New Books in Print

Based on his ethnographic research with militia groups in Sierra Leone and Liberia during those countries’ recent civil wars, as well as the anthropology of violence, interdisciplinary security studies, and contemporary critical theory, Danny Hoffman considers how young men are made available for violent labor on the battlefields and in the diamond mines, rubber plantations, and other unregulated industries of West Africa.

Hazard Adams is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor Emeritus of Humanities in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He is an internationally-known scholar of William Blake, W.B. Yeats, Joyce Cary, and the history of criticism. His latest book, The Day the Dogs Talked, is a modern fable for readers young and old.

The fourteenth-century Piers Plowman is one of the most influential poems from the Age of Chaucer. Following the character Will on his quest for the true Christian life, the three dream narratives that make up this work address a number of pressing political, social, moral, and educational issues of the late Middle Ages. Vaughan’s landmark critical edition of the A version is the first in over fifty years.

In his new book Freedom with Violence, Chandan Reddy (English) offers a new paradigm for understanding race, sexuality, and national citizenship, grounded in queer of color critique and critical ethnic studies.

As If: An Autobiography, Volume 1. Herbert Blau co-founded The Actor’s Workshop, co-directed the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, was artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN, and is credited with introducing American audiences to major playwrights of the European avant-garde. Author of many influential books, he is currently Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington.