We’re publishing some great books this month! Read below to learn more about these exceptional titles.

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CLASS INTERRUPTIONS: INEQUALITY AND DIVISION IN AFRICAN DIASPORIC WOMEN’S FICTION

BY ROBIN BROOKS

As downward mobility continues to be an international issue, Robin Brooks offers a timely intervention between the humanities and social sciences by examining how Black women’s cultural production engages debates about the growth in income and wealth gaps in global society during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this innovative book employs major contemporary texts by both African American and Caribbean writers—Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Dawn Turner, Olive Senior, Oonya Kempadoo, Merle Hodge, and Diana McCaulay—to demonstrate how neoliberalism, within the broader framework of racial capitalism, reframes structural inequalities as personal failures, thus obscuring how to improve unjust conditions. 

Through interviews with authors, textual analyses of the fiction, and a diagramming of cross-class relationships, Brooks offers compelling new insight on literary portrayals of class inequalities and division. She expands the scope of how the Black women’s literary tradition, since the 1970s, has been conceptualized by repositioning the importance of class and explores why the imagination matters as we think about novel ways to address long-standing and simultaneously evolving issues.

Class Interruptions deftly analyzes African American and Caribbean texts while foregrounding class as a necessary category of study in both fields. Timely in its recognition of the class positions of ‘essential workers’ during the COVID pandemic, this work shows that writers have engaged class consistently, even as class remained a lacuna in literary critical studies. Robin Brooks confidently contributes this much-needed component to advance a new generation of literary scholarship in which class has as much analytical presence as does race or gender.

Carole Boyce Davies, Cornell University

NORTH CAROLINA EXTENSION GARDENER HANDBOOK

EDITED BY KATHLEEN A. MOORE & LUCY K. BRADLEY

This national award winning book, now in its second edition, was developed especially for Master Gardener volunteers and home gardeners and is a primary source for research-based information on gardening and landscaping successfully in North Carolina and the Southeast.

A fundamental reference for any seasoned gardener, the North Carolina Extension Gardener Handbook is also written to appeal to beginners just getting their hands dirty. It explains the “why and how” basics of gardening from soils and composting to vegetable gardening and wildlife management. Advice on garden design, preparation, and maintenance covers all types of plantings including lawns, ornamentals, fruits, trees, and containers.

This handbook provides color images, detailed graphics, diagnostic tables, case studies, frequently asked questions, and specific management strategies for insects, diseases, weeds, and other pests. Written by a team of the state’s leading horticulture experts, it contains a wealth of information to support you in creating and managing thriving gardens, lawns, and landscapes. The North Carolina Extension Gardener Handbook is an essential book for serious gardeners in North Carolina and the Southeast.