Tag: literature
Native-American Heritage Month 2024
Get ready to dive into Native American Heritage Month with these must-read books! From epic legends to fresh voices, these stories celebrate the culture, history, and heart of Native communities. Check out more at UCB Overdrive.
Nick Medina
Zitkala-Sa
Heid E. Erdrich
Vanessa Lillie
Jessica Johns
Alicia Elliott
Halloween Staff Picks 2024
Get into the Halloween spirit with these chilling and spine-tingling reads! From ghostly tales and eerie mysteries to the darkest corners of the human mind, these books are perfect for embracing the spooky season this October. Check out more spooky finds at UCB Overdrive!
Jordan Peele
Mariana Enriquez
Paul Tremblay
Isabel Cañas
Josh Malerman
Holly Jackson
Riley Sager
Mona Awad
Jennifer Thorne
Speculative Fiction: Hugo Award Winners in 2024!
To my delight, the Hugo winners have been announced. Check out the full list of categories, short lists, and winners on the Hugo Awards website. On my side, I’ve read the short stories (i.e., less than 7,500 words) and now am making my way through the novelettes (i.e., 7,500 to 17,500 words). I am enjoying myself immensely.
This year’s novel (i.e., 40,000 words or more) winner is Emily Tesh’s 2023 Some Desperate Glory (Tor Books pub., UC Library Book Search).
T. Kingfisher’s 2023 A Fairy Tale Transformed: Thornhedge (Tor, Titan UK pub., UC Library Search) won the prize for novella (i.e., 17,500-40,000 words).
In novelettes, we’ve got Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine” (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2023, fulltext).
In short stories, there is Naomi Kritzer’s “Better Living Through Algorithms” (Clarkesworld, May 2023, fulltext).
In graphic novels, we’ve got the 11th volume of SAGA by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples (Image, pub., UC Library Search).
Then, in games or interactive works, Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios, prod., website).
There is more, but this post is long enough. I encourage you to check out the full list linked at the top. And, If you have time, I hope you enjoy.
Signing off,
Bee (Lit/DH Librarian)
New Years
Happy New Year! Kick off the new year by revisiting some great reads from 2022. Stay tuned for more epic reads coming up this year.
Bonnie Garmus
Fatimah Asghar
Lucy Foley
Celeste Ng
Naomi Novik
Sarah Thankam Mathews
Gabrielle Zevin
Jennette McCurdy
Karen Jennings
December Reads
Spend the break binging these engrossing picks on Overdrive.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Sabaa Tahir
Maddie Mortimer
Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Barbara Kingsolver
Temple Grandin
Malcolm Gaskill
George Saunders
Native American Heritage Month
November is National Native American Heritage Month! We’ve compiled a list of fiction, memoirs, and poetry for you to check out. Visit the Native American Heritage Month website for more information and live events.
David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Angeline Boulley
Marcie Rendon
Morgan Talty
Debra Magpie Earling
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
See more here. Do you have a favorite? Tell us on Twitter!
Notable Books October 2022
Check out the National Book Award finalists of 2022 and celebrate the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature Annie Ernaux! You can find their work at the UC Berkeley Library. Take a peek at some of the selections below:
Tess Gunty
Annie Ernaux
Jamil Jan Kochai
Meghan O’Rourke
Imani Perry
Gayl Jones
Orienting Os Lusíadas @ 450
This online bibliography brings together resources and scholarship to mark the 450th anniversary of the publication of The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas), the magnum opus of Luís Vaz de Camões (c. 1524/5–1580), an epic that “sings” the story of Portugal’s colonial expansion. Long revered as the most important work in the Portuguese language, it draws inspiration from Greco-Roman epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as Persian and Hindu mythology. The ten cantos which structure the long narrative poem are in ottava rima and total 1,102 stanzas.
The Lusiads form a key pillar of an entire mythos constructed around nostalgia for the empire, though one that has received increasing critical attention in scholarly and political circles alike. Anthony Soares, for example, highlights the material and bodily violences that lie behind discursive elements of the text’s poetic cantos. Other scholars have traced the Persian and Indian lyric influences in the text (notably Hāfiz and Omar Khayyam), interpreting the national epic against itself. Some have even identified critiques of Empire, as well as satirical treatments of etymologies and ancestral pretenses, within the text itself, calling into question the poet’s own consent for his work to be interpreted as the uncritical pro-imperialist national epic, par excellence. As 2022 marks the 450th anniversary of its publication, new scholarship (see Camões at Harvard: Navigating 450 years of Os Lusíadas) will continue to critically resituate The Lusiads both in its historical moment and in Portuguese and global literature today.
We hope you make use of this bibliography which highlights resources in UC Berkeley’s distinguished Portuguese collection but also which provides access to open and freely available sources online.
Cameron Flynn
Ph.D. student, Romance Languages and Literatures
Claude Potts
Librarian for Romance Languages Collections
New Book by Timothy Hampton
![Cheerfulness [book cover]](https://pup-assets.imgix.net/onix/images/9781942130604.jpg?w=600&auto=format)
Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West wherein cheerfulness — a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit — functions as a crucial theme in literary, philosophical, and artistic creations from early modern to contemporary times. In dazzling interpretations of Shakespeare and Montaigne, Hume, Austen and Emerson, Dickens, Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong, Hampton explores the philosophical construal of cheerfulness — as a theme in Protestant theology, a focus of medical writing, a topic in Enlightenment psychology, and a category of modern aesthetics. In a conclusion on cheerfulness in pandemic days, Hampton stresses the importance of lightness of mind under the pressure of catastrophe. A history of the emotional life of European and American cultures, a breathtaking exploration of the intersections of culture, literature, and psychology, Cheerfulness challenges the dominant narrative of Western aesthetics as a story of melancholy, mourning, tragedy, and trauma. Hampton captures the many appearances of this fleeting and powerfully transformative emotion whose historical and literary trajectory has never before been systematically traced.
[from publisher’s site]
Professor Hampton, who holds a joint appointment in the Departments of French and Comparative Literature, is director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities. He discussed his recent book with Seth Lerer (Literature, UC San Diego) on April 20 through the Townsend Center’s Berkeley Book Chats.
Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
New Book and a Conversation with Suzanne Guerlac from the French Department
Check out this new book by Department of French faculty member Suzanne Guerlac, available in print and as an ebook through the online catalog.
Through an engagement with the philosophies of Marcel Proust’s contemporaries Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel, author Suzanne Guerlac presents an original reading of Proust’s magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu).
On Wednesday, March 10 from 12-1, Professor Guerlac will be a special guest on Berkeley Book Chats hosted online by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.