Author Description

This issue includes a set of scholarly and literary book reviews from Editor Anna Faktorovich. These reviews consider modern and ancient social problems, such as the divergent representations of the world in Pliny’s ancient geography of a fragment that he believed represented the entire world, in contrast with other maps that show our changing beliefs about the universe. There are also discussions of approaches to attribution decisions and the history of dramatic education in Britain as perceived through the lens of Faktorovich’s BRRAM series. And a visit to the unique qualities of modern Mid-Ulster English in Ireland, and on the hand of the dead Native American Atakapa vocabulary and grammar. P. E. Caquet’s Opium’s Orphans stands out as a potentially history-changing work, if it succeeds in reaching the public with its entirely upturning and densely-researched perspective on the lower-case “war on drugs”. There are also many negative reviews that critique how scholars and novelists have gone awry in their pursuit of publication. You will also find the third part of the series on Biblical Inerrancy from ordained minister Lesly Massey, as well as Kathleen Murphey’s essay on the gendered sexual cliché repeated in Maas’ Throne of Glass series, and Susie Gharib’s essay on surveillance in Bronte’s Professor and Villette. Nick Young has contributed a short story, and there are sets of poems from D. Seth Horton, Rob Luke, and Leo S. Tao.