Recommended Books

Welcome to the faculty's sixth annual summer reading recommendations list! Once you've read this list, you can go to the bottom of the page and click "Older Post" to see previous lists as well. TSERING WANGMO On my list is Francisco Cantu's nonfiction The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border . Cantu worked as an agent for the US Border Patrol for four years. The borderlands, he writes, "have slowly become a place where citizens are subject to distinct standards for search and detention, and where due process for noncitizens is often unrecognized as anything that might exist within the American legal system." I'm also looking forward to reading The Truth Commissioner by David Park. I (and the Writing Through Conflict) class had the chance to see the film based on his novel on the difficult subject of truth and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. ELLEN BONDS I plan to read Michael Ondaatje's latest novel Warlight , ab...

Michael Berthold: I’ve been teaching Octavia Butler’s  Kindred  for a number of years and look forward this summer to reading through the rest of her fiction. Butler visited Villanova back in 2002, and a number of the English faculty had the opportunity to lunch with her! Joe Drury: Here are the books I'm planning to read this summer: Jenny Erpenbeck,  Go, Went, Gone  - much feted contemporary German author. I've been told the novel to read if you want to begin to understand the current European refugee crisis. Cixin Liu,  The Three-Body Problem  - my sci-fi read for the summer, am told it will blow my mind. Preti Taneja, We That Are Young - highly acclaimed new novel about 21st century India, written by someone I worked with briefly in the grim period between college and grad school. Travis Foster: First up, a page-turner of a memoir that addresses rural white poverty far better than the aw-shucks punditry of  Hillbilly Elegy ...

Achinstein, Sharon, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader Bentley, Nancy, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture 1870-1920 Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations Chartier, Roger, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century Empson, William, The Structure of Complex Words Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Gates, Henry Louis, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism Gray, John, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare Heise, Ursula K, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf Levenson, Michael, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study ...