HOT TYPE: New releases by Swarthmoreans

Bruce Oakley ’58
Life on Earth: Scientific and Religious Views
Trafford Publishing

Life on Earth: Scientific and Religious Views lays out the historical search for God and the DNA code of life. The chemicals of life are best understood by examining cells because all creatures are composed of one or more cells. The genes in each cell are long stretches of DNA used to link amino acids together into proteins. RNA may adjust the activity of each gene and may have even been responsible for the emergence of life.

Bill Prindle ’72
Medicine Cache Under Lichen
Finishing Line Press

Prindle engages the natural and human worlds in a spiral dance of mutual yearning, in which there is a place “to change your dread/to compassion,” and which holds hope enough to “bring that fluttering spirit back to life.” The book explores trails in which it is not too late “to find/the path of restoration/together before nightfall.” The poems embrace the delight and the mystery of language, through encounters with bison and moss, loons, and larvae.

Dana Mackenzie ’79
Did You Come Here to Play Chess or to Have Fun?
New in Chess

Did You Come Here to Play Chess or Have Fun? book cover

A collection of stories, games, and instruction from Mackenzie’s 15-year chess blog, which won Best Chess Blog of the Year in 2021 from the Chess Journalists of America. It’s possible to be serious about chess and have fun at the same time! Written for all levels of chess players. Some parts are purely stories with no chess analysis, others are easy enough for beginners, and some will be of interest even to chess masters.

Chris Caruso ’80
“Dragging Me Down”
Unsung Artists Music

This single from the just released album, Lost In The Ages, was recorded and produced at Mendham Studios with Greg Dabal. Available on all streaming platforms and at unsungartistsmusic.com.

Kevin D. Murphy ’82
Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism
Princeton University Press

In the decades preceding World War II, professional architecture schools enrolled increasing numbers of women, but career success did not come easily. Women Architects at Work tells the stories of the resilient and resourceful women who surmounted barriers of sexism, racism, and classism to take on crucial roles in the establishment and growth of Modernism across the United States.

Asbed Pogarian ’84
Loving Father, Bitter Son
Independently published

When young Alex flees Ethiopia with his mother and sister after the 1974 communist revolution, he leaves behind not just a birthplace, but a father shrouded in mystery and betrayal. Decades later, with a life built in Los Angeles, he is forced to confront the truth about the man he thought he hated, and the past he tried to forget.

Susannah Sheffer ’86
The Stone Tries to Understand the Hands
Cornerstone Press

The Stone Tries to Understand the Hands cover

“The electric particulars of the past and the sorrow of knowing dovetail into poems that pulse with music and pleasures, like the way the lyrical thinking serpentines through the language [and] the attentiveness to other texts, to language itself. [This book] never loses sight of human intimacies and intricacies. Susannah Sheffer is a tremendously gifted poet. Her poems are deftly crafted, luminous.”
— Eduardo C. Corrall

Rebecca Sharpless ’90
Shackled: 92 Refugees Imprisoned on ICE Air
University of California Press

In December 2017, U.S. immigration authorities shackled and abused 92 African refugees for two days while attempting to deport them by plane to Somalia. When national media broke the story, government officials lied about what happened. Shackled tells the story of this harrowing failed deportation, the resulting class-action litigation, and two men’s search for safety in the U.S. over the course of three years.

Harris Kornstein ’06, a/k/a Lil Miss Hot Mess, illustrated by Olga de Dios
Make Your Own Rainbow: A Drag Queen’s Guide to Color
Running Press Kids

Drag queens love to dance to their own beat, speak their minds, and let their best selves shine. They love all the colors of the rainbow — as well as all the colors beyond! From scarlet, to azure, periwinkle, Byzantium, and onyx, the world’s diverse range of colors allows drag queens and kings to be authentic and creative. And you, too, can use any color or hue to express yourself and your fierce imagination!

Amanda Vacharat ’06
This Moth Saw Brightness
Dutton Books for Young Readers

When Johns Hopkins University offers D the chance to participate in a prestigious study, the thought of finally making his father proud convinces D to agree. D is fitted with a wristband that monitors his vitals as he completes daily puzzles and tasks. As the study progresses, though, it begins to seem not so ordinary. D teams up with crush Jane and best friend Kermit to try to uncover the truth about the program.

David Stifler ’08
Lucian and the Atticists: Linguistic Satire in the Second Sophistic
Bloomsbury

Amidst 2nd-century CE revival of classical Greek intellectualism known as the Second Sophistic, the Syrian writer Lucian of Samosata stands out for his satirical treatment of literary and cultural tropes from an outsider perspective. Stifler’s new book contextualizes Lucian’s works alongside contemporary texts to show how Lucian’s self-aware engagement with sociolinguistics offers modern readers a nuanced understanding of the complex relationships of race, class, and language in the Roman world.

Mackenzie Pierce ’11
Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust
University of California Press

Sounds of Survival examines an integrated Polish and Polish- Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the Nazi occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians’ lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation.

Sam Sussman ’13
Boy from the North Country
Penguin Press

In this debut novel, Sussman writes of a tender and intimate mother-son relationship. Caring for his mother as her illness worsens, and as she begins to tell him truths he has waited so long to hear, Evan comes to understand the startling gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him.

Allison King ’15
The Phoenix Pencil Company
William Morrow

In this debut novel, a hidden magic — bringing the memories of pencils back to life — holds the power to transform a young woman’s relationship with her grandmother, and to mend long-lost connections across time and space.

The Bulletin receives numerous submissions of new publications from the talented Swarthmore community and can feature only a fraction of those submissions here. Please note that work represented in Hot Type does not necessarily reflect the views of the College.

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