In Lancaster, Ohio, 1800–2000, David R. Contosta tells the story of one American town as it has evolved over a two-hundred year period. Contosta has found that Lancaster was never the sort of idyllic community that writers once imagined for small towns; nor was it the social and cultural wasteland that social critics portrayed during most of the twentieth century.

In explaining why Lancaster has remained a small but relatively successful community for some twenty decades, Contosta looks at various factors, including location, natural resources, technology, transportation systems, local leaders, historic preservation, awareness of local history, and national as well as international events.

As the twenty-first century begins, the widespread use of the automobile, advances in technology, and Lancaster’s proximity to the state capital, Columbus, are transforming the community into something new—part town, part city, and part suburb—a phenomenon that is emerging in hundreds of older communities throughout the United States. Contosta’s history of the development of one small town, and the over one hundred illustrations enhancing the text, offer a microcosm of the profound changes in American life over two centuries.

Language Files has become one of the most widely adopted, consulted, and authoritative introductory textbooks to linguistics ever written. The scope of the text makes it suitable for use in a wide range of courses, while its unique organization into student-friendly, self-contained sections allows for tremendous flexibility in course design. 
 
The thirteenth edition has been revised, clarified, and updated throughout to ensure that it remains the most comprehensive and accessible introductory linguistics textbook on the market. The revised chapter on morphology includes a more thorough discussion of allomorphy and adds sections on templatic morphology, suprasegmental morphology, and morphological metathesis to give students a more complete picture of all morphological phenomena. The chapter on language and computers has been updated with new sections on deep learning, artificial neural networks, and on other areas of computational linguistics, providing readers with a better sense of current research and applications in this rapidly developing field. Other additions include new sections on syntactic non-constituents and non-generative rule systems in the syntax chapter and a complete rewrite to the creole languages file in the language contact chapter. We have also adopted the use of the singular they when referring to a generic person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant. Exercises and lists of other readings have been updated throughout.

Chupacabra Charlie es un chupacabras de diez años educado, guapo e inusualmente alto que anhela la aventura más allá de los límites de México, pero no muy al norte. Poco sabe Charlie cuando se hace amigo de una joven humana, Lupe, que juntos, con solo algunas quesadillas de tocino y algunas latas de Jumex, encontrarán más aventuras de las que podrían manejar. En el camino, se encuentrarán con personas extrañas y peligros inesperados en la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México que ponen a prueba su valentía. ¿Podrán Charlie y Lupe regresar sanos y salvos a casa?

It has been half a century since a few now-canonical Latin American writers introduced magical realism to the world. In that time, new generations of Latinx writers and artists have used that watershed moment as a springboard into new and bold explorations of speculative and fantasy forms. Collectively, they have found exciting new ways to delve into Latinx identities and cultures across genres. Latinx Rising, the first anthology of science fiction and fantasy by Latinxs living in the United States, exuberantly displays the full range of their art. 
 
The new and established voices assembled here (including Kathleen Alcalá, Carmen Maria Machado, Ernest Hogan, and other luminaries) invite us to imagine a Latinx past, present, and future that have not been whitewashed by mainstream perspectives. As in the best mixtapes, this anthology moves satisfyingly through the loud and brash, the quiet and thoughtful. There are ghosts, space aliens, robots—and a grandmother who unwittingly saves the universe through her cooking. The result is a deeply pleasurable read that pushes beyond magical realism and social realism to demonstrate all the thrilling possibilities of what Latinx literature can be. 
 

Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Crushes. Infatuations. Attractions. Unexpected, inexplicable allure. Entanglements steeped in taboo and disruption. In Like Love, nothing is off limits.
 
In these remarkable essays, Michele Morano explores the pleasures, possibilities, strangeness, and lessons of unconsummated romance. With insight and imagination, Like Love interweaves poignant, humorous episodes from adulthood with the backstory of a young family’s turbulent breakup. When Morano was an adolescent in blue-collar Poughkeepsie, New York, her mother left her father for a woman in an era when LGBTQ parents were widely viewed as “unfit.” Through the turmoil, adolescent Morano paid attention, tucking away the stories that were shaping her and guiding her understanding of love.
 
Turning romantic clichés inside out and challenging us to rethink our notions about what it means to love, Like Love tells hard and necessary truths about the importance of desire in growing, traveling, mourning, parenting, and figuring out who you are in the world. With precision and depth, Morano explores what it means to find ourselves in relationships that are not quite—but almost—like love.
 

Margaret Charles Smith, a ninety-one-year-old Alabama midwife, has thousands of birthing stories to tell. Sifting through nearly five decades of providing care for women in rural Greene County, she relates the tales that capture the life-and-death struggle of the birthing experience and the traditions, pharmacopeia, and spiritual attitudes that influenced her practice. She debunks images of the complacent southern “granny” midwife and honors the determination, talent, and complexity of midwifery.

Fascinating to read, this book is part of the new genre of writing that recognizes the credibility of midwives who have emerged from their own communities and were educated through apprenticeship and personal experience. Past descriptions of southern black midwives have tended to denigrate their work in comparison with professional established medicine. Believed to be the oldest living (though retired) traditional African American midwife in Alabama, Smith is one of the few who can recount old-time birthing ways. Despite claims that midwives contributed to high infant mortality rates, Smith’s story emphasizes midwives' successes in facing medical challenges and emergencies.

Finalist, 2021 Locus Award

In Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, eminent contributors pay tribute to Afrofuturism as a powerful and evolving aesthetic practice that communicates the experience of science, technology, and race across centuries, continents, and cultures. While Ryan Coogler and Janelle Monáe may have helped bring the genre into contemporary pop consciousness, it in fact extends back to the writing of eighteenth-century poet Phyllis Wheatley and has continued in the work of Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, N. K. Jemisin, and many others. In examining this heritage, contributors in this volume question generic boundaries, recover lost artists and introduce new ones, and explore how the meteoric rise of a new, pan-African speculative literary tradition may or may not connect with Afrofuturism.
 
Additionally, the editors have marshaled some of today’s most exciting writers for a roundtable discussion of the genre: Bill Campbell, Minister Faust, Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Chinelo Onwualu, Nisi Shawl, and Nick Wood. Pioneering author and editor Sheree R. Thomas limns how black women have led new developments in contemporary Afrofuturism, and artist Stacey Robinson’s illustrations orient readers to the spirited themes of this enduring and consequential literary tradition.

 

This book is a case study that shows how interest groups use the litigation process to further their policy agendas. The case detailed here revolves around issues of reproductive health. It is a good illustration of the commonly held view among judicial scholars that the judicial process is essentially the same as the political process, that in both cases there is room for influence from a variety of sources.

Ira Mittelman, the middle-aged hero of “A Box of Ashes,” one of two novellas in Little Men, is wrestling with a dilemma: should he fulfill his late father’s dying wish by taking the old man’s ashes back to Missouri, to scatter them on the grounds of Camp HaHaTonka, the Boy Scout camp where Ira spent several summers as a boy? It’s a long way to go just to dump some ashes, and if Ira makes this pilgrimage, his absence might jeopardize the fragile relationship he’s managed to maintain with his ex-wife (they’re still having sex every Friday night).

In “Spivak in Babylon,” Little Men’s other novella, it’s 1982, and Leo Spivak, an ambitious 30-year-old copywriter at a large Chicago advertising agency, is about to get his big break: a chance to go to Hollywood to participate for the first time in the filming of a television commercial. A week in Hollywood, on the company’s expense account! A room at the fabled Chateau Marmont (Garbo’s old suite, in fact)! The only problem is the subject of the commercial itself: a new feminine hygiene spray to be marketed to pre-adolescent girls. Hovering over all the proceedings in “Spivak in Babylon” is the genial, befuddled presence of President Ronald Reagan, the Leader of the Free World, who haunts Leo’s dreams.

A. W Livingston (1821-98) was a Reynoldsburg, Ohio, tomato seedsman who was the best known developer of tomato varieties in the United States in the nineteenth century. First published in 1893, Livingston and the Tomato contains both descriptions and drawings of the tomato varieties he developed. The book features over sixty tomato recipes, including ones for slicing, frying, escalloping, baking, and broiling tomatoes; as well as for tomato toast, custard, soup, pie, preserves, figs, jam, butter, salad, sauce, and omelets.

Livingston's pioneering work; his entrepreneurial sons, who transformed his efforts into a successful business concern; the application of scientific principles to agricultural practices; and the tremendous growth of the canning and preserving industries are all reflections of the spirit of Ohio and America on the cusp of the twentieth century.

Why do some parties coordinate their electoral strategies as part of a pre-electoral coalition, while others choose to compete independently at election time? Scholars have long ignored pre-electoral coalitions in favor of focusing on the government coalitions that form after parliamentary elections. Yet electoral coalitions are common, they affect electoral outcomes, and they have important implications for democratic policy-making itself.

The Logic of Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation by Sona Nadenichek Golder includes a combination of methodological approaches (game theoretic, statistical, and historical) to explain why pre-electoral coalitions form in some instances but not in others. The results indicate that pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form between ideologically compatible parties. They are also more likely to form when the expected coalition size is large (but not too large) and when the potential coalition partners are similar in size. Ideologically polarized party systems and disproportional electoral rules in combination also increase the likelihood of electoral coalition formation.

Golder links the analysis of pre-electoral coalition formation to the larger government coalition literature by showing that pre-electoral agreements increase (a) the likelihood that a party will enter government, (b) the ideological compatibility of governments, and (c) the speed with which governments take office. In addition, pre-electoral coalitions provide an opportunity for combining the best elements of the majoritarian vision of democracy with the best elements of the proportional vision of democracy.

What if we didn’t always historicize when we read Victorian fiction?

Lost Causes shows that Victorian writers frequently appear to have a more supple and interesting understanding of the relationship between history, causality, and narrative than the one typically offered by readers who are burdened by the new historicism. As a return to these writers emphasizes, the press of modern historicism deforms Victorian novels, encouraging us to read deviations from strict historical accuracy as ideological bad faith. By contrast, Jason B. Jones argues through readings of works ranging from The French Revolution to Middlemarch that literature’s engagement with history has to be read otherwise.

Perhaps perversely, Lost Causes suggests simultaneously that psychoanalysis speaks pressingly to the vexed relationship between history and narrative, and that the theory is neither a- nor anti-historical. Through his readings of Victorian fiction addressing the recent past, Jones finds in psychoanalysis not a set of truths, but rather a method for rhetorical reading, ultimately revealing how its troubled account of psychic causality can help us follow literary language’s representation of the real. Victorian narratives of the recent past and psychoanalytic interpretation share a fascination with effects that persist despite baffling, inexplicable, or absent causes.

In chapters focusing on Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Lost Causes demonstrates that history can carry an ontological, as well as an epistemological, charge—one that suggests a condition of being in the world as well as a way of knowing the world as it really is. From this point of view, Victorian fiction that addresses the recent past is not a failed realism, as it is so frequently claimed, but rather an exploration of possibility in history.

Lost Literacies is the first full-length study of US comic strips from the period prior to the rise of Sunday newspaper comics. Where current histories assume that nineteenth-century US comics consisted solely of single-panel political cartoons or simple “proto-comics,” Lost Literacies introduces readers to an ambitious group of artists and editors who were intent on experimenting with the storytelling possibilities of the sequential strip, resulting in playful comics whose existence upends prevailing narratives about the evolution of comic strips. 

Over the course of the nineteenth century, figures such as artist Frank Bellew and editor T. W. Strong introduced sequential comic strips into humor magazines and precursors to graphic novels known as “graphic albums.” These early works reached audiences in the tens of thousands. Their influences ranged from Walt Whitman’s poetry to Mark Twain’s travel writings to the bawdy stage comedies of the Bowery Theatre. Most importantly, they featured new approaches to graphic storytelling that went far beyond the speech bubbles and panel grids familiar to us today. As readers of Lost Literacies will see, these little-known early US comic strips rival even the most innovative modern comics for their diversity and ambition. 

In Love and Abolition, Alison Rose Reed traces how the social life of Black queer performance from the 1960s to the present animates the unfinished work of abolition. She grounds social justice–oriented reading and activist practices specifically in the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex, with far-reaching implications for how we understand affective response as a mobilizing force for revolutionary change.

Reed identifies abolition literature as an emergent field of inquiry that emphasizes social relationships in the ongoing struggle to dismantle systems of coercion, criminalization, and control. Focusing on love as an affective modality and organizing tool rooted in the Black radical tradition’s insistence on collective sociality amidst unrelenting state violence, Reed provides fresh readings of visionaries such as James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Sharon Bridgforth, and vanessa german. Both abolitionist manifesto and examination of how Black queer performance offers affective modulations of tough and tender love, Love and Abolition ultimately calls for a critical reconsideration of the genre of prison literature—and the role of the humanities—during an age of mass incarceration.