The eponymous protagonist of Gwendolyn Brooks’s under-examined 1953 novel Maud Martha becomes acutely attuned to the multisensory dimensions of quotidian experience. As she navigates the intersecting forces of race, gender, class, and color in the public sphere, she begins to conceive of herself as a perceiving subject rather than solely as a perceived object in the private sphere. Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, I theorize synesthetic stillness as an aesthetic strategy that reveals aspects of Black interiority through its exploration of overlapping and intermingling perceptual faculties. In deploying synesthetic stillness, Brooks not only counters dehumanizing sensory stereotypes, but traces a mode of Black resistance that privileges internal sensation rather than external expression.

Turle’s interest is ‘translator studies’ at a time when translators seek recognition, claim they are ‘authors’, when biographies of translators seem to surface as a proof that they are flesh and blood, facing their programmed disappearance due to the advent of translation apps. As a self-avowed ‘gallicizing patchworker’ and author of around 200 translations spanning forty years, he recounts his typical day, describing the translator’s everyday aches, doubts, failures, and their possible effects on his work and role in the editorial and publishing process. In particular he reflects on globish; India as the republic of multilingualism; somnolence as a time of maturation, research, and sometimes unexpected revelation; and a bottle of South African wine given to him by Andre Brink on their last meeting.

Don DeLillo is a profoundly religious writer. He is a religious writer because of the questions he asks rather than the answers he finds. He is a religious writer because of how he depicts characters wrestling with moral problems, not because of how those characters emerge victorious from such battles. He is a religious writer because his work is persistently drawn to sacred encounters with the numinous, immanent, and transcendent, even though such moments may prove illusory and are always transient. This chapter traces the evolution of critical perspectives on DeLillo as a religious writer, beginning with postmodern critiques of his metaphysical preoccupations, to defenses of DeLillo’s redemptive moral vision, through post-secular reassessments of his enduring reverence for quotidian mystery. The chapter then examines specific manifestations of spirituality in several DeLillo works, particularly White Noise, Libra, and Underworld. DeLillo raises religious questions and offers responses ranging from parodic skepticism to partial faith. He features religious meditations which glow with quotidian mystery yet remain enveloped by an impenetrable cloud of unknowing.