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Southern writer and folklorist Kelly Kazek's collection of eerie and enigmatic Alabama ghost stories

Deeply personal essays probing the lingering legacies of the southern social divide

"Greek archaeologist Soultana Maria Valamoti takes readers on a culinary journey in her synthesis of plant foods and culinary practices of Neolithic and Bronze Age Greece. Plant foods were the main ingredients of daily meals in prehistoric Greece and most likely of special dishes prepared for feasts and rituals. For more than thirty years, Valamoti has been analyzing a large body of archaeobotanic data that spans 7,000 years from the Neolithic to Bronze Age and that was retrieved from nearly one hundred sites in mainland Greece and the Greek islands. This book also reflects experimentation and research of ancient written sources. Her approach allows an exploration of culinary variability through time. The thousands of charred seeds identified from occupation debris correspond to minuscule time capsules. She is able to document changes from the cooking of the first farmers to the sophisticated cuisines of the elites who inhabited palaces in the first cities of Europe in the south of Greece during the Late Bronze Age. Along the way, she explains the complex processes for the addition of new ingredients (such as millet and olives), condiments, sweet tastes, and complex recipes. "Ancient Grains" also explores regional variability and diversity. Rich chapters are devoted to overviewing plantstuffs in their spatial and temporal distribution, with ritual and symbolic significance noted, and also to broader themes and practices. The main chapters are on bread/cereals, pulses, oils, fruit and nuts, fermented brews, healing foods, cooking, and identity. Valamoti also offers insight into engaging in public archaeology and provides recipes that incorporate ancient plant ingredients and connect prehistory to the present in a critical way. Finally, a thorough bibliography also includes archaeobotanical publications in Greek. Copious color and black and white photos enhance the text"--

"Always Crashing in the Same Car by Lance Olsen is a novel that explores the last months of David Bowie's life through multiple voices and perspectives-the protean musician himself, an academic trying to compose a critical monograph about him, friends, lovers, musicologists, and others in Bowie's orbit"--

A steel town daughter's search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Alabama

"In A Long Essay on the Long Poem, DuPlessis invokes a quote from Ronald Johnson: "Americans like to write big poems, even if people don't read them." It's a joke, in part, but also a telling indication of the difficulty of the subject. Long poems are elusive, particularly in the slippery forms that have emerged in the postmodern mode. DuPlessis quotes both Nathaniel Mackey and Anne Waldman in metaphorizing the poem as a Box: both in the sense of a vessel that contains, and as a machine that processes, an instrument on which language is played. To reckon with a particularly noncompliant variant of a notoriously slippery form, DuPlessis works in a polyvalent mode, a hybrid of critical analysis and speculative essay. She resists a single-focus approach to the long poem and does not venture a bravura, one-size-all thesis. Yet there is an arc of argument here, even as the book ranges across five chapters and a host of disparate writers. DuPlessis roughly divides the long poem and the long poets into three genres: epics, quests, and something she terms "assemblages." The poets surveyed will be familiar for most readers of twentieth-century American and English poetry: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, and Robert Duncan. But rather than attempting a definitive treatment of such a long roster, DuPlessis assumes a certain familiarity in order to focus on key works. A standout example comes in the third chapter, in which DuPlessis reads Dante by way of the modern long poem to generate surprising insights. But she also carefully avoids the self-confirming search for genealogical patterns (e.g., Eliot to Pound to Williams to Zukofsky). Instead she deliberately seeks to see different but intersecting patterns of connection between poems, a nexus rather than a lineage. In doing so she works around the metatextual challenge of the long poem and of her own attempt to "essay" it: how to encompass "everything." The end result is a fascinating and generous work that defies neat categorization as anything other than essential"--

"This is a work of historical archaeology in the American South focusing on religious institutions-two churches and a college-as they existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recently, historical archaeologists are considering more work on churches, churchyards, and cemeteries. Traditionally, the dearth of artifacts was a primary deterrent. Kimberly Pyszka notes that archaeologists have an increasing awareness of how these sites contribute to questions of identity, consumerism, trade, and colonialism, especially when using a landscape archaeology lens. Pyszka aims to demonstrate that select religious institutions used and modified natural landscape features to express their ideology, identity, goals, and social, religious, and political power. Where those structures were constructed, how they sat on the landscape, their architectural style, and their overall visual appearance were well-considered decisions made by religious leaders to benefit their organizations, communities, and, sometimes, themselves. A secondary goal is to show the social roles that religious organizations played in the development of communities. Pyszka connects back to those landscape decisions, specifically to how the architectural design of religious structures was used, intentionally or not, to unite people, often those of differing religious backgrounds. This contributed to the creation of a new common identity among people living in new and still-growing settlements, aiding in community development. She also wants readers to reflect on today's religious landscapes and the ways they are still used to express religious, social, and political ideology and identity"--