Monday, November 13, 2023

Nine retellings & reinventions of Noah’s Ark

Jeffrey J. Cohen is Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University. He is author or editor of several books including Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (winner of the René Wellek Prize of the ACLA) as well as Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking and Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire.

Julian Yates is H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English and Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. He is author or editor of several books, including Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (finalist for the MLA Best First Book Prize) and Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (winner of the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize of the SLSA).

Their new book is Noah's Arkive.

At Lit Hub they tagged nine "books about arks and the price of being saved during ecological catastrophe," including:
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston is an account of deluge as observed at ground level, by a woman who was never invited into any ark of safety and yet found a way to create repeated refuge. The storm at its center drowns many and transports others to a resurfaced Jim Crow America where those with white skin enjoy the safety of bridges and those with black skin are forced to bury the undifferentiated dead. This is not a story of uplift, nor a story of trauma, but a narrative delivered by Janie on a comfortable porch to her friend Pheoby about making one’s way through a world where security never lasts long.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is among Rebecca Kelley's nine top literary classics for the contemporary crime reader, Henry Adam Svec's seven novels by or about folk musicians, Micheline Aharonian Marcom's eight epic quest stories, Michael Zapata's ten books that were almost lost to history, Yann Martel's five favorite books, and Benjamin Obler's top ten fictional coffee scenes in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue