Fordham Arts and Sciences faculty have published several critically acclaimed new books this academic year. Below is a trio of new works that show the diversity of their expertise and creativity, from the impact of news aggregation to the rural roots of modernist literature.
Another Kind of Fire
As a follow-up to his fiction debut in 2019, biology professor Jason Z. Morris, PhD, published his second novel, Another Kind of Fire, early this year. The protagonist is a Harvard PhD student, Jake, who is struggling to finish his research under the toxic leadership of a bullying mentor.
Morris expertly details what it’s like to conduct an experiment that doesn’t yield the expected result: “It feels possible to go back into the lab again without feeling like failure is inevitable,” Morris writes from Jake’s perspective. “But each time you go through this, it takes a little more of your resilience.”
Outside the lab, Jake’s family life reaches an inflection point when his twin sister, who struggles with depression, has a terrible episode. As Jake tries to support her, he gains a greater understanding of his dysfunctional family dynamics, and ultimately finds strength and solace in his Jewish faith and relatives.
“We’re incredibly tightly bound to people who aren’t fully transparent to us, even when they try to be,” Morris said of his attraction to writing about family. “There’s always the possibility of discovering things that can change the way we see each other.”
Kirkus gave the book a starred review and called it “a haunting, slow-burning story about the hunger for connection and the pressures of family.”
Degraded Heartland
English professor Maria Farland, PhD, challenges the idealization of rural America in her new nonfiction book, Degraded Heartland: Antipastoral, Agriculture, and the Rural Modern in US Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press).
Unlike pastoral writing’s romanticization of rural life and the countryside, antipastoral writing, she points out, focuses on the painful byproducts of agricultural capitalism, such as abandoned farms and depleted lands. Through her close readings of modernist authors, she shows that the roots of literary modernism may be more firmly planted in the industrialized countryside than the city.
“This rural emphasis … enriches our understanding of the ways that rural spaces emerged as key sites for what would come to be called modernization,” she writes.
Degraded Heartland, the first book-length study of this mode of writing, has received critical praise from several scholars and writers, including environmentalist Bill McKibben, who called it “a book that will be referenced for decades.”
The Tech-Media Hybrid
In her new book,The Tech-Media Hybrid: Google’s News Ambition (Columbia University Press), Qun Wang, PhD, assistant professor of communication and media studies, examines the decades-long, push-and-pull relationship between Google and the news industry.
Google, typically thought of as a tech giant and the world’s largest search engine, was also among the first tech companies to invest in news, Wang notes. In the book, she explores the various implications of the “Google way” of experiencing news, examining why Google was initially interested in news; how it “datafies” news; and how the disputes between Google and news publishers reflect the changing global news and technology landscape.
Duke University media scholar Philip M. Napoli, PhD, called the book “a valuable contribution to our understanding of the continued blurring of the boundary separating media and technology.”
For more new books by Fordham faculty, check out these new titles from Fordham Law professors.
