DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN ’86
This Is Where the Serpent Lives
Knopf
This first novel by Mueenuddin—whose short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist—evokes Pakistan’s contemporary yet feudal countryside. Unforgettable characters on an old farm struggle to survive under the tight grip of caste and class divisions. The four linked stories, layered across several decades, are tied together by an orphan and chauffeur whom The New York Times calls “a live wire.” Publishers Weekly calls it “a masterpiece.”
ROBERT E. BONNER ’68a
The First Pariah State: How the Proslavery Confederacy Menaced the World
Princeton University Press
The Dartmouth professor of history and biography explores the Confederacy’s failed attempt to gain international recognition and how a transatlantic publicity campaign framed the South’s rebellion as immoral and a global threat. He details how the Union and allies used the Confederacy’s proslavery stance and actions, such as disrupting maritime commerce, to create a “pariah state” through international law and public opinion.
DEVON JERSILD ’80
Luminous Bodies: A Novel of Marie Curie
Paul Dry Books
The tumultuous life of Nobel Prize-winning chemist Marie Curie—from girlhood in Poland, marriage, and death of her husband to her affair with a fellow scientist and subsequent shunning from the scientific community—come vividly to life in this debut novel, which also celebrates Curie’s exhilaration at her scientific discoveries.
NANCY BERNHARD ’84
The Double Standard Sporting House
She Writes Press
Fascinated by how survivors of political and sexual violence heal through storytelling, Bernhard captures the hypocrisies and double standards faced by women of New York City in 1868, including women who worked in a high-end brothel.
CURTIS DOZIER ’00
The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate
Yale University Press
Chair of Vassar’s Greek and Roman studies department and host of The Mirror of Antiquity podcast, Dozier examines how some on the right claim the ancient world as historical precedent for violent politics. One critic calls it “the best volume written on the modern far-right’s toxic obsession with our past.”
