Outstanding Academic Titles 2025: American Literature

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to American Literature

Posted on June 5, 2026 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2025 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles about American Literature. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Unpalatable: stories of pain and pleasure in southern cookbooks
Tippen, Carrie Helms. University Press of Mississippi, 2025

Tippen’s analysis of commercially published southern cookbooks from the 1990s on examines the tension between cookbook audience’s desires for pleasure and joy from upbeat headnotes, mouth-watering recipes, and aesthetic food photography and the reality of the South’s creativity generated within its legacy of suffering, poverty, segregation, enslavement, and violence. All geographic regions struggle with the general expectation of the cookbook genre to erase pain “through its orientation toward pleasure.” Thus southern writers are not unique in this practice as they contextualize authenticity and identity (p. 8). Tippen (Chatham Univ.) argues that southern authenticity is achievable when writers “speak the truth of their painful experiences to powerful audiences,” and when they amplify the contributions of Black southerners to regional culture, thus creating space for reconciliation, reparation, and apology for the past (p. 9). Tippen offers multiple strategies for finding new models of storytelling, a spectrum of suffering in southern cookbook writing that may be tools for truth and reconciliation. Each chapter examines southern cookbooks through a different lens: race, class, gender, ability, and grief (via funerary food practices). A delightful book for food scholars, folklorists, cultural historians, anthropologists, community organizers, and activists interested in food justice and memory. View on Amazon.

2. New sincerity: American fiction in the neoliberal age
Kelly, Adam. Stanford, 2024

This is a book that could very easily have gotten out of hand, an initial observation that became sincere praise for what Kelly (Univ. College, Ireland) has produced. As the first book-length survey of “the new sincerity” in American literature, this study fills a significant gap between the peak of postmodernism and the later genre turn in the historicist consideration of early 21st-century American fiction. Kelly deftly embeds insightful and extended commentaries on works by an array of writers including Susan Choi, Helen DeWitt, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, David Foster Wallace, and Colson Whitehead, within a rich and sprawling critical discourse about literary sincerity that hearkens back to Lionel Trilling (among others) as well as the potential roles that literary art can play in an age dominated by cultural and political neoliberalism. Kelly’s skillful management of this critical framework prevents the book from becoming primarily a diatribe against the admittedly plentiful faults of neoliberalism that only happens to use novels as its supporting evidence (an overly didactic tendency that, in this review’s view, occasionally mars the otherwise excellent scholarship of the post45 collective). View on Amazon.

3. Published by the author: self-publication in nineteenth-century African American literature
Sinche, Bryan. North Carolina, 2024

This fascinating new study examines first-person narratives written and self-published by African American authors during the 19th century. Sinche (Univ. of Hartford) argues that “self-publication was a widespread practice that aspiring authors used to shape their individual circumstances as well as the physical and intellectual spaces they inhabited” (p. 3). Sinche argues that the act of self-publishing was “an idiosyncratic process” that produced a diverse range of publications in many formats and genres, most of which have usually been considered unliterary (p. 5). These publications, which Sinche categorizes and examines according to social functions, potentially complicates the canon of early African American print, which has long been dominated by the genre of first-person slave narratives. In that sense, Sinche’s decision to focus the book on first-person narratives gives up some of that potential diversity and complication. Nevertheless, Published by the Author makes a welcome contribution to the fields of early African American literature and material textual studies. Scholars in these fields will find six chapters full of richly detailed information about a group of authors and genres not often considered to be part of African American or 19th-century American literature. View on Amazon.  

4. Jim: the life and afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s comrade
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Yale, 2025

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn continues to be a controversial book, previously for its social reflections on the Mississippi, now for the N-word and our understanding of its intention in relation to Jim, Huck’s companion, an enslaved Black man. The title pairs Fishkin’s exploratory scholarship with Percival Everett’s James, an angrier book from a different perspective. Fishkin (Stanford Univ.) reveals Twain’s intention to make Jim a strong, humane hero, leading Huck’s “deformed conscience” to greater humanity. Accessibly written, Jim reveals Twain’s embodiment of his background in Hannibal, Missouri. Chapter 4, “Jim’s Version,” retells the whole story in Jim’s voice, convincingly preceded by explorations of the American culture it reveals and followed by a detailed examination of Jim’s role as interpreted in numerous movies and as many stage plays, including the famed heavyweight Archie Moore as Jim, who expressed his admiration for the character. A survey of major Black scholars’ and authors’ appreciations and students’ responses to Jim and the N-word demonstrates how the book can be well and sensitively taught to both white and Black students to appreciate Jim’s honor, rectitude, and nobility. Jim is an important achievement, a highly readable book providing a practical application of extensive research with insights into today’s classroom. View on Amazon.

5. Tasting and testing books: Good housekeeping, popular modernism, and middlebrow reading
Blair, Amy L. Massachusetts, 2024

For many years, scholars castigated Good Housekeeping and other women’s magazines of the early 20th century for allegedly having propagated anti-feminist, traditional gender ideologies and decidedly middlebrow literary tastes among their mass-market audiences, in sharp contrast to the progressive messages conveyed by highbrow, modernist “Little Magazines.” During the past few decades, however, a number of scholars have challenged this sharp dichotomy. In her meticulously researched and well-structured volume, Blair (Marquette Univ.) builds on her outstanding previous study of how popular periodical writers influenced early 20th-century readers—Reading Up (CH, Sep’12, 50-0136)—by examining in great detail a book advice column by Emily Newell Blair (no relation to the author), which appeared in Good Housekeeping between February 1926 and August 1934. Blair sets this column in the context not only of that magazine’s readers and contents but also of contemporary critical debates about literary value, convincingly demonstrating the extensive overlap between “middlebrow” and “modernist” cultures and thereby making an invaluable contribution to the ongoing project of better understanding the actual evolution of literary publishing during the interwar period. View on Amazon.

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