Member Bookshelf

By David Shackleton. Oxford University Press, 2023.

This book assesses the environmental politics of modernism in relation to the idea of the Anthropocene—a proposed geological epoch in which humans have fundamentally changed the Earth System. The early twentieth century was marked by environmental transformations that were so complex and happened on such great scales that they defied representation. Modernist novelists responded with a range of innovative narrative forms that started to make environmental crisis on a planetary scale visible. Paradoxically, however, it ...

By Micah McKay. University of Florida Press, 2024.

Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture looks at the role of waste in Latin American cultural texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and makes the case for foregrounding trash as an object of analysis in literary and cultural studies in Spanish America and Brazil. By considering how writers and filmmakers engage with the theme, Micah McKay argues that garbage illuminates key limits related to the region’s experience with contemporary capitalism.

Recognizing trash as an important ...

By Barbara Leckie. Stanford University Press, 2022.

In this moment of climate precarity, Victorian studies scholar Barbara Leckie considers the climate crisis as a problem of time. Spanning the long nineteenth century through our current moment, her interdisciplinary treatment of climate change at once rethinks time and illustrates that the time for climate action is now.

Climate Change, Interrupted argues that linear, progress-inflected temporalities are not adequate to a crisis that defies their terms. Instead, this book advances a theory and practice of interruption to ...

By Kamala Platt. De Gruyter, 2023.

Environmental Justice Poetics: Cultural Representations of Environmental Racism From Chicanas and Women in India is a book that compels scholars, activists, artists and planetary citizens of all ilk to reconsider their relationships with earth and each other. More regenerative than groundbreaking, this study of expressive work by Mexican American and South Asian women engaged at the nexus of ecology and justice imparts a route toward a calm climate in an equitable world.

While offering a critique of patriarchal structures ...

By Boria Sax. Reaktion Books, 2023.

In 1985 Boria Sax inherited an area of forest in New York State that had been purchased by his Russian, Jewish Communist grandparents as a buffer against what they felt was a hostile world. For Sax, in the years following, the woodland came to represent a link with those who lived and had lived there, including Native Americans, settlers, bears, deer, turtles and migrating birds. In this personal and eloquent account, Sax explores the meanings and cultural history ...

By Debbie Urbanski. Simon & Schuster, 2023.

After World is about humanity’s relationship with the planet and who or what in that relationship is most important. It’s also about artificial intelligence, climate change, extinction, and the future. Humanity has gone extinct to save the planet, and an AI narrator is tasked to tell the story of Sen Anon, the last human on Earth. But as the AI goes about researching and recording Sen’s life, they become uncomfortable with the direction Sen’s story is taking, so ...

By Leanne Dunic. Talonbooks, 2024.

In Wet, a transient Chinese American model working in Singapore thirsts for the unattainable: fair labour rights, the extinguishing of nearby forest fires, breathable air, healthy habitats for animals, human connection. She navigates place and placelessness while observing other migrant workers toiling outdoors despite the hazardous conditions. Through photographs and language shot through with empathy and desire, Wet unravels complexities of social stratification, sexual privation, and environmental catastrophe.

Leanne Dunic (she/her) is a biracial, bisexual woman who has spent her life navigating liminal ...

By Vicki Graham. Red Dragonfly Press, 2023.

After a fire, walk barefoot on burnt earth, the poems of this collection call to the reader. Learn with your body the cycles of catastrophe and renewal in a land shaped by geologic faults and scarred by wildfires. In language at once lyrical and scientific, Graham takes her readers into the aftermath of the fires that have burned in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness of Oregon in the last two decades. And in language equally precise and evocative she ...

By Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan. Lexington Books, 2023.

The Cultural Roots of Slow Food: Peasants, Partisans, and the Landscape of Italian Resistance focuses on the work of a variety of intellectual activists, related food justice literature, and documentary films, and argues that contemporary forms of environmental activism, as they are rooted in local food and sustainable farming, are built on Italian peasant culture and its contributions to the Resistance movement during World War II.

This book looks to the hinterlands to demonstrate that peasants, by sharing ...

By Peter W. Fong. Latah Books, 2023.

After plans were announced for multiple dams in Mongolia’s Selenge River watershed, award-winning author and veteran flyfishing guide Peter W. Fong was spurred to learn more about this remarkable ecosystem. On a first-ever scientific expedition from the headwaters of the Selenge to Russia’s Lake Baikal, he and an international team traveled more than 1,500 kilometers by horse, camel, kayak, and rowboat through one of the world’s most rugged regions and a last, best stronghold for the planet’s ...