I Saw A City Invincible

An anthology of translated and abridged classic works by authors previously little known to Western audiences: Cobo, Garcia, Santos, Vilhena, and Leite de Barros. They present critical analyses spanning hundreds of years, emphasizing Latin American cities of the first rank: Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, Salvador da Bahia, Bogota, and Sao Paulo. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Walt Whitman, Americas eternal and greatest poet, returns on the eve of September 11, 2001, to pay a visit to his chosen Camerado, Michael Sweda, in order to inspire the completion of a great American work to complement his Leaves of Grass and to honor America, its people, and the military service members. Michael Sweda delivers with haunting and stunning poetry that recalls that of Whitman and extends Whitmans great poetic vision for a new time and millenniumour time, this time. For anyone who loves America or an American service member, Dialogues with Walt Whitman for the New American Millennium is a must read. Prepare to be swept away and awed with the poetry of Michael Sweda, who honors the tradition of Walt Whitman and who brings Whitman to a new, higher level, just as Whitman envisioned during his lifetime.

What would you do if you were drafted to fight in a war? As a conscientious objector opposed to all wars, Wayne R. Ferren Jr. had to answer that question during the Vietnam War. He called on his religious and scientific backgrounds as well as his environmental activism to argue that he should be excluded from fighting in, or supporting this war. Following a successful defense of his claim, Wayne served two years of alternative civilian service, which influenced his professional and personal life for the next fifty years. Decades after his service, he was shocked to find his name on the Vietnam War Memorial, which turned out to be that of another young man with a similar name born the same year Wayne was born. That man died in 1968 when his plane was hit by artillery fire and crash landed at Khe Sanh Marine Combat Base. He will forever remain a teenage father killed in a senseless war. To this day, the duality haunts the author, and in this multifaceted memoir, he looks back at a lifetime and how his background, scientific training, and transcendentalism have guided him on a path of conscientious objection, service, and conservation, believing all things are sacred.

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of ReparativeReturn examines the retrospective logic that informs contemporary queer thinking; specifically the narrative return to the 1950s in post-1990s queer and LGBT culture in the United States. The term “Queer Retrosexuality” marks the intersection between retrospective thinking and queerness—to illustrate not only how to “queer” retrospection, but also how retrospection, in some senses can be thought of as always already queer. This book examines the historical possibilities that inform the narrative return to the 1950s in queer cultural and literary productions such as Samuel Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water, Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, Sarah Schulman’s Shimmer, and Mark Merlis’s American Studies—all texts that return to a traumatic past marked by shame, exile, and persecution. Queer Retrosexualities inquires into what motivates the return in these texts to a historical moment informed by the bruises and wounds of history; but more importantly, it poses the question of how such a turn backwards could be theorized as reparative or even hopeful. This book shows how the framework of queer retrospection offers new ways of understanding history and culture, of reformulating disciplines and institutions, and of rethinking traditional modes of political activism and knowledge production. Even while it seems counterproductive to return to a historical moment that is marked by the persecution of sexual and racial minorities, the book examines how a shared feeling of relationality and community produced by the exile of shame shapes the political value of queer retrosexualities. The retrospective return to the 1950s allows queer thinking to move away from the commodification of queer culture in the present that masquerades as progress. Thus, the book theorizes how traumatic history becomes a valuable resource for the political project of assembling collective memory as the base materials for imagining a different—and more queer—future.

Extending the study of post-9/11 literature to include transnational perspectives, this book explores the ways in which contemporary writers from Europe as well as the USA have responded to the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the ensuing 'war on terror.' Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' demonstrates the ways in which contemporary fiction has wrestled with anxieties about national and international security in the 21st century. Reading a wide range of novels by such writers as Amy Waldman, Michael Cunningham, Frédéric Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, Joseph O'Neill, Moshin Hamid, José Saramago, Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie, Susana Araújo explores how the rhetoric of the 'war on terror' has shaped recent representations of the city and how “security” discourses circulate transatlantically and transnationally. By focusing not only on 9/11 but also on the way subsequent events such as the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq are represented in fiction, this book demonstrates how notions of “terror” and “insecurity” have been absorbed, reworked or critiqued in fiction. Araújo examines to what extent transatlantic relations have reinforced or challenged new fictions of “white western middle class captivity.”