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Summary

The In-Betweens tells the story of a biracial boy becoming a man, all the while trying to find himself, trying to come to terms with his white family, and trying to find his place in American society. A rich narrative in the tradition of Justin Torres’s We the Animals and Bryan Washington’s Memorial, Davon Loeb’s memoir is relevant to the country’s current climate and is part of the necessary rewrite of the nation’s narrative and identity.

The son of a Black mother with deep family roots in Alabama and a white Jewish man from Long Island, Loeb grows up in a Black family in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as one of the few nonwhite children in their suburban neighborhood. Despite his many and ongoing efforts to fit in, Loeb acutely feels his difference—he is singled out in class during Black History Month; his hair doesn’t conform to the latest fad; coaches and peers assume he is a talented athlete and dancer; and on the field trip to the Holocaust Museum, he is the Black Jew. But all is not struggle. In lyrical vignettes, Loeb vibrantly depicts the freedom, joys, and wonder of childhood; the awkwardness of teen years, first jobs, first passions. Loeb tells an individual story universally, and readers, regardless of subjectivity and relation, will see themselves throughout The In-Betweens.

Contents

A Love Story
On I-85 South
My Mother’s Mother
Bath Time
The Reconstruction of a Slave
At Church
Like Gladiators
Drinking a Colt 45
Throw the Football
A Roll of Duct Tape
Summer Thunderstorms
Aunt Sammy
Alabama Fire Ants 
Don’t Open the Door
The Settlers Inn
To Be a Man
Patricide and Boot Shines
With My Dad 
Fighting for the Tree
Weekend Weather
O. J. and the Wax Museum
Steve Urkel, Kick the Ball
Before Cell Phones
Between Walls at a Friend’s House
But I Am Not Toby
Thoughts on Hair
The Angels of the Paint
Suicide on the Triples
Shopping with Kris
The Jumps 
Not the Worst of Boys
5-Series BMW
A Back Seat and a Fire Pit
Morning Noise
Quitting Meant Back to Babysitting
After-School Basketball Game
The Best Dancer
The Black Jew
Something about Love
Visitations with My Father
For My Brother
Living in a Studio Apartment
The Makings of a Gym Rat 
In-Between Sirens
A Small Lesson on Loitering
On the Confederate Flag
Retirement

Acknowledgments

Author

Davon Loeb is an assistant features editor at The Rumpus. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University–Camden and has had work published in Catapult, Ploughshares, Joyland, PANK, and elsewhere. He lives in New Jersey. Learn more at davonloeb.com.

Reviews

“Utterly captivating and resonant, The In-Betweens deserves a top spot on your bookshelf.”
Chicago Review of Books

“This gorgeously told 'lyrical memoir' recounts Loeb’s curious, difficult, joyous journey to find a place in the world in light of his Southern Black and Long Island-Jewish heritage.”
Philadelphia Inquirer

“Resonant. . . . Engagingly delivered, candid reflections on heritage and identity.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Ideal for those interested in descriptive, insightful stories about what it is like to not quite fit in anywhere, to inhabit many spaces at once, and to be challenged with the formation of one’s own identity in a sometimes chaotic and contradictory environment.”
Library Journal

“Loeb’s writ­ing is art­ful. . . . One must get to know Loeb slow­ly, one mem­o­ry at a time.”
Jewish Book Council

“Rich, evocative, and surprising.”
Marissa Higgins, Daily Kos

“While the memoir is masterfully told—Loeb employs a variety of craft techniques that have a powerful effect—what makes The In-Betweens so special is the thoughtfulness Loeb brings to his work.”
The Rumpus 

“[Loeb] dances to a slow, beautiful ballad on every page. His story will move any reader, but it’s the craft of his work that truly shines.” 
Debutiful

“With its keen attention to language and its moving portrayal of boyhood and belonging, The In-Betweens has earned its place alongside the greats of lyrical, coming-of-age nonfiction.” 
The Adroit Journal 

“Loeb’s debut memoir crackles with light, breaking open each superb chapter to uncover a memorable and gripping origin story.”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders

“Sentence to sentence, The In-Betweens is awake to the awe of being in a body and the danger of negotiating a culture that wants to drive space between us, inside us. Davon Loeb is writing to stay alive under the harshest conditions, and he has given us a brilliant, devastating book.”
Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

“Confession, manifesto, bildungsroman, and prayer, The In-Betweens is a meditation on bruise and healing. Loeb’s struggles become snapshots of how transformation occurs even where shards have been piled, where one waits ‘for something to happen, like flashes of red and blue and sirens pulsing.’ A truly extraordinary new voice.”
Roy G. Guzmán, author of Catrachos

Summary

Populated with lovers who leave and return, with ghosts of the Holocaust and messages from the dead, Courtney Sender’s debut collection speaks in a singular new voice about the longings and loneliness of contemporary love. The world of these fourteen interlocking stories is fiercely real but suffused with magic and myth, dark wit, and distinct humor. Here, ancient loss works its way deep into the psyche of modern characters, stirring their unrelenting lust for life.

In “To Do With the Body,” the Museum of Period Clothes becomes the perfect setting for a bloody crime. In “Lilith in God’s Hands,” Adam’s first wife has an affair in the Garden of Eden. And in the title story, a woman spends her life waiting for any of the men who have left her to come back, only to find them all at her doorstep at once.

For readers of Elena Ferrante, Nicole Krauss, and Carmen Maria Machado, and for anyone who has known love and loneliness, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me is a wise and sensual collection of old hauntings, new longings, and unexpected returns, with a finale that is a rousing call to the strength we each have, together or alone.

Hear the author read an excerpt from the title story.

Contents

In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back To Me
Black Harness
For Somebody So Scared
Only Things We Say
Epistles
An Angel on Stilts
The Docent
I Am Going to Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved
Lilith in God’s Hands
To Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved
To Do With the Body
From Somebody So Scared
Missives
A New Story

Acknowledgments

Author

Courtney Sender’s writing has appeared in the New York Times’ Modern Love, the Atlantic, the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and Tin House, among others. A MacDowell and Yaddo fellow, she holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School. She currently lives in the Boston area.

Reviews

“Sender shifts between stories of love—between lovers, friends, family, ghosts—and the great looming shadow of the Holocaust, making a deep and howling portrait of longing and loneliness.”
Boston Globe

“Sender’s willingness to explore primal hurts makes her fiction compelling. . . . A distinctive debut from a promising author.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Sender’s intimate worlds explore the hollows of the real and imagined, bringing to life emotions and connections too unwieldy to define or restrain.”
Booklist

“A stunner from the very first page.”
Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, in the Millions

“A profound and deeply funny examination of loneliness in many of its forms.”
Emma Copley Eisenberg in Electric Lit

“This book is fierce. This book is rowdy. This book makes you think about all the relationships in your life that have not panned out as you might have hoped.”
Barrelhouse

“Brooding, poignant. . . . The sharp humor and imagination in these stories helps to temper the aching loneliness of people who are in various phases of losing, rejecting, or longing for love.”
Foreword Reviews

“Courtney Sender hooks us with her singular magic. . . . Brilliantly aching and haunting.”
Sara Lippmann, Lilith blog

“Sender matches the light topic of youthful lost love with the extreme heft of the Holocaust . . . and comes up with a miraculous balance between the personal and the universal.”
Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

“Wholly original, lyrical, fierce, these stories confound expectations at every turn. Courtney Sender writes about passion and loneliness, faith and longing, heaven and hell with a clear eye and a compassionate wit. This collection expands and celebrates, even as it sometimes upends, what it means to tell a love story.”
Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour

“Courtney Sender’s stories are fierce and tender, exploring the urgency of desire, the restlessness of longing, and the way that both trauma and the will to survive can be a haunting inheritance. Sender moves gracefully between the surreal and the everyday, capturing the way romantic love can be at once impossibly strange and mercifully familiar.”
Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

“Trust is the soul of these stories, and it flows both ways: the trust Courtney Sender has in her reader and the trust the reader feels deeply and truly in the hands of such a generous, intelligent, offbeat, singular writer. These stories, structured in an utterly original way, are rare and real; they get under your skin.”
Elisa Albert, author of Human Blues

“Reading these stories is like hearing a series of songs you love—the rhythm, the feeling, the physicality, the words! Literary rock ’n’ roll.”
Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade

Summary

The Wounds That Bind Us is the improbable true story of Kelley Shinn, an orphan at birth who loses her legs at the age of sixteen to a rare bacterial pathogen. She becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover with her three-year-old daughter in tow to bring light to the plight of land mine survivors. With unflinching honesty, exceptional lyricism, and biting humor, Shinn (“that’s two Ns and no shins”) takes readers on a wild journey—literal and emotional—filled with striking characters and landscapes, heartbreaks, and hard-won insights, ultimately arriving at a place of profound redemption.

Told with the energy and intensity of the adventure story it is, this terrifically rich and nuanced examination of a life is also a careful meditation on renewal—a remapping of the world. Guided by the narrator’s keen introspection and her ability to look resolutely at harrowing sorrows and still find hope, joy, and meaning, The Wounds That Bind Us will resonate deeply, long after the last page.

Author

Kelley Shinn lives on Ocracoke, North Carolina, a remote island twenty-six miles from the coast. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Fourth Genre, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and elsewhere.

Reviews

“A harrowing memoir. . . . Readers may not want to follow in [Shinn’s] footsteps, but they will never be bored with her as a companion.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Simultaneously empowering and disconcerting. . . . Ultimately, one comes away from this book with an appreciation for the beauty of broken things.”
Southern Review of Books

“It is impossible to put down this book. The story of Kelley Shinn’s often dangerous but always thrilling and adventurous life will leave you breathless and awed. The courage, compassion, and joy with which Shinn lives her life is inspiring. She is the person every parent would want to see their child grow to be, the mother every kid wishes they had.”
Jessica Anya Blau, author of Mary Jane

“This memoir of single motherhood, disability, and an unlikely off-road adventure around the world delivers just what I’m looking for in my reading these days: courage. That, and fine writing, unforgettable characters, suspense, humor, tenderness, and a profound yet humble sense of moral purpose. Kelley Shinn is a marvel, and her book, despite its pain, makes a better world feel possible.”
Belle Boggs, author of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“The Wounds That Bind Us offers perennial relevance in a fresh literary manner. Kelley Shinn invites the reader, the voyeur, the accidental tourist into a world that is a brilliant jewel box of precise, complex, and beautiful turns, with language that bites and soothes the wound in the same stroke. These personal narratives, written with a deliberate genius of craft, usher an arresting memoir that lifts heavy veils and becomes bountiful succor for the parched truths we share.”
Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate

“A beautiful book about how the things we love are torn away from us and about the ways we hold on. Shinn is an anatomist of velocity. Thrilling.”
Thomas Beller, author of J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist

Summary

Mental health challenges on college campuses were a huge problem before COVID-19, and now they are even more pronounced. But while much has been written about higher education’s mental health crisis, very little research focuses on the role played by those on campus whose influence on student well-being may well be greatest: teachers. Drawing from interviews with students and the scholarship of teaching and learning, this book helps correct the oversight, examining how faculty can—instead of adding to their own significant workloads or duplicating counselors’ efforts—combat student stress through adjustments to the work they already do as teachers.

Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom provides practical tips that reduce unnecessary discouragement. It demonstrates how small improvements in teaching can have great impacts in the lives of students with mental health challenges, while simultaneously boosting learning for all students.
 

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Receive a 30% discount on orders of 10 or more copies of this title with code HIGHEREDBULK30 at checkout.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Why Anxiety and Depression Matter for Learning

2. Become Natural Mentors

3. Design Courses with Students with Mental Health Challenges in Mind

4. Awaken Students’ Innate Drive to Learn

5. Foster Emotional Resilience

6. Build Community

7. Avoid Pitfalls with Active Learning

8. Promote Wellness Practices

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author

Robert Eaton is a professor of religious education, Steven V. Hunsaker is a professor in the department of languages and international studies, and Bonnie Moon is a professor of mathematics, all at Brigham Young University–Idaho.

Reviews

“This is a necessary book for anyone who teaches in higher education. By weaving together research and practice, the authors show faculty how small steps we take can contribute to improved learning and mental health for our students.”
Peter Felten, coauthor of Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College

“Mental health challenges for college students are at a crisis point, and this book is a must-read for instructors. Readers will gain understanding of how mental health issues can obstruct learning, and of how to build a toolkit of research-based teaching practices designed to mitigate harmful stressors and promote learning. Intentional design choices lend structured support to those who need it most, and can benefit all students during the transformative college years.”
Jenny Frederick, Yale University

“A readable synthesis of the research into student mental well-being. The authors provide plenty of relevant and actionable advice on how faculty can effectively incorporate attention to mental health into their daily teaching practices.”
Jason Pickavance, Salt Lake Community College

Summary

Bringing together artwork, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Essential Voices shares the perspectives of people from vulnerable populations as they were affected by COVID-19 in 2020, before the release of the vaccine. The pieces in this volume represent a range of writers and artists, some from international locations, whose work may be less likely to be seen because of race, ethnicity, or current legal status. Contributors include individuals who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, or seniors; those who are immunocompromised or undocumented; those working in medicine, food service, factories, and sanitation; and parents who were unable to work from home, along with individuals who were being held in correctional facilities or facing mental health concerns. This multigenre collection preserves the history of the pandemic by documenting and publishing these essential voices.

Essential Voices will be of interest to readers who want to consider the diverse lived experiences of people during the pandemic when outcomes were most uncertain. It will also be useful for teachers, students, activists, and policy makers in a variety of settings, including government, hospitals, prisons, homeless shelters, colleges, art schools, and secondary schools.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword | Maria del Guadalupe Davidson

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Fear: It lives in droplets

Monster under Me
Fiction | Nathan Blalock

Table of Contents for a Manual of Pandemic Response Protocols
Poetry | Rasha Abdulhadi

The Worst of Times
Essay | Frances Ogamba

Essentials
Poetry | Maria James-Thiaw

Recipe for Troubled Times
Poetry | Linda Parsons

Night Guard
Poetry | Linda Parsons

Pandemic Pandemonium
Poetry | Kenneth Moore

Even the Robins Know
Poetry | Robert Okaji

Distance: As we moan into the phone

How Corona Evolves or Makes Us Evolve, or We Have to Evolve Together
Poetry | Xiaoly Li

Sequestered Alone
Poetry | Joan Hofmann

To whom it may concern,
Letter and Poetry | Alyce Copeland

Love in the Time of Corona
Poetry | John Cuetara

What We Know about the Fatalities
Fiction | Lisa Michelle Moore

Do Lockdowns Ever End?
Poetry | Diego Islas

Wish You Were Here
Poetry | Joan Goodreau

Comfort
Poetry | Celeste Blair

Didn’t We Once Call It Love?
Poetry | E. Ethelbert Miller

The Cheat
Poetry | Rayna Momen

How I’ve Survived This Long, Part 3
Poetry | Kasha Martin Gauthier

What it’s like to get married in prison during a pandemic
Essay | Christopher Blackwell

Mask: A parachute that catches my breath

Invisi dis ability in COVID Times
Essay | Catherine Young

Corona Spring
Poetry | Deborah DeNicola

Unmasked
Poetry | Faiza Anum

The Fabric of Society
Fiction | Alice Benson

Masked
Poetry | Christine Rhein

Melt Down
Poetry | Mary K O’Melveny

May 6, 2020
Poetry | Kevin McLellan

Barriers
Essay | Robbie Gamble

from The Quarantinas
Poetry | Stephanie Lenox

Labor: Warnings on the floor

Bezos Knows
Poetry | Ranney Campbell

We Are Family: A Lesson Learned as an On-line English Teacher during COVID-19
Essay | Maya Lear Brewer

Line Speed
Poetry | Ben Gunsberg

Staying Socially and Politically Active while Socially Distancing: Making the Issues around COVID-19 Part of One’s Activism
Essay | C. Liegh McInnis

Essential Medical Workers Are to Report to Duty
Poetry | Michele Bombardier

These Hands
Fiction | Z. S. Roe

Postcard from Pandemic
Poetry | Robert Okaji

A Classroom Hums in Wait.
Poetry | Vanessa Chica Ferreira

Sickness: My stomach charlie-horsed

My COVID Story
Essay | Brett L. Massey

Essentially Unseen
Poetry | Lavinia Kumar

Nudge
Poetry | Phrieda Bogere

Elegy
Poetry | Bianca Alyssa Pérez

I Cut Up My Hillary T-shirt to Make a COVID Mask
Poetry | Joan E. Bauer

A Story of Constantine, COVID-19, and Pandora
Fiction | Waliyah Oladipo

New Age
Poetry | Robert J. Levy

Alcohol Woman
Poetry | Deidra Suwanee Dees

Grief: Interjected like a comma

Elegy, Interrupted
Poetry | Emily Ransdell

My Mother Whispers, Doesn’t He Look So Peaceful
Poetry | Bianca Alyssa Pérez

A Sonnet for the Living
Poetry | Bianca Alyssa Pérez

#covidclarity
Essay | Marcelle Mentor

Trapped
Poetry | Deidra Suwanee Dees

Love, Coronavirus
Poetry | Lisa Suhair Majaj

A Poet Attempts to Homeschool, Week 6: Fractions
Poetry | Kasha Martin Gauthier

Evaporating Villanelle during a Time of Pandemic
Poetry | Jen Karetnick

A Day in the Life
Essay | Eric Ebers

What You Want to Say
Poetry | Maria Rouphail

Zoom Funeral
Poetry | Laura Glenn

For Jon, Who Died Because of Time
Poetry | Rayna Momen

Survival: Remember every surface you touch

Essential Nonessentials in Lockdown
Poetry | Katy Giebenhain

The Eaters
Fiction | Danielle Lauren

Off-Script
Poetry | Monserrat Escobar Arteaga

Heroes
Fiction | Mark Brazaitis

15 Mar 2020—A (a roll in the hand is worth two on the shelf) Haiku
Poetry | Peter Joel

We Will Sing of Gone Bodies Some Days from Now
Poetry | Blessing Omeiza Ojo

In Times of Quarantine
Poetry | Rosalie Hendon

Halmoni’s Kimchi Pancakes
Recipe | Elia Min

COVID Curriculum
Essay | Dominique Traverse Locke

Monkeys
Poetry | Fabiyas M V

Justice and Reckoning: Colonial co-morbidities

How to Make White Supremacy Generative/How to Survive a Pandemic
Essay | Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán

Blackout
Poetry | Thomas Beckwith

The Marrow-Sucking Grip of Immigration Injustice
Poetry | Kim Denning

White
Poetry | Roan Davis

we’ve been here before
Poetry | Liseli A. Fitzpatrick

Crosstown
Poetry | Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán

My Uncertain Story
Essay | Noe Hernandez

Em Ontvlecetv / Invaded
Poetry | Deidra Suwanee Dees

POV
Poetry | Jameka Hartley

The Home of the Brave
Poetry | David Antonio Reyes

Things I Never Told You
Poetry | Steve Ramirez

Environment and Place: Let the river turn the stone

Lines before Lockdown
Poetry | Lisa Suhair Majaj

hymn
Poetry | Caroline Furr

May Shivers
Poetry | Lukpata Lomba Joseph

For the emptiers have emptied them out
Poetry | Alan Smith Soto

While the World Fell Apart around Us
Poetry | Aimee Nicole

COVID Spring Comes to Southeast Pennsylvania
Poetry | Kenneth Pobo

2020
Poetry | Yuan Changming

Folded Up
Poetry | donnarkevic

Social Distance
Poetry | Fred Shaw

Austin
Poetry | Jeffrey Taylor

Hope: Beyond sorrow there’s a gardenia tree

During quarantine, I embrace myself as a long-hauler,
Poetry | Jen Karetnick

Magdalena
Poetry | Deborah “Deby” Rodriguez

Too Loud to Sleep
Essay | Natalie Mislang Mann

When the Games Return
Poetry | E. Ethelbert Miller

Wasted
Essay | Celeste Blair

This Is Not the End of the World
Poetry | Darius Atefat-Peckham

Touch Screen
Fiction | Mohini Malhotra

Notes
Contributors
About the Editors

Editors

Amy M. Alvarez is an Affrilachian poet and professor living in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Pamela Gemme is a poet, artist, and creative writing tutor from Massachusetts.

Shana Hill is a poet and founder of Poetica Pastor. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Alexis Ivy is a poet and outreach advocate for homeless people in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

“The work is emotionally moving. The attention to the quotidian, lived experiences of those affected offers unique insights into a global catastrophe that has turned precious lives and deaths into statistics. . . . An important cultural response.”
Darius Bost, author of Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence

“This is a text of powerful firsthand accounts that capture the current context in critical and intersectional ways that are attentive to how individual lives are shaped by structural realities. It is important that these voices are engaged.”
Nana Osei-Kofi, Oregon State University

Summary

American Energy Cinema explores how Hollywood movies have portrayed energy from the early film era to the present. Looking at classics like Giant, Silkwood, There Will Be Blood, and Matewan, and at quirkier fare like A Is for Atom and Convoy, it argues that films have both reflected existing beliefs and conjured new visions for Americans about the role of energy in their lives and their history.

The essays in this collection show how film provides a unique and informative lens to understand perceptions of energy production, consumption, and infrastructure networks. By placing films that prominently feature energy within historical context and analyzing them as historical objects, the contributing authors demonstrate how energy systems of all kinds are both integral to the daily life of Americans and inextricable from larger societal changes and global politics.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Part 1: When Disaster Strikes

1. Blackouts, Bad Guys, and Belly Laughs: Exploring America’s First Cascading Power Failure in Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (1968)
Julie A. Cohn

2. Meltdown: Nuclear Cinema and the Martha Mitchell Effect in The China Syndrome (1979) and Silkwood (1983)
Caroline Peyton

3. “The Juice”: The Road Warrior (1981) and the Cultural Logic of Energy Denial in the Early Days of Modern Globalization
Christopher R. W. Dietrich

4. Built for Pyro: A Perfect Inferno on the Deepwater Horizon (2016)
Tyler Priest

5. Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda Win Delivered Thirty-Three Years Late
Kate Brown

Part 2: Energy and Nature

6. Wings (1927): Aviation, War, and Energy
Conevery Bolton Valencius

7. Derricks and Skulls: Filming and Promoting the Extractive Landscapes of Boom Town (1940)
Michaela Rife

8. Petrodocumentary in the 1940s: The Standard Oil Photography Project, Louisiana Story (1948), and the Domestication of the US Oil Industry
Emily Roehl

9. TVA and the Price of Progress: Elia Kazan’s Wild River (1960)
Donald C. Jackson

10. Do Action Movies and an Environmental Message Mix? About as Much as Oil and Water: On Deadly Ground (1994)
Teresa Sabol Spezio

Part 3: Critiquing the Western

11. Selling the American “Oil Frontier”: Tulsa (1949), Giant (1956), and American Resource Politics during the Early Cold War
Sarah Stanford-McIntyre

12. Ranches to Oil Wells: Reconfiguring the Western Hero in Hellfighters (1968) and Fires of Kuwait (1992)
Ila Tyagi

13. Revisiting Matewan (1987): Upending the Appalachian “Western” and Broadening an Old Labor Tale
James R. Allison III

14. “This Is the Third World”: Coal-Fired America in Montana (1990) and Powwow Highway (1989)
Ryan Driskell Tate

15. Hydrocarbon Nostalgia and Climate Disaster: An Environmental History of Hell or High Water (2016)
Mark Boxell

Part 4: Energy and Morality

16. Control of the Industry: Nineteenth-Century Oil and Capitalism in High, Wide and Handsome (1937)
Alexander Finkelstein

17. The Formula (1980): Corporate Villains, Synthetic Fuel, and Environmental Fantasies
Raechel Lutz

18. “Keep Moving”: Convoy (1978), Car Films, and Petropopulism in the 1970s
Caleb Wellum

19. There Will Be Petroleum Cinema: Portraying the Corrosion of Oil Addiction in There Will Be Blood (2007)
Brian C. Black

Part 5: Energy and the State

20. There’s No Business Like Oil Business: The Allure of Tax-Sheltered Oil Income to Hollywood’s Wealthy
Yuxun Willy Tan

21. “Limitless Power at Man’s Command”: A Is for Atom (1953), the Cold War, and Visions of the Nuclear Future in the 1950s
Sarah E. Robey

22. Syriana (2005): The Oil Curse and Hollywood’s 9/11 Film
Robert Lifset

23. Hoover Dam in Hollywood: Energy Anxiety in Superman (1978), Transformers (2007), and San Andreas (2015)
Daniel Macfarlane

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index

Editors

Robert Lifset is the Donald Keith Jones Associate Professor of History in the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism. Raechel Lutz teaches history and civics at the Wardlaw+Hartridge School. Sarah Stanford-McIntyre is assistant professor of engineering, ethics, and society at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Reviews

“A rich and compelling collection of essays covering a broad range of moments and films in the histories of oil, coal, nuclear power, and energy in America.”
Toby Jones, Rutgers University 

“Movies are a fun escape from reality, cultural snapshots in time, and valuable historical documents. That’s the key thesis and value of this book: it gives readers an engaging way to learn the history of energy—rather, the history of American society—with a century of thrillers, dramas, comedies, and whodunits. Addressing a range of genres, story lines, and themes, this collection of essays will be captivating and informative for movie lovers, energy enthusiasts, and historians alike.”
Michael E. Webber, host and creator of the PBS special Energy at the Movies 

Summary

Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene is a tour de force. With transdisciplinarity and theoretical lucidity, it rethinks the Anthropocene from a material ecocritical perspective, envisioning innovative modes of knowledge for deeper understandings of Anthropocene ecologies. Focusing on nonhuman agencies, Serpil Oppermann shows in fascinating detail how to better imagine an ecological future on our storied planet that has suffered enormously from an anthropocentric mindset.

Contents

Introduction

1. The Storied Planet in the Anthropocene

2. The Scale of the Anthropocene and New Anthroposcenarios

3. Migrant Ecologies of the Anthropocene

4. Postnatural Ecologies of the Anthropocene

5. The Ecology of Colors in the Anthropocene

Coda

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Author

Serpil Oppermann is professor of environmental humanities and director of the Environmental Humanities Center at Cappadocia University. She is the coeditor of many books, including International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, Material Ecocriticism, and Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene.

Reviews

“Simply dazzling. . . . The  book  is  shockingly revealing, honest, and  persuasive. It  shines.”
Ecocene

“Genuinely interdisciplinary, clear, and readable. This should be read across the academy—from geography to literary studies.”
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University

Summary

One of the first book-length studies of Robert Morgan, Community across Time considers the Appalachian writer’s explorations of memory, family history, and landscape. It provides a study of all of Morgan’s fiction to date, as well as a chapter on his poetry and some reference, where appropriate, to his nonfiction. Rebecca Godwin examines the family history that informs much of this body of work, offering an extended biographical essay that ties characters and plot details to Morgan’s ancestors’ lives and to his own experiences growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Religious rifts, economic hardships, class conflicts, the place of women and Indigenous peoples, and the failure of humans to recognize the divinity of the natural world are among the motifs centering Morgan’s writing. Community across Time explores those themes as it looks to Morgan’s relationship to the Appalachian South.

Contents

Preface

1. Influences and Context: Robert Morgan in Literary Community

2. Roots of a Writing Life: His Appalachian Homes, South and North

3. Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century History: Fictionalizing Pioneers and Conflicts

4. The Family Novels: Two Generations of Paternal and Maternal Ancestors

5. More Short Fiction: Classism, War, Machine-Age Destruction

6. Poetry’s Place: Memory, Nature, Science, Resurrection

7. Final Words: The Morgenland Elohist

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author

Rebecca Godwin is professor of English and Elizabeth H. Jordan Chair of Southern Literature at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina. She is author of a book on Lee Smith as well as forty essays and book reviews in critical anthologies or scholarly journals, all focused on southern or Appalachian writers.

Reviews

“Robert Morgan has established himself as a major American writer and one of the most important voices to have emerged from Appalachia in the past half century. Remarkably, no scholarly monograph has yet been published on his writing. Rebecca Godwin’s excellent treatment is poised to satisfy a demand that is keenly and widely felt.”
George Hovis, author of Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction

Summary

After spending four years of adolescence in suburban North Carolina, Kristine Langley Mahler, even as an adult, is still buffeted by the cultural differences between her pioneer-like upbringing in Oregon and the settled southern traditions into which she could never assimilate. Collecting evidence of displacement—a graveyard in a mall parking lot, a suburban neighborhood of white kids bused to desegregate public schools in the 1990s, and the death of her best friend—Curing Season is an attempt to understand her failed grasp at belonging.

Mahler’s yearning for acceptance remains buried like a splinter, which she carefully tweezes out in the form of artifacts from her youth. But it isn’t until she encounters a book of local family histories that she takes inhabitation and truth apart, grafting and twisting and imprinting her history on theirs, until even she can no longer tell the difference between their truth and her own. Using inventive essay forms, Mahler pries apart the cracks of exclusion and experiments with the nature of belonging, memory, and place. Curing Season is a coming-of-age memoir for anyone who grew up anywhere but home.

Contents

Surface Tension
Club Pines
Shadowbox
A Fixed Plot
Mädchenfänger
She’ll Only Come Out at Night
Creepsake
Not Something That’s Gone
Out Line
In the Burn Pile Behind the Old Nobles House
A Pit Is Removed, a Hollow Remains
Alignment
Pull Me Through the Doorway

Acknowledgments 
Notes

Author

Kristine Langley Mahler is a memoirist experimenting with the truth who lives near Omaha, Nebraska. Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council and is published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Brevity, Speculative Nonfiction, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is the director of Split/Lip Press.

Reviews

“An exquisite, aching memoir of adolescent girlhood. . . . Treasures await.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“These experimental essays about place, home, and the failed effort to belong are closely tied to Eastern North Carolina, but will resonate everywhere.”
Shelf Awareness

“Through careful excavation . . . Mahler manages to create a time machine harking back to the simplicity and complexity of adolescence in 1990s America.”
Booklist

“A fun, strange play on nostalgia and belonging that embodies something so middle school that it aches. . . . It’s a lovely and clever book of essays that add up to an intricate depiction of what must surely be everyone’s oddest time.”
The Rumpus

“Kristine Langley Mahler’s Curing Season is a lovely and rapturous excavation and examination of the past, a lesson in writing oneself into history when it doesn’t offer you a space. Displaced, coming of age, estranged from tradition, feeling out of place, this is a voice that teaches us how to live in the aftermath: you may not recognize life as you are living it, mementos may not reveal themselves until after the fact, what we miss and mourn may be what harmed us in the past. In imaginative forms and gripping prose, Mahler leads us to the entombed interiors of loss and shows us how to rewrite our stories so that we truly fit in.”
Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“An exquisite excavation of childhood and adolescence, Curing Season recounts Kristine Langley Mahler’s long-ago attempts at fitting in after moving to her new town: from wanting to carry the right shopping bag in the mall to forming an alliance with one girl against others to mailing ‘histrionic letters of homesickness’ to friends at her old school. In wise, lyrical, and formally inventive essays, Mahler vividly illustrates the heartaches of trying to belong in a place—even after leaving it.”
Jeannie Vanasco, author of Things We Didn’t Talk about When I Was a Girl

“An exceptional example of both place-based and experimental writing. My own adolescence and all the times I felt like an outsider sprang to life reading these pages.”
Erica Trabold, author of Five Plots