Books Acquired Recently

Arthur, Anthony. The Tailor-King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.

Queer Mennonite literature has been the primary focus of my scholarship over the last year and a half. I keep discovering more and more of it, and as I do, I realize that it is a much larger, longer-tenured tradition than I first thought, as is the queer Mennonite tradition in general. As I have been thinking about the deep-rootedness of queerness in the Mennonite community, I’ve begun to wonder about the Münsterites, a group of radical Anabaptists that practiced polygamy and took over the city of Münster in Germany in 1534. Present-day Mennonites disown the Münsterites because of their sexual transgressions as well as their use of violence, and as a result of this bias I know very little about the group. I am interested in learning more about their sexual rebelliousness, so I bought this book, which is the standard popular account of the group’s brief history.

Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway, 2010.

I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace’s work, but I just recently found out that this book existed. I am very excited to read it, as it sounds like a Wallace-esque work (think “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) about Wallace himself.

Scholder, Amy, Carla Harryman, and Avital Ronell, eds. Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker. London: Verso, 2006.

I’m only slightly less obsessed with Kathy Acker’s work than I am with Wallace’s, and I will be teaching Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School later on this semester, so I am in the process of reading criticism on Acker’s work. I acquired this book as a part of that endeavor.

All three books were purchased from independent sellers on amazon.com.