In 2016, in the midst of the en masse arrival of refugees in europe, the austrian library association brought out a welcome poster, a Willkommensplakat. At the center of the poster is a human figure with his back toward the viewer, standing upright on a stack of books. The figure bears an uncanny resemblance to the man in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (circa 1817), the famous painting by the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. In the welcome poster, however, Friedrich's willful, romantic wanderer, standing on the solid ground of rocks, is replaced by a migrant, forced to leave his nation of residence, seeking refuge, perched on precarious grounds. Instead of a sea of fog, the figure in the poster faces a vast screen, on which the word “welcome” is spelled out in twenty-nine world languages from Arabic to Yoruba, including sign language.

Jennifer Egan is known for her formal and thematic virtuosity, a constant reinvention that makes each of her novels feel fresh and surprising. “If I've read it or done it before then I'm not interested,” she claims, describing an “aesthetic … guided by curiosity and desire” (Julavitz). But this isn't the whole story; an exacting reader will find familiar threads running through Egan's fiction. Among the most consistent is an interest in siblings (or cousins, in The Keep): how their relationships evolve over time, as they develop horizontal intimacies apart from the world of parents, and how they negotiate various forms of inequality—for instance, how a more typical sibling contends with a beloved other who is ill or disabled. These themes carry over into Egan's most recent novel, Manhattan Beach. Although many reviewers described it as an abrupt departure (Franklin; O'Rourke; Charles), the novel is consistent with Egan's previous work in featuring a disabled sibling and in being concerned with how genre—whether mystery, romance, PowerPoint presentation, or text message—shapes family dynamics. But where earlier projects are marked by unexpected generic combinations, Manhattan Beach hews closely to the contours of two interrelated forms: the historical novel and literary sentimentalism. At the heart of its thick portrait of a particular time and place is a sibling relationship that becomes an occasion for exploring the possibilities and limitations of genre.

Langston Hughes traveled to Spain in 1937, during that Country's Civil War. He saw the Republic's Fight against Franco as an international fight against fascism, racism, and colonialism and for the rights of workers and minorities. Throughout the 1930s, Hughes organized for justice, at home and abroad, often engaging with communist and other left political organizations, like the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the International Workers' Order (Rampersad, Life 236, 286, 355; Scott). When the war in Spain began, in 1936, workers and intellectuals who were engaged on the left came from around the world to fight against Franco's forces; these volunteers, the International Brigades, included approximately 2,800 Americans known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which about ninety were African American (Carroll vii; “African Americans”). Hughes went to Spain to interview black antifascist volunteers in the International Brigades and write about their experiences for the Baltimore Afro-American, VolunteerforLiberty, and other publications. Much of Hughes's writing from Spain sought to explain to people at home why men and women, and African diasporic people especially, had risked their lives to fight in Spain. Hughes profiled African Americans fighting for the first time alongside white comrades in the International Brigades, including Ralph Thornton, Thaddeus Battle, and Milton Herndon (“Pittsburgh Soldier Hero,” “Howard Man,” “Milt Herndon”). In addition to writing articles, he wrote poetry, gave radio speeches, and translated poems and plays from Spanish into English. Much of Hughes's work from the Spanish Civil War has been collected in anthologies. However, so prolific was Hughes, and so fastidious was he in saving drafts and ensuring they reach his collection at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, that many unpublished works exist in archives. The four poems here represent different poetic registers and levels of polish, and they illuminate the dynamic range of Hughes's literary production during his time in Spain.

As her epigraph to manhattan beach, Jennifer Egan chooses one of ishmael's typically abstract musings in moby-dick: “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.” Yet more relevant is his observation in the opening paragraphs of Melville's novel:

How do you read jewish? The question sounds odd. Why is it that reading jewish is catachrestic in a way that reading German is not? The obvious answer is that German is a language while Jewish is not. Yet there are Jewish languages. Hebrew is one, of course, and linguists describe many more, from Ladino (the language of the Iberian Jewish diaspora) to Krymchak (the ethnolect of a group of Crimean Jews). There is also Yiddish, the language of most European Jews for roughly the millennium preceding the Holocaust; now it lives on primarily in Hasidic communities around the world. Yiddish means Jewish; and in a sense, knowing how to read the former (i.e., decipher the Yiddish language) can imply knowing how to read the latter (i.e., decipher Jewish identity). This has been the belief of many Jews from the late nineteenth century to the present who accept the idea that language is central to national identity. Strangely, in this period the reverse notion has also been active: that knowing Jewish implies knowing Yiddish. his paradox—that you can read a language without knowing it—was catalyzed by a modernist approach to the intersection of Jewish language with Jewish identity. But it was also grounded in facets of the history and philology of Yiddish reading that opened a path to literacy through illiteracy.

The facts on the ground: That is where investigation starts, and that is what the court will have to deal with during the trial. And beyond: if the case goes up to an appellate court, those facts will be retold in an effort to judge whether the law has been correctly applied to them—whether the facts were appropriately formalized, one might say. So the statement of facts is a genre within a genre, one that doesn't much interest legal scholars since it is supposed to be neutral, factual indeed—it's there so the more interesting legal work can go forward. But surely this genre within a genre is interesting in itself.

Between November 1879 and January 1880, the argentine author Eduardo Gutierrez published a serialized narrative of the life of Juan Moreira in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Patria Argentina. Titled simply Juan Moreira, the heroic tale of the real-life outlaw went like this: Moreira was a good gaucho gone bad, who fought to preserve his honor against the backdrop of modernizing forces that were transforming life in this part of South America. His string of crimes and ultimate downfall resulted from his unjust persecution by corrupt state officials. The success of the serial surpassed all expectations. The paper's sales skyrocketed, and the melodramatic narrative soon appeared in book form. Enterprising printers produced tens of thousands of authorized and pirated editions to sell in the Rio de la Plata (Argentina and Uruguay), making Juan Moreira a leading example of everyday reading for the region's rapidly growing literate population and one of Latin America's pre-twentieth-century bestsellers (Acree, Everyday Reading; Gutiérrez, The Gaucho Juan Moreira).

Why comics? “All that it is Necessary to say … upon this subject, may be effected by affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions, either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in comics, the comics will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once.” That's not exactly what William Wordsworth wrote in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, of course—he had “verse” where I have “comics” (112). Nor did Wordsworth say that the pleasure of seeing expressive, hand-drawn characters could produce

In Crippled America: How to make America great again (2015), Donald J. Trump writes, “The most important lesson is this—Stand behind your word, and make sure your word stands up'” His next paragraph begins, “I don't make promises I can't keep.” Trump seems to align his word with his promises here, but he immediately follows “I don't make promises I can't keep” with “I don't make threats without following through. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking you can bully me. My business partners and employees know that my word is as good as any contract—and that better go for the other side's word as well” (138). The “word” that “stands up” and “behind” which Trump stands is a weapon of defense against bullying. It is a threat by “me” (Trump) against “you” should your word turn out not to be, like Trump's word, “as good as any contract.” Even if Trump does not explicitly invoke the slang usage of “contract” (i.e., hiring an assassin to kill someone), he “follow[s] through” on his threats against “the other side,” whose word had “better” be as good as his.

Disabled women in literature seldom have erotic lives. Think of poor, crippled laura wingfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, waiting passively alongside her anxious mother to be taken up by a man. Or consider Gertie McDowell in James Joyce's Ulysses, the object of Leopold Bloom's voyeuristic fantasies, limping along, herself sexually blank. Even Eva Peace, the one-legged crone goddess in Toni Morrison's Sula, is done with sex. There is something at least untoward and at most perverse about representing disabled women as erotic. In The Sexual Politics of Disability, the sociologist Tom Shakespeare and his coauthors detail a long history of disability as a sexual disqualifier or as an occasion for perversity for both men and women in narrative representation.

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH OF 1903, SUN BAOXUAN—A SCHOLAR-OFFICIAL IN LATE QING DYNASTY CHINA—documented in his diary that he had acquired a copy of the periodical 新小說 (Xin xiaoshuo; “he New Novel”), founded by Liang Qichao in 1902 to propagate translated fiction and new Chinese fiction. Immediately drawn to the stories and novels it carried, Sun soon concluded that Western fiction had the unique strength of imparting knowledge and expanding rational capacity: 「觀西人政治 小說，可以悟政治原理；觀科學小說，可以通種種格物原理；觀包 探小說，可以覘西國人情土俗及其居心之險詐詭變，有非我國所 能及者」 (“Political novels teach us principles of politics; scientific novels teach us theories of things; detective novels show us Western customs and treachery, which often surpass ours”; 690). Immersed in a culture where vernacular novels had been suppressed by official censorship and prejudice among the elites, Sun ardently embraced translated fiction. By contrast, vernacular Chinese novels, with few exceptions, seemed to him routinely 「陳腐」 (“decadent”), providing no more than 「排遣」 (“diversion and entertainment”; 677, 690) The perceived rationality of Western fiction gave him a sudden license to seriously engage with a genre that the literary culture in China continued to exclude well into the twentieth century. Sun's encounter with foreign fiction marked the early stage of a somewhat bumpy adventure. In later sections of the diary, Sun documents reading sentimental strains of translated fiction and the more ambiguous responses they incited in him.

In Jennifer Egan's manhattan beach, certain aspects of american culture—farmland in brooklyn, the ziegfeld follies, Jean Harlow's curls, the “old salts” who sailed in wooden ships (259)—are recalled at the moment of their vanishing. These and other disappearances provide evidence that, in the novel, historical change is treated as an epic trope. At the same time, disappearances mark swerves in an individual character's destiny as novelistic events. In its blending of history with individuals' stories, Manhattan Beach can be called an epic novel, along the lines of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Don DeLillo's Libra. Whereas novels particularize individual experience in an evolving present, epics position individual destinies in a fixed, complete history. Novels differ from epics in the distance that they take from their respective subjects, though the two genres demonstrate “all-inclusiveness” and “expansiveness” (Merchant 71, 93). The epic novel mobilizes at the point where national ambitions overlay personal stories. hrough the trope of disappearance, Manhattan Beach correlates the epic ambition to show historical transformation with the novelistic ambition to represent personal renewal. Disappearances may be escapes, but they also forecast characters' fresh starts and future convergences.

The facts of history have long been thought of as Contingent:Not determined by unchanging laws of nature or by divine will but instead produced by human beings, who are limited by circumstances yet capable of agency. The belief in the contingency of historical facts is an invitation to speculate about what might have happened instead, and the thought experiments we call counterfactual history accept that invitation by imagining alternative historical events. Before the scientific revolution, contingency was thought to be a characteristic of facts in general: the word fact was used mainly to describe the time-bound and particular deeds of humankind as opposed to the eternal and general truths of nature. The scientific revolution marked the beginning of a long process in which modern thinkers gradually developed the concept of the fact to mean any observable, freestanding, particular occurrence in history or nature. The idea that there were natural, as well as historical, facts became acceptable, whereas earlier it would have seemed self-contradictory (Shapiro).

Searching for the phrase “appreciation of literature” in Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase reached its peak usage in English publications between 1936 and 1937 and then nosedived after those years. It's interesting to speculate about what came together at that time. In 1937, DC Thomson published the first issue of The Dandy, one of the best selling comics in the history of British pop culture and the third-longest-running comics in the world; Daffy Duck debuted in the animated short Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series; and Detective Comics commenced publication. A year later, Superman went public. But 1937 also was the year that John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt University for Kenyon College and published “Criticism, Inc.” in The Virginia Quarterly Review. The target of Ransom's ire is “moralist” historical criticism, into which camp he puts actual morality purveyors, the new humanists and the new leftists (those purveyors of what we often now call symptomatic readings), and “personal registrations” or unfettered appreciation (597). While of course correlation is not causation, 1937 might mark an important fork in the subterranean lines in the United States, where the two trains of comics fandom and literary criticism begin to go in different directions, on trajectories that take them farther apart during and after World War II: comics toward the aesthetics of appreciation, and criticism to increasingly professionalized literary analysis. Critics today seem to be returning to this junction, asking how comics and criticism might reunite. Perhaps that convergence is happening now, through approaches variously known as surface reading (Best and Marcus), reparative reading (Sedgwick), close reading, postcritique (Felski, Limits), thin description (Love), or redescription (Latour)—each of which encourages professionalized critical appraisal without taking rolling stock into dead-end symptomatic tunnels. Perhaps it is through some other approach, one that may look like Hillary Chute's Why Comics?