University of Denver Autumn 2024

RELEASES

Top Picks for the Season New books and music to cozy up with this autumn

By Janette Ballard

Juris Ex Machina John W. Maly (JD ’08)

Landing Uphill: Seven Years at San Luis Eleanor Herz Swent (MA ’47)

In a future where AI has replaced judge and juror, the justice system has become airtight in this sci-fi legal thriller. Yet somehow a well-intentioned young kleptomaniac named Rainville falls through the cracks and is wrongfully convicted of mass murder. He’s exiled to Wychwood Prison,

As a young bride in 1947, Eleanor Herz Swent travels to the San Luis mine in Mexico to join her husband Langan, known locally as “el niño Americano”—the American boy. Swent is both an insider and a newcomer. She has BA and MA degrees but has never ridden a mule,

seen a cockroach or cooked on a wood stove. She visits remote ranches where a priest comes to perform marriages and baptisms. She earns the confidence of women and teaches family planning. Seven years and three children later, she and Langan leave the Mexico they love and return to the United States with mixed feelings.

where the dead outnumber the living, and where the inmates are also the guards. He soon becomes a marked man. In a race against time, Rainville must escape and save not only himself, but the city that cast him out.

The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love Rachel Feder, associate professor, Department of English and Literary Arts What if we’ve been reading Jane Austen and romantic classics all wrong? Literature scholar Rachel Feder offers an eye-opening take on how contemporary love stories are actually terrifying. Mr. Darcy is the brooding, rude, standoffish romantic hero of “Pride and Prejudice” who eventually succumbs to Elizabeth Bennet’s charms. It’s a classic enemies-to-lovers plot, one that has influenced our cultural ideas about courtship. But what if this classic isn’t just a grand romance, but a horror novel about how scary love and marriage can be for women?

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UNIVERSITY OF DENVER MAGAZINE | AUTUMN 2024