Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures
By Sarah Dimick. Columbia University Press, 2024.
As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United ...
Craft & Current: A Manual for Magical Writing
By Janisse Ray. Trackless Wild LLC, 2024.
To write killer prose you need three things.
You need craft. That means you need to learn how to put words together so they say more than what’s on the page. You have to push your words to say more. Plus, something more than craft is necessary. You need a sparkling, juicy, and ever-deepening relationship with mystery. You have to get yourself into that current. How? How do you tap into magic and transfer it to the page? You need ...Time and Nature in the Poetry of Niyi Osundare: Poetics of Animism, Anthropocene, and Capitalocene
By Chukwunwike Anolue. Routledge, 2024.
Time and Nature in the Poetry of Niyi Osundare provides an ecocritical analysis of the poetry of the famous Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare. It interrogates the intricate interface between time and nature in 11 of Osundare’s defining poetry collections. This is a book of postcolonial ecocriticism from an African perspective. It brings together the ecocritical theory of animism and theories of geologic time in the discussion of Osundare’s poetry. Osundare shows that animism has a lot to offer in ...
Devils Island
By Midge Raymond and John Yunker. Oceanview Publishing, 2024.
On a remote island off the coast of Tasmania, an Australian wilderness guide embarks on a four-day hike with six guests—and arrives at their destination with only two. Through the structure of a closed-door mystery, Devils Island tells the story of the Tasmanian devil and its struggle to survive. While there’s an abundance of nonfiction about climate change and mass extinction, Devils Island adds to a small but fast-growing sub-genre of eco-mysteries.
Midge Raymond is the ...
Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore
By Jamie Wang. MIT Press, 2024.
This book is an exploration of the multifaceted urban environmental issues in Singapore through a more-than-human lens, calling for new ways to think of and story cities. As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of ...
Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection
By Heather Swan. Penn State University Press, 2024.
Through narrative, verse, and art, Where the Grass Still Sings celebrates the many tiny creatures that play crucial roles in our ecosystems—as well as the people on the front lines of the fight to save them. Weaving art and science with inspiring stories of people doing their part to protect insects and the environment, author Heather Swan takes readers around the globe to highlight practical solutions to safeguard our fragile planet. Visit a sustainable coffee farm ...
The Mississippi: Soundings on America’s Arterial River
Call for Submissions for The Mississippi: Soundings on America’s Arterial River
Edited by A. Robert Lee and Chad Weidner
Introduction and Scope: The Mississippi River, often regarded as America’s central artery, has been instrumental in shaping the nation’s geography, culture, and history. This edited volume, The Mississippi: Soundings on America’s Arterial River, aims to explore the river’s vast influence, tracing its course from the headwaters at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to its expansive delta at the Gulf of Mexico.
Through a multidisciplinary approach—encompassing geography, ecology, history, culture, ...
ASLE 2025: The Neanderthal Presence
Panel CFP for the ASLE 2025 Biennial Conference, July 8-11 in College Park, MD.
The panel seeks proposals examining the Neanderthal’s increasing cultural prominence in fictional narrative (paleofiction, sci fi, cli fi, etc.), scientific narrative, and popular science reportage. How are we moving beyond images of the Neanderthal as prehuman or fossil other? What of the Neanderthal can we bring into the human or posthuman future? 200 word abstract and 150-word biographical statement to Tim Sweet tsweet@wvu.edu by December 6, 2024.