Edited by Jada Ach and Gary Reger – Contributions by Jada Ach; Cordelia Barrera; Ron Broglio; Jennifer Dawes; Paul Formisano; Quinn Grover; Amy T. Hamilton; Zachary R. Hernandez; Tom Lynch; Kyoko Matsunaga; Celina Osuna; Gary Reger and Holly Jean Richard

In literary and cinematic representations, deserts often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offers readings of literature set in the American Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. This book explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art, and traces the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, prompting us to reconsider new, provocative modes of human/nonhuman engagement in arid ecogeographies.