Books published by Wayne State University Press

Focusing on films from Chile since 2000 and bringing together scholars from South and North America, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World is the first English-language book since the 1970s to explore this small, yet significant, Latin American cinema.

Uses a love story to explore topics such as familial loyalty, the conflict between American individualism and ethno-religious heritage, and anti-Semitism in the United States. The introduction includes biographical background on Wolf based on new research and explores key literary, historical, and religious contexts for the book.

Drawing on a variety of legal, liturgical, literary, and archival sources, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner examines the reasons for the involvement in crime, the social profile of Jews who performed crimes, and the ways and mechanisms employed by the legal and communal body to deal with Jewish criminals and with crimes committed by Jews.

Considers the ways in which fairy tales in their mediated forms deconstruct the world and offer alternative views for peaceful, appropriate, just, and intersectionally multifaceted encounters with humans, non-human animals, and the rest of the environment.

Challenges a long-held view that those who had apostatized and later returned to the Jewish community in northern medieval Europe were encouraged to resume their places without the need for special ceremony or act that verified their reversion.

Tells the story of Guy Stern's remarkable life. This is not a Holocaust memoir; however, Stern makes it clear that the horrors of the Holocaust and his escape from Nazi Germany created the central driving force for his life. If one can name a singular characteristic that gives Stern strength time after time, it is his determination to persevere.

If you thought the suburbs were boring, think again. Kelly Fordon's I Have the Answer artfully mixes the fabulist with the workaday and illuminates relationships and characters with crisp, elegant prose and dark wit. The stories in Fordon's latest collection are disquieting, humorous, and thought-provoking.

A collection of poetry by award-winning Ojibwe author Lois Beardslee. Much of the book centres around Native people of the Great Lakes but it has a universal relevance to modern indigenous people worldwide.

Argues that humour performs political, cultural, and social functions in the wake of horror. David Slucki, Gabriel Finder and Avinoam Patt have assembled an impressive list of contributors who examine what is at stake in deploying humor in representing the Holocaust. Namely, what are the boundaries?

Tells the story of the struggle to shape green redevelopment in Detroit. Based on years of fieldwork, Alesia Montgomery takes us into the city council chambers, nonprofit offices, gardens, churches, cafes, street parties, and public protests where the future of Detroit was imagined, debated, and dictated.

Brings together emerging and established researchers in various disciplines from around the world to decenter existing cultural and methodological assumptions underlying fairy-tale studies and suggest new avenues into the increasingly complex world of fairy-tale cultures today.

Drawing on feminist literary studies and television studies, Kate Browne makes a case for The Golden Girls as a TV milestone not only because it remains one of the most popular sitcoms in television history but also because its characters reflect shifting complexities of gender, age, and economic status for women.

Brings together emerging and established researchers in various disciplines from around the world to decenter existing cultural and methodological assumptions underlying fairy-tale studies and suggest new avenues into the increasingly complex world of fairy-tale cultures today.

With a fresh perspective, this book challenges the current historical paradigm in the study of Orthodox Judaism and other tradition-bound faith communities in the United States. Paying attention to "lived religion", the book moves beyond sermons and synagogues and examines the webs of experiences mediated by any number of American cultural forces.

Offers contemporary perspectives on Ettore Scola (1931-2016), one of the premier filmmakers of Italian cinema. While Scola has received extensive attention from scholars based in Italy and France, Remi Lanzoni and Edward Bowen's edited volume is the first English-language book on Scola's cinematographic career.

Studies the works of Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995), an author, documentary filmmaker, social activist, and professor. Thabiti Lewis's analysis serves as a cultural biography, examining the liberation impulses in Bambara's writing.

Explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. The book argues these texts helped clarify the role of East European Jewish identity in the construction of a post-Holocaust American one.