Fugitive Tilts
Ishion Hutchinson
Hutchinson is Arts & Sciences’ W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities, and a poet whose three collections include a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Fugitive Tilts, his first book of essays, collects work from the past few decades—contemplating such topics as his childhood in Jamaica and the country’s colonial history.
Many of the essays originally appeared in major periodicals such as Harper’s, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review.
As Hutchinson tells the Cornell Chronicle in an interview about Fugitive Tilts: “To a great extent it’s about the education of an aesthetic sensibility which is very much caught between all kinds of sociopolitical and historical structures that bear heavily on that reader hoping to become an artist or a writer or a poet, discovering what it means to become more confident.”
The Shah of Texas
Charlie Green
In this satirical novel by Green—a senior lecturer in English who previously published the poetry collection Feral Ornamentals—Texas secedes from the U.S. Then it installs a shah as its leader, and goes to war against its former country.
The tale is set in 1989, a decade after the secession. Its characters include those loosely based on such governmental bigwigs as President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor John Bolton.
The novel’s protagonist is a journalist seeking to uncover a Texas camp where political prisoners are tortured; meanwhile, the rebel state’s government is feeding its residents disinformation to convince them it’s winning the war.
As the author has described it: “Think Dr. Strangelove meets Mel Brooks meets 1984.”
The Doorman
Chris Pavone ’89
“Pavone is the author of five previous books, literary thrillers characterized by elegant writing and intricate plotting,” says a New York Times review. “This is something bigger in tone and ambition.”
His latest novel is set in and around a luxury apartment building in Manhattan. It centers on its doorman, a former Marine named Chicky Diaz, who struggles with massive debt while surrounded by enormous wealth. Meanwhile, political protests are inflaming the city, and the building’s privileged residents endure their own dramas and crises—often of their own making.
Read the full story on the Cornellians website.
