Based on original reporting from West Africa and the United States, and the poet's experiences as a doctor and journalist, If God Is A Virus charts the course of the largest and deadliest Ebola epidemic in history, telling the stories of Ebola survivors, outbreak responders, journalists and the virus itself. Documentary poems explore which human lives are valued, how editorial decisions are weighed, what role the aid industrial complex plays in crises, and how medical myths and rumor can travel faster than microbes. These poems also give voice to the virus. Eight percent of the human genome is inherited from viruses and the human placenta would not exist without a gene descended from a virus. If God Is A Virus reimagines viruses as givers of life and even authors of a viral-human self-help book.

A superbly crafted study of Hunter S. Thompson’s literary formation, achievement, and continuing relevance.    Savage Journey is a "supremely crafted" study of Hunter S. Thompson's literary formation and achievement. Focusing on Thompson's influences, development, and unique model of authorship, Savage Journey argues that his literary formation was largely a San Francisco story. During the 1960s, Thompson rode with the Hell's Angels, explored the San Francisco counterculture, and met talented editors who shared his dissatisfaction with mainstream journalism. Peter Richardson traces Thompson's transition during this time from New Journalist to cofounder of Gonzo journalism. He also endorses Thompson's later claim that he was one of the best writers using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon. Although Thompson's political commentary was often hyperbolic, Richardson shows that much of it was also prophetic.   Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more than a decade after his death, Thompson's celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. This book refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson's influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. It concludes that Thompson was not only a gifted journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century. 

Media and Democratic Transition in Zimbabwe provides an empirical analysis of Zimbabwe’s ongoing state of affairs. Bruce Mutsvairo and Cleophas T. Muneri examine the intersection between journalism, democracy, and human rights to historicize and critique past successes and failures that have played out in Zimbabwe’s past, as well as future challenges that await the current government of the country. The authors pose the question of what role human rights activists, journalists, and social media dissents play in ending the country’s current adversity. Scholars of journalism, media studies, communication, African studies, and political science will find this book particularly useful.

Three distinguished authorities offer informed reflections on the history of books, on literary commerce, and on the reading public in eighteenth-century England, France, and Germany. Concerned with an area of study that has gone largely unexplored--the social function of the book trade and the various agencies of distribution--Robert Darnton. Roy M. Wiles, and Bernhard Fabian lay the groundwork for the intellectual, social, and literary historian as well as the student of political revolutions.Robert Darnton's rich account of a clandestine book dealer expands our knowledge of the actual habits of eighteenth-century Frenchmen. We learn about the livres philosophiques, as they were known in the trade--obscene. irreligious. or seditious works; about the intricate circuit of agents linking publisher and bookdealer; and about a confidence game often surviving on sheer bravura. Darnton not only gives us a general sense of the literary tastes in a small provincial city in France on the eve of the Revolution but also opens the way toward an understanding of the country's entire literary underground.The late Roy M. Wiles investigates the principal readership in eighteenth-century England and demonstrates that intellectual activities were not confined to polite society in London. Employing new, often untouched materials--newspaper circulation and delivery figures, book lists and advertisements in London and local papers, subscription books in provincial towns and cities--Wiles helps dispel some of the uncertainty surrounding the question of literacy and shows that, in fact, what the provincial readers chose to read more accurately registers the eighteenth century's relish for reading than those books considered by Londoners as "required" reading.Bernhard Fabian explores the sources that permit us to assess the circulation of English letters in Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century. By considering the kind of information obtained from subscription lists, by studying the relation of English literature to the general reader of the period, and by examining the emergence of a reading public that actually read English, Fabian helps delineate a broad view of the contemporary reading scene in eighteenth-century Germany.

A concise history of the Aries Press, founded in the 1920s by philanthropist, Spencer Kellogg Jnr. The Aries Press was an American private press founded by Spencer Kellogg, Jr., in the 1920s. A second-generation millionaire and supporter of the arts, Kellogg was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement. Though little known today, the Aries Press produced exceptional examples of fine printing. Richard Kegler documents its colorful history accompanied by fine illustrations and samples from the Press. RICHARD KEGLER is the Director of the Wells College Book Arts Center in Aurora, New York. He founded both the P22 Type Foundry and the Western New York Book Arts Center in Buffalo, New York. Kegler is a letterpress printer and book designer with a long-standing interest in printing history.

In this rich collection, bestselling author Adam Hochschild has selected and updated over two dozen essays and pieces of reporting from his long career. Threaded through them all is his concern for social justice and the people who have fought for it. The articles here range from a California gun show to a Finnish prison, from a Congolese center for rape victims to the ruins of gulag camps in the Soviet Arctic, from a stroll through construction sites with an ecologically pioneering architect in India to a day on the campaign trail with Nelson Mandela. Hochschild also talks about the writers he loves, from Mark Twain to John McPhee, and explores such far-reaching topics as why so much history is badly written, what bookshelves tell us about their owners, and his front-row seat for the shocking revelation in the 1960s that the CIA had been secretly controlling dozens of supposedly independent organizations. With the skills of a journalist, the knowledge of a historian, and the heart of an activist, Hochschild shares the stories of people who took a stand against despotism, spoke out against unjust wars and government surveillance, and dared to dream of a better and more just world.

What would it mean to be avant-garde today? Arguing against the notion that the avant-garde is dead or confined to historically "failed" movements, this book offers a more dynamic and inclusive theory of avant-gardes that accounts for how they work in our present. Innovative in approach, Provisional Avant-Gardes focuses on the medium of the little magazine-from early Dada experiments to feminist, queer, and digital publishing networks-to understand avant-gardes as provisional and heterogeneous communities. Paying particular attention to neglected women writers, artists, and editors alongside more canonical figures, it shows how the study of little magazines can change our views of literary and art history while shedding new light on individual careers. By focusing on the avant-garde's publishing history and group dynamics, Sophie Seita also demonstrates a new methodology for writing about avant-garde practice across time, one that is applicable to other artistic and non-artistic communities and that speaks to contemporary practitioners as much as scholars. In the process, she addresses fundamental questions about the intersections of aesthetic form and politics and about what we consider to be literature and art.

This study is an attempt to chronicle and analyse the attitudes of the New York press in connection with the events of the period from 1914 to 1917 relating to American neutrality. It is based primarily on a day to-day study of sixteen daily newspapers in New York City for the period of American non-participation in the First World War. The research involved not only editorial opinion but also news items, feature articles, letters to the editor, book reviews and special commentary. The files of the major New York newspapers of the period naturally constituted the basic sources. In addition to this, use was made of the memoirs, diaries and private papers of editors, publishers and other public figures; the Congressional Record, 1914-1917; Congressional hearings and reports, 1915, 1919, 1936 and 1937; certain British and German materials; books, articles and other secondary sources. The author also drew upon the recollections of New Yorkers active in journalism during the period."

Current Research in Puerto Rican Linguistics is an edited collection of original contributions which explores the idiosyncratic grammatical properties of Puerto Rican Spanish. The book focuses on the structural aspects of linguistics, analysed with a variety of frameworks and methodological approaches, in order to presents the latest advances in the field of Puerto Rican and Caribbean linguistics. Current Research in Puerto Rican Linguistics brings together articles from researchers proposing new, challenging, and ground-breaking analyses on the nature of Spanish in Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican Spanish in the United States.

Filling an important gap in the history of print and reading, Elspeth Jajdelska offers a new account of the changing relationship between speech, rank and writing from 1600 to 1750. Jajdelska draws on anthropological findings to shed light on the different ways that speech was understood to relate to writing across the period, bringing together status and speech, literary and verbal decorum, readership, the material text and performance. Jajdelska's ambitious array of sources includes letters, diaries, paratexts and genres from cookery books to philosophical discourses. She looks at authors ranging from John Donne to Jonathan Swift, alongside the writings of anonymous merchants, apothecaries and romance authors. Jajdelska argues that Renaissance readers were likely to approach written and printed documents less as utterances in their own right and more as representations of past speech or as scripts for future speech. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, however, some readers were treating books as proxies for the author's speech, rather than as representations of it. These adjustments in the way speech and print were understood had implications for changes in decorum as the inhibitions placed on lower-ranking authors in the Renaissance gave way to increasingly open social networks at the start of the eighteenth century. As a result, authors from the lower ranks could now publish on topics formerly reserved for the more privileged. While this apparently egalitarian development did not result in imagined communities that transcended class, readers of all ranks did encounter new models of reading and writing and were empowered to engage legitimately in the gentlemanly criticism that had once been the reserve of the cultural elites. Shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) book prize 2018

The much-loved, irresistibly funny memoir of literary New York which was an international bestseller and enchanted readers around the world - now a major film starring Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley, My New York Year 'Gripping and funny' Observer 'Like a literary The Devil Wears Prada ... An irresistible read' Harper's Bazaar 'Irresistible' Sunday Times 'Spellbinding' Guardian After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. Precariously balanced between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office - where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze after three-martini lunches - and then goes home to her threadbare Brooklyn apartment and her socialist boyfriend. Rakoff is tasked with processing Salinger's voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agency's form response and impulsively begins writing back. The results are both humorous and moving, as Rakoff, while acting as the great writer's voice, begins to discover her own.

In May 1924, the Soncino Society of the Friends of the Jewish Book was founded in Berlin. Named after the Soncinos, a 15th to 16th century Jewish-Italian family of printers, it was the first society of Jewish bibliophiles, and set the goal of publishing rare Jewish books and Hebrew printings. The eight essays in this volume explore the history of the Society and its commitment to Hebrew book culture.

In this learned and delightful book, John L. Lievsay shows how energetic English printers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped to bring the language and literature of Italy into England. His description of how these men, who were not usually troubled by modesty and sometimes not by honesty, capitalized on and helped to create the Englishman's appetite for things Italian will be welcomed by scholars; his analysis of the contents of libraries and catalogues and his commentary on the books themselves will be relished by those who enjoy the scholarship and the gossip behind the collecting and printing of books. In his first essay, "English Printers, Italian Texts," the author identifies the printers and the variety of Italian authors. Torriano's proverbs and Florio's language manuals met a receptive audience. John Wolfe published Pietro Aretino under false imprint, inventing fictional places of publication, and his printings of Machiavelli, suppressed in Italy and not generally available in translation, were highly successful. John Bill, King's Printer, even published an Italian translation of Bacon's Essay. Lievsay then turns to the Italian titles found in library collections of the time, among them Thomas James's catalogs of the Bodleian Library, the bookseller Robert Martin's lists, and the libraries of eminent Englishmen, including those of John Locke and Sir Edward Coke. Lord Herbert's library held a book by "Partenio Etiro," an anagram for Aretino. The work of Tomaso Garzoni has been neglected, but Lievsay revives it in the third essay with descriptions of Garzoni's immensely popular Piazza and Theatro; and quotations from his Mirabile cornutopia-a mock letter of consolation to cuckolds-are evidence of the high spirit of this learned and bizarre man. The essays are based on lectures given at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1969 for the A. S. W. Rosenbach Fellowship in Bibliography.

The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies takes an important place in the scholarly landscape by bringing together a compelling collection of essays that reflect the evolving ways in which researchers think and write about the Iberian Peninsula. Features include: A comprehensive approach to the different languages and cultural traditions of the Iberian Peninsula; Five chronological sections spanning the period from the Middle Ages to the 21st century; A state-of-the-art account of the field, reaffirming Iberian Studies as a dynamic and evolving discipline with promising areas for future research; An array of topics of an interdisciplinary nature (history and politics, language and literature, cultural studies and visual arts), focusing on the cultural distinctiveness of Iberian traditions; New perspectives and avenues of inquiry that aim to promote a comparative mode within Iberian Studies and Hispanism. The fifty authoritative, original essays will provide readers with a diverse cross-section of texts that will enrich their knowledge of Iberian Studies from an international perspective.

The creation of texts preserves culture, literature, myth, and society, and provides invaluable insights into history. Yet we still have much to learn about the history of how those texts were produced and how the production of texts has influenced modern societies, particularly in smaller nations like Wales. The story of publishing in Wales is closely connected to the story of Wales itself. Wales, the Welsh people, and the Welsh language have survived invasion, migration, oppression, revolt, resistance, religious and social upheaval, and economic depression. The books of Wales chronicle this story and the Welsh people's endurance over centuries of challenges. Ancient law-books, medieval manuscripts, legends and myths, secretly printed religious works, poetry, song, social commentary, and modern novels tell a story of a tiny nation, its hardy people, and an enduring literary legacy that has an outsized influence on culture and literature far beyond the Welsh borders.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This book examines the changes taking place in literary writing and publishing in contemporary China under the influence of the emerging market economy. It focuses on the revival of literary best sellers in the Chinese book market and the establishment of a best-seller production machine. The author examines how writers have become cultural entrepreneurs, how state publishing houses are now motivated by commercial incentives, and how "second-channel," unofficial publishers and distributors both compete and cooperate with official publishing houses in a dual-track, socialist-capitalist economic system. Taken together, these changes demonstrate how economic development and culture interact in a postsocialist society, in contrast to the way they work in the mature capitalist economies of the West. That economic reforms have affected many aspects of Chinese society is well known, but this is the first comprehensive analysis of market influences in the literary field. This book thus offers a fresh perspective on the inner workings of contemporary Chinese society.

Jack Hart, master writing coach and former managing editor of the Oregonian, has guided several Pulitzer Prize-winning narratives to publication. Since its publication in 2011, his book Storycraft has become the definitive guide to crafting narrative nonfiction. This is the book to read to learn the art of storytelling as embodied in the work of writers such as David Grann, Mary Roach, Tracy Kidder, and John McPhee. In this new edition, Hart has expanded the book's range to delve into podcasting and has incorporated new insights from recent research into storytelling and the brain. He has also added dozens of new examples that illustrate effective narrative nonfiction. This edition of Storycraft is also paired with Wordcraft, a new incarnation of Hart's earlier book A Writer's Coach, now also available from Chicago.

Between 1815 and 1890, the German book market experienced phenomenal growth, driven by German publishers' dynamic entrepreneurial attitude towards developing and distributing books. Embracing aggressive marketing on a large scale, they developed a growing sense of what their markets wanted. This study, based almost entirely upon primary sources including over seventy years of trade newspapers, is an in depth account of how and why this market developed-decades before there was any written theory about marketing. This book is therefore about both marketing practice and marketing theory. It provides a uniquely well-researched account of how markets were developed in very sophisticated ways long before there was a formal discipline of marketing: for example, German publishers used segmentation at least 150 years before the first US articles on the subject appeared. Much of their experience was also shared by the UK and US book markets through international interactions between booksellers and other businessmen. All scholars of marketing will find this historical account a fascinating insight into markets and marketing, This will also be of interest to social historians, scholars of German history, book trade and book trade historians.