Textbooks
Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Discussion Date: November 17
Ghostroots
by 'Pemi Aguda
ON CAMPUS: November 12, 2025
In this beguiling collection of twelve imaginative stories set in Lagos, Nigeria, 'Pemi Aguda dramatizes the tension between our yearning to be individuals and the ways we are haunted by what came before.
In "Manifest," a woman sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter's face. Shortly after, the daughter is overtaken by wicked and destructive impulses. In "Breastmilk," a wife forgives her husband for his infidelity. Months later, when she is unable to produce milk for her newborn, she blames herself for failing to uphold her mother's feminist values and doubts her fitness for motherhood. In "Things Boys Do," a trio of fathers finds something unnatural and unnerving about their infant sons. As their lives rapidly fall to pieces, they begin to fear that their sons are the cause of their troubles. And in "24, Alhaji Williams Street," a teenage boy lives in the shadow of a mysterious disease that's killing the boys on his street.
These and other stories in Ghostroots map emotional and physical worlds that lay bare the forces of family, myth, tradition, gender, and modernity in Nigerian society. Powered by a deep empathy and glinting with humor, they announce a major new literary talent.
'Kiss' and the Medicine of Love
by Tommaso Ghezzani
Visiting Assistant Professor of Transnational Italian Studies
This is a revised critical edition of philosopher and scientist, Francesco Patrizi's manuscript, Il Delfino, overo del bacio (c.1555), with an English translation and commentary. Il Delfino, or 'The Kiss' survives in a single manuscript, compiled by an assistant and interspersed with autograph corrections by Patrizi himself. The only modern critical edition of the text, edited by Danilo Aguzzi Barbagli (1975), is known to contain many errors that prevent a correct understanding of the work. This book therefore fills this historiographical gap and at the same time provides a reliable text for further translations of Patrizi's work into other languages.








