New Books in November

It’s a new month, with a new batch of great releases! Check out the books we have coming out this November.

Cover of The Pandemic Divide: How COVID Increased Inequality in America edited by Gwendolyn L. Wright, Lucas Hubbard, and William A. Darity. The title is in black font against a white background; a light blue surgical mask lies in between "Pandemic" and "Divide."

The contributors to The Pandemic Divide, edited by Gwendolyn L. Wright, Lucas Hubbard, and William A. Darity, analyze and explain the myriad racial disparities that came to the forefront of the COVID-19 pandemic while highlighting what steps could have been taken to mitigate its impact.

In This Flame Within, Manijeh Moradian revises conventional histories of Iranian migration to the United States as a post-1979 phenomenon characterized by the flight of pro-Shah Iranians from the Islamic Republic and recounts the experiences of Iranian foreign students who joined a global movement against US imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s.

When the Smoke Cleared contains poetry written by incarcerated poets in Attica Prison and journal entries and poetry by editor Celes Tisdale, who led poetry workshops following the uprising there in 1971.

Cover of Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball by Thomas Beller. Cover is a photograph that shows a small flock of pigeons taking off from in front of an outdoor basketball hoop.

Capturing the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of the countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball, Thomas Beller charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it in Lost in the Game. If you’re in New York City, join us for a writerly discussion of basketball featuring Beller and Alexander Wolff, author of Big Game, Small World, on November 15.

In Surface Relations, Vivian L. Huang retheorizes the stereotype of inscrutability as a queer aesthetic strategy within contemporary Asian American cultural life.

Stephen C. Finley offers a new look at the religious practices and discourses of the Nation of Islam in In and Out of This World, showing how the group and its leaders used multiple religious and esoteric symbols to locate black bodies as sites of religious meaning.

Cover of Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject by Biko Mandela Gray. The cover is black and features the text in white in small letters in the upper right corner and also in large gray vertical letters.

Biko Mandela Gray offers a philosophical eulogy for Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Sandra Bland that attests to their irreducible significance in the face of unremitting police brutality in Black Life Matter.

Michael Degani explores how electricity and its piracy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has become a key site for urban Tanzanians to enact, experience, and debate their social contract with the state in The City Electric.

In The Pivot, Robert J. Bliwise charts the impact of the pandemic at Duke University, as the university tried to manage in an environment of constant challenge and frustrating unpredictability. Bliwise will join a panel of Duke faculty to discuss teaching in the pandemic at the Duke University library on November 7.

Cover of Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetic: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic by Lisa E. Bloom. Cover shows a glacial landscape that focuses on a cave shaped like a grimacing face.

Lisa E. Bloom considers the way artists, filmmakers, and activists in the Arctic and Antarctic use their art to illustrate our current environmental crises and to reconstruct public understanding of them in Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics. Bloom will give a talk about her book at Konst/ig Books in Stockholm on November 15.

In Visitation, Jennifer DeClue examines Black feminist avant-garde films from filmmakers including Kara Walker, Tourmaline, and Ja’Tovia Gary that visualize violence suffered by Black women in the United States.

Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr—two scholars deeply embedded in the HIV response—present the history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations in We Are Having This Conversation Now. Juhasz and Kerr are planning an online event with Bureau of General Services, Queer Division on November 15 and an online event hosted by Charis Books on November 17.

Cover of The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment by Cameron Awkward-Rich. Cover features the title in pink font running vertically from the bottom against a black background.

Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Cameron Awkward-Rich argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal in The Terrible We.

In Feeling Media, Miryam Sas explores the potentialities and limitations of media theory and media art in Japan, showing how artists and theorists reframe ideas about collectivity, community, and connectivity. Sas will appear in person at Aix Marseille University tomorrow, November 2, to discuss her book.

Lex Morgan Lancaster traces the formal and material innovations of contemporary queer and feminist artists in Dragging Away, showing how they use abstraction as a queering tactic for social and political ends.

Never miss a new book! Sign up for our e-mail newsletters, and get notifications of new titles in your preferred disciplines as well as discounts and other news.