Mid-Fall roundup: Reviews, media attention, and author events

Sadie Hoagland’s American Grief in Four Stages lands alongside books by Jia Tolentino, Jaquira Diaz, Sarah Elaine Smith, and others on the Electric Lit roundup of the best debuts of the second half of 2019. This fall Hoagland will read in Davis, Salt Lake City, and Lafayette, LA. Learn more at her website.

A Blue Ridge Public Radio piece about the Appalachian studies community and its reactions to Hillbilly Elegy draws on Appalachian Reckoning, quoting coeditor Meredith McCarroll and contributor Ivy Brashear. The book is also profiled in the Charleston Gazette Mail, and reviewed on the US Intellectual History blog, which praises it for “[uplifting] historically marginalized voices, such as LGBTQIA+ Appalachians and Affrilachians.”

The Gazette Mail also interviews author and series editor Travis Stimeling about his book Songwriting in Contemporary West Virginia.

Titles in our higher education series continue to attract attention. Joshua Eyler talks with Inside Higher Ed about How Humans Learn, his “incredibly well-received new book,” which also appears on the list of the 66 best education books of all time from Book Authority.

In other news from our teaching and learning series:

  • Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy appears in a roundup of selected new books on higher ed from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the author is interviewed on the podcast from Lecture Breakers.
  • Derek Bruff talks with the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast about his new book Intentional Tech.
  • Kevin Gannon’s forthcoming Radical Hope is featured in Literary Hub as part of the “Best of the University Press” reading list for University Press Week.
  • Thomas Tobin and Kirsten Behling’s Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone hits number seven on the Library Journal bestsellers list for education.

Krista Eastman’s The Painted Forest is an “intricate portrait of place and belonging,” according to ZYZZYVA: A San Francisco Journal of Arts and Letters. The book is also covered in Madison’s free weekly Isthmus and excerpted in Wisconsin People and Ideas.

University Bookman reviews Jesse Donaldson’s On Homesickness, which “stands squarely at the intersection of fiction, memoir, and poetry as a crossover, an oddball book that breaks genre conventions and creates its own form.”

Media blog The Wrangler says LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia “brings a nuance that has been sorely lacking from representations of Southern queerness.”

Valerie Nieman, author of To the Bones, appears in the “Research Notes” feature from Necessary Fiction.

In a rave that deems it “essential reading,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature praises Imre Szeman’s “excellent and provocative” On Petrocultures.

Environmental History calls Capitalist Pigs “a clear and accessible read, beautifully illustrated with paintings, maps, and photographs that demonstrate the prominence of the pig in America.”

Oil and Nation provides “a fresh perspective on the dynamics of current politics over natural resources,” says Latin American Research Review.

Marcus Wood’s The Black Butterfly: Brazilian Slavery and the Literary Imagination appears in the roundup of “Recent Books of Interest to African American Scholars” from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

On November 5, Wheeling native Keith Maillard, now at the University of British Columbia, will return home to launch Fatherless at the Ohio County Public Library. Keep up with all of our author events on WVU Press’s calendar.

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