Larry Carver’s Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure is the fifth full-length monograph on Rochester to appear in the past fifty years, and the first to treat The Farce of Sodom as a pivotal work in Rochester’s development as a poet and satirist rather than as a piece of cheap pornography.

Organized in six parts, Black Panther Woman contains many revelations. Besides describing Huggins’s family background, the first part details her rejection of her mother’s Old Testament Christianity and the early self-protective thought practices she developed to cope with her father’s physically abusive behavior.

“THIS IS A BOOK about a staircase and the men who lived on it.” Thus Simon Goldhill begins his alternative history of Cambridge University. The staircase is located in the Gibbs Building, a beautiful 18th-century structure where the teachers and students of King’s College have lived and learned together for centuries.

Elias commissioned essays from nineteen artists, critics, writers, and scholars for Speculative Light, including Baldwin biographers Nicholas Boggs, Robert Reid-Pharr, Magdalena Zaborowska, and Leeming.

BY WAY OF the complicated life of poet Countée Cullen and the influence of the Harlem Renaissance, an autobiographical meditation emerges from Kevin Brown’s combination of family recollections and literary essays: Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance: A Personal History. This engaging narrative, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, is structured in 24 essays that are initially focused on Cullen and other mid-20th-century Black writers, then weave in responses to Cullen’s work by Black artists and writers of the last forty years.

In Spent, her fifth semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Bechdel has a successful TV series based on her previous graphic novel Death and Taxidermy, which is streaming on Schmamazon (after Amazon, of course).