This Element explores twenty-first century Black Gothic literature and film as it responds to American anti-Blackness and as they illustrate a mode of Black Gothic fiction termed Black Lives Matter (BLM) Gothic. The various texts express frustration, rage, and sorrow over the failures of previous civil rights fights. Intended as an introduction to a complex mode, this Element explores the three central themes in BLM Gothic texts and defines the mode's pattern of tropes. The first section r...

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century examines the intimate connections between the horror genre and its audience’s experience of being in the world at a particular historical and cultural moment. This book not only provides frameworks with which to understand contemporary horror, but it also speaks to the changes wrought by technological development in creation, production, and distribution, as well as the ways in which those who are traditionally underrepresented p...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that "speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR).These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deep...

**Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for BiographyLonglisted for The Orwell Prize for Political WritingAn electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent, from the author of Orwell's Roses**In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on t...

A collection of feminist essays steeped in "Solnit's unapologetically observant and truth-speaking voice on toxic, violent masculinity" ( The Los Angeles Review).In a timely and incisive follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers sharp commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and...

**Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle AwardMany worry that criticism is suffering from a crisis of authority. In a world where everyone’s a critic, what is criticism for? Since her canonical essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a leading public intellectual and a bold cartographer of the new landscape of taste itself.**Authority brings together sharp, illuminating essays on everything from...

A fearless and darkly comic essay collection about race, justice and the limits of good intentions from the editor in chief of Catapult.In this stunning debut collection, award-winning voice actor and cultural critic Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that has grown fluent in the language of social justice but doesn’t always follow through.These nine daring essays explore the sometimes troubling and often awkward nature of that ...

The Pulitzer–Prize winning and Guggenheim-honored Hilton Als curates the best essays from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites, bringing "the fierce style of street reading and the formal tradition of critical inquiry, reads culture, race, and gender" ( New York Times) to the task."The essay, like love, like life, is indefinable, but you know an essay when you see it, and you know a great one when you feel it, because it is concentrated life," writ...

A timely, nuanced work that dissects the thorny debate around cultural appropriation and the literary imagination.How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In Appropriate, creative writing professor Paisley Rekdal addresses a young writer to delineate how the idea of cultural appropriation has evolved—and perhaps calci...

Eggleston, the iconoclastic and colorful groundbreaker, imbues the mundane with vibrancy.This article appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Southern Cultures:The Photography Issue. “When the color photographs of William Eggleston first appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, the boldness of Eggleston’s palette and his disregard for the conventions of black-and-white photography were shocking; nearly all the major critics were scornful, and Ansel Adams wrote a scathing letter of protest...

From the groundbreaking trans scholar Susan Stryker, a provocative, genre-bending call to reconsider the story we tell about gender itself.With the far right weaponizing the rhetoric of anti-gender ideology and increasingly targeting the lives of transgender people, one question becomes ever more urgent and contested: What are we even talking about when we talk about gender? Where did the concept itself come from, and where might it go?In Changing Gende...