To save 20% on select titles, visit our website:

In the next few months we will publishing Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics by Yvette Christiansë and I am reminded of the Contemporary American Fiction Class I took with Professor Jonathan Levin where I read Song of Solomon as a junior.

I unearthed my essay on Song of Solomon that I had long since forgotten. In it I stressed that Song of Solomon is a novel that stresses the importance that a traditional past has on a contemporary American. Morrison creates a novel that is filled with largely religious references that form a commentary on contemporary American society, which appears to be moving towards secularization. However, the main character, Milkman takes a journey that shows the reader that a contemporary individual cannot break with their religion any more than Milkman can break with his cultural and religious past because it is the past that completes him. Milkman takes a leap at the end of the novel in which he lives life to the fullest, because in that second between life and death, he is free. A beautiful and painful concept.

I think that Song of Solomon may be the only work I have read by Toni Morrison. There is a copy of Paradise sitting on a bookshelf. With our upcoming publication, I just might dust both off and immerse myself in the writings of Toni Morrison, with Professor Christiansë as my guide.

Katie Sweeney

“Scare Tactics is that rare academic work that’s accessible rather than purposefully opaque, and it has much to offer readers interested in American literature, gothic fiction, or uppity women.”—Bitch Magazine

The notion of “the Gothic” permeates our society’s art forms, conveying the darkest of possible tones. It is this sense of discomfort, this sudden acquaintance with the disturbing and the uncanny, which draws us towards this type of literature time and time again.

Scare Tactics, written by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, explores the women authors who contributed to this strangely intriguing literary field. Between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1930, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press and in books. These include stories by familiar figures such as Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty-first-century readers, such as Josephine Dodge Bacon, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Focusing on this tradition of female writing offers a corrective to the prevailing belief within American literary scholarship that the uncanny tale, exemplified by the literary productions of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, was displaced after the Civil War by literary realism.

To read Chapter 1, “The Ghost in the Parlor: Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna M. Hoyt, and Edith Wharton”, click here.

For a 20% discount off Scare Tactics, go to www.fordhampress.com. Use Promo Code SCARE at checkout.

There are over 4,000 hand-carved pumpkins that line the walkways, porches, and gardens of Van Cortlandt Manor. Besides the traditional jack-o-lantern faces, there are dinosaurs, insects, a honey hive, pirates, an undersea aquarium, and even a pyramid made of pumpkins. And, of course there are hot apple cider and baked treats to accompany your walk.

This year, the Blaze runs until November 7^th, but if you’re not lucky enough to see the blaze on a clear night and a full moon, here are a few titles that might get you in the Halloween spirit.

Scare Tactics by Jeffrey Weinstock explores the tradition of supernatural writing by American women.

The women of the time repeatedly used Gothic conventions to express discontentment with circumscribed roles for women and to imagine alternative possibilities.

Paying attention to these overlooked authors—Josephine Dodge Bacon, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford—helps us better understand not only the literary marketplace of their time, but also more familiar American Gothicists from Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King.

The staff is also excited about another title rooted in the supernatural—Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, edited by Deborah Christie, and Sarah Juliet Lauro.

The authors investigate the zombie from an interdisciplinary perspective, providing the reader with a classic overview of the zombie’s folkloric and cinematic history.

Christie and Lauro seek to provide an archaeology of the zombie—tracing its lineage from Haiti, mapping its various cultural transformations, and suggesting the post-humanist direction in which the zombie is ultimately heading.

Katie Sweeney

Fordham Press is proud to feature several books honoring women’s contributions, past and present, to American history and culture. American Women, Italian Style: Italian Americana’s Best Writings on Women, forthcoming in July, is an essay collection which seeks to bring awareness to the successes and triumphs of the modern Italian American woman. With topics ranging from cookbooks, inventions, Jewish-Italian intermarriages, and entrepreneurship, the collection offers an in-depth look at modern womanhood from all angles.

Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation is Mary Farmer-Kaiser’s in-depth exploration of women’s instrumental role during Reconstruction and their relationship with the government.

Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics is a comprehensive collection of Arendt’s writings and photos, highlighting the thinking of a pioneer in a field primarily dominated by men.