A lot of new writing to report.
The biggest news is that The Last Samurai Reread was finally released for Columbia University Press’s Rereadings Series. It’s a study of Helen DeWitt’s great 2000 novel. Bits of it were published in Bookforum (😢) and Public Books. I’ve been very grateful for the review attention the book has already received. I also did a Book Launch event with my UMD colleague Orrin Wang where I explain the origin of the project.
My edited collection, Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman, which I’ve been working on with my co-editor Georgiana Banita since 2015, finally came out from the University Press of Mississippi’s Tom Inge Series on Comics Artists. Here’s another Book Launch event, this time with another of my UMD colleagues, Christina Walter. The collection includes my own contribution, “Art Spiegelman’s Faustian Bargain: TOON Books and the Invention of Comics for Kids,” which is as far as I know the first scholarly article on Spiegelman’s children’s comics. I also co-wrote the introduction (with Geogiana), “Up from the Underground: Art Spiegelman and the Elevation of Comics.” It’s long but tries to give a comprehensive overview of Spiegelman’s whole career.
I’ve done a bunch of editing, too. In 2021, a special issue of American Literary History I co-edited with Dan Sinykin came out. It’s a special issue about the role of the publishing industry and recent American literary history. Dan and I wrote the introduction.
More recently, I published an essay called “Post-American Speculations” with ALH, for a special issue on “Democracy and the Novel in the US,” edited by Rachel Greenwald Smith and Gordon Hutner. This month, I have an essay called “Love What You Do: Neoliberalism, Emotional Labor, and the Short Story as a Service” coming out in The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story, which was edited by Gavin Jones and Michael Collins.