The 2025 Fales Lecture by Kinohi Nishikawa

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Join NYU Special Collections for this year’s Fales Lecture to explore a pivotal yet often overlooked chapter in African American literary history. Kinohi Nishikawa, Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University, will examine how the rise of the mass-market paperback shaped the circulation, reception, and legacy of major Black writers during the civil rights era.

In the late 1940s, New American Library broke off from Britain’s Penguin operation in New York City to become a leading publisher of what was then a new media format: the mass-market paperback. Produced in dimensions of 4¼” x 7”, the mass-market paperback democratized America’s literary culture by making classic and contemporary works available in a cheap and handy format. While a host of paperback competitors quickly sprung up in the industry, New American Library stood out for reprinting books by nearly every major African American writer of the time: Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and others. Many of these works tackled pressing social problems of the era, and New American Library played a significant role in disseminating these narratives widely through their paperback editions. Critics and scholars have long discussed the social, aesthetic, and political disagreements that forged this generation of writers. But few have pointed out their striking commonality: that New American Library kept their books in print through the civil rights era, and that it designed and marketed them as of a piece. This talk draws on Fales Library and Special Collections’ New American Library archive to recount this chapter in African American literary history and to theorize how media format at once conditions and constrains Black writers’ horizon of reception.

About the Speaker

Kinohi Nishikawa is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. He teaches and conducts research in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature and popular culture, using methods drawn from bibliography, periodical studies, and the history of the book. Nishikawa is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (Chicago, 2018), as well as articles and book chapters on African American print and publishing history. His monograph-in-progress is Black Paratext, a study of book design and African American literature from the rise of the modern paperback to the contemporary book arts scene.

The Fales Lecture is co-sponsored annually by NYU Special Collections and the Department of English. Established and sustained by a gift from Haliburton Fales, 2nd (1919-2015), the lecture explores historical, current, and emerging themes in English and American literature.

To learn more about The Fales Library of English and American Literature please visit our website.

As a part of NYU's commitment to global inclusion, our events and initiatives are open to all backgrounds and identities. This event is open to any interested individual, regardless of identity or background.