This month’s featured titles include a debut novel and a nonfiction book about the comedy troupe Firesign Theater, both by A&S authors.
The Edge of Water
Olufunke Grace Bankole ’01
“Bankole debuts with a beautiful narrative about two Nigerian women who seek independence from their patriarchal culture,” says Publishers Weekly in a starred review, calling the novel “one to savor.”
The plot follows a mother and daughter: the elder, a rape victim who was coerced into marrying her attacker, wants a better life for her child—who grows up to dream of living in the U.S. despite a prophecy that she’ll encounter danger there. The daughter’s story eventually takes her to New Orleans, where she becomes a single mother and struggles to survive during Hurricane Katrina.
Kirkus calls Bankhole’s book a “global, multigenerational novel suffused with heart, feeling, devastation, and hope” while Booklist praises it as a “powerful and emotional debut novel that deftly explores the complexities of identity, family, and belonging.”
A government major in Arts & Sciences, Bankhole is a Maryland native who grew up in both the U.S. and Nigeria.
Firesign
Jeremy Braddock
In this nonfiction work—subtitled The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums—a Cornell English professor explores the cultural impact of the Firesign Theatre, an avant garde comedy troupe popular in the 1960s and ’70s.
As Braddock—an associate professor who specializes in modernist literature and culture—notes in an interview with the Cornell Chronicle, he became a Firesign fan in his early teens, when he received their records from an uncle who came of age in the ’60s.
“It is not an accident that album was originally, and remains, a word for a kind of book,” he writes in the volume, published by University of California Press.
Read the full story on the Cornellians website.
More News from A&S
CTI announces 2026 winners of Ye Awards for graduate achievements in teaching
Neurobiology and behavior
