Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Writing and Literature

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to writing and literature

Posted on June 11, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on writing and literature. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Love in the time of self-publishing: how romance writers changed the rules of writing and success
Larson, Christine M. Princeton, 2024

Eminently readable and impossibly well researched, Larson’s book is at once an efficiently written investigation into the history and current state of romance publishing and a perceptive and balanced assessment of the potentials and pitfalls of the gig economy and creative labor. The book takes on the formidable task of mapping “Romancelandia,” which Larson (journalism, Univ. of Colorado) defines as the “sprawling network of authors, readers, traditional publishers, and editors, indie editors, formatters, proofreaders, reviewers, podcasters, bloggers, and others.” While previous books about romance literature focused exclusively on either audience, author, or industry, Larson understands that one must consider the ecosystem to map the growth of online, independent publishing. Additionally, Larson makes a convincing argument about the need to view this ecosystem within the context of feminist ethics of care, which serves to both grow organizations such as the powerful Romance Writers of America and structure how conflicts about racism, sexuality, and exclusion are confronted. Refreshingly, Larson avoids tired, elitist concerns about the quality of the literature and instead focuses on what kinds of communities, opportunities, and voices this female-dominated, billion-dollar industry fosters, and how corrections can be made to promote broader inclusivity. View on Amazon

2. Forms of modernist fiction: reading the novel from James Joyce to Tom McCarthy
Attridge, Derek. Edinburgh University Press, 2023

This important new work by Attridge (emer., Univ. of York, UK) is as ambitious in depth as it is impressive in breadth. Attridge centers his analysis on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel he believes is unparalleled for the immense challenge it presents to the tradition of the novel that preceded the modernist explosion. The formal inventiveness introduced by Ulysses, Attridge claims, began a “renovation of the novel tradition” that propels literary innovation to the present day. Attridge advances this claim with a series of persuasive, subtle readings of Ulysses that introduce such concepts as “inorganic form” to describe a detaching of form from content so that their relationship “is no longer organic” or intrinsic but characterized, instead, by a degree of arbitrariness that can account for, among other things, wide variations in style within a single work. After exploring Ulysses’ unique formal richness, Attridge expands the scope of his analysis to trace Joycean patterns in the work of writers spanning continents, including W. F. Hermans, Zoë Wicomb, and Kamila Shamsie.  View on Amazon

3. How Russian literature became great
Hellebust, Rolff. Northern Illinois, 2024

This ambitious study explores the complex cultural, political, and historical mechanisms that helped build the image of the Russian literary tradition as one of the greatest in the world. Focusing on national self-image instead of the works of individual writers and their influence, the six chapters of this volume present an overview of how different movements and individual theorists formulated the foundations for defining a literary tradition; a close examination of Czech literary historian Felix Vodička’s conception of literary tradition as an expression of its understanding among readers and writers; the relationships among literature, national history, and identity in molding the Russian literary tradition; an exploration of the spiritually inspired “redemptive mission” of Russian literature, as viewed by critics and writers; and a contextualization of literary tradition definitions within 19th-century Russian literature in particular. The sixth and final chapter attempts to identify the components of the resulting underlying narrative that established Russia’s literary tradition. View on Amazon

4. Emerging trends in third-generation Holocaust literature
ed. by Alan L. Berger and Lucas F. W. Wilson Lexington Books, 2023

The essays in this collection are particularly strong: they are insightful, well researched, and well written. There is now a robust critical literature about the second generation, the children of Holocaust survivors (sometimes the term is also applied to the children of perpetrators). In the present volume Berger (Florida Atlantic Univ.) and Wilson (Univ. of Calgary) take the next step, analyzing the fiction, memoirs, and films of the third generation—the grandchildren. Berger and Victoria Aarons (contributors to this volume) have both written well-received volumes on both generations. The notion of postmemory—a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to signal the transmission of trauma from the generation that actually experienced the Holocaust to their offspring—is central to understanding 2G and 3G, as the second and third generations are often termed. The contributors are diverse (from Canada, the US, Australia, Germany, Israel, England, and Romania), as are the authors discussed: Nora Krug, Amy Kurzweil, Max Czollek, Mirna Funk, Julie Orringer, Susanne Fritz, Fabrice Humbert, Uriel Sinai, Dana Doron, Bram Presser, Cynthia Banham, Nava Semel. View on Amazon.

5. Restoring relations through stories: from Dinetah to Denendeh
Watchman, Renae. Arizona, 2024

This important work has enough material for three books. Watchman (McMaster Univ., Canada) has mixed Cherokee and Navajo (Diné) ancestry and her kinship ties become part of the story. She does not detach herself from the narrative but exists as a constant presence. Her initial focus is on the stories associated with the Navajo sacred mountain in New Mexico, Tsé Bit’a’í (known in English as Shiprock Peak). Her guiding principle for understanding Indigenous stories is their restorative power for Indigenous culture. The second focus is on is two Navajo films, Sydney Freeland’s Drunktown’s Finest and Larry Blackhorse Lowe’s 5th World. A final and less integral chapter explores a third subject: storytelling among the Dene of northern Canada. The Dene, like the Navajo, speak an Athapascan language, and Watchman wishes to encourage intercultural relations. The book provokes thought in the best way—by exploring Indigenous knowledge. Watchman is uncompromising in using Indigenous vocabulary; a glossary would have been helpful. The book is illustrated with helpful maps and photos. View on Amazon.

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