Christopher Hager: 4 books

For men in the Union and Confederate armies and their families at home, letter writing was the sole means to communicate. Taking pen to paper was a new and daunting task, but Christopher Hager shows how ordinary people made writing their own, and how they in turn transformed the culture of letters into a popular, democratic mode of communication.

Consigned to illiteracy, American slaves left little record of their thoughts and feelings—or so we have believed. But a few learned to use pen and paper to make sense of their experiences, despite prohibitions. These authors’ perspectives rewrite the history of emancipation and force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom.

Addressing texts produced by writers who lived through the Civil War and wrote about it before the end of Reconstruction, this collection explores the literary cultures of that unsettled moment when memory of the war had yet to be overwritten by later impulses of reunion, reconciliation, or Lost Cause...

Here at Jersey Devil Press, there are three things we look for in a story: strangeness, beauty, and poop jokes. And while this collection is admittedly a little shy on scatological humor, the 18 works collected here are easily the strangest and most beautiful things we’ve ever published. The...