A. C. Spearing, English professor, translator. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works. Penguin Classics.

Frederick M. Hess, assistant professor of education. Revolution at the Margins: The Impact of Competition on Urban School Systems. Brookings Institution.

Susan McKinnon, associate professor of anthropology, and Sarah Franklin, Lancaster University, England, co-editors. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Duke University Press.

Sidney M. Milkis, professor of government and foreign affairs, and Jerome M. Mileur, professor of political science, University of Mass.-Amherst, editors. The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism. University of Massachusetts Press.

Joseph E. Davis, program director, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, editor. Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements. SUNY Press.

Stephen F. Knott, assistant professor and research fellow, Miller Center of Public Affairs. Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth. University Press of Kansas.

Olivier Zunz, Commonwealth Professor of History, Leonard Schoppa, associate professor of politics, Nobuhiro Hiwatari, political science professor, University of Tokyo, editors. Social Contracts Under Stress: The Middle Classes of America, Europe and Japan at the Turn of the Century. Russell Sage.

Charles Wright, Souder Family Professor of English. A Short History of the Shadow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Stephen Cushman, professor of English. Cussing Lesson. Louisiana State University Press.

Gregory Orr, professor of English. The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems. Copper Canyon Press.

Gregory Hays, assistant professor of classics. Translation of Marcus Aurelius’ The Meditations. Modern Library.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they do not know how to tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

— from Book II

John Casey, Henry Hoyns Professor of English. Translation of Alessandro Boffa’s You’re an Animal, Viskovitz. Knopf.

Peter Sheras, professor in the Curry Programs in Clinical and School Psychology, with Sherill Tippins, author. Your Child: Bully or Victim? Understanding and Ending Schoolyard Tyranny. Simon and Schuster.

This book is intended as a hands-on, practical guide for the parents of the nearly one in three schoolchildren affected by bullying. The authors cover such topics as knowing when it’s time to step in and talk to other adults to protect your child and how to refute common (and dangerous) myths, such as “boys will be boys” and “just ignore them and they’ll go away.” They also describe successful school programs that combat bullying.

Jerome J. McGann, John Stewart Bryan University Professor. The Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. Oxford University Press.

David Kovacs, professor of classics, editor and translator. Helen, Phoenician Women, Orestes, by Euripides. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press.

Alon Confino, associate professor of history, and Peter Fritzsche, professor of history, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture. University of Illinois Press.