NEW BOOKS
“Achy Affects: Crisis and Compositions of Selfhood,” by CE Mackenzie, publicity manager for the Humanities Center (2025, University of Pittsburgh Press)
CE Mackenzie’s “Achy Affects” is a trans-genre memoir that reimagines how we care for ourselves and our communities amidst relentless cultural, political and ecological upheavals. As we wrestle with burnout and exhaustion, capitalism demands we push harder, achieve more, and become better. Mackenzie offers a radical alternative: give up the goal and just feel.
Organized into four key emotions — wonder, shame, shyness, and nostalgia, with a final meditation on ache itself — “Achy Affects” confronts the simplistic idea that feelings are either “positive” or “negative.” This binary demands we rehabilitate the bad into the good, whether or not this rehab is ethical, or even desirable. Instead, by tuning into the feeling of ache, we can resist these pressures and reclaim our agency through compositions of our own making.
Mackenzie weaves their personal experiences of crisis — divorce and coming out, working in drug outreach, top surgery, new parenthood, and traversing the Alaskan tundra — into a nuanced exploration of ache. Through this lens, Mackenzie invites us to live alongside pain, not as something to be fixed, but as something to be understood without judgment or expectation.
“Ritual Energy and Social Life: The Importance of Mutuality” by Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, professor and senior research associate, respectively, in the Pitt Department of Anthropology (2025, Carolina Academic Press)
This book takes up a controversial theme in the analysis of practices of gift exchanges, including places in Highlands societies of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the theory of “costly signaling.” In this theory, costly signals are deployed in social relations as a means of establishing credentials or exercising power over others through the use of wealth or force. In this book, the authors argue that such signals gain their efficacy by expression in terms of ritualized forms that convey energy and culminate in elaborate events that are epideictic displays of wealth given between partners in different groups.
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Newly published works can be submitted through this link. Please keep the book descriptions short and accessible to a general audience.
Self-published works will not be accepted. The listings also are restricted to complete works, because individual chapters, articles, works of art and poems would be too numerous.
We’ll also be highlighting some books and book talks with connections to Pitt.
If you have any questions, please contact editor Susan Jones at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.