Books published by Louisiana State University Press

The innovative and dazzling short stories collected in Josh Russell's King of the Animals explore love and heartbreak, growing up and growing old, cities and suburbs, the fantastic and the everyday.

While most people are aware of the World War II internment of thousands of Japanese citizens and residents of the US, few know that Germans, Austrians, and Italians were also held in internment camps. Port of No Return tells the story of New Orleans's key role in this complex secret operation.

reveals previously unrecognized efforts by African Americans to use, manage, and exploit policing. In the process, Brandon Jett exposes a complex relationship, suggesting that while violence or the threat of violence shaped police and minority relations, it did not define all interactions.

Drawing from recent debates about the validity of regional studies and scepticism surrounding the efficacy of the concept of authenticity, Clare Chadd's Postregional Fictions focuses on questions of southern regional authenticity in fiction published by Barry Hannah from 1972 to 2001.

Explores the moral and ethical dilemmas that characters face inside themselves and in their interactions with others in the works of these two famed authors. Karl Zender's characterological study offers insightful, critically rigorous analyses of the complicated figures who inhabit several major Shakespeare plays and Faulkner novels.

David Johnson uses Spencer Roane's conflict with John Marshall as ballast for the first-ever biography of this highly influential but largely forgotten justice and political theorist. Because Roane's legal opinions gave way to those of Marshall, historians have tended to either dismiss him or cast him as little more than an annoying gadfly.

Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is arguably the most important written document of the civil rights protest era and a widely read modern literary classic. This volume offers a comprehensive history of King's "Letter" and examines its literary appeal.

Poet and novelist Ashley Mace Havird confronts global and personal change. Her subjects range from the extinction of a prehuman species to the present-day reduction in sea life due to the climate crisis. Closer to home, she confronts the death of her father and her own aging.

In Surprised by Sound, Roi Tartakovsky uncovers the mechanics of rhyme, revealing how and why it remains a vital part of poetry with connections to large questions about poetic freedom, cognitive and psychoanalytic theories, and the accidental aspects of language.

Examines how the French left perceived and used the image of the United States against the backdrop of major historical developments in both countries between the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Along the way, Tom Sancton weaves in the voices of scores of French observers.

Examines the challenges that resulted from US territorial expansion through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. In doing so, the book offers profound insights into the interplay of class, ethnicity, and race, as well as an understanding of colonialism, the nature of republics, democracy, and empire.

Fans and scholars have long regarded the 1980s as a significant turning point in the history of comics in the United States, but most critical discussions of the period still focus on books from prominent creators. This volume offers a more complicated and multivalent picture of this robust era of ambitious comics publishing.

Offers a celebration of the natural environment that also bemoans its mistreatment at the hands of humans. The collection's long sequence, "A Field Guide to People", is an alpha-bestiary of twenty-six sonnets, each a meditation on a species of flora or fauna that is thriving, endangered, or extinct.