The Deep Blue of Neptune is a striking, meditative collection of poems by Terry Belew, which reminds readers of the necessity of empathy in the midst of uncertain and unsettling times. Set against a rural backdrop, Belew’s poems reside in the everyday—driving on gravel backroads, roaming the aisles of Walmart, and doomscrolling on a smart phone—to highlight the contradictory qualities of existence.

On July 3, 1915, John Pierpont Morgan Jr., one of the most famous names in finance, was entertaining guests at his Long Island estate when the doorbell rang. An armed man forced his way inside.

The Man Who Shot J. P. Morgan is a riveting tale of false identities, radical political beliefs, and ambitious criminal schemes set during the tumultuous time shortly before the United States entered World War I.

Deadbeats, Dead Balls, and the 1914 Boston Braves chronicles the team’s misfortune, meteoric rise through the 1914 season, and audacious World Series run against the overwhelmingly dominant Philadelphia Athletics. Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem, a mainstay in the game for over 70 years, called the Braves “the most spirited team he ever saw”—but would their spirit be enough against one of the most powerful teams ever put together?

In the Ohio counties of the Allegheny Plateau, 19th-century barns hewn from old-growth wood rest near remnant forests, reminders of the state’s deep agricultural roots and rich ecological past. Through 14 linked, meditative essays, Deborah Fleming, author of the award-winning Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape, persuasively and passionately argues for protecting these vestiges of the region’s natural and rural history.

Finding the Numinous explores the premise that the environments depicted in The Lord of the Rings and the Dune saga are not only for the purpose of world-building; rather, these imagined worlds’ environments are sacred spaces fundamental to understanding these texts and their authors’ purposes. Willow Wilson DiPasquale applies Tolkien’s three functions of fantasy—recovery, escape, and consolation—to demonstrate how both authors’ works are intrinsically connected to their ecocritical messages and overarching moral philosophies.

Somewhere west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River, the Midwest begins. Just where exactly, and how, and why are the questions explored in Where East Meets (Mid)West. Bringing together a range of perspectives, the volume argues that while cultural boundaries remain difficult to define, Ohio has been central to regional transitions throughout history. To Native Americans, Ohio was the meeting place of two major drainage basins: the Ohio River and the Great Lakes Basin, which resulted in large amounts of trade activity, cultural exchange, and conflict. During America’s westward expansion, Ohio was an essential pathway, the first of the new Northwest territories to gain statehood, and a battleground over the issue of enslavement. 

In this thoughtfully researched and beautifully written study, Danielle St. Hilaire argues that we can find frameworks for understanding the intersection of emotion, ethics, and literature that unite modern discourses of aesthetic autonomy with seemingly incompatible ethical theories that have largely fallen out of contemporary discussions regarding the value of literature.

More Important Than Good Generals is an in-depth study of the Army of the Tennessee’s junior officers—the company and field grade lieutenants, captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels. While many studies have examined generals and common soldiers, Civil War armies’ “middle management” has been largely ignored.

Lawrence E. Y. Mbogoni depicts a range of volunteers’ experiences, including anecdotes about their training, their work and social lives in Tanzania, and how they readjusted to life back in America following their service. Although there are several memoirs by returned Peace Corps volunteers from Tanzania, this is the first scholarly study of the agency’s history in Tanzania more broadly. Mbogoni draws extensively on archival resources, Tanzanian newspapers and government reports, and interviews he conducted with returned volunteers. The result is an engaging account of volunteers’ contributions and a critical assessment of how successfully the Peace Corps has met its objectives.

Though Ernest Hemingway distrusted Hollywood and often found himself in conflict with directors and producers, he frequented theaters and freely acknowledged the art and potential that cinema contained. In turn, the film industry’s interest in his stories has endured for nearly a century. Focusing on the relationship between written and cinematic work, Hemingway and Film brings together diverse literary and film studies scholars to both deepen understanding of Hemingway’s fiction and film adaptations and to provide practical guidance for approaching these topics in the classroom.