A Few of Our Favorite Things

Happy Holidays from the Northwestern University Press team!

As we prepare to lock down our little office for the season, we wanted to share our NUP gift guide. For your own brown paper packages tied up with string, here are a few of our favorite things:

Kristen Twardowski

As anyone who has read Jane Austen knows, etiquette – and dancing! – were once key ways that people showed their cultivation and status. A twirl around the dance floor could help a lady advance in society, or it could lead to her ruin. From the Ballroom to Hell is a compilation of excerpts from the dance, etiquette, beauty, and fashion manuals that people actually used during the nineteenth century, and reading them offers a fascinating view of the past. (And, yes, “Grace and Folly in the Ballroom” is my favorite chapter.)

Anne E Gendler

From the frontlist, I’m going with Radio Free Stein. This charming little book explores radio as a modernist medium. Its in-depth exploration of Gertrude Stein’s dramatic writing references Adorno and Wittgenstein and documents a project to incorporate her five-act play “What Happened” and her essay on playwriting into a script and a musical score. There’s a companion website.

Here’s one from the backlist, and 2024 marks 150 years since the author’s birth. The Beast is a literary masterpiece that deserves to be better known. This small gem is magical and transcendent, with stories set in the Camargue delta in southern France—the landscape becomes a character in its own right, with a strong sense of place pervading all the stories in the book. In one, a body sinks into the marsh. The titular story is about a solitary bull-herder who stumbles upon a starving godlike creature who is half man and half goat. The translation is finely polished and sparkles.

Faith Wilson Stein

This time of year, the days are darker and yet so full of light and shine, including candles and decorations reflecting brightly in double-paned winter windows, so I wanted to shine a light—pun intended, sorry—on Julia Bekman Chadaga’s Optical Play: Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture. Published a decade ago, this study of the material and cultural role played by glass in the Russian and Soviet artistic and social imaginary remains one of my favorite NUP titles and a compelling example of scholarship that both reflects and refracts, changing how we view what had looked most ordinary.

Marisa Siegel

When the days grow short and temps dip below freezing, who doesn’t love to curl up with a mug of tea and a great book? Marianne Boruch’s Sing by the Burying Ground is exactly the sort of read I reach for in the wintertime. Award-winning poet Boruch brings her unique sensibilities and sentence-level attention to craft to each of the essays in her fourth essay collection, and her subject matter here is delightfully varied. But whether she’s remembering her stay at a Trappist monastery or analyzing the lines of a Sylvia Plath poem, Boruch’s wonderment and humor is a balm against the cold winter weather and wearying news cycle alike.

Megan Stielstra

I will sing my love of Here, Now from the mountaintops. In the year following the death of her three-year-old son, Lev, Michelle Mirsky charts the real-time complexities of grief. These essays are devastating and hilarious and weird. They cut and scream and hug your heart. They are the truest expression of hurt and healing I’ve ever read. The Epilogue was chosen by Cheryl Strayed for the Best American Essays, and the collection’s stunning opener, “Here, After,” was written on the tenth anniversary of Lev’s death, as Mirsky ties together her deeply personal loss to the collective grief we were experiencing as a county in the fall of 2020.

Maddie Schultz

I cannot recommend enough Sophie Ratcliffe’s Loss, a Love Story. This book takes a look at complex relationships, novels, and beautiful landscapes (what could be better?), all while weaving together Sophie’s past, present, and future. For lovers of Anna Karenina in particular, this is a must-read. Part memoir and part literary analysis, this book houses everything you could want for a cozy-up read by the fireplace this holiday.

Charlotte Keathley

Can Xue’s Old Floating Cloud: Can Xue may not have won the Nobel this year, but this book (really a pair of novellas—two for the price of one!) won my heart.

Jenny Irish’s Hatch: An artificial womb goes on the lam! Set in an apocalyptic future, but, as the good folks at Rain Taxi put it, Irish “write(s) with the oracular voices of old.” And they are right!

Christopher Bigelow

Two of the very best things I read all year, I can’t speak highly enough of these titles.

Altars of Spine and Fraction, debut poetry collection by Nicholas Molbert, is a gorgeous reflection on the tension between what was, what is, and what might be. The poems in this collection take on masculinity, nature, family history, and love in ways that linger long after you’ve read them.

A Small Apocalypse, a collection of short stories by Laura Chow Reeve, is similarly sticky. This collection explores the messy nature of queer love and friendship, how the past haunts us, and how to find hope even when things seem bleakest.

This will be our final blog of 2024! We’ll return on January 8th!

Please note that Northwestern University Press will be closed from Tuesday, December 24th through Wednesday, January 1. We look forward to reconnecting in the New Year!