If the clothes make the man, then Father Michael Montebello is a complicated figure indeed. Though torn over his decision, he trades in his priestly robes for camouflage and the boots of a soldier. But the killing isn't occurring just on the battlefield. As Michael leaves his church, people are mysteriously dying at the hands of a young woman named Urania. Just what motivates this woman, however, is a mystery. Meanwhile, Michael finds himself clutching his rosary beads amid a war. Four days after being wounded in battle, he wakes up in a hospital having barely survived his ordeal. When he returns to his church, he finds that it is lying in ruins and a seemingly evil man has taken over both his house and parish. Desperate to atone for the sins that were committed in his absence, Michael becomes a policeman, and Urania continues to kill. The two eventually meet, and then Michael is led to an island set against the beautiful Atlantic Ocean where he journeys through a wide range of human emotions in There He Was, Gone.

Don Gifford in Zones of Re-membering shows clearly, thoughtfully, yet entertainingly how no one explanation will account for the depth and complexity of human experience and its grounding in Memory. Because consciousness is a function of Memory, “life without Memory is no life at all” as Alzheimer’s all too frequently demonstrates. Both our individual and collective Memory is stored in the arts, he contends, which in turn provide a way of knowing and of nourishing Memory and consciousness. Memory, like language, is never really stable or accurate but appears as narrative and these narratives collectively form our entire culture. For Gifford, the profoundest explorer of the human consciousness, time, and memory is James Joyce and in its range of reference, wit, and humanity the spirit of Joyce permeates this book.

Indecorous Thinking is a study of artifice at its most conspicuous: it argues that early modern writers turned to figures of speech like simile, antithesis, and periphrasis as the instruments of a particular kind of thinking unique to the emergent field of vernacular poesie. The classical ideal of decorum described the absence of visible art as a precondition for rhetoric, civics, and beauty: speaking well meant speaking as if off-the-cuff. Against this ideal, Rosenfeld argues that one of early modern literature's richest contributions to poetics is the idea that indecorous art—artifice that rings out with the bells and whistles of ornamentation—celebrates the craft of poetry even as it expands poetry’s range of activities. Rosenfeld details a lost legacy of humanism that contributes to contemporary debates over literary studies’ singular but deeply ambivalent commitment to form. Form, she argues, must be reexamined through the legacy of figure. Reading poetry by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth alongside pedagogical debates of the period and the emergence of empiricism, with its signature commitment to the plain style, Rosenfeld offers a robust account of the triumphs and embarrassments that attended the conspicuous display of artifice. Drawing widely across the arts of rhetoric, dialectic, and poetics, Indecorous Thinking offers a defense of the epistemological value of form: not as a sign of the aesthetic but as the source of a particular kind of knowledge we might call poetic.

Through economic liberalization and the untethering of labor and production markets, masculinity as hegemon has entered a crisis stage. Renegotiated labor and familial orders have triggered a widespread cultural renegotiation of how masculinity operates and is represented. This holds especially true in Latin America. Addressing this, Vinodh Venkatesh uses contemporary Latin American literature to examine how masculinity is constructed and conceived. The Body as Capital centers socioeconomic and political concerns, anxieties, and paradigms on the male anatomy and on the matrices of masculinities presented in fiction. Developing concepts such as the “market of masculinities” and the “transnational theater of masculinities,” the author explains how contemporary fiction centers the male body and masculine expressions as key components in the relationship between culture, space, and global tensile forces. Venkatesh includes novels by canonical and newer writers from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Peru, and Chile. He focuses on texts produced after 1990, coinciding with what has popularly been termed the neoliberal experiment. In addition to probing well-known novels such as La fiesta del Chivo and La mujer habitada and their accompanying body of criticism, The Body as Capital defines and examines several masculine tropes that will be of interest to scholars of contemporary Latin American literature and gender studies. Ultimately, Venkatesh argues for a more holistic approximation of discursive gender that will feed into other angles of criticism, forging a new path in the critical debates over gender and sexuality in Latin American writing.

A satyr bard, a half-demon thief, and a changeling barbarian find themselves on an adventure on the island nation of Sol. Upon arriving they are met with goblins, cruel law enforcement, a tyrant king, and an untouchable boy in blue. The group must resolve the distress that has overcome the port city of Alpherg and solve the mystery of the true reason why they were called to the island country.

The English language in the Renaissance was in many ways a collection of competing Englishes. Blank investigates the representation of alternative vernaculars in both linguistic and literary works of the time.