Dorothy book longlisted for National Book Award
Lana Lin’s “The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam” has been longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for nonfiction. The book is published by Dorothy, an independent publishing project co-founded by WashU’s Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker.
Look Out
The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View
Look Out is an exploration of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down and far-ranging perspectives—from pre–Civil War America to our vexed modern times of drone warfare, hyper-surveillance at home and abroad, and quarantine and protest.
Face and Form
Physiognomy in Literary Modernism
Faces, faces, faces – faces everywhere! Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquity of the human face, argues Anca Parvulescu in Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism. Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and, later, Kōbō Abe framed their literary projects around the question of the face, its dynamic of legibility and opacity. […]
McBride, Joyce to edit ‘Thinking With James Baldwin’ book series
WashU’s Dwight A. McBride and Justin A. Joyce will serve as series editors for the new book series “Thinking With James Baldwin.”
Loewenstein wins NSF digital infrastructure grant
Joe Loewenstein, a professor of English and director of the Humanities Digital Workshop and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities, all in Arts & Sciences, will serve as co-principal investigator for a $798,000 Human Networks and Data Science grant from the National Science Foundation.
The Odds
Poems
Suzanne Cleary’s The Odds is about chance: crazy luck, bad luck, about the luck of the draw, and what we make of that draw. Through arresting imagery and surprising turns, these narrative and contemplative poems examine the work of holding a job, of making art, of making sense of our historical moment. There is mortality […]
Arc of the Universe
A novel
How do you design a system of government from scratch when you’ve lost faith in government itself? Carrie Davenport, a renowned constitutional law professor, has the career opportunity of a lifetime. Project Mars, the brainchild of a billionaire tech tycoon, has ambitious plans to establish the first human settlement on Mars. And Project Mars selected […]
Maxwell installed as Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature
William J. Maxwell has been installed as the inaugural Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. A lecture and reception to celebrate his appointment were held recently in Whittemore House.
I Make Envy on Your Disco
A novel
It’s the new millennium and the anxiety of midlife is creeping up on Sam Singer, a 37-year-old art advisor. Fed up with his partner and his life in New York, Sam flies to Berlin to attend a gallery opening. There he finds a once-divided city facing an identity crisis of its own. In Berlin the […]
Violet is Blue
Amazon bestseller, Suburban Fiction Violet Sellers is blue, and for good reason. She’s holding a shocking secret she won’t tell anyone, especially her comfortably middle-class parents. When she befriends Jules Marks, who lives on the “other side of the tracks” with his five little sisters, she is introduced to a dark world of self-abuse. As […]
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