Books published by Rutgers University Press

The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its landscape, history, and mystical practices in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti, as well as lesser-known female Beat writers like Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger.

This collection gives readers a front-row seat to a pivotal moment in LGBTQ literary history with twenty-seven of the most memorable speeches from the 1990-1999 OutWrite conferences, including talks from such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, Essex Hemphill, Patrick Califia, Dorothy Allison, and Edmund White that cover everything from racial representation to sexual politics.

This book tells the saga of the Yiddish-language general encyclopedia Algemeyne entsiklopedye (1932-1966) and the editors who continued to publish it even as they were sent into repeated exile and their world was utterly transformed by the Holocaust. It is not a story only about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.

Combining fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy, 1650-1850 delivers a comprehensive but richly detailed rendering of the first days, the first principles, and the first efforts of modern culture.

Precarious Democracy collects powerful and intimate political ethnographic writing on Brazil’s pivotal years, 2013-19, from the nation’s megacities to rural Amazonia. The volume demonstrates the necessity of ethnography for understanding social and political change, and provides crucial insights on one of the most epochal periods of change in Brazilian history.