With the box office successes of movies based on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, familiarity with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is growing. Unfortunately, scholarship dealing with Middle-Earth itself is comparatively rare in Tolkien studies, and students and scholars seeking greater insight have few resources. Similarly, although public concern for the environment is widespread and “going green” has never been trendier, ecocriticism is also an underserved area of literary studies. Arda Inhabited fills a gap in both areas by combining ecocritical and broader postmodern concerns with the growing appreciation for Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

Overshadowed by the so-called Good War that followed, the Great War—the First World War—captured the imagination of American writers both while the conflict was underway and during the decades that followed. As these authors struggled and, at times, fought with one another to define the war’s elusive meaning, they produced a body of short fiction astonishing in its range of styles and themes.

Some of the richest of these short stories, originally published in long-forgotten magazines and books, have remained lost—until now. The first collection of its kind, World War I in American Fiction brings together 26 stories to present a fuller picture of the war’s immediate impact on American culture and its subsequent, deeply contested memory. The volume features canonical authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Katherine Anne Porter, and Edith Wharton alongside writers who deserve a wider readership, such as Thomas Boyd, Kay Boyle, Claude McKay, and Laurence Stallings. The stories highlight the lingering effects of the war on veterans, women, and African Americans, and they take the reader from the contested skies over the Western Front to the influenza-ravaged American home front. An extensive introduction places the stories in their historical and literary context.

Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant examines Donaldson’s first three novels in an attempt to define their place in the fantasy canon. The book begins with an extensive introduction to the fantasy genre in which W.A. Senior eloquently defends fantasy against charges of being mere escapism, or simply juvenile, and not warranting serious critical considerations.

Herman Melville’s literary reputation is based chiefly on his fiction, especially Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. Yet he was a gifted poet, as evidenced by his collection of Civil War poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), and by his epic-length poem, Clarel (1876), a symbolic rendering of his pilgrimage of 1856–57 to the Holy Land, as well as the two small volumes of poems he published before his death in 1891.

Ernest Hemingway’s early adulthood (1917–1929) was marked by his work as a journalist, wartime service, marriage, conflicts with parents, expatriation, artistic struggle, and spectacular success. In War + Ink, veteran and emerging Hemingway scholars, alongside experts in related fields, present pathbreaking research that provides important insights into this period of Hemingway’s life.

In Sacred Land, author Mark Buechsel shows that Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others, turned to two potential sources for grounding their region’s and nation’s life authentically: nature itself—particularly the super-abundant nature to be found in Midwestern states and the model provided by the traditional sacramental culture of medieval Europe. The result was a new sacramental vision of how life in the Midwest—and, by extension, life in modern America—might be lived differently. Buechsel demonstrates that each author painted his or her spiritual and cultural vision with different shades and nuances and looked to America’s future with varying degrees of optimism.

This work brings together a world-class group of literary and theological scholars and Lewis specialists that includes Paul S. Fiddes, Monika B. Hilder, Sanford Schwartz, Michael Travers, and Michael Ward. The collection is enhanced by Walter Hooper’s reminiscences of his conversations with Lewis about Perelandra and the possible provenance of the stories in Lewis’s imagination.

In Pat Frank’s 1959 novel Alas, Babylon, the character Helen says of her children: “All their lives, ever since they’ve known anything, they’ve lived under the shadow of war—atomic war. For them the abnormal has become normal.” The threat of nuclear annihilation was a constant source of dread during the Cold War, and in Under the Shadow, author David Seed examines how authors and filmmakers made repeated efforts in their work to imagine the unimaginable.

In C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages, medievalist Robert Boenig explores Lewis’s personal and professional engagement with medieval literature and culture and argues convincingly that medieval modes of creativity had a profound impact on Lewis’s imaginative fiction.

The New Ray Bradbury Review is designed principally to study the impact of Bradbury’s writings on American culture and is the chief publication of The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies—the archive of Bradbury’s writings located at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Like its pioneering predecessor, the one- volume review published in 1952 by William F. Nolan, The New Ray Bradbury Review contains articles and reviews about Bradbury but has a much broader scope, including a thematic focus for each issue. While Bradbury’s effect on the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction is still being assessed, there is no doubt about his impact, and to judge from the testimony of his admirers, many of them now professional writers themselves, it is clear that he has affected the lives of five generations of readers.