Category: General and Theory

May Joseph and Sofia Varino, Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge, 2023) 97pp. £38.39 Hb. ISBN: 9781032326405 In Aquatopia: Climate Interventions, May Joseph and Sofia Varino present a concise yet conceptually ambitious reflection on climate performance, colonial histories and water ecologies. Situated within Routledge’s Critical Climate Studies series, the book documents and theorises the site-specific performances of…

Rebecca A. Durham, Be Still Mere Molecule (Raleigh, NC, USA: Broken Tribe Press, 2025) 120 pp. $14.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781965412107 How does a poet witness the world? How does a scientist? What if a person were to be both at once? Would that experience of the in-betweenness of both worlds aid them in finding, perhaps…

N. Katherine Hayles, Bacteria to AI: Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) 304 pp. $27.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780226837475 As a species, we Homo sapiens often take it for granted that humanity is separate from, and superior to, the rest of existence. It’s a view that has permeated much of our…

Meredith Martin, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025) 224 pp. £84 Hb. £30 Pb. ISBN: 9780691254678 Meredith Martin’s Poetry’s Data is a large-scale attempt to bring together literary studies, linguistics, digital humanities, and critical archives studies. It presents a compelling case on why we should critically examine…

Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022) 272 pp. £30 Hb. £16.99 Pb. ISBN: 9780691180472 Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds (Random House, 2022), 416 pp. £10.99 Pb. £9.99 e-book. ISBN: 9780141991146 Both books reviewed here are invitations to travel to imagined worlds: to the…

Sebastian P. Klinger, Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) 255 pp. £45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781421450803 In Sleep Works, historian and literary scholar Sebastian P. Klinger sets out to provide a ‘comprehensive account’ of early twentieth-century scientific, pharmaceutical and literary understandings of sleep (134). By examining developments in…

Chienyn Chi, Madness, Psychiatry, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) xvii + 143 pp. £109.99 Hb. £89.99 ebook. ISBN: 978-3-031-59891-3 Chienyn Chi’s work is a bold attempt to decolonize psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourse by revealing how theories of madness are deeply entangled in imperial histories and power…

Belinda Waller-Peterson, Womb Work: Healing Narratives as Reparative Praxis in Black Women’s Literature (South Carolina: Clemson University Press, 2024) 156 pp. $130 Hb. ISBN: 9781638040644 This book is deservedly on the BSLS 2024 Book Prize shortlist. It is impressive in a number of ways and it feels politically urgent. The series it is published in…

Sarah Dimick, Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Ohio: Columbia UP, 2024) 328 pp. £30 Pb. ISBN: 9780231209250 Sarah Dimick has coined the term ‘climate arrhythmias’ to describe that feeling the seasons are not working as they should be or as they usually have done in the past (p. 2). These arrhythmias can be experienced…