Really happy to say that my article on Pynchon and Star Wars is out now in Studies in American Fiction. I'm grateful to SAF for supporting a long and idiosyncratic piece. Honestly, it's kind of my life's work thus far! (2025 date is presumably because of a backlog.)
muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
So, so excited to read 'Lines of Flight, Lines of Force: Thomas Pynchon and Star Wars' by the immensely talented Sam Thomas: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
Congratulations Chris!!
My new book has a cover!!
Collage of book covers: Sally Rooney: Beautiful world, where are you; Sarah Moss: The Fell; Natasha Brown: Assembly; Samantha Harvey: Orbital; Ali Smith: Summer; Carlos Manuel Álvarez: False War.
So happy to see ‘Stuck on Stuckness: On the Intractability of the Present’, co-authored by @alicebennett.bsky.social @keeblearin.bsky.social @heyitsdenisew.bsky.social and me for @c21literature.bsky.social special issue The Century @ 25, out in the world after over two years! doi.org/10.16995/c21...
Excited to announce that our new issue has opened! c21.openlibhums.org/issue/1422/i...
'The Century at 25' was guested edited by Alice Bennett, Arin Keeble, Melissa Schuh, and Denise Wong
This article features analyses of the following novels:
Working on this was so rewarding and in particular I'm very proud of our co-authored article: c21.openlibhums.org/article/id/2...
Part one of 'The Century @25' SI of @c21literature.bsky.social ed by @alicebennett.bsky.social @melissaschuh.bsky.social @heyitsdenisew.bsky.social and I, is out now (part two coming soon): please check it out! c21.openlibhums.org/issue/1422/i...
On my way to strike and picket this morning at (checks notes) Edinburgh Napier University, over (checks notes) redundancies in the institution barely a year after Prof Nolan's departure...
We are looking for review essays! You can see some of our selected titles at the post below. Get in contact with our review editors @heyitsdenisew.bsky.social and @olihaslam.bsky.social to request some or for further info
I wrote two fiction reviews that published this weekend - on Elisa Shua Dusapin's The Old Fire @dauntbookspub.bsky.social for the TLS and Makenna Goodman's Helen of Nowhere @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social for the FT weekend. Very different books but both immensely rewarding reads!
The people who spent years defending and even lionizing Kyle Rittenhouse and Ashli Babbitt now want us to believe that an unarmed mother in her car and a disarmed nurse were domestic terrorists who deserved to be murdered by law enforcement.
For LARB, I wrote about the principled dissenters of Pluribus, The Lowdown, Andor, and The Pitt, and 2025 as the year TV celebrated resistance @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social lareviewofbooks.org/article/lowd...
'The ideas at work in this exhilarating and surprising novel are far from limited....' Arin Keeble reviews HELEN OF NOWHERE by Makenna Goodman for @financialtimes.com: www.ft.com/content/0b4f...
This is Ernie, though we now mostly call him ‘Biggles’.
It happened like this: Ernie > ‘Little E’ > ‘Big E’ > ‘Biggie’ > ‘Biggles’.
Webpage now with cover art!
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/beyond-mo...
An outstanding thesis and important contribution to knowledge in contemporary literary studies- many congratulations @scaredofcustard.bsky.social !!
Happy hauntings, all! This cluster has been a long time coming, and I bet its rich and suggestive essays will stick around for a long time to come!
Our newest cluster is here... and it's (a-)LIVE!!!
HAUNTINGS
Edited by Emmy Waldman (@emmywaldman.bsky.social) & David Hering
Feat:
Nicole Dib
Arin Keeble
Jay Shelat
Irina Troconis
Dorinne Kondo
George Kowalik
A. Banerjee
M. Stang
Christine Prevas
asapjournal.com/cluster/haun...
Co-writing this was a very rewarding experience. If anyone hasn't had a chance to read these stories by Jamil Jan Kochai, I'd urge you to do so!
Book cover: Melissa Schuh, Literary Autobiography: Contemporary No Elises and their Self-Representations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
Flyer: Melissa Schuh Literary Autobiography Contemporary Novelists and their Self-Representations -Explores the narrative strategies developed by novelists as they cross generic boundaries of ction and non-fiction -Presents case studies of works by canonical contemporary authors -Develops de nitions and concepts to analyse forms of autobiographical writing that flaunt their fictionality Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing Get 20% off with this code: PALAUT
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING Series Editors: Clare Brant • Max Saunders "Melissa Schuh's Literary Autobiography offers a theoretically elegant and literarily sensitive rethinking of the fraught relationship between the novel and autobiography. Central to the book is the concept of performative contradiction, which Schuh develops as the defining aesthetic strategy of literary autobiography—a strategy that embraces fictionality not to undermine life writing, but to open it toward deeper questions of truth, identity, and narrative ethics. Schuh's analyses of Roth, Coetzee, and Grass persuasively show how these works form an aesthetic lineage that contemporary autofiction continues to draw from. This book will be indispensable for scholars across life writing studies, narratology, and literary ethics." —Stefan Kjerkegaard, Aarhus University, Denmark Why do novelists write about themselves? What modes do novelists use to manipulate representations of their personality? Why is it often late in their career that novelists write about their own lives? This book develops the concept of literary autobiography as a genre responding to a profound uncertainty about the knowability of the self, often negotiated through a particular concern with the writing life. Comprising a particular sub-genre and style of contemporary life writing, the autobiographies examined in this book foreground their formal 'literariness' through the explicit use of fictionality, disrupting established (auto) biographical tropes by employing narrative innovations associated with postmodern fiction and prefigured by modernist experimentation. Taken together, they exemplify an aesthetics of performative contradiction, in which novelistic strategies cast doubt on the veracity of the life represented. Exploring works by canonical and popular novelists - J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Günter Grass, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgard - this book addresses the increasing novelisation of contemporary life w…
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, because my book is out now, fresh off the press!
Happy book birthday to “Literary Autobiography: Contemporary Novelists and their Self-Representations” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) 📕🎉! doi.org/10.1007/978-... @hss.springernature.com
Thrilled to announce our new issue, Novel Media/Media Novel, edited by Dong Xia and Sandro Eich:
c21.openlibhums.org/issue/1286/i...
In conjunction with @bacls.bsky.social, we are looking for some proposals for panels at BAAS and MSA! Read more here:
Wish I could clear my schedule!!!
Disney/ABC have a responsibility to refuse to participate in corruption.
Kimmel must be reinstated. If Disney/ABC agree to this extortion then perhaps creatives + workers should consider collective action to push back. Same w/buying park + cruise tickets if they bow.
People have power. Ask Target
Sign up for the MTC reading group for Banu Mushtaq’s 2025 International Booker Prize winning collection HEART LAMP! We’re meeting this Thursday, Sept 18! It’ll be a great time—even if you don’t do the reading :)
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
5 tv shows from 2025-25 that Americans need to watch, but will probably never get a chance to.
5. Machine (Arte France)
a rollicking 6-er, Kung-Fu fighting, Karl #Marx, & labor rights.
austerity brain: when you’ve got nothing left to cut you start trying to cut other people’s free labour
