Monthly Archives: February 2012

Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry ($39.95, Iowa Press) What is patriarchal poetry? How can it be both attractive and tempting and yet be so hegemonic that it is invisible? How does it combine … Continue reading →

PBC staffer Emma Eisenberg also writes for the West Philly Local.  See her recent column  in support of local bookstores  

Join us for a reading, refreshment and conversation with Bettina Hoerlin, who taught for many years in Penn’s Urban Studies Program. Hoerlin’s memoir “Steps of Courage: My Parents’ Journey from Nazi Germany to America” is based on more than 500 … Continue reading →

by Cheryl Strayed ($13.95, Mariner) Revealed just last night on The Rumpus to be the real person behind the online columnist Dear Sugar who’s developed a massive cult-like following for her raw and clear-eyed advice and insight into writing, healing, … Continue reading →

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ($35.00, Harvard University Press) The world’s most renowned critical theorist–who defined the field of postcolonial studies–has radically reoriented her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient, she argues … Continue reading →

edited by Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen, and editors from n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy & The New Inquiry ($14.95, Verso Books) In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part … Continue reading →

by Dave Isay ($24.95, Penguin) In honor of Valentine’s Day, Penn Book Center is doing a display of books on love. In All There Is, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay shares stories of love and marriage, revealing the many and remarkable … Continue reading →

by Nicholson Baker ($15.00, Simon and Schuster) Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. Luna meets a man made of light bulbs at a tanning parlor. So begins Nicholson … Continue reading →

by Tony Judt (with Timothy Snyder) ($36.00, Penguin) The final book of the brilliant historian and indomitable public critic Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century maps the issues and concerns of a turbulent age on to a life of intellectual conflict and … Continue reading →