Books Acquired Recently

Burkholder, J. Lawrence. Recollections of a Sectarian Realist: A Mennonite Life in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Myrna Burkholder. Elkhart, IN: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 2016.

I did a paper on Burkholder, who was a rebel Mennonite theologian at Harvard (he got his Ph.D. at Princeton) before becoming president of the Mennonite-owned Goshen College, when I was an undergraduate. Burkholder was kind enough to meet me for lunch to discuss it. At the time, I thought his ideas were much too liberal, but now I appreciate his thought a lot more. I decided to buy this memoir after reading a fascinating review of it in Mennonite Quarterly Review. I purchased it online from the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary bookstore. The rest of the books were bought from amazon.com.

Cantú, Francisco. The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.

I bought this and Luiselli’s book as background reading for a writing retreat on the Arizona/Sonora border that I’ll be on next month.

Delany, Samuel R. Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love. 1979. Whitmore Lake, MI: Bamberger Books, 1997.

I have the original 1979 Bantam edition of this book, but decided to buy the newer (though still over twenty years old! I can’t believe 1997 was that long ago already.) edition because I’ll be writing an essay on it later this summer and using the newer edition (which is still available new on amazon even though I think the publisher is out of business) will be more accessible for readers.

Luiselli, Valeria. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017.

Pérez, Hiram. A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

I would like to do more work on queer Latinx literature and bought this book because it relates to that intersection.

Rivera, Gabby. America: The Life and Times of America Chavez. Vol. 1. New York: Marvel, 2017.

I loved Rivera’s novel Juliet Takes a Breath and have been meaning to read this comic by her for a while. The book contains the first six issues of the eponymous comic. I must say that this volume is of lesser production quality than other Marvel omnibuses I have bought. The cover is quite flimsy.