On November 29th, 1781, somewhere between the coast of West Africa and the island of Jamaica, some 150 enslaved Africans were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean on orders of the captain of the ship Zong. The book length poem, Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, was written entirely from the words of the legal decision regarding this massacre.…
Wesleyan is pleased to announce its publication of the first complete English translation of Jules Verne’s debut novel from 1863, Five Weeks in a Balloon: A Journey of Discovery by Three Englishmen in Africa translated with introduction and notes by Frederick Paul Walter and edited by Arthur B. Evans. One of the great “first novels” in…
Wesleyan is pleased to announce the second edition of this intimate portrait of the Afrobeat legend. Fela: Kalakuta Notes by John Collins and with a foreword by Banning Eyre is an evocative account of Fela Kuti—the Afrobeat superstar who took African music into the arena of direct action. With his antiestablishment songs, he dedicated himself to Pan-Africanism…
Mainstream news coverage of the catastrophic earthquake of January 12, 2010, reproduced longstanding narratives of Haiti and stereotypes of Haitians. Cognizant that this Haiti, as it exists in the public sphere, is a rhetorically and graphically incarcerated one, the feminist anthropologist and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse embarked on a writing spree that lasted over…
For the first time in English, readers can now evaluate the extraordinary breadth of César Vallejo’s diverse oeuvre that, in addition to poetry, includes magazine and newspaper articles, chronicles, political reports, fictions, plays, letters, and notebooks. Edited by the translator Joseph Mulligan, Selected Writings follows Vallejo down his many winding roads, from Santiago de Chuco…
The Lives of Robert Ryan provides an inside look at the gifted, complex, intensely private man whom Martin Scorsese called “one of the greatest actors in the history of American film.” The son of a Chicago construction executive with strong ties to the Democratic machine, Ryan became a star after World War II on the…
Enter a Rafflecopter giveaway to win a FREE copy of Honorée Fanonne Jeffer’s The Glory Gets! In her three previous, award-winning collections of blues poetry, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has explored themes of African American history, Southern culture, and intergenerational trauma. Now, in her fourth and most accomplished collection, Jeffers turns to the task of seeking and reconciling…
The Cinema of Errol Morris offers close analyses of the director’s films—from box office successes like The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War to Morris’s early works like Vernon, Florida and controversial films like Standard Operating Procedure. Film scholar David Resha’s reappraisal of Morris’s films allows us to rethink the traditional distinction between…
Wesleyan is pleased to announce that Joseph Ceravolo’s Collected Poems, edited by Rosemary Ceravolo and Parker Smathers, is now available in paperback. Like an underground river, the astonishing poems of Joseph Ceravolo have nurtured American poetry for fifty years, a presence deeply felt but largely invisible. The Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of…
We are pleased to announce that In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011 by Peter Gizzi is now available in paperback. Since his celebrated first book of poetry, Peter Gizzi has been hailed as one of the most significant and distinctive voices writing today. Gathered from over five collections, and representing close to twenty-five years…
