Alumni Bookshelf
Many English Department alums are published authors. We're happy to show off your work. Send us the title and publication date of your recent book, along with a 40-50 word description or blurb, and we'll feature it here as well as in future issues of eAnnotations. Email us at annotations@english.wisc.edu
Action Based Communication: Changing Experience through Language
Renée Barnow, BA '70
Action Based Communication is necessary reading for anyone who wants to create and sustain connections, especially in challenging times. The book presents a novel way to explore the quality of conversations by examining the physicality of words: how the words you speak and hear resonate in your body.
Skin Deep
Gary Braver (a.k.a. Gary Goshgarian), PhD '72
In this riveting psychological thriller, best-selling author Gary Braver explores the nature of beauty, how women may strive to achieve it, and the forbidden yearnings that kill in its name. Booklist writes, "Not only is this Braver's best novel so far . . . it's a gripping, twisty thriller that deserves a wide audience.
A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England
Julie E. Fromer, PhD '02
A Necessary Luxury analyzes tea histories, advertisements, and nine Victorian novels. Fromer demonstrates that the ritual of tea drinking simultaneously elided and reinforced many of the binaries that structure our understanding of Victorian culture. Tea was a necessity and a luxury; it was seen as masculine as well as feminine; it symbolized the exotic and the domestic; and it represented both moderation and excess.
Delicate Edible Birds
Lauren Groff, MFA '06
Delicate Edible Birds collects nine stories, including "L. DeBard and Aliette," previously featured in Best American Short Stories, and "Lucky Chow Fun," which appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXII. The Boston Globe noted that Groff writes "with such subtlety and economy . . . that novelists might as well hang up their pencils."
Loopholes and Retreats: African American Writers and the Nineteenth Century
John Culler Gruesser, PhD '89, co-edited with Hanna Wallinger
The essays in this volume explore the loopholes and retreats employed and exploited by African American polemicists, poets, novelists, slave narrators, playwrights, short story writers, essayists, educators, historians, clubwomen, and autobiographers during the nineteenth century. These exciting contributions examine how apparent weakness was turned into strength, defensiveness into activism, and the machinery of oppression into the keys to liberation.
The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories
Brian J. Showers, BA '99
In the spirit of Le Fanu's classic trio of tales, Brian J. Showers' The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories populates his own Dublin neighbourhood with an authentic host of ghosts, ghouls, and goblins. The result is a realistic and shadow-filled portrait of a modern neighborhood, written in the traditional style of the classic literary ghost story.
White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Brenda Wineapple, PhD '76
A finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Award, White Heat is a radiant portrayal of one of the most remarkable friendships in American letters — between the elusive, original poet and the radical abolitionist, reformer, and writer whom we have to thank for the publication of Emily Dickinson's poetry. "One of the most astonishing books about poetry I have ever read." — Franz Wright, poet
Author interviews
Gary Braver
We asked Gary Braver how he comes up with ideas for his bestselling novels. Read his answer...
Lauren Groff
In 2008, Annotations asked Lauren to describe what it was like writing her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton. Read more...
Past Bookshelf books
Check out these alumni books listed in our Fall 2008 eAnnotations.