The Lousy Racket is a thorough examination of Ernest Hemingway’s working relationship with his American publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and with his editors there: Maxwell Perkins, Wallace Meyer, and Charles Scribner III. This first critical study of Hemingway’s professional collaboration with Scribner’s also details the editing, promotion, and sales of the books he published with the firm from 1926 to 1952 and provides a fascinating look into the American publishing industry in the early twentieth century.

World, Self, Poem collects the best of the essays submitted by poets and scholars from around the U.S. and Canada, and beyond, for presentation at the “Jubilation of Poets” festival celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in October 1986. In this collection, eighteen critics consider the works of a number of important postmodern poets and, using various approaches, confront some of the central problems posed by the poetry of the past 25 years.

Like its pioneering predecessor, the one-volume review published in 1952 by William F. Nolan, The New Ray Bradbury Review contains articles and reviews about Bradbury but has a much broader scope, including a thematic focus for each issue. Since Nolan composed his slim volume at the beginning of Bradbury’s career, Bradbury has birthed hundreds of stories and half a dozen novels, making him one of this country’s most anthologized authors. While his effect on the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction is still being assessed (See Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, Kent State University Press, 2004), there is no doubt of his impact, and to judge from the testimony of his readers, many of them now professional writers themselves, it is clear that he has affected the lives of five generations of young readers.

The New Ray Bradbury Review is designed primarily to study the impact of Ray Bradbury’s writings on American culture. It is the central publication of The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, a newly established archive of Bradbury’s writings located at Indiana University. This first number is devoted to the question of adaptation, or Bradbury’s translation into other media. Bradbury often speaks of himself as a “hybrid” writer, someone whose authorship took shape in a culture dominated by mass media and the decline of book reading. This first number also features two of Bradbury’s unpublished screenplays and an extensive bibliography of Bradbury’s adaptation into other media.

While numerous studies on C. S. Lewis’s literary achievements have been published in the past several years, The Rhetoric of Certitude brings much-needed attention to Lewis’s nonfiction prose, identifying his unique style and explaining why his writing has remained popular while that of so many of his contemporaries has not. In this thorough examination of Lewis’s religious essays and literary criticism, author Gary L. Tandy argues that Lewis’s style evolved from a “purposeful rhetorical stance” that unites his nonfiction prose, a style that was informed by his ideas on language, communication, and style, as well as his view of Christianity, and can be most accurately described as a rhetoric of certitude.

In Hemingway and French Writers, Ben Stoltzfus illuminates the connections between Hemingway and the most important French intellectuals, such as Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux, and Albert Camus. A distinguished scholar of both French literature and Hemingway studies, Stoltzfus compares Hemingway’s major works in chronological order, from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea, with novels by French writers. While it is widely known that France influenced Hemingway’s writing, Hemingway also had an immense impact on French writers. Over the years, American and French novelists enriched each other’s works with new styles and untried techniques. In this comparative analysis, Stoltzfus discusses the complexities of Hemingway’s craft, the controlled skill, narrative economy, and stylistic clarity that the French, drawn to his emphasis on action, labeled “le style américain.”

The first volume in this new series is Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, by H. R. Stoneback. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s first big novel, immediately established him as one of the great prose stylists and preeminent writers of his time. It is also the book that encapsulates the angst of the post–World War I generation, known as the “Lost Generation.” This poignant story of a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion to Pamplona represents a dramatic shift in Hemingway’s ever-evolving style. Featuring Left Bank Paris in the 1920s and brutally realistic descriptions of bullfighting in Spain, the story is about the flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley and the hapless Jake Barnes in an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.

Sounding the Whale is Christopher Sten’s comprehensive account of his own close encounter with Moby-Dick. Originally a long, self-contained chapter in The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel, just published by Kent State University Press, this chapter-by-chapter study of Moby-Dick evolved as a book within a book. Sten argues that Melville not only was familiar with the traditional forms of narrative but that he refined them and appropriated them to his own original purposes. For Moby-Dick, he fused the heroic qualities of the ancient Homeric epic with the spiritual qualities of the early modern form found in Dante and Milton, then cast the whole enterprise in an unprecedented poetic prose form. Thus he formulated the first prose epic of its kind, and the only religious epic on the subject of whaling anyone is likely to write.

Mellville’s interest in the visual arts and the translation of that interest into his writings is at the center of this new interdisciplinary study of one of America’s most celebrated writers. Melville’s lifelong engagement with the visual arts has been noted in other works, but only Savage Eye suggest the extraordinary depth and range of the author’s multifaceted interest in the subject. Editor Christopher Sten has collected 13 essays from 12 specialists in the field to produce this groundbreaking study which connects Melville’s writings with topics relating to the arts of painting, printmaking, sculpture, architecture and landscape design, as well as art history.

In this provocative and vigorously argued interdisciplinary study of the development of institutional censorship, Clare Spark explores the complexities of 20th-century American cultural politics through the protagonists of the Melville Revival. She investigates closely the history of the Revival and its key critics, who manipulated Melville’s life and writings in the service of their own particular social and political agendas. Although often boldly conjectural and speculative, Spark’s assertions are based on her meticulous and thorough exploration of either newly opened or previously unexplored archival materials of leading Melville scholars.