.
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
by
"In 1965, the US government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians—eliminating the largest Communist Party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring other copycat terror programs.
In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins draws from recently declassified documents, archival research, and eyewitness testimony to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it’s been believed that the developing world passed peacefully into the US-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington’s final triumph in the Cold War."
Crisp narration of one reason why sensible emancipatory movements are in such short supply today: every single time such movements got under way the CIA lopped off their head and handed untold firepower to the nearest thug.
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth
by
"Malm unearths the shared roots of colonial adventurism in Palestine and fossil fuelled warfare.
Israel’s pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted on Palestine since October 2023 has merely ushered in a new phase in a long history of colonization and extraction that reaches back to the nineteenth century. In this urgent pamphlet, Andreas Malm argues that a true understanding of the present crisis requires a longue durée analysis of Palestine's subjugation to fossil empire. Returning to the British empire’s first use of steam-power in war, in which it destroyed the Palestinian city of Akka, Malm traces the development of Britain’s fossil empire and shows how this enduring commitment to fossil energy continues to drive Western support for the destruction of Palestine today."
A spirited diagnosis of the viral indifference that allows destruction to unfold in full-view without outrage. Televised genocide in Palestine and the warping of planetary systems beyond the ability of billions to survive come into view as a conjoined, contemporary process. And one that must be confronted.
More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy
by
"The radical, paradigm-shifting international bestseller that destroys our delusions about energy consumption and will change the way we talk about climate change.
We have long been taught that humanity’s relationship with energy is one of progress, with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear—until at some future point everything will be replaced by “green” energy. But the long-held belief in transition and sustainability is completely untrue, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argues.
More and More and More demolishes this disastrous fallacy, showing how our industrial age and beyond has in fact been powered by an ever-greater accumulation of each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples from past and present, from the whaling and candle-making industries of the nineteenth century to our post-nuclear age today, Fressoz describes how humanity has gorged on all forms of energy—with whole forests used to prop up coal mines, and fossil fuels remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products we rely on every day. While nations have signed climate agreements aimed at reducing fossil fuels, the sad truth is that the world today burns more wood, coal, and carbon than ever before.
More and More and More forces readers to confront hard truths, including how “transition” was originally promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a way to put off any meaningful change. It offers a clear-eyed understanding of the modern world in all its voracious reality and shines a hard light on the true nature of the enormous challenges eight billion of us face, as we stand at the precipice of planetary crisis."
In the wider sweep of human history, energy transitions have never occurred. Not really. This uncomfortable fact is exceedingly well documented here, as is all the grand plans such a fact deflates, disables, and demystifies. Something else is required than big talk about energy transitions.
Faculty - Ecology
By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
by
Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests—in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples.
In the 1830s Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed. Over a century later, a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen on tribal land. His defense attorneys argued the murder occurred on the reservation of his tribe, and therefore Oklahoma didn’t have the jurisdiction to execute him. Oklahoma asserted that the reservation no longer existed. In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court settled the dispute. Its ruling that would ultimately underpin multiple reservations covering almost half the land in Oklahoma, including Nagle’s own Cherokee Nation.
Here Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.
The Birds That Audubon Missed: Discovery and Desire in the American Wilderness
by
"Raging ambition. Towering egos. Competition under a veneer of courtesy. Heroic effort combined with plagiarism, theft, exaggeration, and fraud. This was the state of bird study in eastern North America during the early 1800s, as a handful of intrepid men raced to find the last few birds that were still unknown to science.
The most famous name in the bird world was John James Audubon, who painted spectacular portraits of birds. But although his images were beautiful, creating great art was not his main goal. Instead, he aimed to illustrate (and write about) as many different species as possible, obsessed with trying to outdo his rival, Alexander Wilson. George Ord, a fan and protégé of Wilson, held a bitter grudge against Audubon for years, claiming he had faked much of his information and his scientific claims. A few of Audubon’s birds were pure fiction, and some of his writing was invented or plagiarized. Other naturalists of the era, including Charles Bonaparte (nephew of Napoleon), John Townsend, and Thomas Nuttall, also became entangled in the scientific derby, as they stumbled toward an understanding of the natural world—an endeavor that continues to this day.
Despite this intense competition, a few species—including some surprisingly common songbirds, hawks, sandpipers, and more—managed to evade discovery for years. Here, renowned bird expert and artist Kenn Kaufman explores this period in history from a new angle, by considering the birds these people discovered and, especially, the ones they missed. Kaufman has created portraits of the birds that Audubon never saw, attempting to paint them in that artist’s own stunning style, showing how our understanding of birds continues to gain clarity, even as some mysteries persist from Audubon’s time until ours."
Small Game: A Novel
by
A gripping debut novel about a survival reality show gone wrong that leaves a group of strangers stranded in the northern wilds
Four strangers and six weeks: this is all that separates Mara from one life-changing payday. She was surprised when reality TV producers came knocking at Primal Instinct—the survival school where she teaches rich clients not to die during a night outdoors—and even more shocked to be cast in their new show, Civilization. Now she just has to live off the land with her fellow survivors for long enough to get the prize money.
Whisked by helicopter to an undisclosed location, Mara meets her teammates: The grizzled outdoorsman. The Eagle Scout. The white-collar professional. And Ashley, the beautiful but inexperienced one who just wants to be famous. Mara’s unusual, rugged childhood has prepared her for the discomforts and hard work ahead. But trusting her fellow survivors? Not part of Mara’s skill set.
When the cast wakes one morning to find something has gone horribly wrong, fear ripples through the group. Are the producers giving them an extra challenge? Or are they wrapped up in something more dangerous? Soon Mara and the others face terrifying decisions as “survival” becomes more than a game.
A provocative exploration of the comforts, rituals, and connections we depend upon, Small Game is a gripping page-turner and a poignant story about finding the courage to build a new life from the ground up.
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
by
"In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah’s Ark?
Both fell far short of their goal, but in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, the future of the Earth, and humanity itself. Linnaeus gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate, and Homo sapiens, but he also denied that species change and he promulgated racist pseudoscience. Buffon formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, warned of global climate change, and argued passionately against prejudice. The clash of their conflicting worldviews continued well after their deaths, as their successors contended for dominance in the emerging science that came to be called biology.
In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts weaves a sweeping, unforgettable narrative spell, exploring the intertwined lives and legacies of Linnaeus and Buffon—as well as the groundbreaking, often fatal adventures of their acolytes—to trace an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day."
Faculty - Drama
The Safekeep: A Novel
by
"It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be--led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel's doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season. Eva is Isabel's antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn't. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house--a spoon, a knife, a bowl--Isabel's suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel's paranoia gives way to infatuation--leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva--nor the house in which they live--are what they seem."
Remarkable and compelling- with many unexpected and rewarding turns.
Isola:
by
"Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes a unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island.
Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.
Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival."
Inspired by real life of a sixteenth century heroine—a real page turner.
Clown Town
by
"“Old spies grow ridiculous, River. Old spies aren’t much better than clowns.” Or so David Cartwright, the late retired head of MI5, used to tell his grandson. He forgot to add that old spies can be dangerous, too, especially if they’ve fallen on hard times—as River Cartwright is about to learn the hard way.
David Cartwright, long buried, has left his library to the Spooks’ College in Oxford, and now one of the books is missing. Or perhaps it never existed. River, once a “slow horse” of Slough House, MI5’s outpost for demoted and disgraced spies, has some time to kill while awaiting medical clearance to return to work, and starts investigating the secrets of his grandfather’s library.
Over at the Park, MI5 First Desk Diana Taverner is in a pickle. An operation carried out during the height of the Troubles laid bare the ugly side of state security, and those involved are threatening to expose details. But every threat hides an opportunity, and Taverner has come up with a scheme. All she needs is the right dupe to get caught holding the bag.
Jackson Lamb, the enigmatic and odiferous head of Slough House, has no plans to send in the clowns. On the other hand, if the clowns ignore his instructions, any harm that befalls them is hardly his fault. But they’re his clowns. And if they don’t all make it home, there’ll be a reckoning."
The Slowhouse gang are at it again.. and I'm a huge fan of the wit/humor and pure escapism of these unlikely heroes.
Sipsworth
by
"Following the loss of her husband and son, Helen Cartwright returns to the village of her childhood after living abroad for six decades. Her only wish is to die quickly and without fuss. She retreats into her home on Westminster Crescent, becoming a creature of routine and habit: “Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle—as though even for death there is a queue.”
Then, one cold winter night, a chance encounter with a mouse sets Helen on a surprising journey. Over the course of two weeks in a small English town, this reclusive widow discovers an unexpected reason to live."
Beautiful and moving storytelling that investigates loneliness, loss and finding oneself anew.
Director Of Library Services
Angel Down: A Novel
by
"Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.
What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.
Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict."
“A thunderous gallop of a war novel, a new classic, a best-in-class example of speculative fiction.” —The New York Times Book Review
The Lamplighters: A Novel
by
"Cornwall, 1972. Three keepers vanish from a remote lighthouse, miles from the shore. The entrance door is locked from the inside. The clocks have stopped. The Principal Keeper's weather log describes a mighty storm, but the skies have been clear all week. What happened to those three men, out on the tower? The heavy sea whispers their names. The tide shifts beneath the swell, drowning ghosts. Can their secrets ever be recovered from the waves? Twenty years later, the women they left behind are still struggling to move on. Helen, Jenny and Michelle should have been united by the tragedy, but instead it drove them apart. And then a writer approaches them. He wants to give them a chance to tell their side of the story. But only in confronting their darkest fears can the truth begin to surface ..."
The Book Censor's Library
by
"A perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government. The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day, he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish--allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night, pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter, and the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture. Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell's 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor's Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them."
Associate Director of Career Development and Field Work Term
Earthly Bodies: Embracing Animal Nature
by
"How can wolves, misunderstood in myths but vital to ecosystems, teach us to rewrite dangerous stories and respect nature’s wisdom? How do the peaceful coexistence strategies of black bears offer insights into sharing resources? How can the engineering feats of beavers guide us in fostering regenerative building solutions and vibrant ecosystems? What can the loyal partnership of seahorses teach us about nurturing and love?
In Earthly Bodies, Vanessa draws parallels from struggles she has weathered in her own life to those endured by twenty-three wild animals—from wolves to sea lions—exploring our unease of feeling like prey; challenging the entrapment of our limiting beliefs; contextualizing the turmoil of fractured landscapes; and affirming our primal ache to belong.
Vanessa’s pivotal encounters with creatures in sync with their primal rhythms and demands illustrate the necessity of relying on the intelligence of gut instinct; of the magnetic pull of attraction; of the body’s mandate for restorative rest; and of the sacred bonds of love. We often cut ourselves off from identifying with wild animals—like wolves, foxes, bats and bears, and other animal relatives—out of fear, ignorance, disgust, or misunderstanding, yet our earthly human bodies can lead us in our pursuits of pleasure, love, wonder, healing, and connection.
With each section containing an aspect of injured animal’s return home to their natural habitat, and—in our case—to an embodied, instinctual self, Earthly Bodies meditates on how this journey from enclosures, to rehabilitation, to soft release, and finally to homing raises questions about our humanity. In so learning, we understand how we might benefit from embracing our own animal nature to gain deeper self-actualization, find common ground with our fellow animals, and learn to thrive together."
Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks
by
"Winner of the 2025 John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing. Earth has been reinventing itself for more than four billion years, keeping a record of its experiments in the form of rocks. Yet most of us live our lives on the planet with no idea of its extraordinary history, unable to interpret the language of the rocks that surround us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud believes that our lives can be enriched by understanding our heritage on this old and creative planet.
Contrary to their reputation, rocks have eventful lives–and they intersect with our own in surprising ways. In Turning to Stone, Bjornerud reveals how rocks are the hidden infrastructure that keep the planet functioning, from sandstone aquifers purifying the water we drink to basalt formations slowly regulating global climate.
Bjornerud’s life as a geologist has coincided with an extraordinary period of discovery in the geosciences. From an insular girlhood in rural Wisconsin, she found her way to an unlikely career studying mountains in remote parts of the world and witnessed the emergence of a new understanding of the Earth as an animate system of rock, air, water and life. We are all, most fundamentally, Earthlings and we can find existential meaning and enduring wisdom in stone."
Student, Class of 2025 December
There Are Rivers in the Sky
by
"In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.
In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.
In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.
A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, which remanifests across the centuries. A source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
Closely Watched Trains
by
Hrabal's postwar classic about a young man's coming of age in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is among his most popular works. Milos Hrma is a timid railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. Milos has been away for three months, recuperating from a suicide attempt, and is warmly welcomed back by Station Master Lansky and Dispatcher Hubicka. The year is 1945, the Germans have lost command of the air-space over the town, but it remains an important rail hub for them and certain key transport trains are nominated by the German high command for "close surveillance" to ensure that they are not delayed by signals failures or problems on the lines.
The Book of Goose
by
"A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.
Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised―the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now Agnès is free to tell her story.
As children in a war-ravaged backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves―until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss."
Station Eleven
by
"An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse. It is fifteen years after a flu pandemic wiped out most of the world's population. Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony, a small troupe moving over the gutted landscape, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. But when they arrive in the outpost of St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the disaster brought everyone here, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty, telling a story about the relationships that sustain us."
Technical Instructor in Printmaking
One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest
by
Wade Davis is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. One River recounts his 1970s travels to the Amazon River.
An enthralling read, packed with so much information about a wide variety of subjects.
Campus Safety Van Driver
Ironweed: A Novel
by
"This tale, set during the Depression, tells about Francis Phelan and other inhabitants of skid row in Albany, New York. Ironweed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the best-known of William Kennedy's three Albany-based novels. Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally - and fatally - dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present. Chronicles the final wanderings of a one-time ballplayer turned down-and-out murderer."
Go Down, Moses
by
"William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses is a collection of interconnected stories, published in 1942, that together function as a complex and cohesive novel. It chronicles the history of the McCaslin family, both the white and Black branches, in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, over several generations. A central theme is the destructive and lingering legacy of slavery, examining how the past's racial injustice and moral failures continue to haunt and shape the lives of all the descendants. The stories, including the well-known "The Bear," are told in a non-chronological order, gradually revealing the deep and tangled relationships and history of the family. Through its intricate narrative structure, the book explores themes of inheritance, human identity, and the relationship between humans and the natural world."
The Road
by
"A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food -- and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation"
A People's History of the United States
by
"Historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools—with its emphasis on great men in high places—to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, itis the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles—the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.
Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history."
Registrar
My Black Country: a Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present and Future
by
"It was at the age of three, sitting in the front seat of her father's car, that Alice Randall began to write her first country song: 'Daddy, don't go in that B-A-R.' To Randall, country music is a beating heart, shared communally with her family alive and gone, and the origin of a singular distinction she holds in American music history: the first Black woman to cowrite a #1 country hit, Trisha Yearwood's 'XXX's and OOO's.' Randall found inspiration and comfort in the sounds and history of the first family of Black country music: DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries, who, together, made up a community of Black Americans rising through hard times to create simple beauty, true joy, and, sometimes, profound eccentricity. Now, in My Black Country, comes a celebration of country music as a genre with its original yet ever-evolving Black roots and flowers. Randall guides the reader with painstaking care as she revisits her own past marked by times of trial and triumph. Situating us in the present as country music goes through a fresh renaissance, with a new wave of Black artists enjoying success, My Black Country is both an earnest reclamation of the genre and a vibrant introduction for a new generation of listeners who appreciate the radical joy in realizing the power of Black influence on American culture."
Written by the first Black woman to co-write a number one country hit, and explores her personal insights/experiences with country music, as well as highlighting Black country artists. Such a compelling read!!
Lollapalooza: the Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival
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"The definitive, no-holds-barred oral history of 1990s alt-rock festival Lollapalooza--told by the musicians, roadies, and industry insiders who lived it. From the New York Times bestselling authors of Nothin' But A Good Time. In Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival, New York Times bestselling authors Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour tell the no-holds-barred history of the iconic music festival. Through hundreds of new interviews with artists, tour founders, festival organizers, promoters, publicists, sideshow freaks, stage crews, record label execs, reporters, roadies and more, Lollapalooza chronicles the tour's pioneering 1991-1997 run, and, in the process, alternative rock's rise--as well as the reverberations that led to a massive shift in the music industry and the culture at large. Lollapalooza features original interviews with some of the biggest names in music, including Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Ice-T, Rage Against the Machine, Green Day, Patti Smith, Alice in Chains, Metallica and many more. Conceived by Farrell as a farewell tour for Jane's Addiction, Lollapalooza's inaugural outing across the U.S. in the summer of 1991 helped to coalesce an ideology and aesthetic that not only washed over popular music but seeped into fashion, film, television, literature, food, politics and more. Throughout the decade, Lollapalooza offered a vast and diverse ensemble of bands, breaking barriers of genre and uniting alternative rock, heavy metal, punk, hip-hop, industrial, goth, avant-garde, spoken word, electronic dance music and other styles under one big tent, and setting the template for the modern American music festival and the scores of other contemporary destination fests that are now an integral part of how audiences experience live music. Unorthodox not just in music, Lollapalooza also spotlighted visual arts, nonprofit organizations, political outfits and even the occasional freak show, offering a tantalizing cocktail of culture, art, and activism that, taken together, defined the alternative mindset that dominated the 1990s. Echoes of its impact reverberate strongly today - cemented by annual sell-outs at destination events all over the world, an estimation of 400,000 attendees at the flagship Chicago fest each summer, and a spot among the world's largest and longest-running music festivals. A nostalgic look back at 1990s music and culture, Lollapalooza traces the festival's groundbreaking origins, following the tour as it progresses through the decade, and documenting the action onstage, backstage, and behind-the-scenes in detailed and uncensored and sometimes shocking first-person accounts. This is the story of Lollapalooza and the 1990s alternative rock revolution"
Did you know that Lollapalooza came to Pownal in July 1996? While 'Pownalpalooza' isn't specifically mentioned in this book, it's a fascinating history of the alternative music festival, and pulls togethers the voices from nearly everyone who was there.
Kala: A Novel
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"In the seaside village of Kinlough, on Ireland's west coast, three old friends meet for the first time in years. They - Helen, Joe and Mush - were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lannan at its white-hot center. But later that year, Kala disappeared without a trace. Now remains have been discovered in the woods--including a skull with a polaroid photo tucked inside--and the town is both aghast and titillated at reopening this old wound. On the eve of this gruesome discovery, Helen had reluctantly returned for her father's wedding, the world-famous musician Joe had come home to dry out and reconnect with something authentic, and Mush had never left, too shattered by the events of that summer to venture beyond the counter of his mother's café. But when two more girls go missing, they are forced confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala's disappearance. Ultimately, they must do what others should have done before to stop the violent patterns of their town's past repeating themselves once again. In cracklingly vivid prose, Kala brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging, as well as the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption"
I love all things Ireland, and loved this book so much. It's told from the viewpoints of three (now adult) friends who lost a friend when they were teenagers under mysterious circumstances. The twists and turns - and ultimate reveal - of what really happened to Kala are quite dark.
Faculty - Drama
Mother Mary Comes to Me
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"A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer. Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as 'my shelter and my storm.'"
The book Roy never intended to write. “Heart-smashed” by her mother’s death, she began to write to figure out why she was so shaken. She wrote not only as a daughter, but as a writer who has lost her “most enthralling subject.” Intricate, simple, glorious.
Light: A Day in Monet's Garden
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"This shimmering novel is an extraordinary portrait of a day in the life of an artist at work and at home. In prose as luminous as the colors Monet is using to portray his garden, Eva Figes guides us from dawn (‘midnight blueblack growing grey and misty’) through midday (‘the sun was high now… shrinking what little shadow remained, fading colors, the pink rambler roses on the fence by the railway track looked almost white’) to evening (‘the tide of shadows rising as the sunset glow faded outside.’) Monet’s wife, grieving for a lost daughter; a living daughter, fretting that she will not be able to marry the man she loves; their friend the abbé, eating and drinking with them; two children playing, closest to Monet in the freshness and certainty of their vision; all experiencing in different ways the richness of the light that Monet works unceasingly to pin down in his last, great paintings."
A slim novel: one day in the life and the light that shines on Monet, his family, his gardens, and the workers who maintain the estate at Giverny. Joyce Carol Oates calls it a luminous prose poem. If you could fall into one of his paintings, and experience both the world and his brush strokes, this masterpiece comes close.
Orbital: A Novel
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A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in twenty-four hours. A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots a day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space--not toward the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at warp speed as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live. Profound, contemplative, and gorgeous, Orbital is a gift--a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet
Science fiction, Philosophical fiction, and crystalline poetry of time and space. 24 hours, which constitutes several days, of six astronauts orbiting earth. Intimately close in space, yet far away from home. It gives you a sense of the weightlessness of zero gravity.
Director of Poetry at Bennington and Faculty - Literature.
Lazarus Species
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"Traversing historical, terrestrial, and discursive limits, Devon Walker-Figueroa brings a chorus of perspectives, eras, idioms, and ideals into novel if not turbulent dialogue. In this dazzling second collection, bursting with detailed case studies, obscure natural phenomena, and flagrant apocrypha, these poems calculate the debilitating and contorting costs of survival."
An exceptional and audacious second book of tour de force poems by an alumna and former visiting faculty member.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Poems
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"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a book-length sequence of 53 poems with identical eponymous titles. Heartbreaking and searingly lucid, this debut collection from poet Matthew Tuckner chronicles his best friend’s illness and subsequent death from cancer. Its brilliance is not only in recognizing the vastness and particularity of grief — how the loss of a beloved is so personally all encompassing that it splits time irrevocably, separating our personal history into distinct eras of before and after as the governing principles of our lives crumble — but also in joining the discrete experience of one person’s sickness to a carcinogenic imperial core, the late-capitalist global order that ensnares all people in toxic landscapes that make us sick.
Describing a trip to Japan, Tuckner evokes the brute force of appetite alongside the delicacy of life as he recalls “memories of its greedy koi fish, a ceramic bowl / of goji berries perfectly balanced on a tree branch.” Beholden to a ticking clock, we catalogue, becoming evidentiary and encyclopedic in our impulses. “We fatten the time until it bursts into artifacts: / sixteen photographs of a single puddle // taking shape in the red glow of your darkroom.” In borrowing the title of Edward Gibbon’s seminal 6-volume history, Tuckner anchors the associative detours of his sprawling intellect and executes a stunning metacommentary on his own lyrics: time collapses every era into a spattering of sentences, tyrannical as it forcibly converts the present to the past, and yet the barbarous recursion of human feeling resists oblivion, evoking the eternity of emotional significance. Tuckner’s shrewd balance of irony and tenderness make this cerebral inversion possible: this friendship is the poet’s canon event, the Rome at which every road in his mind arrives, and yet it is also the singular dialect that will not cede to death’s subsuming lingua franca.
Damien Hirst’s taxidermy art, The John Keats House, superfund sites in Rome, NY, the 2023 Ohio Train Derailment, a children’s book titled Oil Spill! — these poems travel widely in their topics to understand the specific ravages of disease on the human body, and in turn, the ravages of human beings on the planet. Its trenchant criticism isn’t pessimistic, though — its redemption is the restorative, unending love that made these elegies possible. Equally gutted and mesmerized by our infinite, arbitrary ability to discern meaning in mess, these poems ask us to bear witness to what we can develop if we will sit in the darkness. To read the photo essay of a storm’s aftermath. It tells an ancient story that becomes brand new, the one about “a puddle you glimpsed the moon in & stopped for. // A puddle that was just plain rain until it fell.”"
A stunning book-length sequence of 53 poems all called "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," about the loss of a friend to cancer against the backdrop of U.S. late-capitalist imperial decline.
Death Styles
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"In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely—River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk—McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day. In frank, mesmeric lyrics, Death Styles navigates the opposing forces of survival and grief, finding a way to press against death’s interface, to step the wrong way out of the grave."
A wild and singular book-length meditation on loss, trauma, survival, language, and style, written in the wake of the author's loss of her infant daughter and the necessity to keep going and keep writing.
Happily: A Personal History, With Fairy Tales
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"The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls "this strange American weather." Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. In "Sorry Peter Pan, We're Over You," Mark grapples with a loss of innocence when her son decides he would rather dress up as Martin Luther King, Jr., than Peter Pan for Halloween; in "The Evil Stepmother" Mark finds unlikely communion with wicked wives and examines the roots of their bad reputation; and in "Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand," the hunt for a wig maker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest forces Mark to finally confront her sister's cancer diagnosis and the stories we tell ourselves to get by."
An artful, imaginative, whimsical memoir by a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South., presenting modern life as essentially a series of surreal fairy tales.
Campus Safety Officer
The Great Gatsby
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"Story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted "gin" was the national drink and sex the national obsession. The narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means. Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout."
This year is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby.
From Strength to Strength:
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"The roadmap for finding purpose, meaning, and success as we age, from bestselling author, Harvard professor, and the Atlantic's happiness columnist Arthur Brooks. Many of us assume that the more successful we are, the less susceptible we become to the sense of professional and social irrelevance that often accompanies aging. But the truth is, the greater our achievements and our attachment to them, the more we notice our decline, and the more painful it is when it occurs. What can we do, starting now, to make our older years a time of happiness, purpose, and yes, success? At the height of his career at the age of 50, Arthur Brooks embarked on a seven-year journey to discover how to transform his future from one of disappointment over waning abilities into an opportunity for progress. From Strength to Strength is the result, a practical roadmap for the rest of your life. Drawing on social science, philosophy, biography, theology, and eastern wisdom, as well as dozens of interviews with everyday men and women, Brooks shows us that true life success is well within our reach. By refocusing on certain priorities and habits that anyone can learn, such as deep wisdom, detachment from empty rewards, connection and service to others, and spiritual progress, we can set ourselves up for increased happiness. Read this book and you, too, can go from strength to strength."
The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
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"Doing well with money isn't necessarily about what you know. It's about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money--investing, personal finance, and business decisions--is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don't make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life's most important topics"
Associate Director of Digital Marketing
The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works
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"A scientist’s exploration of the "ocean engine"―the physics behind the ocean’s systems―and why it matters.
All of Earth’s oceans, from the equator to the poles, are a single engine powered by sunlight, driving huge flows of energy, water, life, and raw materials. In The Blue Machine, physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski illustrates the mechanisms behind this defining feature of our planet, voyaging from the depths of the ocean floor to tropical coral reefs, estuaries that feed into shallow coastal seas, and Arctic ice floes.
Through stories of history, culture, and animals, she explains how water temperature, salinity, gravity, and the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates all interact in a complex dance, supporting life at the smallest scale―plankton―and the largest―giant sea turtles, whales, humankind. From the ancient Polynesians who navigated the Pacific by reading the waves, to permanent residents of the deep such as the Greenland shark that can live for hundreds of years, she introduces the messengers, passengers, and voyagers that rely on interlinked systems of vast currents, invisible ocean walls, and underwater waterfalls.
Most important, however, Czerski reveals that while the ocean engine has sustained us for thousands of years, today it is faced with urgent threats. By understanding how the ocean works, and its essential role in our global system, we can learn how to protect our blue machine. Timely, elegant, and passionately argued, The Blue Machine presents a fresh perspective on what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet."
Playground: A Novel
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"Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away. Set in the world's largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity."
Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life
by
One of humanity’s oldest beliefs is that our world is alive. Though once ridiculed by some scientists, the idea of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance in recent decades. We, and all living things, are more than inhabitants of Earth—we are Earth, an outgrowth of its structure and an engine of its evolution. Life and its environment have coevolved for billions of years, transforming a lump of orbiting rock into a cosmic oasis—a planet that breathes, metabolizes, and regulates its climate.
Acclaimed science writer Ferris Jabr reveals a radical new vision of Earth where lush forests spew water, pollen, and bacteria to summon rain; giant animals engineer the very landscapes they roam; microbes chew rock to shape continents; and microscopic plankton, some as glittering as carved jewels, remake the air and sea.
Humans are one of the most extreme examples of life transforming Earth. Through fossil fuel consumption, agriculture, and pollution, we have altered more layers of the planet in less time than any other species, pushing Earth into a crisis. But we are also uniquely able to understand and protect the planet’s wondrous ecology and self-stabilizing processes. Jabr introduces us to a diverse cast of fascinating people who have devoted themselves to this vital work.
Becoming Earth is an exhilarating journey through the hidden workings of our planetary symphony—its players, its instruments, and the music of life that emerges—and an invitation to reexamine our place in it. How well we play our part will determine what kind of Earth our descendants inherit for millennia to come.
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
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"Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?"
Faculty - Society, Culture and Thought
Austerlitz
by
W.G. Sebald traces the moving story of Jacques Austerlitz, sent to Wales on the last Kindertransport from Europe on the eve of World War II. He is adopted by Welsh Calvinists who decide to remove any trace of his true origins.
This novel, like all Sebald's novels, manages to be both deeply beautiful and deeply weird. It feels haunted from the first page on, a feeling that's enhanced by the grainy black-and-white photos interspersed throughout. It feels simultaneously intimate and posthumous, so you don't know whether you're reading a book or attending a seance.
The Inheritance of Loss
by
In a crumbling house in the remote northeastern Himalayas, an embittered, elderly judge finds his peaceful retirement turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai. Kiran Desai's tragicomic novel The Inheritance of Loss spans two continents and three generations. The story cuts between New York and India, contrasting the menial jobs and meager conditions of immigrant life in the city with the political unrest engulfing an isolated Himalayan hill town.
The book is a loving and unflinching look at the people and culture originating in a small sector of India at the foot of the Himalayas. It travels between India and America, between poverty and politics, love and betrayal. It's fantastic. And she's a Bennington alum!
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
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A controversial novel of the life of Jesus Christ portrays his family as complex as anyone's family and with a realism that is filled with visions, dreams, and an omen.
This is a crisp, poetic, and sometimes shocking book built around a central question: what if one of the gospels focused on the life of Jesus as he understood it himself? Not for the faint of heart.
Faculty - Visual Arts and Drama
There Are Rivers in the Sky
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"In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.
In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.
In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.
A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, which remanifests across the centuries. A source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
Termination Shock: A Novel
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"One man—visionary billionaire restaurant chain magnate T. R. Schmidt, Ph.D.—has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as “elemental.” But will it work? And just as important, what are the consequences for the planet and all of humanity should it be applied?
Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, from the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas to the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert, Termination Shock brings together a disparate group of characters from different cultures and continents who grapple with the real-life repercussions of global warming. Ultimately, it asks the question: Might the cure be worse than the disease?
Epic in scope while heartbreakingly human in perspective, Termination Shock sounds a clarion alarm, ponders potential solutions and dire risks, and wraps it all together in an exhilarating, witty, mind-expanding speculative adventure."
Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel
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One week into the COVID-19 shutdown, tenants of a Lower East Side apartment building in Manhattan have begun to gather on the rooftop and tell stories. With each passing night, more and more neighbors gather, bringing chairs and milk crates and overturned pails. Gradually the tenants—some of whom have barely spoken to each other—become real neighbors. In this Decameron-like serial novel, general editors Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston and a star-studded list of contributors create a beautiful ode to the people who couldn’t escape when the pandemic hit. A dazzling, heartwarming, and ultimately surprising narrative, Fourteen Days reveals how beneath the horrible loss and suffering, some communities managed to become stronger.
Includes writing from: Charlie Jane Anders, Margaret Atwood, Joseph Cassara, Jennine Capó Crucet, Angie Cruz, Pat Cummings, Sylvia Day, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, Diana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, John Grisham, Maria Hinojosa, Mira Jacob, Erica Jong, CJ Lyons, Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Mary Pope Osborne, Douglas Preston, Alice Randall, Ishmael Reed, Roxana Robinson, Nelly Rosario, James Shapiro, Hampton Sides, R.L. Stine, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Monique Truong, Scott Turow, Luis Alberto Urrea, Rachel Vail, Weike Wang, Caroline Randall Williams, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, and Meg Wolitzer.
Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking: A Cookbook
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Vegetarian cooking is a way of life for more than 300 million Indians. Jaffrey travels from north to south, and from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, collecting recipes for the very tastiest dishes along the way. She visits the homes and businesses of shopkeepers, writers, designers, farmers, doctors, weavers, and more, gathering their stories and uncovering the secrets of their most delicious family specialties.
From a sweet, sour, hot, salty Kodava Mushroom Curry with Coconut originating in the forested regions of South Karnataka to simple, crisp Okra Fries dusted with chili powder, turmeric, and chickpea flour; and from Stir-Fried Spinach, Andhra Style (with ginger, coriander, and cumin) to the mung bean pancakes she snacks on at a roadside stand, here Jaffrey brings together the very best of vegetable-centric Indian cuisine and explains how home cooks can easily replicate these dishes—and many more for beans, grains, and breads—in their own kitchens.
With more than two hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated throughout, and including personal photographs from Jaffrey’s own travels, Vegetarian India is a kitchen essential for vegetable enthusiasts and home cooks everywhere.
Student, Class of 2026
Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting
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The 21st century offers a dizzying array of new technological developments: robots smart enough to take white collar jobs, social media tools that manage our most important relationships, ordinary objects that track, record, analyze and share every detail of our daily lives, and biomedical techniques with the potential to transform and enhance human minds and bodies to an unprecedented degree.
Emerging technologies are reshaping our habits, practices, institutions, cultures and environments in increasingly rapid, complex and unpredictable ways that create profound risks and opportunities for human flourishing on a global scale. How can our future be protected in such challenging and uncertain conditions? How can we possibly improve the chances that the human family will not only live, but live well, into the 21st century and beyond?
This book locates a key to that future in the distant past: specifically, in the philosophical traditions of virtue ethics developed by classical thinkers from Aristotle and Confucius to the Buddha. Each developed a way of seeking the good life that equips human beings with the moral and intellectual character to flourish even in the most unpredictable, complex and unstable situations--precisely where we find ourselves today.
Through an examination of the many risks and opportunities presented by rapidly changing technosocial conditions, Vallor makes the case that if we are to have any real hope of securing a future worth wanting, then we will need more than just better technologies. We will also need better humans.
Director and Curator of the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery and Faculty - Visual Arts
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead
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Finalist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, and autonomy and fate. In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind ...
The Fraud: A Novel
by
"It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper--and cousin by marriage--of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also skeptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. The 'Tichborne Trial'--wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title--captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task"
The Flamethrowers: A Novel
by
"The year is 1975 and Reno--so-called because of the place of her birth--has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in the art world--artists have colonized a deserted and industrial SoHo, are staging actions in the East Village, and are blurring the line between life and art. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, she begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the semi-estranged scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro's family home in Italy, Reno falls in with members of the radical movement that overtook Italy in the seventies. Betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow."
Student - Class of 2025, December
The Scapegracers
by
Skulking near the bottom of West High’s social pyramid, Sideways Pike lurks under the bleachers doing magic tricks for bottles of Coke. As a witch, lesbian, and lifelong outsider, she’s had a hard time making friends. But when the three most popular girls pay her forty dollars to cast a spell at their Halloween party, Sideways gets swept into a new clique. The unholy trinity are dangerous angels, sugar-coated rattlesnakes, and now—unbelievably—Sideways’ best friends.
Together, the four bond to form a ferocious and powerful coven. They plan parties, cast curses on jerks, and try to find Sideways a girlfriend, all while eluding the fundamentalist witchfinders hell-bent on stealing their magic. But for Sideways, the hardest part is the whole “having friends” thing. Who knew that balancing human interaction with supernatural peril could be so complicated?
Rich with the urgency of feral youth, The Scapegracers is an atmospheric, voice-driven novel of the occult that explores magic, growing up, and the complexities of friendship with all the rage of a teenage girl.
If Mean Girls met The Craft, and they had a beautiful queer baby. Features found family and an ink demon.
The Secret Life of the Woolly Bear Caterpillar
by
"Kids often spot woolly bear caterpillars creeping across the ground in fall, but these furry-looking creatures seem to disappear as quickly as they pop up. Where do they come from in autumn, and where do they go? In fact, they live throughout North America all year long. In vivid storytelling style, Laurence Pringle uncovers the secret life of the woollybear caterpillar, following one caterpillar as she feasts, tiny and hidden, inthe tall summer grass; molts and grows; then sets off on the fall journeywhere she's most likely to be seen. Packed with surprising details (did you know that woolly bears can survive freezing temperatures by producing a natural antifreeze?), this book will appeal to every child who's been lucky enough to spy one of these beloved caterpillars—and to anyone who'd like to."
Follow Bella the Woolly Bear caterpillar as she eats, travels, and even escapes dangerous predators. Watch her weave a cocoon at the end for a secret surprise!