Velorio, Xavier Navarro Aquino (HarperVia) The narrative follows a group of survivors in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. Losing hope of help from their government, the characters pin their futures on Memoria, an idyllic society that is being created in the mountains. But Memoria might not be the paradise they envision. This is the debut novel of Navarro Aquino, an assistant professor of English who Publishers Weekly named to its “Writers to Watch” list in fall 2021.
Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson (University of Chicago Press) An examination of how racial resentment, rather than prejudice alone, motivates a growing resistance among Whites to improve the circumstances faced by racial minorities. The theory is that people with heightened racial resentment are likely to reject special race treatment because they see it as unfairly benefitting Blacks and other minorities. The book is co-authored by Davis, a political science professor and the Snyder Family Mission Professor, and David C. Wilson, a dean and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Everyday people are implicated,” the authors write, “not because they are racist but because they possess certain values that lock in disadvantage for African Americans.”
Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi (Mariner Books) Arezu, an Iranian-American Muslim teenager, goes to Marbella, Spain, to meet her estranged father, but he’s not there and she ends up in an abusive relationship with an older man. Two decades later, Arezu and her best friend, Ellie, an Israeli-American scholar, visit the location together to confront their traumatic memories of sexual violence. This is the third novel by Van der Vliet Oloomi, an associate professor of English whose earlier novel, Call Me Zebra, earned her the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern, edited by Brian Ó Conchubhair (Wake Forest University Press) Printed in Irish and English side-by-side, this comprehensive volume traces Irish history in verse from the sixth century to the present. The book – edited by Ó Conchubhair, an associate professor of Irish language and literature, and Samuel K. Fisher ’11 and ’17PhD, an assistant professor of history at Catholic University – features new translations and emphasizes poetry’s longstanding central role in Irish culture. The title is inspired by a quotation from 17th-century Irish historian Geoffrey Keating, who said that the bone and marrow of Irish history was to be found in poems.