Explore the vast range of titles available.

What do Adam Mansbach's Go the F**k to Sleep and Barbara Park's MA! There's Nothing to Do Here! A Word from your Baby-in-Waiting have in common? Both are large-format picture books that you might find in the children's section of your local bookstore. However, their subject matter is decidedly intended for parents rather than children. In No Kids Allowed, Michelle Ann Abate examines a constellation of such books which she argues form a paradoxical new genre: children's literature for adults. Distinguishing children's literature for adults from YA and middle-grade fiction that appeals to adult readers, Abate argues that there is something unique and fascinating about this phenomenon in contemporary US culture. While historical studies of children's literature show that its relationship with adulthood is varied and complex, Abate suggests that this recent outcropping has its genesis with the 1986 publication of Dr. Seuss's You're Only Old Once!, cleverly subtitled A Book for Obsolete Children. Principally defined by its form and audience, children's literature, Abate demonstrates, engages with more than mere nostalgia when recast for grown-up readers. Parodies, politics, innuendo, and knowing prose captured in simple language and colorful illustrations do not infantilize adult readers; instead, they suggest that the relationship between childhood and adulthood may be something other than linear. Ultimately, Abate explores what happens to children's literature when arguably its most fundamental characteristic is removed: a readership of children. No Kids Allowed is the first book-length study of children's literary forms—including board books, coloring books, bedtime stories, and series detective fiction—written and published specifically for an adult audience. Abate's project examines how these narratives question the boundaries of children's literature while they simultaneously challenge the longstanding Western assumption that adulthood and childhood are separate and even mutually exclusive.

Applying critical race theory to contemporary African American children's and young adult literature, this book explores one key racial issue that has been overlooked both in race studies and literary scholarship—internalised racism. By systematically examining the issue of internalised racism and its detrimental psychological effects, particularly towards the young and vulnerable, this book defamiliarises the very racial issue that otherwise has become normalised in American racial discourse, reaffirming the relevance of race, racism, and racialisation in contemporary America. Through readings of works by Jacqueline Woodson, Sharon G. Flake, Tanita S. Davis, Sapphire, Rosa Guy, and Nikki Grimes, Suriyan Panlay develops a new critical discourse on internalised racism by studying its effects on marginalised children, its manifestations, and the fictional narrative strategies that can be used to regain and reclaim a sense of self.

Girls' Series Fiction and American Popular Culture examines the ways in which young female heroines in American series fiction have undergone dramatic changes in the past 150 years, changes which have both reflected and modeled standards of behavior for America's tweens and teen girls. Though series books are often derided for lacking in imagination and literary potency, that the majority of American girls have been exposed to girls' series in some form, whether through books, television, or other media, suggests that this genre needs to be studied further and that the development of the heroines that girls read about have created an impact that is worthy of a fresh critical lens. Thus, this collection explores how series books have influenced and shaped popular American culture and, in doing so, girls' everyday experiences from the mid nineteenth century until now. The collection interrogates the cultural work that is performed through the series genre, contemplating the messages these books relay about subjects including race, class, gender, education, family, romance, and friendship, and it examines the trajectory of girl fiction within such contexts as material culture, geopolitics, socioeconomics, and feminism.

This paper explores the emergent legend of Colton Harris-Moore, the Barefoot Bandit, to locate its place within American folk legendry. Analysis builds off the work of Eric Hobsbawm and Graham Seal, highlighting how folklorists might re-envision classifications and representations of banditry in constantly changing yet specific populations and environments.

On 9 October 2011, Freedom University Georgia, a volunteer-driven organization, opened its doors to 32 undocumented students in Athens, Georgia in a symbolic yet concrete statement of solidarity, justice and equality in education. Since its conception, Freedom University has contributed to a recent movement that is redefining struggles in the South, bringing together scholars, community organizations, students, dreamers and undocumented immigrants of diverse backgrounds in a coalition of new human rights advocates. Freedom University is not the solution to the injustices affecting immigrant youth in the state.

Michele Leggott's new book of poetry follows on from her 2009 collection, Mirabile Dictu, in its exploration of light and of gathering dark. Leggott is a poet of the lilting, shining moment, and five of the sections in this collection follow her through her own moments and movements—to Devonport, to Australia, to the North—though these sequences also reverberate with the stories and histories of others. The final two sections take this exploration of character and narrative further as in one we see off a soldier—shadowed by Leggott—to the First World War; and in the other—set in an earlier, unspecified time charted for us by telegraphic weather reports—a family tragedy unfolds, until a body is finally brought home for burial. Previously a poet to whom layout was crucial, the book includes the last poems Michele wrote that she was able to see the shapes of on the page, and thus Heartland gestures back towards previous work while at the same time beginning to chart a new compositional method.