Wayne State University Press imprint: 405 books

“Magic culture is certainly fascinating. But what is it? What, in fact, are magic writings, magic artifacts?” Originally published in Hebrew in 2010, Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah is a comprehensive study of early Jewish magic focusing on three major topics: Jewish magic inventiveness,...

The goals and challenges that face the people of Israel are vividly illustrated by the country’s many folk stories. Here Haya Bar-Itzhak presents these tales—gathered from the early settlers of the kibbutz, from immigrants who arrived in Israel after independence, and from ethnic groups—to create...

For many people the term “silent comedy” conjures up images of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Buster Keaton’s Stoneface, or Harold Lloyd hanging precariously from the side of a skyscraper. Even people who have never seen a silent film can recognize these comedians at a glance. But what about...

Lying in the River’s Dark Bed: The Confluence of the Deadman and the Mad Angler by Michael Delp is a collection of fifty-six poems that brings together two characters Delp has been perfecting for years: Deadman and the Mad Angler. The Deadman, a spirit that constantly shifts, is one part troublemaker,...

In 1903, a preacher named Benjamin Purnell and five followers founded a colony called the House of David in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where they prepared for eternal life by creating a heaven on earth. Housed in rambling mansions and surrounded by lush orchards and vineyards, the colony added a thousand...

A valuable contribution to African American literary and theatrical scholarship, this volume is a compilation of sixteen plays written during the Harlem Renaissance, brought together for the first time and set in a historical context.

Sharp Blue Search of Flame is an exploration in poetry of a complex network of nuanced journeys into a variety of worlds. The searingly rich poems reflect Zilka Joseph’s own history of living in Eastern and Western cultures, as well as the influences of her Jewish Indian roots. Joseph’s free verse...

The second full-length collection from award-winning poet Chris Dombrowski, Earth Again transports readers to an imaginative world where identity is explored and expanded. With a mixture of long poems and shorter pieces, Dombrowski probes birth, death, sex, memory, and our blessed but treacherous engagement...

The sheer volume of responses to the first issue of Fairy Tale Review shows that fairy tales continue to be one of the most viable art forms. In fairy tales, all things are interdependent, mysteriously and insanely entwined. They contain a deeply ecological world. The Green Issue is devoted to new fairy...

The Aquamarine Issue is the fifth anniversary issue of Fairy Tale Review, and is appropriately its most oceanic, its most aesthetically diverse, issue to date. Despite this diversity the fairy tale pulse or “feel” is present in each piece in The Aquamarine Issue. What also contains this issue and...

Ochre is the color of our earliest stories. It is the color we chose when we wanted to make paintings on the walls of caves, in places that never did learn the name of sunlight. By the grace of small fires we etched in ochre; we coughed at the smoke in a confined area but also the absurdity of things...

The Blue Issue is the inaugural issue of Fairy Tale Review. Swiss scholar Max Luthi wrote about fairy tales as literary examples of abstract art. The strange quality that Luthi identifies as “firm form” is sparse, flat and depthless as it is wild, weightless and bright. The writing selected for the...

This issue is themed around yellow: the color of my skin, my namesake, the color used to describe four billion plus Asians, and this doesn’t even account for the diasporic population. Yellow, the color of diseased skin and diseased people. Yellow, the color of aging. All these denigrations contained...

When we speak of grey as a location, placing a thing into a grey area, the color represents territory where the definite becomes lost. Grey lets us know that the truth is not always clear; even the most well-known paths can turn strange when a low grey cloud of fog rolls in. Grey is an act of subtraction,...