Off to Portland

I am flying today to Portland, OR (not ME), where tomorrow, at Reed College, I will give a talk concerning my book project on literature and high-end inequality, as described here.

The book, entitled Dangerous Grandiosity: Literary Perspectives on High-End Inequality Through the First Gilded Age, should be appearing in print and as an e-book, perhaps as soon as the first half of 2020. The publisher is Anthem Press, and I have found them both pleasant and professional to work with. All my prior books were published by university presses, or in one case a D.C. think tank press. But (if I may say so) the book's originality, refusal to stay within a single academic silo, and lack of any precedent for exactly this sort of thing, seems to have made some of the usual suspects among editor types uneasy and uncertain about how to proceed, even when they recognized (as several did) the book's merit and commercial promise.

I will link here to the slides for my talk at Reed once I am back in NYC next week.