byYou’d think I would have learned long ago to associate Northwestern University Press with daring, off-the-beaten-path publications that are often right up my alley, considering that they put out translations of Veltman’s Selected Stories (translated by James J. Gebhard, 1988) and Andrei Bely’s Kotik Letaev (translated by Gerald J. Janecek, 1999; I wrote about the novel here). Not for them the umpteenth version of Anna Karenina or yet another Reader’s Companion to Dostoevsky! I have just finished the first of these, Benjamin Paloff’s brand-new Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning, and I’m here to tell you about it. Paloff’s book is very short (93 pages of text and 27 pages of endnotes) and focused on a single aspect of Bakhtin’s thought, his concept of “adventure” as it applies to both life and literature. Well done, NUP!