Jessica Burstein is an associate professor of English at the University of Washington. She specializes in modern British and American literature and culture.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

I look at e-mail and the Guardian online, since it has a better sense of proportion than American papers. Then I look at The New York Times. I have a friend in New York who reads everything and sends me articles that I need, even before I know I need them.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?

I receive The London Review of Books in the mail, as well as online; ditto for The New York Review of Books. I read The New Yorker online—my Internet-less mother requires the hard-copy version, so I have my minions get that to her. That’s the magazine I grew up with, and as much as the cartoon contests pain me, I will never leave it. I prefer the Times Literary Supplement to The New York Times Sunday Book Review: Substantive evidence about whether something is worth reading or avoiding can be useful.

Substance aside, because I am shallow and write about fashion, I subscribe to Harper’s Bazaar. I comb the captions but never read the articles. I don’t even know if they have them, now that I think about it. Vogue has better writers, so occasionally I slip up and read them. That’s all hard, cold, slick copy, even as I go online to watch the models teeter around in the magazine extras. Once in a while I will buy W magazine, but it is so physically large that I can barely fit it into my apartment. I read nothing mobile, unless you count taking my hard copy of the LRB onto the bus.

Q: What are the best books and articles you’ve read recently?

I just finished Julian Barnes’s new memoir of grief, Levels of Life. If you love anyone mortal, it is mandatory. I need one book of fiction that has nothing to do with my academic life or I go numb; right now I am finishing Spring Torrents by Turgenev—I like his blend of merriment and pity. For work, I read Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, which got to me far more than James’s other books, so perhaps my ear has advanced to the point where I need to go back to the big novels and listen again. I just reread Howards End, and after thinking I had grown out of Forster (and writing a long letter to a friend excoriating him), wept—and I mean wept—when it was over. It was because—and pardon me for being technical—the people playing on the grass at the end weren’t real.
I truly miss being able to read Frank Kermode’s newest—his voice was so poised and clean. Oh, and since you politely abstained from asking, I will note that the worst article I just read by someone whose aesthetic (not political) judgment I otherwise appreciated, if not always liked, was Christopher Hitchens’s bozo piece on women not being funny. I just want to make plain that I do speak ill of the dead.

Q: What are among the most overrated novels, past or present? Underrated?

There’s no point in mentioning overrated novels if the point is to winnow them from public consciousness. Therefore let it be known that Penelope Fitzgerald is extraordinary, and should be read more. She possesses such moral acuity and range: If you need a description of doing laundry in 18th-century Germany alongside Romanticism, Moscow before the revolution, or how to run a bookshop, she’s your woman. Barbara Pym has a different set of muscles; she plumbs closer terrain. She is amazing and subtle, and attention should be paid. Her Excellent Women is in fact excellent. I will never tire of teaching or reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. Last year an undergraduate asked me why no one was celebrating a particular character’s birthday, and I about kissed him—in an ombudsman-friendly fashion—because it was such an important question, and had never occurred to me.

Q: Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years?

This could be understood as a question about either the mechanics of reading habits—I dislike reading online—or habits of thought. I have a lifetime subscription to Critical Inquiry. I also receive Modernism/modernity. I was its first managing editor, and I continue to see all the mistakes in its editing, so it’s difficult to read, but I do it anyway. In terms of habits of thought, I now look at professional journals in terms of their sensibility. Hopefully they have one; some don’t. Grey Room really did—it was so damn groovy—and it has just changed editorial boards, so I am curious about what happens next; The Space Between is developing an interesting one; and I can see the lucidity of the editors’ voices in the newish Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.

I also look at arcs of current critical interest. (When I was a lackey at Critical Inquiry, we established that if three academics have said something, it would be referred to as a “critical wave”; I therefore now look for arcs rather than waves.) I have recently developed a cross-disciplinary crush on The Journal of Inverse and Ill-Posed Problems, for what to any humanities type would be obvious reasons.

Q: The book as object: Is it a pleasure, a necessity, an anachronism?

In this realm at least, why should pleasure be distinct from necessity? There is no substitute for a book qua object (well, they’re all objects, but I assume this means the one that isn’t electronic, or fed directly into your brainstem). They really are, or should be, objects of beauty, as well as something to misplace in order to re-find, mark, carry around, throw out the window (once, a novel I won’t name), and complain about having to pack. I keep a peacock-feather necklace in Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason, and you can’t do that with an e-book. I recognize the ergonomic wisdom of e-books when it comes to travel, but haven’t succumbed.

Q: Do you read blogs?

No, thank you.

Q: Do you use Twitter? If so, whom do you follow?

I signed up years ago, but just because Stephen Fry did. Now that I don’t check my Twitter account, he e-mails me constantly.

Q: What are the guilty pleasures in your media diet?

If you can admit to it, it’s not guilt.

Sketch by Monica Hellström

So Hirabayashi, then a University of Washington student, defied two orders—one imposing curfews, another requiring anyone officials deemed a possible enemy to fill out a “loyalty questionnaire.” For that he was arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned.

He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1943, it ruled against him. In 1987, via a rarely used legal doctrine, the high court overturned his conviction.

Hirabayashi’s stance made him a household name in Japanese-American circles, and among civil-rights advocates, more generally. As a result, his struggle and case have been analyzed every which way—but one.

It has not been, until A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States, that readers have had access to Hirabayashi’s reflections at the time of his resistance.

The novelty of the book, says one of its compilers, Hirabayashi’s nephew, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, is that it reveals what was going through the mind of an exceptionally principled university student subjected to enormous pressure to toe a line. It is composed of Hirabayashi’s youthful writings in letters and a large trove of notebooks. Those came to light when the project first began, fully 20 years ago. Now, the book, just out from the University of Washington Press, may be the last piece of an infamous passage in American civic and legal history.

Much has been written about his uncle’s case, says the nephew, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he holds the inaugural George and Sakaye Aratani Chair in Japanese-American Incarceration, Redress, and Community.  But biographical perspectives have been few, and while his uncle pursued a long career in academe and community activism, his writing dealt with technical aspects of his legal struggles.

Says Lane Ryo Hirabayashi: “In regards to Gordon’s writ of error coram nobis,” the successful 1987 motion to vacate his 1940s convictions, “almost no personal correspondence had been found in terms of what he was feeling, and what he was thinking, at that time. There was nothing of depth from him about when he was 24 and 25 years old.”

His uncle’s notebooks and correspondence of that part of his life “are really fresh,” he says. Their entries range from the high-minded to the mundane to the emotional to the indignant. Gordon Hirabayashi writes, for example, that when a federal agent told him that not signing the loyalty oath would subject him to criminal punishment, he replied, “I don’t make my decisions on the basis of what I think you’re going to do.” Pondering the evacuation order while serving time in prison for defying it, he wrote: “If this is to be the new order here, then the war is already lost so far as democracy is concerned.”

Among many touching thoughts about how his stance is affecting his family, he wrote that “time after time, [my mother] would worry herself sick, then reproach me from every angle. When I refuse to change, she turns around and becomes my strongest supporter.” At the racist fury that was directed at him, he wrote: “We rise to our dignity and challenge being so insulted. Thus there remains hope for progress. I am a chronic optimist.”

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi’s father, the late James A. Hirabayashi, who died last year as an emeritus professor of Asian-American studies at San Francisco State University, had been working on his older brother’s papers, and interviewing him extensively. In 1990, he found his brother’s 1940s notebooks in a garage in Edmonton, where his brother had virtually forgotten about them since the 1960s while teaching sociology in Canada at the University of Alberta.

In the documents, the father-and-son team of James and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi found rich veins of insight into the philosophical and ethical motivations of their resister family member, but also much about his spiritual formation. Gordon Hirabayashi had recorded all that as his legal battle proceeded—and as he sat in King County Jail in Seattle and then at the Catalina Federal Honor Camp, in Arizona.

Among the many rich annotations in A Principled Stand is this: “When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Gordon’s conviction on the charge of violating the curfew order, he had to hitchhike down to Arizona [to the Catalina] work camp where prisoners labored to build a highway through the mountains. (Ironically, more than 55 years after the fact, the…Camp area was renamed the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site.)”

Clearer now, says Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, are the directions his uncle’s thinking took after an unusual childhood. Born of Japanese-immigrant parents in 1918, in Seattle, Gordon Hirabayashi grew up on a cooperative farm worked by newcomers who, like the Hirabayashis, practiced Mukyokai, a form of Japanese, non-church Christianity. After he enrolled at the University of Washington in 1939, Gordon Hirabayashi discovered an affinity between Mukyokai and Quakerism, including its pacifism.

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi joined his father on working on the Gordon Hirabayashi papers soon after that discovery in the Edmonton garage. The publication now of A Principled Stand is bittersweet for him, he says, because not only did his uncle die last year, but so did his father. He says: “I’ve been talking about it with them since I was a teenager—about what led to Gordon’s decision and also how that affected the decisions my father made in terms of his own career and trajectory. I came away from Gordon’s personal files thinking I had insights into him that even his kids hadn’t had.”

The project began, those two decades ago, when the University of Washington Press asked Gordon Hirabayashi to write an autobiography. “We did find an outline of an autobiography in his papers,” says his nephew. But his uncle was always busy with his scholarship or with redress campaigns relating to the Japanese-American internments. And then, his aging intervened. “My uncle lived a long time,” he says. “He was probably the longest lived member of our family. And in his late 80s and then 90s his memories of World War II faded.”

A Principled Stand is “one we’re really proud of,” says Marianne Keddington-Lang, a senior acquisitions editor at the Washington press who was the last in the project’s line of editors. “Gordon Hirabayashi was a University of Washington student when things began, so it was home ground, for us.” She says Lane Ryo and James Hirabayashi have managed “to retain as much as they could of Gordon’s voice” by creating a “composite narrative that holds together beautifully.”

UWP has a healthy list in Asian-American titles, many in the Scott and Laurie Aoki series, which tends to focus on historical and social-science perspectives on Asian migration to the United States and community life and assimilation there, particularly when there’s a Northwest regional angle. However the press has published more extensively in Asian art, history, and politics.

But A Principled Stand marks both expanded coverage and new directions in Asian-American studies, says Ranjit Arab, a senior acquisitions editor who came to Seattle last summer from the University Press of Kansas. He says Kansas “did not formally have an Asian-American series, but it did have a CultureAmerica series that I oversaw, and we tried to bring in Asian-American topics. That has always been a personal interest of mine, coming from an East Indian context.”

He has come to UWP with “freer rein to go out and find projects,” he says. He and colleagues have been in discussions with senior figures in Asian-American studies to gauge the feasibility of a new series. An announcement may come in the next weeks. With a potential output of four or five titles a year, “we are really hoping to focus on innovative subjects” such as the Asian-American “pushback against empire. There is a strong need for those kinds of works, especially with transnational perspectives.”

Ezekiel J. Emanuel is vice provost for global initiatives and chair of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

The New York Times. In print. I’m boring.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print versus online versus mobile/tablet?

I get The Economist, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the New Republic, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg Businessweek. I think that might be it. I read these in print—I’m old-fashioned.

Q: What are the best articles and books you’ve read recently?

One book I read that I really like is Jerusalem: The Biography, by Montefiore. I’m also in the midst of a book that’s coming out in a few months, the fantastic My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, by Ari Shavit—a gripping, gripping story. It’s fascinating from a personal, familial, historical perspective. And it’s controversial. I am then going to start a book on the evolution of humans and why they supplanted Neanderthals. In terms of articles, besides Steven Brill’s “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” I’ve read a couple great articles in recent New Republic magazines. One on peace in the Middle East and one on Phil Griffin and the rise of MSNBC.

Q: Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years?

When reading journal articles, I tend to skim for content and then go back to things I need for my own work. That’s been my system for years. I build up three or four weeks of them, take them on a plane ride, and then quickly rip through them. Unlike many people, I’m a hard-copy guy. I like paper in my hands.

Q: How did Brothers Emanuel come about? Do you have another book project in mind for the future?

The book came about in part because Maureen Dowd kept asking me about what my mother put in the cereal when the brothers were growing up. I also had been writing down stories for my daughters, so that they would know about the family. It was the collision of those two interests.

In May I begin writing my next book, on health care and health-care policy. It’s a short primer on the American health-care system and the Affordable Care Act, along with my prognostications and forecasting about the future of the system. It’s very difficult to explain American health-care policy. A lot of people ask me about it, and I just want to say: “Here’s a 250-page book that explains it.” That 250-page book has never been written, perhaps because if you’re a tenured professor, you think it’s beneath you to write that book. Given all the attention of the topic, I think that book is very important.

Q: The book as object: Is it a pleasure, a necessity, an anachronism?

I think it’s a necessity. Absolutely. I just bought four new bookshelves for my house.

Q: Do you read blogs? If so, what blogs do you like best?

No, absolutely not. I think you should label this column “The Luddite Returns.” The most valuable and scarce resource I have is time. I prefer not to waste my time.

Q: What are the guilty pleasures in your media diet?

Rahm, my brother, and I both thoroughly enjoy history books. We trade recommendations back and forth, whether it’s World War II, the Civil War, or biographies. I just bought Sugar in the Blood—a new book about sugar plantations and slavery—for both of us. I’m not sure that’s a guilty pleasure, though I doubt it matters to my career advancement. Still, every so often you learn a piece of history that illuminates something you’re working on.

Illustration for The Chronicle by Monica Hellström

In History, Fredrik Logevall won for Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House), cited as “a balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road to full-blown war.” Logevall is a professor of international studies and of history at Cornell University, where he also directs the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

In Fiction, Adam Johnson, who teaches creative writing at Stanford University, was lauded for his “exquisitely crafted” novel The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House) set in totalitarian North Korea.

The Pulitzer in Poetry went to Sharon Olds for Stag’s Leap (Alfred A. Knopf), a collection of “unflinching poems” on the poet’s divorce that examine “love, sorrow, and the limits of self-knowledge.” Olds teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University.

Finally in Music, Caroline Shaw won for “Partita for 8 Voices,” a recording released last October by New Amsterdam Records. Shaw, a graduate student in composition at Princeton University, was cited for “a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects.”

Go here for a complete list of Pulitzer winners, finalists, and juries.

Adam Grant is a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Grant is the author of

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

Without fail, when I wake up, I immediately gravitate to the most mesmerizing, so-enthralling-that-I-can’t-put-it-down genre of our era: e-mail. Luckily, on most mornings, my inbox is sprinkled with at least a few e-mails that open the door to exciting stories. Sometimes it’s a gripping New York Times story; in other cases, it’s an article about a mind-boggling new finding from psychology.

Q: What are the best articles and books you’ve read recently?

I loved Barry Schwartz’s call in The Atlantic for a council of psychological advisers to the president. I share his view that the vast majority of government decisions depend heavily on predicting and changing human behavior, and there is a rich body of knowledge in psychology that can inform these decisions. On the book front, I loved The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner, a self-described grump who went globe-trotting in search for the happiest place on earth, and Quiet by Susan Cain, who beautifully integrated science and stories to challenge the “extravert ideal” in Western culture. I also found Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind extremely perceptive and provocative in overturning many assumptions that we hold about political and religious ideologies, and I’ve just started reading Decisive, the latest blockbuster from the Heath brothers.

Q: Has your reading of professional journals changed in the past 10 years?

These days I read more widely. A decade ago, I focused primarily on organizational, social, and personality psychology. Now it’s common for me to dive into articles from other branches of psychology, such as developmental or evolutionary psychology, as well as other fields altogether–especially political science, anthropology, sociology, behavioral economics, physics, medicine, and law. In addition to fostering interesting interdisciplinary conversations, I find that this broader knowledge base sparks creative ideas.

Q: How did Give and Take come about? Do you have another book project in mind for the future?

As an organizational psychologist, I’ve long been fascinated by the dynamics of success at work and in life. I started my career in advertising, and I was struck by the fact that my accomplishments depended heavily on my relationships with colleagues and clients. When I looked at the evidence, I noticed that most research on job performance and productivity focused on individual factors like effort, talent, and luck. I decided to study the social forces that shape success. I was particularly excited to get to the bottom of the debate about whether “good guys” finish first or last. As I started conducting research, I stumbled across a surprising pattern: People who focused on helping others with no strings attached were overrepresented at the top and the bottom of most success metrics. After I received tenure, I decided I had the responsibility to share these results with a broader audience, in the hopes of enabling readers to think differently about success and laying the groundwork for organizations to create more sustainable mechanisms for supporting helping behaviors.

Q: The book as object: Is it a pleasure, a necessity, an anachronism?

To me, there are few things in life that blend pleasure and necessity better than a great book. Although I do plenty of reading on Kindle and iPad, the best books are the ones that I feel drawn to own in print–I enjoy being able to comb back through them and lend them to friends, colleagues, and students. The ideal book launches me into the state of complete absorption that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, to the point where I’m so immersed in the narrative that I lose a sense of time and the outside world. At the same time, it leaves me with new insights and a fresh way of seeing the world. One of my hobbies is performing as a magician, and a truly exceptional book is like a spellbinding magic trick: I experience awe and wonder in the moment, and I spend days or weeks puzzling about it afterward.

Q: Do you read blogs? If so, what blogs do you like best?

My favorite blogs are about big ideas in the social and behavioral sciences. I’m a fan of Bob Sutton’s Work Matters blog, which focuses on evidence-based management, and Dan Pink’s blog, which covers captivating topics ranging from motivation to influence to creativity. I also enjoy perusing the counterintuitive studies that frequently appear on the Freakonomics blog.

Q: What are the guilty pleasures in your media diet?

I love reading fiction, especially mysteries and plots that involve superheroes or magic. My all-time favorite books include Ender’s Game, The Zero Hour, and of course the Harry Potter series. I’ve read just about everything written by Joseph Finder, James Patterson, John Grisham, Robert Ludlum, Harlan Coben, Barry Eisler, Stephenie Meyer, Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, Suzanne Collins, and Matt Reilly. I collected comic books for years, and I still love reading them, especially Superman and the X-Men.

Illustration by Monica Hellström for The Chronicle Review.

Nine writers, ages 33 to 87, none of whom knew they were nominated, won $150,000 prizes for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction, and drama. The only condition? Participate in a multi-day literary festival at Yale in September where the awards will be given.

Academics among the winners were:

Adina Hoffman, who has taught at Wesleyan, Middlebury, and New York Universities, and been a fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. Her books include My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century (Yale University Press, 2009), a biography of Taha Muhammad Ali.

Jonny Steinberg, a lecturer in African Studies at the University of Oxford. Author of several books about South Africa, Steinberg’s most recent work is Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York (Jonathan Cape, 2011).

Zoë Wicomb, a professor emerita at Strathclyde University in Scotland. The South African-born writer is best known for such fiction as the short-story collection You Can’t Get Lost in Capetown (Feminist Press at CUNY), but has written in postcolonial theory and related realms.

Visit Windham Campbell Prizes for a complete list of the awards.

Marianne Boruch

Claremont Graduate University has announced that Marianne Boruch has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for 2013. The prize, $100,000, is given annually to a mid-career poet and is one of the largest monetary awards for poetry in the United States. Boruch, who teaches at Purdue University and Warren Wilson College, won for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press).

In addition, the poet Heidy Steidlmayer will receive $10,000 as winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her collection Fowling Piece (Tri-Quarterly).

Visit CGU for additional information and a list of finalists for both awards.

In the poetry world, that proved much the case in late 2011 when The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry appeared. Rita Dove, a former US Poet Laureate and the 1987 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, edited it, and took enormous flak for her judgment.

In a new edition of Postmodern American Poetry, due out in March from W.W. Norton, editor Paul Hoover is on safer ground if only because devotees of experimental poetry comprise a small subset of all poets and poetry readers, and because even large numbers of the devoted will surely find much of what Hoover has selected baffling.

Much postmodern poetry, if it is to be considered postmodern, presumably must baffle, given the way Hoover and others have defined it. In essence, he writes in his introduction, postmodern poetry is avant-garde, experimental writing from 1950 to the present that displays “an experimental approach to composition, as well as a worldview that sets itself apart from mainstream culture and the sentimentality of self-expressiveness of its life in writing.”

It also constitutes opposition to “establishment,” “formalist,” and “academic” verse, or any form conventional at the time, says Hoover, a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and author of nine books of poetry and one novel. Certainly it seeks to move well away from 19th-century romanticism—Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, and company—as well as from modernism of the early 20th century whose icons include William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot.

Hoover writes that postmodern poetry has continued to be what it was in 1994, when he edited the first edition. However several more subcategories of postmodern verse have emerged during the interim. To styles that went by such names as Beat, projectivist, New York School, deep image, and aleatory poetry have been added newer forms that go by cyberpoetry, Newlipo (see Oulipo, an earlier form, below), and flarf, the last employing such techniques as an online anagram generator.

In a starred pre-pub review, Publishers Weekly calls Hoover’s range of selections “stunning”  and the anthology “essential.”

The scholar, who also is one of two editors of the journal New American Writing, says that all postmodern styles, pre-1994 and post-, have in common a “resistance to dominant and received modes of poetry; it is the avant-garde that renews poetry as a whole through new, but initially shocking, artistic strategies.” He parses out those qualities in numerous ways; for instance, the postmodern may shock because it is “messy rather than neat, plural rather than singular, mannered and oblique rather than straightforward.” Or, Hoover says, the verse may, in words the critic Fredric Jameson used to describe postmodernism more generally, express “the end of the bourgeois ego.” Or it may sample elements of “dead styles” to create pastiche that responds to a culture of late capitalism run rampant.

All that hints at why postmodern poetry’s readership is specialized, even if it no longer has to seek out little-known broadsheets and poetry journals with readerships in the fewer than three figures. Since the earliest days of the approaches, the audience has remained small for work that evokes the loss of individuality in a consumer society, or the loss of privacy and rights in an era of surveillance and control, or that may be dizzyingly cheeky, ludic, populist, or ironically generated by machines.

At its most surprising—at least to anyone for whom Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow” has epitomized poetry since their high-school English classes—postmodern verse takes such forms as the “authorless” texts of such (non)authors as Kenneth Goldsmith, whose 2011 work “Seven American Deaths and Disasters” contains nothing he wrote himself, but instead consists of transcripts of police tapes and mass-communications reports. Explains Hoover: “The text is mediated and edited but, strictly speaking, it is not authored.” And, “such an approach presents a challenge to authorship’s treasured concept of originality.” (Except, presumably, insofar as Goldsmith was quixotic enough to construct such a thing.)

Not that postmodern forms and procedures have no precursors, says Hoover. Many postmodern styles hark back to modernist collage as found in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” from 1922, or to Dada, which at about the same time used found words and objects, or to Oulipo, a movement that in the 1960s was known for such devices as writing poems and even novels without common letters—‘e,’ in the famous case of Georges Perec’s 1969 novel La disparition. (He could hardly have called it L’extinction.)

Postmodern poetry may demonstrate a fascination with cyberspace, “a delight in poetry machines,” or the manipulation of “found texts”—whether a note picked up from a sidewalk or, in some cases, mass-media products such as the issue of The New York Times that was reproduced in Goldsmith’s 2003 work, The Day—every word of it, with the addition of not one word of his own. Whether to categorize such works as poetry or something else— just “conceptual,” say—seems a reasonable question. So, too, in the case of Craig Dworkin’s “Parse,” from 2008. Dworkin, born in 1969, took Edwin A. Abbott’s 1874 book How to Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar, and made a work of it that consists entirely of parsing of the book’s grammatical structures.

Hoover allows that the results of many or even all the approaches of postmodern poetry may prove “silly” unless poets also have imagined compelling ways to use raw linguistic materials. But of works such as Dworkin’s, he observes that the stakes are considerable: “With the death of God and the unfortunate but inevitable distancing of nature, appropriation becomes a reigning device.”

And, Hoover affirms, Dworkin very much knows what he is doing: He presents his work as plainly “uncreative,” but he also is intent on suggesting that poetry can be just another niche-market infotainment commodity. Further, writes Hoover, “the work’s exhaustiveness is part of its conceptual humor,” as is a footnote in which Dworkin states that he was in part inspired by a comment made several decades earlier by Gertrude Stein: “I really do not know that anything has even been more exciting than diagramming sentences.”

Craig Dworkin, says Hoover, has emerged as “an important conceptual poet and one of conceptualism’s leading theorists.” He also is a professor of English at the University of Utah.

That would not surprise Hoover. An irony of postmodern American poetry, he notes, is that it has fared so well since his 1994 first edition that, far from remaining ghettoized in small publications, many of its practitioners now hold endowed chairs at leading universities. That may demonstrate that earlier antipathy between bohemian poets and the institutions that rarely used to hire them has faded away. He also allows that the efflorescence of college creative-writing programs have assisted in winning jobs for postmodern poets.

Nonetheless, thanks to those developments, Hoover’s anthology seems unlikely to provoke a punch-up of the kind that Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry provoked.

Like a court jester, postmodern poetry may have been accommodated by the “establishment” more than vilified by it. The critic Marjorie Perloff wrote in a 1996 article in Diacritics that even by the time of the appearance of the first edition of Postmodern American Poetry, “there was no longer a clear line of demarcation between the raw and the cooked, the oppositional and the established, the ‘experimental’ and the ‘safe.’”

Among other winners, a second Princeton book, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy, by Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady, won for excellence in the social sciences.

The University of California Press won for excellence in the physical sciences and mathematics with its Atlas of Yellowstone, by W. Andrew Marcus, James E. Meacham, Ann W. Rodman, and Alethea Y. Steingisser.

Harvard University Press won for excellence in the biological and life sciences with Arthropod Brains: Evolution, Functional Elegance, and Historical Significance, by Nicholas James Strausfeld.

Cambridge University Press won for excellence in reference works with The Cambridge History of Religions in America, edited by Stephen J. Stein.

For a complete list of awards and honorable mentions, visit the PSP page.

Kracht, currently UPP’s editorial director and director of electronic publishing, succeeds Cynthia Miller, who last year announced plans to retire this winter after leading the press since 1995.

Reached by e-mail, he says he doesn’t anticipate any major changes given that he’s been working closely with Miller since he left Praeger to join UPP  in 2005. He says the press will continue expanding its lists in the history of science, urban history, history of architecture and the built environment, and Central Asian studies as key new editorial programs.