This month’s featured titles include books by A&S faculty and alumni: poetry, a kids’ book about Bali, and a short story collection.
Borrowing Paradise
Kaja McGowan, PhD ’96
A doctoral alum in art history, McGowan is an associate professor in that field on the Hill, specializing in South and Southeast Asia. She has a particular focus on the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali—and this co-authored children’s book shares a cultural tale about the latter.
The story draws on McGowan’s experiences during a Fulbright Fellowship, when she learned about a tradition in which Balinese Hindus borrow a single, communal bird of paradise—one that has been stuffed after death—to use in funeral rites rather than hunting one, facilitating a spiritual practice while sparing animals’ lives.
Aimed at children ages three to eight, the book—featuring illustrations by McGowan’s artist sister—centers on a Balinese boy named Surya, who helps with funeral preparations after his beloved grandfather dies, including carrying the bird during the ritual procession.
“Borrowing something implies that you will return it, and it is this concept of ‘return’ that most intrigues me,” McGowan says in an interview on the Arts & Sciences website. “‘Re-using’ one stuffed bird of paradise to assist the souls of an entire village over time argues for a more ecologically sustainable approach to preserving nature.”
Purchase
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
This is the latest poetry collection by Van Clief-Stefanon, an associate professor of English and American studies whose previous work includes the National Book Award finalist Open Interval.
“From a hidden river in upstate New York to a massive flood in Kentucky, currents of all strengths run through these poems,” says the publisher, University of Pittsburgh Press, “taking the reader through grief, estrangement, and the too-often unseen interiority of Black women, landing at a new perspective, the light of faith dawning.”
As Van Clief-Stefanon writes in a poem titled “Currents”:
“Think of the way blood is. / A host, listening. Roiled under the tide—. / A windowsill cat’s making a new language / For birds, cracks his whisper into chittering. Day breaks like silver levered / Trays once cracked opaque cubes to scattered white sheering, skittered. The secret to beats / A shattering—the world is cold. I could have been a better host to love. / But look there. Under the creek bank’s tangled branches / A delicate line of ice blossoms—made, swayed by the freezing brook bump ...”
Alternative Facts
Emily Greenberg ’14
“Greenberg’s short-story collection invites readers to reconsider their perspectives on seemingly familiar topics, including politics and interpersonal relationships,” says Kirkus, going on to call the volume “a bold and often eerie set of tales that skillfully explore life’s what-if complexities.”
The author’s debut book comprises seven stories in which she crafts speculative peeks into the inner lives of such famous names as George W. Bush, Jay Leno, Kellyanne Conway, and Paris Hilton (who, in Greenberg’s imagination, falls from a helicopter onto the fire escape of famously reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon ’59).
A double major in English and fine arts on the Hill, Greenberg earned an MFA from Ohio State. Her work has been published in the Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
