Literary studies: fiction Books
Columbia University Press Gore Vidal Writer Against the Grain
Book SynopsisThis collection of critical essays attempts to construct a comprehensive portrait of Vidal's writings and to determine why his work has been underestimated. It includes an interview with Vidal in which he discusses his career and his troubled relationship with literary reviewers.Table of ContentsGore Vidal: A Chronology of His Works1. Jay Parini--Gore Vidal: The Writer and His Critics 2. Italo Calvino--Imagining Vidal 3. David Price--Williwaw: Gore Vidal's First Novel 4. Claude J. Summers--The City and the Pillar as Gay Fiction 5. Bernard F. Dick--Gore Vidal: The Entertainer 6. Robert F. Kiernan--The Vidalian Manner: The Judgement of Paris, Two Sisters, Kalki 7. Alan Cheuse--A Note on Vidal's Messiah 8. Heather Neilson--The Fiction of History in Gore Vidal's Messiah 9. Ray Lewis White--Vidal as Playwright: In Gentlest Heresy 10. William H. Pritchard--Vidal's Satiric Voices 11. Samuel F. Pickering--Living Appropriately: Vidal and the Essay 12. Robert Boyers--On Gore Vidal: Wit and the Work of Criticism 13. Thomas M. Disch--Vidal as Essayist: The Man Who Has Everything 14. Stephen Spender--Gore Vidal: Private Eye 15. Catharine R. Stimpson--My O My O Myra 16. James Tatum--The Romanitas of Gore Vidal 17. Harold Bloom--The Central Man: On Gore Vidal's Lincoln 18. Richard Poirier--Vidal's Empire 19. Louis Auchincloss--Babylon Revisited 20. Donald E. Pease--America and the Vidal Chronicles 21. Jay Parini--An Interview with Gore VidalNotes Selected Bibliography Contributors Index
£90.00
Columbia University Press The Columbia History of the American Novel
Book SynopsisThe first history of America's major literary form offers new views of our literary history and a sophisticated examination of areas of fiction that have only recently begun to receive attention.
£84.75
Columbia University Press Criminal Conversations
Book SynopsisWhat kinds of stories win cases, and why? Drawing on trial transcripts and appellate court opinions in civil adultery cases, and on literary examples from Mark Twain, E.D.E.N Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others, Laura Korobkin sheds new light on the intersections of gender, genre, law and story.Trade ReviewRecommended... for its impressive clarity, incisive analysis, mastery of sources, and timeliness. -- E. Nettels, College of William and Mary Choice In the course of this interesting mix of methodologies and historical time periods, Korobkin makes fascinating suggestions about the impacts of women's sentimental (domestic) fiction on popular and legal rhetoric of the time. College EnglishTable of ContentsIntroduction and Historical Foundation Prologue: Telling Stories in the Courtroom Criminal Conversation and the Conversational Process of the Law The Transformative Magic of Legal Fictions: The Suppression of Sex in Early English Civil Adultery Cases Theodore Tilton v. Henry Ward Beecher: Criminal Conversation, 1875 Prologue: Crisis of Confidence in the Courtroom The Maintenance of Mutual Confidence: Sentimental Strategies at the Beecher-Tilton Trial Silent Woman, Speaking Fiction: The "ministry of Catherine Gaunt" at the Beecher-Tilton Trial Female-Plaintiff Criminal Conversation Cases: Rewriting the Law's Story of Marriage Prologue: Four Cases Rethinking the Law's Story of Marriage: The Bonds of Sentiment Consequences of Change: The Sexually Passive Husband and the Erotically Autonomous Wife
£25.20
Columbia University Press HardBoiled Sentimentality
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThis is an erudite, illuminating and highly readable study Journal of American Studies Cassuto has profitably plowed new ground in this study. It's certain to become an essential document for undersatnding crime fiction's inner workings. African American ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: Sentimentality, Sympathy, Serial Killers (Dashiell Hammett, Charles Willeford, and others) Part I. Revising the Roots of the Hard-Boiled Tradition: The 1920s 1. Crime and Sympathy (Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway) 2. Hammett and the Hard-Boiled Sentimental Part II. Reading the Hard-Boiled Sentimental: From the Thirties to the Fifties 3. Depression Domesticity (James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler. Also Horace McCoy, Damon Runyon, Erskine Caldwell) 4. The Sentimental Action Hero in Cold War Crime Stories (Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, William P. McGivern, Wade Miller, John Evans [aka Howard Browne]. Also Cornell Woolrich, Mickey Spillane, Gil Brewer) 5. Sentimental Perversion: The Canonized Nonconformists of the Fifties (Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith) Part III: Crime Fiction at the Sentimental Apocalypse: The Rise of the Hard-Boiled Domestic Detective and the Serial Killer from the Sixties to the Present 6. The Homely Heart of the Hard-Boiled: Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald (Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Robert Bloch) 7. Hard-Boiled Therapists, Hard-Boiled Women, and a Vigilante (Thomas Harris, Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, and others) 8. Shades of Professional Sympathy: Race, Crime, Detection (Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, William P. McGivern, Dennis Lehane, and others) 9. The Rise of the Serial Killer (Robert Finnegan, Truman Capote, Thomas Harris. Also Robert Bloch, John D. MacDonald, Dean Koontz, Gil Brewer, Alice Sebold, and others) Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press Writing the Republic
Book SynopsisFocusing on the works of Herman Melville, Gore Vidal, Russell Banks, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Roth, the author scrutinizes a number of critical studies and makes a cogent case for a more interdisciplinary approach to the American political novel that focuses less on the politics of representation and more on the representation of politics.Trade Review[A] clear, often brilliant study... Recommended CHOICETable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction. Liberalism and the Problem of Tradition in American Literature Part 1. The Nineteenth-Century Context 1. Elusive Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson and the Foundations of American Politics in Gore Vidal's Burr 2. "Our Divine Equality": Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter and the Redemptive Liberalism of the Lincoln Republic Part 2. The Twentieth-Century Context 3. Ideas in Modulation: Marxism and Liberal Revaluation in Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey 4. Liberalism Betrayed: Neoconservatism and the Postwar American Left in Philip Roth's American Trilogy Conclusion. Writing the Republic: Moby Dick and the Form of American Political Fiction Notes Bibliography Index
£52.70
Columbia University Press Virginia Woolf
Book SynopsisWinner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt award for biography, this remarkable portrait sheds new light on Virginia Woolf’s relationships with her family and friends and how they shaped her work. Forrester weaves a colorful, intense drama that forces readers to rethink their understanding of Woolf, her writing, and her world.Trade ReviewVirginia Woolf was the object of considerable mystery. Viviane Forrester not only tells us about this mystery but clarifies it. At the beginning, the biographer announces that she will shatter equivocal and false portraits. She does precisely that. The result marks a decisive break in the knowledge we thought we had of this English writer. Forrester crosses the threshold of truth. Without reproving those who wrote before her, knowing what was said and how, Forrester provides a staggering analysis of the youth, marriage, work, and world of Woolf. She tracks, close up, the internal defense mechanisms and means of protection that veil the truth. In a style as poetic as the novelist/poetess deserves, Forrester throws light on the life and the death, Woolf's two tragedies, and reveals the price of her scintillating work. -- Alice Ferney Le Figaro Over the years, Viviane Forrester has read and annotated all the journals of Woolf, the five volumes of her correspondence, including, among other things, the letters from her father, Leslie Stephen, and those from her sister, Vanessa Bell, whom Virginia idolized and envied her entire life. Such a considerable quantity of fragments of a vast, complex mosaic, assembled here by the biographer, provides a new vision of Woolf. We discover her close up, fleeing, uncatchable, by turn fragile, ferocious, resplendent, or perverse... In a lively and limpid style, Forrester attacks first the myths that have calcified around Woolf. First among them, that of her 'madness.' Under the sharp pen of Forrester, therefore, Virginia is not mad, nor is she a martyr. -- Lila Azam Zanganeh LE MONDE An engrossing, intimate, and deeply empathetic portrayal of a brilliant and enigmatic woman. Kirkus Reviews Nimbly moving from one fragmentary impression to another, Forrester challenges the idea (proposed by Woolf's nephew, Quentin Bell, in his biography of her) that Woolf was afflicted with mental illness and suicidal impulses when she was a teenager. Instead, Forrester offers the portrait of a woman who strove to strip away any illusions and capture the rhythms of reality in her writings. Publishers Weekly Intriguing... Illuminating... Readers interested in Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury circle, and early twentieth-century modernist writers will require this biography. Library Journal [A] brilliant, provocative biography. -- Jocelyn McClurg USA Today [Virginia Woolf: A Portrait] offers unexpected insights and useful challenges to settled ideas about Woolf, her friendships, her marriage, and her imagination. -- Anne Fernald Open Letters Monthly A provocative portrait, richly woven with Woolf's distinctive voice and Forrester's faithful echo. -- Maureen McCarthy Star TribuneTable of ContentsPart 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Abbreviations Notes Works Cited Index
£69.26
Columbia University Press In the Company of Strangers
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewMcCrea's work, original, well considered and detailed, offers fresh insight into vital, complex texts and brings queer theory usefully into contemporary debate when reconsidering such influential works. -- Eibhear Walshe Irish Times Elegant... I recommend In the Company of Strangers both for its clarity, readability, and sophistication and for bringing to bear on Victorian texts important new insights from the burgeoning field of queer narratology. Victorian Studies In the company of Strangers is an excellent book... McCrea's study is a must-read for those interested in narratology, Victorian and modernist prose fiction, queer theory, and the works of the novelists, including Joyce, under consideration, which are treated with sensitivity and intelligence. James Joyce QuarterlyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part I 1. Queer Expectations 2. Holmes at Home Part II Introduction 3. Family and Form in Ulysses 4. Proust's Farewell to the Family Notes Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press Stalking Nabokov
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA readable collection on one of the 20th century's greatest writers, this will be enjoyed by Nabokov fans and students of 20th century literature. Library Journal Boyd's graceful style and passionate advocacy achieves the goal of the best literary criticism: it compels us to pick up Nabokov and read, or read again, the work of a master. Publishers Weekly In Stalking Nabokov Boyd attempts something fairly ambitious: he takes the titanic Nabokov and seeks to revise him upwards. As Boyd sees it, he is not only the greatest novelist of the century; he is also a considerable poet, an important scientist, a controversially original translator, a fearless and liberating critic, a learned psychologist... Vera [Nabokov] soon came to value him and to trust him; and we should follow her lead... Professor Boyd, as the author of books on evolution and cognition, is well equipped to give us a real sense of Nabokov's scientific weight... The long and fervent essay in Stalking Nabokov [on the poem] "Pale Fire," compel us to reexamine the poem as an autonomous whole. And the exercise is epiphanic. "Pale Fire" glows with fresh pathos and vibrancy-and so does Pale Fire. For the first time we see the poem in all its innocence, and register the vandalism of Kinbote's desperate travesty. // So at last the true dimensions of Pale Fire are more clearly revealed to us... On the timbre of Nabokov's artistic spirit Boyd is fundamentally right-headed. -- Martin Amis Times Literary Supplement Advances a consistent and intriguing reading of [Nabokov's] work... a powerful corrective to a prevailing view of Nabokov. -- Larry Hardesty Boston Globe Essential for everyone interested in the Russian master. Booklist Boyd's deft analysis of the novels is superb... genuinely exhilarating... Brian Boyd is not only Nabokov's biographer but also his pre-eminent critic. This is a valuable and delightful collection of essays on one of the twentieth century's most significant novelists. -- Paul Morgan Australian Book Review There is plenty of sensible and revealing stuff here. New Yorker Absolutely fascinating... Uniquely compelling... This is Boyd at his best. -- Eric Naiman San Francisco Chronicle There is much here that will inform, enliven, and enlighten the work of one of the greatest novelists of his century. New York Times Book Review Required reading for serious students of Nabokov. Choice Boyd is always a pleasure to read...and this collection does not disappoint. -- Stephen H. Blackwell Slavic Review Ambitious... Fervent... Epiphanic. -- Martin Amis Times Literary Supplement Substantial... Impressive... Enlightening... Best of all, his enthusiasm for Nabokov's verbal pyrotechnics, for his comically deluded heroes pursuing elusive objects of desire, for the ability to depict life itself, joyously 'swarming with inexhaustible diversity and delight,' sends you back to read the books... of one of literature's great masters. -- David Eggleton The Listener Boyd's sophisticated use of texts and contexts, close readings informed by archival materials and decades of experience, and wonderful writing style mean that all Nabokov scholars and fans will enjoy. -- Jason Merrill The Russian Review Boyd is, without a doubt, an incredibly exacting and rigorous scholar - his tireless research and collection of a vast array of materials is something which coming generations of academics will continue to be grateful for. -- U.H. Dematagoda Slavonic and East European ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Nabokov: The Writer's Life and the Life Writer 1. A Centennial Toast 2. A Biographer's Life 3. Who Is "My Nabokov"? Nabokov's Manuscripts and Books 4. The Nabokov Biography and the Nabokov Archive 5. From the Nabokov Archive: Nabokov's Literary Legacy Nabokov's Metaphysics 6. Retrospects and Prospect/s 7. Nabokov's Afterlife Nabokov's Butterflies 8. Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera 9. Netting Nabokov: Review of Dieter E. Zimmer, A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths Nabokov as Psychologist 10. The Psychological Work of Fictional Play Nabokov and the Origins and Ends of Stories 11. Stacks of Stories, Stories of Stacks Nabokov as Writer 12. Nabokov's Humor 13. Nabokov as Storyteller 14. Nabokov's Transition from Russian to English: Repudiation or Evolution? Nabokov and Others 15. Nabokov, Pushkin, Shakespeare: Genius, Generosity, and Gratitude in The Gift and Pale Fire 16. Nabokov as Verse Translator: Introduction to Verses and Versions 17. Tolstoy and Nabokov 18. Nabokov and Machado de Assis Nabokov Works 19. Speak, Memory : The Life and the Art 20. Speak, Memory : Nabokov, Mother, and Lovers: The Weave of the Magic Carpet (1999) 21. Lolita : Scene and Unseen 22. Even Homais Nods: Nabokov's Fallibility; Or, How to Revise Lolita 23. Literature, Pattern, Lolita; Or, Art, Literature, Science 24. "Pale Fire": Poem and Pattern 25. Ada : The Bog and the Garden; Or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat: Sources and Places in Ada 26. A Book Burner Recants: The Original of Laura Notes Bibliography Index
£95.00
Columbia University Press Stalking Nabokov
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA readable collection on one of the 20th century's greatest writers, this will be enjoyed by Nabokov fans and students of 20th century literature. Library Journal Boyd's graceful style and passionate advocacy achieves the goal of the best literary criticism: it compels us to pick up Nabokov and read, or read again, the work of a master. Publishers Weekly In Stalking Nabokov Boyd attempts something fairly ambitious: he takes the titanic Nabokov and seeks to revise him upwards. As Boyd sees it, he is not only the greatest novelist of the century; he is also a considerable poet, an important scientist, a controversially original translator, a fearless and liberating critic, a learned psychologist... Vera [Nabokov] soon came to value him and to trust him; and we should follow her lead... Professor Boyd, as the author of books on evolution and cognition, is well equipped to give us a real sense of Nabokov's scientific weight... The long and fervent essay in Stalking Nabokov [on the poem] "Pale Fire," compel us to reexamine the poem as an autonomous whole. And the exercise is epiphanic. "Pale Fire" glows with fresh pathos and vibrancy-and so does Pale Fire. For the first time we see the poem in all its innocence, and register the vandalism of Kinbote's desperate travesty. // So at last the true dimensions of Pale Fire are more clearly revealed to us... On the timbre of Nabokov's artistic spirit Boyd is fundamentally right-headed. -- Martin Amis Times Literary Supplement Advances a consistent and intriguing reading of [Nabokov's] work... a powerful corrective to a prevailing view of Nabokov. -- Larry Hardesty Boston Globe Essential for everyone interested in the Russian master. Booklist Boyd's deft analysis of the novels is superb... genuinely exhilarating... Brian Boyd is not only Nabokov's biographer but also his pre-eminent critic. This is a valuable and delightful collection of essays on one of the twentieth century's most significant novelists. -- Paul Morgan Australian Book Review There is plenty of sensible and revealing stuff here. New Yorker Absolutely fascinating... Uniquely compelling... This is Boyd at his best. -- Eric Naiman San Francisco Chronicle There is much here that will inform, enliven, and enlighten the work of one of the greatest novelists of his century. New York Times Book Review Required reading for serious students of Nabokov. Choice Boyd is always a pleasure to read...and this collection does not disappoint. -- Stephen H. Blackwell Slavic Review Ambitious... Fervent... Epiphanic. -- Martin Amis Times Literary Supplement Substantial... Impressive... Enlightening... Best of all, his enthusiasm for Nabokov's verbal pyrotechnics, for his comically deluded heroes pursuing elusive objects of desire, for the ability to depict life itself, joyously 'swarming with inexhaustible diversity and delight,' sends you back to read the books... of one of literature's great masters. -- David Eggleton The Listener Boyd's sophisticated use of texts and contexts, close readings informed by archival materials and decades of experience, and wonderful writing style mean that all Nabokov scholars and fans will enjoy. -- Jason Merrill The Russian Review Boyd is, without a doubt, an incredibly exacting and rigorous scholar - his tireless research and collection of a vast array of materials is something which coming generations of academics will continue to be grateful for. -- U.H. Dematagoda Slavonic and East European ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Nabokov: The Writer's Life and the Life Writer 1. A Centennial Toast 2. A Biographer's Life 3. Who Is "My Nabokov"? Nabokov's Manuscripts and Books 4. The Nabokov Biography and the Nabokov Archive 5. From the Nabokov Archive: Nabokov's Literary Legacy Nabokov's Metaphysics 6. Retrospects and Prospect/s 7. Nabokov's Afterlife Nabokov's Butterflies 8. Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera 9. Netting Nabokov: Review of Dieter E. Zimmer, A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths Nabokov as Psychologist 10. The Psychological Work of Fictional Play Nabokov and the Origins and Ends of Stories 11. Stacks of Stories, Stories of Stacks Nabokov as Writer 12. Nabokov's Humor 13. Nabokov as Storyteller 14. Nabokov's Transition from Russian to English: Repudiation or Evolution? Nabokov and Others 15. Nabokov, Pushkin, Shakespeare: Genius, Generosity, and Gratitude in The Gift and Pale Fire 16. Nabokov as Verse Translator: Introduction to Verses and Versions 17. Tolstoy and Nabokov 18. Nabokov and Machado de Assis Nabokov Works 19. Speak, Memory : The Life and the Art 20. Speak, Memory : Nabokov, Mother, and Lovers: The Weave of the Magic Carpet (1999) 21. Lolita : Scene and Unseen 22. Even Homais Nods: Nabokov's Fallibility; Or, How to Revise Lolita 23. Literature, Pattern, Lolita; Or, Art, Literature, Science 24. "Pale Fire": Poem and Pattern 25. Ada : The Bog and the Garden; Or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat: Sources and Places in Ada 26. A Book Burner Recants: The Original of Laura Notes Bibliography Index
£28.50
Columbia University Press Deaths in Venice
Book SynopsisDiving into the philosophical depths of Thomas Mann's beloved novella, as imagined in words, music, and film.Trade ReviewPhilip Kitcher's book is a profession of love: for Mann's novella, for Mahler's music, and for the commitment to ideas and reflections on life that a certain current of German culture represented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One senses that Kitcher has so completely immersed himself in the works of Mann, Mahler's music, their biographies, and to an extent the works by Britten and Visconti, that he speaks from within these works and lives. -- Mark M. Anderson, Columbia University Unusually rich, rewarding, and astounding in its range, Deaths in Venice asks important philosophical questions-about art's demands on its practitioners, its connections to the rest of life, and the possibility of endowing our short, evanescent lives with some lasting significance. More than reaching conclusions, these works provide beginnings: examples of new human possibilities that are not to be imitated but transcended-and that, in large part, is how the book itself proceeds. This is much more than a work on the philosophy of art: it does philosophy with art. -- Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University Deaths in Venice is a thorough discussion of the possible relation of literature, and art in general, to philosophical thinking. It is this double intensity of perspectives-a double intensity that is never sacrificed in the one or the other direction-that makes reading the book a unique experience. -- Rudiger Campe, Yale University Deaths in Venice is to the twenty-first century what Nietzsche's literary and musical criticism was to the nineteenth: a philosopher's profound, shrewd, learned, sharp-eyed, and humane interpretation of art, which is also a profound interpretation of daily life. Starting from the doomed, lonely passion of Thomas Mann's Aschenbach, Philip Kitcher explores three millennia of thinking and the hidden mysteries of the individual mind as it confronts itself, its neighbors, and the universe. -- Edward Mendelson, Columbia University [An] outstanding, intellectually agile book, which sheds so much fresh light on Mann's work and on the philosophical questions that it explores. -- Ritchie Robertson Times Literary Supplement Original and thought provoking... [Deaths in Venice] is a delight to read, and Kitcher's deep commitment to humanism and his passion for art radiate contagiously from every page. -- Iris Vidmar Philosophy and LiteratureTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface List of Abbreviations A Note on Translations 1. Discipline 2. Beauty 3. Shadows Notes Index
£69.26
Columbia University Press Deaths in Venice The Cases of Gustav von
Book SynopsisDiving into the philosophical depths of Thomas Mann's beloved novella, as imagined in words, music, and film.Trade ReviewPhilip Kitcher's book is a profession of love: for Mann's novella, for Mahler's music, and for the commitment to ideas and reflections on life that a certain current of German culture represented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One senses that Kitcher has so completely immersed himself in the works of Mann, Mahler's music, their biographies, and to an extent the works by Britten and Visconti, that he speaks from within these works and lives. -- Mark M. Anderson, Columbia University Unusually rich, rewarding, and astounding in its range, Deaths in Venice asks important philosophical questions-about art's demands on its practitioners, its connections to the rest of life, and the possibility of endowing our short, evanescent lives with some lasting significance. More than reaching conclusions, these works provide beginnings: examples of new human possibilities that are not to be imitated but transcended-and that, in large part, is how the book itself proceeds. This is much more than a work on the philosophy of art: it does philosophy with art. -- Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University Deaths in Venice is a thorough discussion of the possible relation of literature, and art in general, to philosophical thinking. It is this double intensity of perspectives-a double intensity that is never sacrificed in the one or the other direction-that makes reading the book a unique experience. -- Rudiger Campe, Yale University Deaths in Venice is to the twenty-first century what Nietzsche's literary and musical criticism was to the nineteenth: a philosopher's profound, shrewd, learned, sharp-eyed, and humane interpretation of art, which is also a profound interpretation of daily life. Starting from the doomed, lonely passion of Thomas Mann's Aschenbach, Philip Kitcher explores three millennia of thinking and the hidden mysteries of the individual mind as it confronts itself, its neighbors, and the universe. -- Edward Mendelson, Columbia University [An] outstanding, intellectually agile book, which sheds so much fresh light on Mann's work and on the philosophical questions that it explores. -- Ritchie Robertson Times Literary Supplement Original and thought provoking... [Deaths in Venice] is a delight to read, and Kitcher's deep commitment to humanism and his passion for art radiate contagiously from every page. -- Iris Vidmar Philosophy and LiteratureTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface List of Abbreviations A Note on Translations 1. Discipline 2. Beauty 3. Shadows Notes Index
£20.90
Columbia University Press Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction
Book SynopsisHeather Houser traces the development of ecosickness, which links ecological and bodily injury, through a compelling archive of contemporary U.S. novels and memoirs, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction shows how narrative affects such as wonder and disgust organize perception of an endangered world and orient us ethically toward it.Trade ReviewThis sophisticated reconnaissance of an impressive range of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century works both adroitly builds upon and convincingly takes issue with the new 'materialist' ecocriticism by offering a subtly compelling assessment of the place of affect in works of environmental imagination and environmental intervention generally. Not contemporary U.S. fiction specialists alone, but ecocritics in all bailiwicks are sure to profit from Heather Houser's insights. -- Lawrence Buell, Harvard University The 'ecosickness' that Heather Houser explores offers yet another example of the dangers of humanity's efforts to 'master' nature. The novels and memoirs she studies demonstrate the intricate connections between somatic and ecological damage. Yet it is the literary critical argument that most distinguishes this work. Houser elegantly shows how these novels and memoirs produce narratives with unpredictable affects and how that unpredictability in turn generates an ethics that, she argues, might lead to new ways of addressing ecological damage. This timely book is crucial not only for its ecocritical insights, but for its depiction of the importance of humanistic inquiry to planetary ethics. -- Priscilla Wald, Duke University, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative In its analytical poise and sharp close readings, Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction itself is a valuable addition to affect studies and ecocriticism. 49th Parallel This well-researched argument draws on psychology, sociology, cognitive science, and other disciplines to illuminate the contributions artists make in conversations--typically dominated by scientists, environmentalists, and politicians--about environmental policy, and aims to encourage and enrich those conversations. CHOICE Houser engages with affect theory to push the boundaries of material ecocriticism in an innovative and necessary direction... she insightfully complicates the role of "writer-activist" and asks her audience to consider critically what shape this activism might take and what its future might entail. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the EnvironmentTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Ecosickness 2. AIDS Out of the City: Discordant Natures 3. Richard Powers's Strange Wonder 4. Infinite Jest's Environmental Case for Disgust 5. The Anxiety of Intervention in Leslie Marmon Silko and Marge Piercy Conclusion: How Does It Feel? Notes Works Cited Index
£80.39
Columbia University Press Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction
Book SynopsisHeather Houser traces the development of ecosickness, which links ecological and bodily injury, through a compelling archive of contemporary U.S. novels and memoirs, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction shows how narrative affects such as wonder and disgust organize perception of an endangered world and orient us ethically toward it.Trade ReviewThis sophisticated reconnaissance of an impressive range of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century works both adroitly builds upon and convincingly takes issue with the new 'materialist' ecocriticism by offering a subtly compelling assessment of the place of affect in works of environmental imagination and environmental intervention generally. Not contemporary U.S. fiction specialists alone, but ecocritics in all bailiwicks are sure to profit from Heather Houser's insights. -- Lawrence Buell, Harvard University The 'ecosickness' that Heather Houser explores offers yet another example of the dangers of humanity's efforts to 'master' nature. The novels and memoirs she studies demonstrate the intricate connections between somatic and ecological damage. Yet it is the literary critical argument that most distinguishes this work. Houser elegantly shows how these novels and memoirs produce narratives with unpredictable affects and how that unpredictability in turn generates an ethics that, she argues, might lead to new ways of addressing ecological damage. This timely book is crucial not only for its ecocritical insights, but for its depiction of the importance of humanistic inquiry to planetary ethics. -- Priscilla Wald, Duke University, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative In its analytical poise and sharp close readings, Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction itself is a valuable addition to affect studies and ecocriticism. 49th Parallel This well-researched argument draws on psychology, sociology, cognitive science, and other disciplines to illuminate the contributions artists make in conversations--typically dominated by scientists, environmentalists, and politicians--about environmental policy, and aims to encourage and enrich those conversations. CHOICE Houser engages with affect theory to push the boundaries of material ecocriticism in an innovative and necessary direction... she insightfully complicates the role of "writer-activist" and asks her audience to consider critically what shape this activism might take and what its future might entail. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the EnvironmentTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Ecosickness 2. AIDS Out of the City: Discordant Natures 3. Richard Powers's Strange Wonder 4. Infinite Jest's Environmental Case for Disgust 5. The Anxiety of Intervention in Leslie Marmon Silko and Marge Piercy Conclusion: How Does It Feel? Notes Works Cited Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press Born Translated
Book SynopsisA new understanding of the novel’s cultural and political significance in the age of the global audience.Trade ReviewA work of resounding insight and unremitting freshness, Born Translated matter-of-factly deconstructs the assumption that national belonging is natural to literature, showing how this assumption structures the sense we make of contemporary world fiction and how much more sense that fiction makes without it. -- Bruce Robbins, Columbia University Erudite and meticulous, with a comfort zone extending from Cervantes to Roberto Bolano, Orhan Pamuk, and Haruki Murakami, Rebecca L. Walkowitz gives us a theory of world literature based on works that are 'born translated,' incorporating cross-lingual circulation as part of their compositional processes. Eye-opening and field-defining. -- Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University Walkowitz transforms our understanding of the contemporary novel by demonstrating how far translation has become its engine rather than its afterthought. We cannot think of the history of the novel any more without considering its intimate and dynamic relation to translation. A remarkable tour de force. -- Robert J. C. Young, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University An excellent proposition for literary history. -- Will H. Corral World Literature Today An ambitious work that strives to redefine not just one field but two: world literature and contemporary fiction. -- Sarah Chihaya Contemporary Literature One explosive conclusion [from Born Translated] is that a novel's surface is no more important than other larger, more overlooked stylistic units. -- Adam Thirlwell Times Literary Supplement Born Translated is about a kind of multilingualism internal to contemporary English-language novels, and like the works it studies, the book seeks to deprovincialize anglophone literature from within. -- Dora Zhang Public Books Walkowitz's engaging book gives enlightening close-readings-at-a-distance of many novels... Walkowitz's readings move both writers and translators into a collective of writing, publishing, and reading that de-emphasizes sources and celebrates their interaction. -- Geoffrey C. Howes Translation Review Walkowitz's book is well informed by theories of world literature and translation, and her prose is never less than readable and accessible. She shows us in Born Translated how important the role of translation is in contemporary Anglophone literature and, at the same time, how it complicates that very notion. The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory Born Translated offers a fresh approach to contemporary fiction. Among the first to offer a convincing explanation of how national traditions morph into the world novel, Walkowitz succeeds in showing-brilliantly, to my mind-how novels by J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Mitchell, Kiran Desai, Peter Ho Davies, Caryl Phillips, and W. G. Sebald force us to confront a world where languages, territories, and nations no longer line up. -- Nancy Armstrong, Duke University Born Translated is a landmark work in the field of contemporary Anglophone literature and should be read by anyone interested in recent theorizations of world literature. Comparative Literature Studies By placing translation at the center of an alternative approach to the study of world literature, Born Translated challenges the distinction between original and translation, native and foreign reader, and production and circulation. Modern Fiction Studies An invigorating account of global anglophone literature that will surely stimulate discussion on methods of reading, theories of translation, and forms of classifying contemporary novels in English. Journal of Postcolonial WritingTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Theory of World Literature Now 1. Close Reading at a Distance 2. The Series, the List, and the Clone 3. Sampling, Collating, and Counting 4. This Is Not Your Language 5. Born Translated and Born Digital Epilogue: Multiples Notes Bibliography Index
£20.90
Columbia University Press Soseki
Book SynopsisJohn Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of Natsume Sōseki, the father of the modern novel in Japan. This biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated twentieth-century modernism.Trade ReviewNathan, a master translator and a gifted storyteller. . . . paints a portrait of this singular man based mostly on primary sources, accompanied by convincing textual analyses of the novelist’s representative works. The result is an accessible account of a tortured, difficult, and yet ultimately irresistible soul that is touching even to those who are not yet familiar with the pleasures of Sōseki’s writing. -- Eri Hotta * Times Literary Supplement *[Natsume Sōseki's] life and work are explored insightfully in John Nathan’s outstanding and cohesive literary biography. -- Eileen Battersby * Financial Times *Comprehensive and discerning. . . . A revealing portrait of a writer who deserves a new audience. * Kirkus Reviews *A compelling narrative of this complicated man....Recommended. * Choice *Sōseki captures the soul of Japan’s greatest modern writer in the best tradition of biography. Here the venerated figure comes fully alive with his infuriating failings and astounding intelligence, his maddening ambitions and biting self-deprecations. The book also offers a vibrant portrayal of Japan’s rapidly transforming society—an extraordinary feast. -- Minae Mizumura, author of Inheritance from MotherA vivid portrait of Sōseki’s anxious and troubled life, of his violent mood swings, as well as of the chaos that constantly lurked just below the surface, ready to explode at any moment. -- Martin LaFlamme * Japan Times *A vibrant portrayal of the transformation of a modern Japan as witnessed through the story of one of that country’s best writers. * International Examiner *A fine biographical work that also helpfully covers Sōseki's major works in quite good depth, Sōseki is a solid and interesting biography -- M.A. Orthofer * Complete Review *Anyone with an interest in Japanese literature will enjoy the book. Not only is it a nice introduction to his work, but it also provides fascinating insights into a life cut short. As such, Sōseki: Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist is a work to be recommended, an easy read about a great writer. * Tony's Reading List *[An] illuminating biography. . . . Nathan’s incisive portrait of Sōseki as a troubled yet widely celebrated literary game changer—his image adorned the ¥1,000 banknote in 1984—will likely drive new readers to his fiction. * Publishers Weekly *All the varied accomplishments of this man who's often considered Japan's greatest writer, together with his many shortcomings, are put in perspective and context by literary scholar John Nathan. Sōseki: Modern Japan's Greatest Novelist provides a literary biography of the finest sort: an engaging, reasonably paced narrative of Sōseki 's life punctuated by just enough literary analysis to render the book intellectually important as well. -- Hans Rollman * PopMatters *In John Nathan’s excellent and very readable new biography, Sōseki: Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist, the first English-language biography of the writer’s life in fifty years, we are given a portrait of a complex, troubled individual who spent his career resisting black-and-white interpretations. -- Angela Qian * Cha: An Asian Literary Journal *This biography and literary study describes a difficult, demanding man, plagued by poor physical and mental health, yet one who was also a master stylist with an extraordinary gift. * Times Higher Education *Nathan offers a lucid view of the life and works of the writer many consider to be Japan’s most important, and best, novelist. He deftly shows how Sōseki's life reflects the many social and intellectual changes that occurred over the tumultuous decades of his lifetime—decades of Japan’s transformation into a modern nation. -- Alan Tansman, University of California, BerkeleyIt’s been half a century since the appearance of the most recent English-language biography of Natsume Sōseki, one of the giants of twentieth-century world literature, so the arrival of John Nathan’s fine new study is cause for celebration. Sōseki's life story often reads like one of his novels, and Nathan captures it in prose worthy of his subject. -- Michael Bourdaghs, University of ChicagoJohn Nathan has certainly shown in this biography why Sōseki is such an important figure in Japanese literature, as well as demonstrating that he can hold his own with the best novelists the West have to offer. * Asian Review of Books *John Nathan has given us a robust portrayal of Sōseki’s aesthetic practices and what they meant for his life and his work. His thoughtful readings, always grounded in his own aesthetic and emotional response and further honed through translation, provide an inspiring model for the Japanese literary criticism of the future. * Monumenta Nipponica *Table of ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgments1. Beginnings2. School Days3. Words4. The Provinces5. London6. Home Again7. I Am a Cat8. Smaller Gems9. The Thursday Salon10. A Professional Novelist11. Sanshirō12. A Pair of Novels13. Crisis at Shuzenji14. A Death in the Family15. Einsamkeit16. Grass on the Wayside17. The Final YearNotesSelected BibliographyIndex
£69.26
Columbia University Press How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses
Book SynopsisDraws a remarkable connection between innovations in modes of graphic storytelling and the unstable, contradictory, and ambiguous figurations of the Jewish self in the postmodern eraTrade ReviewA careful and nuanced exploration of the complexities of identity and identification, "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?" is an excellent and ground-breaking work, invaluable to scholars of Jewish studies, comics studies, and women's studies. -- Jeremy Dauber, Director, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University As a cartoonist who is a woman and who happens to be a non-Jew, I love this book, and completely identify with Oksman's theories of the deep intersectionality of these issues. She examines the beauty of how cartoons and graphic narrative can uncover difficult, personal ideas so masterfully. Oksman helps the reader see the art and struggles of a group of talented women as they search for honest identity and a place to call home. -- Liza Donnelly, cartoonist, author of When Do They Serve the Wine?: The Folly, Flexibility, and Fun of Being a Woman An original study that charts how three indisputably fascinating subjects-feminism, Judaism, and comics-intersect today. In Oksman's analysis, the word-and-image form, comics, and the identities it presents on its pages are connected: they both resist overdetermination, refiguring traditional categories and taxonomic pressures. A unique and compelling addition to several different fields. -- Hillary L. Chute, University of Chicago, author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics A brilliant analysis. Oksman's readings are as nuanced and inventive as the artists she describes. -- Joyce Antler, Brandeis University For those interested in the graphic form, [Oksman] provides ample observations and insights into the construction of female Jewish identity. -- Ada Brunstein Jewish Book Council Tahneer Oksman's study "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?": Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs is a welcome reminder that, in comics that appear on the page as well as comics who get up on stage, Jewish women are insisting we reckon with their bawdy bodies. -- Marissa Brostoff The Forward Tahneer Oksman's "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?" offers a new way to think about Jewish identity in America. -- Rachel Gordan Contemporary Jewry Oksman challenges readers to transform their understanding of the comic format - to see the serious exploration that underlies the cartoonist's work. I certainly will never look at a graphic novel or memoir in quite the same way again. The Reporter Oksman is superb at interpreting visual and narrative details, and she provides elegant links back and forth between the cartoonists. -- Candida Rifkind Contemporary Women's Writing Oksman's work helps illuminate the ways in which Jewish women artists in particular have negotiated, subverted, reclaimed or straight-out rejected stereotypical expectations of what being 'American', 'Jewish' and 'female' means in twentieth and twenty-first century society and culture. -- F. K. Clementi Life Writing An insightful... generously illustrated volume, brimming with startling and provocative images. -- Ranen Omer-Sherman Jewish Renaissance An impressive book. -- Sharon Packer, MD Metapsychology Detailed and insightful... [Oksman's] excellent analysis of the combination of text and art in each of the works reveals the suitability and uniqueness of the graphic format for memoirs as well as fiction. Overall, Oksman's is a worthwhile book, highly recommended for all libraries with or without graphic narrative collections. -- Stephen E. Tabachnick Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?" makes an essential contribution to scholarship on American Jewish literature and the Jewish graphic novel. In bringing together questions of gender and Jewishness to discuss these contemporary comics, Oksman expands the terms of analysis for discussing not just graphic narratives but, more broadly, Jewish literature and culture in a visual age. -- Melissa Weininger American Jewish History [An] insightful book that might function best as a map for making sense of a highly diffuse and dispersed genre in which the central (dare I say canonical?) texts are already complex acts of representation. Oksman's guide to them adds another layer of representation and reflection that deepens our understanding of the books and the complex of identities that they already represent. -- Ari Y. Kelman Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies With the explosion of graphic novels and other graphic works, this is a fascinating look at a new form of memoir, but also of how to analyze and critique this format... Highly recommended. -- Sheryl Stahl AJL Reviews Oksman has produced a valuable and long overdue volume that will add immeasurably to the field of contemporary Jewish cultural studies... This book will be of use to anyone who seeks to write or think about Jewish American identity in the twenty-first century, as Oksman has done such yeoman's work in compiling and synthesizing the theoretical contributions to that conversation. And her forward-looking assessment of where contemporary graphic memoirs are now will prove generative for scholars for years to come. It is difficult to imagine any future scholarship on graphic memoirs or Jewish graphic novels that wouldn't cite this book. -- Jennifer Caplan AJS ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: "To Unaffiliate Jewishly" 1. "My Independent Jewish Monster Temperament": The Serial Selves of Aline Kominsky Crumb 2. "What Would Make Me the Most 'Myself'": Self-Creation and Self-Exile in Vanessa Davis's Diary and Autobiographical Comics 3. "I Always Want to Know Everything True": Memory, Adolescence, and Belonging in the Graphic Memoirs of Miss Lasko-Gross and Lauren Weinstein 4. "But you don't live here, so what's the dilemma?": Birthright and Accountability in the Geographics of Sarah Glidden and Miriam Libicki Conclusion-"Where are they now?": Translation and Renewal in Liana Finck's A Bintel Brief Notes Bibliography Index
£79.20
Columbia University Press The Fate of Ideas
Book SynopsisAs editor of the magazine Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century’s most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir.Trade ReviewThe Fate of Ideas is a brilliant, highly original, and delightful book that achieves a unique balance between criticism and personal essay, revealing the author himself as both a decisive thinker and an appealingly flawed, divided human being. Looking at a wide range of ideas by peeling away attendant presuppositions and contradictions, Robert Boyers argues with friends, intellectual heroes, and respected elders while examining his own prejudices. Throughout we find ourselves in the company of a first-rate mind alert to changes in intellectual fashion and the quickness with which politically or aesthetically 'correct' assumptions harden into received ideas. -- Phillip Lopate, director (nonfiction) of the Writing Program, Columbia University School of the Arts, and author of Getting Personal: Selected Essays In a dance that is both demanding and exhilarating, Robert Boyers engages thinkers and ideas, insisting there are things worth arguing about that are larger and grander than the standard scholarly or academic discourse can get at. An elegant and courageous book. -- Mary Gordon, Mcintosh Professor, Barnard College, author of The Company of Women This book is a combination of memoir and cultural criticism, though all of the chapters shed light on the protean character of the author, a prominent cultural critic and-perhaps above all-the founder and longtime editor of the quarterly Salmagundi. Whatever form they take-some chapters are deeply personal, others are largely polemical-all are thought experiments, essays often ironic and self-deprecating, Emersonian in the sense that Robert Boyers is unabashed in his 'appetite for masters and masterpieces' that can become 'a constitutive aspect of my very being.' A superb and singular work. -- James Miller, director of liberal studies, graduate faculty, New School for Social Research, author of The Passion of Michel Foucault An attractive, original, subtle, and heartening book that combines the methods of the moral and personal essay with informal literary and cultural criticism. -- Richard Locke, Columbia University, author of Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels The 12 literary essays collected in this volume are bottomless wells of provocation and insight... Readers who crave rich food for thought will find much to savor in this volume. Publisher's Weekly (starred review) Boyers's intellectual rigor and literary acuity showcase the life's work of an individual deeply committed to the liberal arts. A timely collection... Essential. ChoiceTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Authority 2. Pleasure 3. Reading from the Life 4. Fidelity 5. Saving Beauty 6. My "Others" 7. Politics and the Novel 8. Realism 9. The Sublime 10. Psychoanalysis 11. Modernism 12. Judgment Bibliography Index
£80.39
Columbia University Press Mediamorphosis
Book SynopsisMediamorphosis compiles articles by some of today’s leading forces in the scholarship of Kafka as well as film studies to provide a thorough investigation of the reciprocal relations between Kafka’s work and the cinematic medium.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction, by Ido Lewit and Shai Biderman Part I. The Cinematic Kafka Kafka, Rumour, Early Cinema: Archaic Moving Pictures, by Paul North Sebald Goes to the Movies: Reading Kafka as Cinematography, by Nimrod Matan The Ghost Is Clear: The POV of the Daydreamer, by Laurence A. Rickels Moving Pictures-Visual Pleasures: Kafka's Cinematic Writing, by Peter Beicken To Move as the Image Moves: The Rule of Rhythmic Presence and Absence in Kafka's The Man Who Disappeared, by Tobias Kuehne Noises Off: Cinematic Sound in Kafka's 'The Burrow', by Kata Gellen Gesture, Wardrobe, Backdrop and Prop in Franz Kafka's The Man Who Disappeared and Peter Weir's The Truman Show, by Idit Alphandary The Possibility of the Cinematic in 'The Metamorphosis' and 'The Burrow', by Kevin W. Sweeney Part II. The Kafkaesque Cinema 'The Essential Is Sufficient': The Kafka Adaptations of Orson Welles, Straub-Huillet and Michael Haneke, by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes K., the Tramp, and the Cinematic Vision: The Kafkaesque Chaplin, by Shai Biderman 'The Medium Is the Message': Cronenberg 'Outkafkas' Kafka, by Iris Bruce The Absurdity of Human Existence: 'The Metamorphosis' and The Fly, by William J. Devlin and Angel M. Cooper 'This Is Not Nothing': Viewing the Coen Brothers Through the Lens of Kafka, by Ido Lewit The Face: K. and Keaton, by Omri Ben-Yehuda Translating Kafka into Italian: Kafkaesque Themes in Eilo Petri's Films, by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Leonardo Acosta Lando Epilogue: A Personal Quest Into the Cinematic Kafkaesque Magic, Mystery and Miracle: Re-spiralling Marker and Kafka, by Dan Geva Transcribing Kafka Into Film: A Tortuous Love-Story, by Henry Sussman Index
£70.40
Columbia University Press Brevity
Book SynopsisDavid Galef provides a guide to writing flash fiction, from tips on technique to samples by canonical and contemporary authors to provocative prompts that inspire powerful stories in a little space. Brevity is an indispensable resource for anyone working in this increasingly popular form.Trade ReviewIf I had to choose just one book for my class in writing flash fiction, it would be this one. Practical, direct, wonderful examples, fun to read-if this book doesn't energize your writing, nothing will. -- Robert Shapard, coeditor of Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories Brevity represents a useful addition to the range of current creative writing texts, combining an anthology of flash fiction with an analysis of the subcategories within the form and writing exercises that will inspire students. Galef's witty, welcoming tone will appeal to beginning and intermediate writers. Often, I felt so inspired by the prompts that I wanted to sit down at my computer and try the exercises myself. -- Eileen Pollack, author of A Perfect Life: A Novel Brevity is a thorough introduction to the form, offering a variety of strategies for composition, as well as a wide-ranging, international anthology linked to each chapter's focus. A relentlessly generative, eclectic, instructive, entertaining, and motivational text. -- Michael Martone, author of The Flatness and Other Landscapes Galef is an excellent writer, and the book throughout is a delight-he makes the reader want to immediately start writing... He provides deft insights and suggestions on editing... and he suggests techniques that work well when applied to a small text. Best of all, each chapter provides examples of great flash fiction-from authors as different as Saki and Steve Martin-as well as ideas for readers to explore. Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments A Short Introduction Vignettes. Readings: Colette: "The Other Wife"; Isaac Babel: "An Incident on the Nevsky Prospekt" Character Sketches. Readings: L. E. Leone: "The Argument for a Shotgun"; Josefina Estrada: "The Extravagant Behavior of the Naked Woman" Letters. Readings: Yasunari Kawabata: "Canaries"; Phil Karasik: "Mickey the Dog Phones Home" Diary Entries. Readings: Will Stanton: "Barney"; Mark Budman: "The Diary of a Salaryman" Lists. Readings: Sei Shonagon: "Annoying Things"; Steve Martin: "Disgruntled Former Lexicographer" Fables. Readings: Anonymous: Untitled; Raphael Dagold: "The Two Rats and the BB Gun" Anecdotes. Reading: The peasant and the genie Prose Poems. Readings: Yusef Komunyakaa: "Nude Interrogation"; Len Kuntz: "Story Problems" Soliloquies, Rants, Riffs, and Themes. Readings: Christine Byl: "Hey, Jess McCafferty"; John Edgar Wideman: "Witness" Perfect Miniatures. Readings: John Collier: "The Chaser"; Jeffrey Whitmore: "Bedtime Story" Intermission: Cutting Down. Bruce Taylor: "Exercise" Surrealism. Readings: Richard Brautigan: "A Need for Gardens"; Donald Barthelme: "The Baby" What If? Readings: Wayland Hilton-Young: "The Choice"; Dicky Murphy: "The Magician's Umbrella" Genre. Readings: Roxane Gay: "The Mistress of Baby Breath"; Tara Orchard: "My Love" Setting. Readings: Bharati Mukherjee: "Courtly Vision"; Alice Walker: "The Flowers" Twists. Readings: Luisa Valenzuela: "Vision Out of the Corner of One Eye"; Saki: "The Open Window" Two Viewpoints. Readings: Robert Schipits: "Dialogue Between Two Teenagers, One Interested in Cars and One Not"; Ryan Ridge: "Shaky Hands & All" Mass Compression. Readings: Bruce Holland Rogers: "Dinosaur"; Susan O'Neill: "Memento Mori" Metafiction. Readings: Ptim Callan: "Story"; Jorge Luis Borges: "Borges and I" Vanishing Point. Readings: Merilee Faber: "We came around the corner"; Dean Clayton Edwards: "It was pretending"; Davian Aw: "She raised the glass"; Augusto Monterroso: "The Dinosaur" The Future Conclusion Bibliography Permissions Index
£63.00
Columbia University Press The Man Who Couldnt Die
Book SynopsisIn the chaos of early 199s Russia, a paralyzed veteran’s wife and stepdaughter conceal the Soviet Union’s collapse from him in order to keep him—and his pension—alive, until it turns out the tough old man has other plans. Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die is an instant classic of post-Soviet Russian literature.Trade ReviewDarkly sardonic . . . . oddly timely, for there are all sorts of understated hints about voter fraud, graft, payoffs, and the endless promises of politicians who have no intention of keeping them. It is also deftly constructed, portraying a world and a cast of characters who are caught between the orderly if drab world of old and the chaos of the 'new rich' in a putative democracy. . . . Slavnikova is a writer American readers will want to have more of. * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) *Rather than celebrate the crumbling of walls, Slavnikova’s novel shows us all the Lenin statues still in place. It portrays a culture chained to old realities, unable to establish a new understanding of itself. This is a funhouse mirror worth looking into, especially in today’s United States with its alternative facts, unpoetic assertions, and morbid relationship with the past. -- Leeore Schnairsohn * Los Angeles Review of Books *The Man Who Couldn’t Die, lucidly translated by Marian Schwartz, will resound with American readers. Bristling with voter fraud, fake news, and the cozy top-and-tail of media moguls and politicians, Slavnikova’s book is fluent in new language of the damaged reality principle. -- Olivia Parkes * The Baffler *The Man Who Couldn’t Die is a Gogolian portrait of the Kharitonovs, a Moscow family who 'had not been handed any party favors at capitalism’s kiddie party' after the fall of the Soviet Union. -- Natasha Randall * Times Literary Supplement *The Man Who Couldn’t Die is an overlooked masterpiece of post-Soviet prose by one of contemporary Russia’s most important authors. It reveals how Slavnikova’s descriptions (and Schwartz’s English equivalent) belong alongside those of Vladimir Nabokov, Iurii Olesha, and Nikolai Gogol as truly revolutionary in Russian prose. -- Benjamin Sutcliffe, Miami UniversityThe Man Who Couldn’t Die is a wonderful depiction of a society in flux, and of the people caught up in these waves of change. * Tony's Reading List *Table of ContentsIntroduction by Mark LipovetskyThe Man Who Couldn’t Die
£12.99
Columbia University Press Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea
Book SynopsisThe lineage novel flourished in Korea from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Ksenia Chizhova foregrounds lineage novels and the domestic world in which they were read to recast the social transformations of Chosŏn Korea and the development of early modern Korean literature.Trade ReviewKinship Novels of Early Modern Korea is a methodologically brilliant introduction to Korean lineage novels and the domestic worlds in which they were produced and consumed. Written as women were becoming ever more constrained by patriarchal kinship ideals, lineage novels are a rich archive of the often unruly emotional responses to the affective restructuring of the domestic realm. -- Maram Epstein, author of Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late-Imperial Chinese FictionKinship Novels of Early Modern Korea sets an admirable standard for emerging studies of premodern Korean literature with its in-depth historical analysis, theoretical sophistication, and measured, clear writing style. -- Sunyoung Park, author of The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea offers a captivating story about the rise and fall of the lineage novel, walking us through the ways in which the kinship feelings and practices of elite families cast not only the form and content of this genre but also its production and circulation. Compelling testimony of how our deep understanding of history can help us appreciate the aesthetics of bygone days and why literature still matters. -- Yoon Sun Yang, author of From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men: Translating the Individual in Early Colonial KoreaIn this sweeping account of the political, social, and cultural life of seventeenth- to early twentieth-century Korea, Ksenia Chizhova provocatively asks, How did Koreans do kinship? Her fascinating answers offer glimpses into the unruly emotions of everyday life and the oft-tumultuous relations between genders and generations. This is early modern Korea as never before seen and literary history at its best. -- Andre Schmid, author of Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919Eloquent, detailed, and original, this book’s account of the lineage trope, vernacular writing, gender, and readership sheds new light on the early modern novel in East Asian literary history. -- Ning Ma, author of The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and WestAn impressive, well researched book that opens a new vista on the history of premodern Korean literature. . . [Chizhova’s] work deserves highest praise for its meticulous scholarship and fascinating narrative. It will interest scholars and students of Korean literature as well as sociologists/anthropologists who want to learn about the intricate human relationships that reigned in the daily life of elite households in eighteenth-century Korea. -- Martina Deuchler * The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *This book is a sophisticated and engaging study of early modern Korean lineage novels, and it is highly recommended to anybody with interest in premodern Korea and East Asia, the gender and language politics of literary traditions, and, incidentally, global histories of the novel. -- Wiebke Denecke * Journal of Asian Studies *Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea is a fascinating read, and Chizhova does an excellent job in outlining the development, structure and history of the lineage novel. -- Tony Malone * Tony's Reading List *Chizhova combines historical and literary criticism superbly, showing broad knowledge of these and other disciplines, especially material culture and gender. Her book is also original in its approach and methodology. -- Francisco Gómez Martos * Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Lineage and the Novel in Chosŏn Korea, 1392–1910Part I: Figurations of Chosŏn Kinship1. The Structure of Kinship: Generational Narratives2. The Texture of Kinship: Vernacular Korean CalligraphyPart II: The Affective Coordinates of Kinship3. Feelings and the Space of the Novel4. Feelings and the Conflicts of KinshipPart III: Reconfiguration5. The Novel Without the LineageNotesReferencesIndex
£93.60
Columbia University Press Things with a History
Book SynopsisIn Things with a History, Héctor Hoyos argues that the roles of objects in recent Latin American fiction offer a way to integrate materialisms old and new, transforming our understanding of how things shape social and political relations.Trade ReviewIn this singular book, Hoyos unveils a world of unexplored relations between subjects, objects, materiality, and immateriality. He explores the social pact between words and things. Through the idea of transcultural materialism, Hoyos discusses how contemporary Latin American literature mobilizes cultural meanings to illuminate moments in an exploitative global economy. The book deploys a sophisticated web of literary genealogies, as well as theories of materialism, and engages us in new conversations on literature in the global context. -- Graciela Montaldo, Columbia UniversityThings with a History provides a fresh optic on the new materialisms of our time and on the history of things (rubber, cell phones, corpses) that have shaped the history of our present. Héctor Hoyos engages a wonderful range of contemporary Latin American authors and a powerful tradition attuned to both nonhuman agency and human responsibility, unwilling to unlearn the lessons of historical materialism. Grappling with these regional “literatures of extraction” as a political ecologist, Hoyos contributes to today’s most pressing critical conversations. -- Bill Brown, author of Other ThingsAmbitiously conceptualized and beautifully written, Things with a History takes up the formidable task of connecting the humanities with material science and biology and succeeds in opening up new spaces for critique. Hoyos offers provocative pairings of overconsumption and hunger, abundance and scarcity, overextraction and underutilization. By reading a dazzling array of authors and thinkers from Latin America and beyond, Hoyos demonstrates, with uncommon facility, the urgent need for an engaged world literary politics. -- B. Venkat Mani, author of Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany's Pact with BooksIn a fine-grained textual commentary, Things with a History follows the texts’ meanderings, noting their complexities and avoiding unnecessary reductiveness. Combining critical imagination with theoretical rigor, Hoyos persuasively breathes new life and meaning into “new materialism” and its predecessors. -- Aníbal González-Pérez, Yale UniversityA great example on how to work beyond the false dichotomy of representation and practices and to deeply dissect the benefits and limitations of regional critical takes in the context of a globalized world. -- Valeria Meiller, Georgetown University * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Tale of Two MaterialismsPart I: Objects1. Raw Stuff Disavowed2. Of Rocks and Particles3. Corpse Narratives as Literary HistoryPart II: Assemblages4. Politics and Praxis of Hyperfetishism5. Digitalia from the MarginsConclusions: Extractivism EstrangedNotesBibliographyIndex
£75.00
Columbia University Press The Ferrante Letters
Book SynopsisIn The Ferrante Letters, four critics create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Elena Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, they strike a tone that falls between the seminar and the book club.Trade ReviewWith fiery insight and feminist spirit, they have written a fitting companion to Ferrante’s books. * Booklist (starred review) *The intimate tone lends a beguiling humanity to the book, inducing a pleasure more often associated with novels: the pleasure of character. * New Yorker *A truly innovative approach to understanding the author-reader connection made all the more compelling for having one of the 20th century's greatest literary works at its core. * Library Journal *The combination of intellectual rigor and personal reaction makes this fascinating reading for Ferrante fans. * Publishers Weekly *If The Ferrante Letters is meant to be an experiment in what would happen if boundaries, forms, and the shape of literary criticism were to dissolve and the opinions of critics blurred into one another, it is one that the authors recognize as both an exciting and frightening possibility. * New Republic *The Ferrante Letters gives us a unique opportunity to read—or reread—the Neapolitan novels with four distinct guides beside us, both literary and personal, posing questions and offering insights, analysis, and discussion that enrich and deepen our experience of the books. -- Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novelsThe Ferrante Letters is a smart, beautiful, often moving meditation on the experience of reading the Neapolitan Quartet. This collection of letters and essays deftly manages that tricky balance of the creative, the critical, and the personal. A magnificent accomplishment. -- Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift: A NovelThese four smart feminist critics reflect on the Neapolitan novels' exploration of women's friendship, intellectual labor, and personal lives. Reading The Ferrante Letters feels like you have stumbled upon your favorite reading group talking about your favorite author. It captures the way critical thinking should work, not in isolation but in conversation. -- Pamela Thurschwell, University of SussexIn The Ferrante Letters, expertise and passion dovetail to great effect. This absorptive, idiosyncratic book is a work of collective criticism that offers a set of rigorous, convivial, and stylish readings of its primary texts, staging the critical act as also a creative one. This book reveals that the form literary criticism takes is as important as its content. -- Sarah Blackwood, author of The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United StatesWhile it is primarily Ferrante devotees who will find this book most intriguing, those interested in alternative modes of critical inquiry should take a look as well. A sharp and lively book for fans and scholars. * Kirkus Reviews *This book is a must-read for anyone who loves Elena Ferrante and for anyone who wants to think about new directions in literary criticism. * Bookriot *If you are new at the Ferrante's world this one will be a great introduction...Highly recommended. * Il Feminile *The Ferrante Letters is a bold, often inspiring attempt to rethink literary criticism and teaching practices on a collective basis, bridging the personal, critical and pleasurable. * Times Higher Education *I would heartily recommend The Ferrante Letters to fellow Ferrante fans, to feminist scholars, to readers interested in collective critical experiments. * Times Literary Supplement *What Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards have created might cater more to the cultivated reader of Ferrante than the scholar, yet academics stand to learn much from as daring and novel a form of criticism as this one. * World Literature Today *The Ferrante Letters is extremely absorbing. It’s rare to come across university-nurtured criticism, informed by theory, that is jargon-free and studded with insight. * Virginia Quarterly Review *I was thoroughly compelled by the rigor and candor with which Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards explore the intimacies that readers create through and with novels—and by their readiness in The Ferrante Letters to put their own reading lives under the microscope while they do so. I want to continue to read with these four critics, jointly and severally. They certainly should be your companions as well, dear readers, the next time all of us, severally or jointly, read Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. -- Deidre Lynch * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Collective CriticismI. Letters (2015)My Brilliant FriendThe Story of a New NameThose Who Leave and Those Who StayThe Story of the Lost ChildII. Essays (2018)Unform, by Sarah ChihayaThe Story of a Fiction, by Katherine HillThe Queer Counterfactual, by Jill RichardsThe Cage of Authorship, by Merve EmreAfterwordAppendix: Guest Letters, by Sara Marcus, Marissa Brostoff, Lili Loofbourow, Cecily Swanson, and Amy SchillerAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliography
£58.90
Columbia University Press The Ferrante Letters
Book SynopsisIn The Ferrante Letters, four critics create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Elena Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, they strike a tone that falls between the seminar and the book club.Trade ReviewWith fiery insight and feminist spirit, they have written a fitting companion to Ferrante’s books. * Booklist (starred review) *The intimate tone lends a beguiling humanity to the book, inducing a pleasure more often associated with novels: the pleasure of character. * New Yorker *A truly innovative approach to understanding the author-reader connection made all the more compelling for having one of the 20th century's greatest literary works at its core. * Library Journal *The combination of intellectual rigor and personal reaction makes this fascinating reading for Ferrante fans. * Publishers Weekly *If The Ferrante Letters is meant to be an experiment in what would happen if boundaries, forms, and the shape of literary criticism were to dissolve and the opinions of critics blurred into one another, it is one that the authors recognize as both an exciting and frightening possibility. * New Republic *The Ferrante Letters gives us a unique opportunity to read—or reread—the Neapolitan novels with four distinct guides beside us, both literary and personal, posing questions and offering insights, analysis, and discussion that enrich and deepen our experience of the books. -- Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novelsThe Ferrante Letters is a smart, beautiful, often moving meditation on the experience of reading the Neapolitan Quartet. This collection of letters and essays deftly manages that tricky balance of the creative, the critical, and the personal. A magnificent accomplishment. -- Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift: A NovelThese four smart feminist critics reflect on the Neapolitan novels' exploration of women's friendship, intellectual labor, and personal lives. Reading The Ferrante Letters feels like you have stumbled upon your favorite reading group talking about your favorite author. It captures the way critical thinking should work, not in isolation but in conversation. -- Pamela Thurschwell, University of SussexIn The Ferrante Letters, expertise and passion dovetail to great effect. This absorptive, idiosyncratic book is a work of collective criticism that offers a set of rigorous, convivial, and stylish readings of its primary texts, staging the critical act as also a creative one. This book reveals that the form literary criticism takes is as important as its content. -- Sarah Blackwood, author of The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United StatesWhile it is primarily Ferrante devotees who will find this book most intriguing, those interested in alternative modes of critical inquiry should take a look as well. A sharp and lively book for fans and scholars. * Kirkus Reviews *This book is a must-read for anyone who loves Elena Ferrante and for anyone who wants to think about new directions in literary criticism. * Bookriot *If you are new at the Ferrante's world this one will be a great introduction...Highly recommended. * Il Feminile *The Ferrante Letters is a bold, often inspiring attempt to rethink literary criticism and teaching practices on a collective basis, bridging the personal, critical and pleasurable. * Times Higher Education *I would heartily recommend The Ferrante Letters to fellow Ferrante fans, to feminist scholars, to readers interested in collective critical experiments. * Times Literary Supplement *What Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards have created might cater more to the cultivated reader of Ferrante than the scholar, yet academics stand to learn much from as daring and novel a form of criticism as this one. * World Literature Today *The Ferrante Letters is extremely absorbing. It’s rare to come across university-nurtured criticism, informed by theory, that is jargon-free and studded with insight. * Virginia Quarterly Review *I was thoroughly compelled by the rigor and candor with which Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards explore the intimacies that readers create through and with novels—and by their readiness in The Ferrante Letters to put their own reading lives under the microscope while they do so. I want to continue to read with these four critics, jointly and severally. They certainly should be your companions as well, dear readers, the next time all of us, severally or jointly, read Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. -- Deidre Lynch * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Collective CriticismI. Letters (2015)My Brilliant FriendThe Story of a New NameThose Who Leave and Those Who StayThe Story of the Lost ChildII. Essays (2018)Unform, by Sarah ChihayaThe Story of a Fiction, by Katherine HillThe Queer Counterfactual, by Jill RichardsThe Cage of Authorship, by Merve EmreAfterwordAppendix: Guest Letters, by Sara Marcus, Marissa Brostoff, Lili Loofbourow, Cecily Swanson, and Amy SchillerAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliography
£19.00
Columbia University Press The Gentrification Plot
Book SynopsisThomas Heise identifies and investigates the emerging “gentrification plot” in contemporary crime fiction. He considers recent novels that depict the sweeping transformations of five iconic neighborhoods—the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.Trade ReviewCompelling and sophisticated, The Gentrification Plot offers richly detailed readings of recent NYC crime fiction that delineate and critique the destructive effects of gentrification. Heise's attention to shifts in geography and genre adds to the critical framework for reading, understanding, and appreciating the ethical stakes of contemporary fiction. -- Kathy Knapp, author of American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel After 9/11In this excellent book, Thomas Heise argues that gentrification transformed not just the neighborhoods of New York City but also the city’s crime novels. Providing a new and inventive lens for reading crime fiction, Heise convincingly shows how the quintessentially urban genre of the crime novel found itself unavoidably implicated in the politics of gentrification and real estate speculation. At once an innovative history of contemporary crime fiction and an eye-opening account of gentrification’s impact on individual neighborhoods and communities, The Gentrification Plot is a major work in an important field. -- Theodore Martin, author of Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the PresentIn this groundbreaking book, Heise unlocks the multiple meanings of “plot” to cast new light on the complex links among crime, property, policing, race, and literature. With a diverse group of contemporary novelists as his guide, he brilliantly shows us how the gentrification of New York City stands in for and enacts the logic of crime as much as murder and theft. One of the best books on its subject I have ever read. -- Andrew Pepper, author of Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the StateThe range of Heise’s scholarship is impressive and diverse, and his analyses are intelligently presented. He writes with assurance about and passion for his subject. The Gentrification Plot is a significant contribution to crime fiction scholarship. * Choice Reviews *[A] highly recommended read for those who are fascinated by New York City as a matter of investigation. Readers who loved the meta-detective stories in The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, or essay collections like The Lonely City by Olivia Laing particularly for the discourse around Manhattan law-and-order policing of the 2000s, will find in The Gentrification Plot new, precious insights about contemporary socio-spatial transformations. * LSE Review of Books *The Gentrification Plot provides a nuanced, expertly read literary account of neoliberalization, changing modes of production, racial capitalism, and the social production of space. It is a book that could only be written by someone deeply intimate with New York City itself—able to see its impasses all the more clearly because of love[.] * American Literary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Death and Life in Postindustrial New York1. The Lower East Side: Cops, Culture, and the Creative Class 2. Chinatown: Policing the Ethnic Enclave 3. Red Hook: Blood on the Industrial Waterfront 4. Harlem: Uptown Dead Zones5. Bedford-Stuyvesant: White Boys in the HoodEpilogue: Escape from New YorkAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex
£90.00
Columbia University Press The Gentrification Plot New York and the
Book SynopsisThomas Heise identifies and investigates the emerging “gentrification plot” in contemporary crime fiction. He considers recent novels that depict the sweeping transformations of five iconic neighborhoods—the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.Trade ReviewCompelling and sophisticated, The Gentrification Plot offers richly detailed readings of recent NYC crime fiction that delineate and critique the destructive effects of gentrification. Heise's attention to shifts in geography and genre adds to the critical framework for reading, understanding, and appreciating the ethical stakes of contemporary fiction. -- Kathy Knapp, author of American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel After 9/11In this excellent book, Thomas Heise argues that gentrification transformed not just the neighborhoods of New York City but also the city’s crime novels. Providing a new and inventive lens for reading crime fiction, Heise convincingly shows how the quintessentially urban genre of the crime novel found itself unavoidably implicated in the politics of gentrification and real estate speculation. At once an innovative history of contemporary crime fiction and an eye-opening account of gentrification’s impact on individual neighborhoods and communities, The Gentrification Plot is a major work in an important field. -- Theodore Martin, author of Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the PresentIn this groundbreaking book, Heise unlocks the multiple meanings of “plot” to cast new light on the complex links among crime, property, policing, race, and literature. With a diverse group of contemporary novelists as his guide, he brilliantly shows us how the gentrification of New York City stands in for and enacts the logic of crime as much as murder and theft. One of the best books on its subject I have ever read. -- Andrew Pepper, author of Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the StateThe range of Heise’s scholarship is impressive and diverse, and his analyses are intelligently presented. He writes with assurance about and passion for his subject. The Gentrification Plot is a significant contribution to crime fiction scholarship. * Choice Reviews *[A] highly recommended read for those who are fascinated by New York City as a matter of investigation. Readers who loved the meta-detective stories in The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, or essay collections like The Lonely City by Olivia Laing particularly for the discourse around Manhattan law-and-order policing of the 2000s, will find in The Gentrification Plot new, precious insights about contemporary socio-spatial transformations. * LSE Review of Books *The Gentrification Plot provides a nuanced, expertly read literary account of neoliberalization, changing modes of production, racial capitalism, and the social production of space. It is a book that could only be written by someone deeply intimate with New York City itself—able to see its impasses all the more clearly because of love[.] * American Literary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Death and Life in Postindustrial New York1. The Lower East Side: Cops, Culture, and the Creative Class 2. Chinatown: Policing the Ethnic Enclave 3. Red Hook: Blood on the Industrial Waterfront 4. Harlem: Uptown Dead Zones5. Bedford-Stuyvesant: White Boys in the HoodEpilogue: Escape from New YorkAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex
£23.75
Columbia University Press CrossCultural Harlem
Book SynopsisDrawing on fiction, sociology, political speech, autobiography, and performance, Sandhya Shukla develops a living theory of Harlem, in which peoples of different backgrounds collide, interact, and borrow from each other, even while Blackness remains crucial.
£93.60
Columbia University Press CrossCultural Harlem
Book SynopsisDrawing on fiction, sociology, political speech, autobiography, and performance, Sandhya Shukla develops a living theory of Harlem, in which peoples of different backgrounds collide, interact, and borrow from each other, even while Blackness remains crucial.
£27.00
University of Illinois Press Dicta and Contradicta
Book SynopsisFrom the decadent turn of the century to the Third Reich, the acerbic satirist Karl Kraus was one of the most famous-and feared-intellectuals in Europe. This title provides an introductory essay on Kraus' life and milieu and annotations that clarify many of Kraus' literary and sociohistorical allusions.Trade Review"McVity's volume is ... important both as translation and as evidence that Kraus can be translated... Others ... have tried their hand at translating the aphorisms, but McVity is the most ambitious... McVity masterfully preserves the flavor, spirit, meaning, and intent of the original." -- Choice "McVity takes the refreshing view that translation is an opportunity rather than an impossibility, and he has some wonderfully inventive equivalents for Kraus's wordplay." -- Michael Wood, London Review of Books "These 9l8 aphorisms, courageously translated by John McVity, reveal Kraus in all his truculent, rebarbative, crap-cutting glory. Like postcards lost in the dead-letter office for the better part of a century, they call up a world no longer our own and yet manage to speak with surprising frequency to many of our most abiding concerns." - Martin Jay, author of Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time "McVity has done the seemingly impossible: translate the complex and quirky wisdoms of one of the greatest twentieth-century masters of the German language into an English that is not only coherent but lets the brilliance of the original shine through." - Fred Viebahn, University of Virginia "The volume includes, for the first time in English, the entire text of Kraus's first book of aphorisms... For all of Kraus's political intricacies, 'the most painful part' of translating his work into modern English ... is capturing his ingenious and assiduous wordplay." -- Aaron Retica, Lingua Franca.
£28.80
MO - University of Illinois Press Frederik Pohl
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Frederik Pohl--writer, editor, critic, literary agent, futurist, teacher--was one of the central figures of Twentieth Century American science fiction, playing an extraordinarily influential role for more than fifty years. This is a splendid overview of his long and remarkable career."--Robert Silverberg "Frederik Pohl did more than any other human to transform the very character of science fiction literature, from adventure-story roots into a tool for exploring plausible tomorrows. Other giants are known for their own great works. But, as this stirring and detailed biography shows, Fred Pohl taught us to be more than just storytellers. Science fiction became the R&D department for human destiny."--David Brin "Frederik Pohl was one of science fiction's most intelligent and creative writers. His consistent talent and brilliance helped define our field from the 1950s well into the twenty-first century. Michael R. Page's book is a fascinating inspection of the man and his career. Highly recommended."--Greg Bear"An up-and-coming scholar has done a thorough and insightful job of analyzing the life and impact on science fiction of the iconic master whose career covered every aspect of the science fiction of our times."--James Gunn"A well-rounded and appealing portrait of an intellectually fertile and sophisticated talent."--Science Fiction Studies"This authoritative volume will be indispensable for those interested in this vibrant writer of science fiction and his abiding influence on US science fiction. Highly recommended."--Choice"An assiduously documented, clearly written, and useful account of Pohl's career."--LOCUS
£81.90
University of Illinois Press Splattered Ink
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewCo-winner, Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA), 2016 "This significant addition to the scholarship on postfeminism provocatively and powerfully reads a too-often-overlooked category of print fiction. Splattered Ink vividly addresses the 'dark side' of postfeminism, generating a sturdy, supple analytic frame for female-authored, often avidly female-consumed books about women's victimization and vulnerability that belie postfeminism's customary preference for stock themes of empowerment and resilience and affective investment in the sanguine and upbeat."--Diane Negra, author of What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism"Whitney does a great job of moving back and forth from the specific to the general throughout the manuscript, which makes for a great read and a strong and persuasive argument."--Astrid Henry, coauthor of Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women's Movements"Whitney engagingly extends the contemporary female Gothic canon into the 21st Century."--Helene Meyers, author of Femicidal Fears: Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience
£77.35
University of Illinois Press Iain M. Banks
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewBSFA Award for Best Non-Fiction, British Science Fiction Association, 2018 Finalist, Hugo Award for Best Related Work, 2018Locus Recommended Reading List, 2017 "Paul Kincaid has done an admirable job with this book, presenting us with the first really comprehensive survey of Banks' work across all his literary modes. Insightful, detailed, fair-minded, as generous as it is bracingly honest, it's a work that demands the attention of anyone with a real interest in this much-beloved author."--Alastair Reynolds, author of Poseidon's Wake"A thorough, focused, and very useful study of the works of Iain Banks . . . with the M and without the M!"--Gwyneth Jones, author of Life"Kincaid's Iain M. Banks is a significant and authoritative addition to these books that is likely to become a benchmark for Banks studies in the years ahead."--Strange Horizons"Kincaid remains a masterful practitioner of the lost art of finely calibrated literary criticism . . . Kincaid is, unsurprisingly, both meticulous and astute."--Science Fiction Studies"A warmly appreciative yet acutely critical survey, clear, concise, and well-judged."--Ken MacLeod, author of The Corporation Wars: Insurgence"Kincaid's short Ian M. Banks is admirable in the scope and depth of its explorations of Banks's many writerly projects." --Fafnir
£77.35
University of Illinois Press J. G. Ballard
Book SynopsisProphetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.Trade ReviewLocus Recommended Reading List, 2017 "Elegantly argued, intuitively organized, and sure to be relevant to Ballardian scholars. . . . A testament to Ballard's continued relevance."--Library Journal"Scholars and fans of Ballard will find this study comprehensive and stimulating."--Publisher's Weekly"J. G. Ballard is an engaging and comprehensive study that marshals a constellation of insights around a single, robust argument. No scholar writing on Ballard in future will want to be without it. The book would also serve as an ideal introduction to Ballard for undergraduates or others coming to his work for the first time."--The British Society for Literature and Science"Wilson interweaves the biographical elements with rich and insightful analysis of Ballard's oeuvre, from the novels to the short stories, plus commentary on his non-fiction work."--Amazing Stories"A comprehensive and intelligent overview of the author's work, it is critically engaged, well-informed in terms of existing scholarship, and written in a lively and accessible style. This is an excellent introduction to Ballard's work for scholars new to the author, as well as for fans and general readers." --Science Fiction Studies"Energetically written and deeply informed, Wilson's study is a highly recommended resource for readers needing either a convenient refresher of Ballard's entire oeuvre or a singular entry point into Ballard's fascinating life work." --SFRA Review"Wilson has put together an impressive book. There is something intuitive and effortless in his assessment of Ballard's work, and around every corner are oh-my-goodness-how-could-anyone-have-possibly-missed-that moments of discovery. For fans and critics alike, this is a must-read." --American Book Review"A new comprehensive standard. Wilson's insights reach to the furthest ends of J. G. Ballard's bookshelf, complicate easy assumptions about the location of the 'autobiographical' in his novels, and, best of all, assert that if there is a science fiction worth advancing into the twenty-first century, Ballard is at the center, not the periphery, of that project."--Jonathan Lethem "In this wide-ranging and accessible work, D. Harlan Wilson argues that J. G. Ballard is a writer who remained true to science fiction even as he claimed to abandon the genre. With clear-eyed intelligence and a deep understanding of his subject, Wilson builds a compelling case for Ballard as perhaps SF’s most radical innovator."--Simon Sellars, coeditor of Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967–2008 "Did J. G. Ballard protest too much? In this engaging work, Wilson makes a compelling case that, though Ballard often distanced himself from science fiction, his entire oeuvre belongs to the genre, even if Ballard fundamentally changed the genre along the way to include the terrain of inner space and the science-fictionalization of everyday life. A wonderful reading of one of late modernity’s greatest imaginative writers."--David Ian Paddy, author of The Empires of J. G. Ballard: An Imagined Geography "Both interested and academic readers will appreciate the delicate balance Wilson achieves between the breadth of his palate and the depth of each shade, all the while amused by Wilson’s snappy prose and ever-unfolding insights that reveal with appeal in this unique and compelling study of the Seer of Shepperton. What comes after highly recommended?"--Rick McGrath, editor of Deep Ends: The J. G. Ballard Anthology
£77.35
University of Illinois Press Arthur C. Clarke
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The book offers a fresh perspective on Clarke and some thought-provoking readings of his fiction. . . . This study should prompt other scholars to follow up on Westfahl's interesting opening assertions about the unique nature of Clarke's storytelling skills and prose style. " --Fafnir"This is the most insightful analysis of Clarke I have seen. It has many gems, such as this irresistible pearl: 'Clarke's characters anticipate the way that more and more people now live their lives. Clarke's characters, then, may someday be regarded as his most significant prediction of the future, making him seem more like a twenty-first century writer than a twentieth-century writer--perhaps the greatest compliment one can imagine for a science fiction writer.' His scaffold leading to this is of the highest quality."--Gregory Benford"The legacy of Sir Arthur has finally been given justice, and therefore this guide is to be wholeheartedly recommended."--SFFWorld"Gary Westfahl's compact critical biography closely yet succinctly examines everything from Clarke's British childhood through his last years on the island of Sri Lanka, his juvenilia through the numerous 'collaborations' that fill the last pages of his bibliography." --Shepherd Express“A well-considered reevaluation of Arthur C. Clarke’s legacy. . . . His analysis is most valuable in its scope, ranging beyond Clarke’s major works and considering his myriad stories, his less successful novels, his nonfiction, and even his juvenilia.”--Booklist"Westfahl successfully relocates the context of Clarke's work, which in turn allows him to bring a fresh perspective even to oft-analyzed texts." --InterGalactic Medicine Show"Gary Westfahl's Arthur C. Clarke (2018) fills the gap by offering a much-needed survey of Clarke's entire oeuvre, from his juvenilia to his many collaborations. This book will provide a useful starting place for future conversations about Clarke." --Science Fiction Studies
£77.35
University of Illinois Press Alice in Pornoland
Book SynopsisThe unquenchable thirst of Dracula. The animal lust of Mr. Hyde. The acquiescence of Lewis Carroll's Alice. Victorian literature--with its overtones of prudishness, respectability, and Old World hypocrisy--belies a subverted eroticism. The Victorian Gothic is monstrous but restrained, repressed but perverse, static but transformative, and preoccupied by gender and sexuality in both regressive and progressive ways. Laura Helen Marks investigates the contradictions and seesawing gender dynamics in Victorian-inspired adult films and looks at why pornographers persist in drawing substance and meaning from the era's Gothic tales. She focuses on the particular Victorianness that pornography prefers, and the mythologies of the Victorian era that fuel today's pornographic fantasies. In turn, she exposes what porning the Victorians shows us about pornography as a genre. A bold foray into theory and other forbidden places, Alice in Pornoland reveals how modern-day Victorian Gothic pornography Trade Review"[Marks's] book will certainly be of interest to porn studies scholars. It also provides solid accounts of the ways that pornographers generate new erotic energies from classic texts. " --Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books"Through its in-depth investigation of the dialogue between the porn industry and the world of our supposedly 'prudish' forefathers, Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic represents an important contribution to the analysis of a cinematic genre (neo-Victorian porn) that has been partially neglected in scholarly works." --Neo-Victorian Studies"A giddy pleasure to read the future of porn studies unfolding in these pages."--Celine Parreñas Shimizu, author of The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene"Laura Helen Marks offers a persuasive exploration of the complexities of porn’s love affair with all things Victorian, particularly the fantasy invocations and reimaginings of Gothic sexualities. Her account moves across the pornographic genre and its seeming obsession with the earlier historical period in order to open some very contemporary concerns about sex, desires and technology."--Clarissa Smith, coauthor of Studying Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Cultures
£77.35
University of Illinois Press Joanna Russ
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA PopMatters Best Non-Fiction Book of 2019 A Locus 2019 Recommended Read Finalist, non-fiction category 2020 Locus Awards, 2020 "The primary and secondary bibliographies, along with the interviews and the through coverage of Russ's work that Jones offers make this volume one that libraries public, academic, and personal should possess, especially if they have an interest in feminist literature and/or science fiction. . . . This book is a fine tool for continuing Joanna Russ's legacy." --Science Fiction Studies"In Joanna Russ,” a new survey of Russ’s work, the writer and critic Gwyneth Jones provides a helpful window into Russ’s early life." --New Yorker"An important and compact new study. . . Russ was an unfairly neglected writer, and Jones’ introduction is a great place to start learning about her." --Seattle Times"Essential reading for those interested in the history and evolution of sci-fi as a genre, and in the continued fight for diversity, inclusion, and visibility of sci-fi and pop culture more broadly." --Popmatters"It is time [Russ],was remembered and honored for her gallant, elegant and witty contribution." --Times Literary Supplement"This overview would be a particularly good introduction for undergraduates (or any interested reader) looking for a way into Russ’s career and into the gender-in-SF issues of her time." --Locus"A rigorous biography of Russ’s mind. . . . Every writer must dream of someday having a reader who reads their work the way Gwyneth Jones reads Joanna Russ." --Fantasy & Science Fiction"Gwyneth Jones's study of Russ's life and work is important reading for anyone interested in feminism, science fiction, or terrific writing. With insight and warmth, she reveals Russ to us as a brilliant, impossible person and as a groundbreaking, uncompromising writer."--Julie Phillips, author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon "Jones’s concise, thorough survey successfully traces the tensions and confluences between Russ’s various fields of work. Her positions as genre writer, academic, and feminist are in flux, in conversation; by creating illustrative juxtapositions within a chronological framework as well as integrating analysis with biographical detail, Jones offers insight and clarity into the difficulties that drove Russ’s career trajectory and eventual retirement from the SF field."--Brit Mandelo, author of We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling
£77.35
MO - University of Illinois Press Kim Stanley Robinson
Trade Review"Kim Stanley Robinson crafts scientifically grounded speculative fictions in which the utopian impulse is a matter of thinking deeply about problems that most literary fiction has not yet even bothered to register. Robert Markley has done us readers of KSR an immense service in tracking the evolution of methods and themes across the wounded galaxy of this writer's work. This is the essential guide to the world KSR has made."--McKenzie Wark, author of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century "Robert Markley’s book makes it clear that there’s much, much, more to Kim Stanley Robinson than the conquest of the high frontier." --Amazing Stories"Kim Stanley Robinson's formidable expanse of science fiction leaves many of us wondering where to begin. Begin here. Having studied Kim Stanley Robinson's work for decades, Robert Markley presents a cogent and inviting introduction to one of the most important figures in twentieth century SF. Markley gracefully traces the 'slurry' of Marxism, Buddhism, and ecology running throughout the novels, highlighting the survival strategies Robinson envisions for present and future peoples. For Robinson and for Markley, literature becomes, ideally, a mode of action—as well as an ethical and political intervention for more carefully considered, just, and livable worlds."--Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times "Each tale is an attempt to move closer to some idea settling of the issues of eco-economics and cooperative living that the author sees as utopian. In the end, Robinson is both nihilistic and optimist, understanding that utopia, like enlightenment, may be achievable but not sustainable." --SFRevu
£77.35
University of Illinois Press Bradbury Beyond Apollo
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Eller's review of his muse's last for years of work brings to a satisfying conclusion a decade-long project to recount the life on one of American's most prolific and respected writers. . . .Eller illuminates the life and eventual death of this great American writer in a way that truly enriches any reader's understanding of him. This quiet yet present cultural icon may not always have had the impact he hoped for, but Bradbury clearly left a written legacy meriting a three-volume biography." --H-Net"Certain to be our generation's definitive life of Bradbury . . . This book makes an effective case for Bradbury's literary and social significance." --Science Fiction Studies "This final volume, published in the centennial years of its subject, is a fitting tribute to an admirable American original." --University Bookman "An enlightening examination of the last years of Bradbury's remarkable life . . . Essential." --Choice "The careful detail of this biography paints a rich portrait of Bradbury as a talented conversationalist and gifted collaborator and allows readers to understand the nuances of his professional relationships." --Science "Jonathan Eller’s final volume of his excellent biography of Ray Bradbury is an elegant and often poetic celebration of our great friend and a great man. Many wonderful memories return, and futures rise up. This book helps Ray follow the advice of Mr. Electrico: Live forever."--Greg Bear "The third book from Jonathan Eller dealing with the creative life of Ray Bradbury is just as amazing and brilliant and insightful as the previous volumes. My only disappointment is that it's over, and unlike the others, this one carries a sweet and sour coating of finality. As it neared the end of Ray Bradbury's life and creative works, I wept. And that usually takes a knife wound. An insightful roundup of Ray Bradbury's life, inspirations, triumphs, and disappointments makes this one of the best books about an author I've ever read, and I've read a few. It's a triumph." --Joe R. Lansdale "Jonathan Eller's conclusion to his biographical trilogy tracing the life and work of Ray Bradbury is every bit as terrific as the previous two volumes. Meticulous, informative, critically insightful, entertaining and utterly indispensable, it's just what one expects from our greatest authority on this great American writer."—Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post "Eller's exhaustive exploration of Bradbury's creative output ties together how the strands of the author's restless imagination created a cohesive body of work with theme and panache. A must-have for Bradbury fans and sf scholars, and the perfect companion to the earlier volumes in the trilogy." --Library Journal "As with his earlier volumes, Eller makes meticulous use of his detailed research and extraordinary access to materials such as correspondence, manuscripts, and notebooks. The focus here is less on how Bradbury became a major writer, or how he parlayed his early success, than on his status as what Eller quite defensibly calls an American icon."--Gary K. Wolfe, author of Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature "Eller’s achievement in Bradbury Beyond Apollo and his two previous volumes will stand for years as the most penetrating view into the creative fire that was Bradbury’s mind and talent. It is a work of clear-eyed scholarship and, it must be said, love." --The Emotional Rationalist "A well-crafted biography of a man who inspired 'cosmic awareness in the everyday world.'" --Kirkus "Bradbury Beyond Apollo satisfyingly closed out a minutely researched and finely realized three-volume biography of Ray Bradbury. " --LocusTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part I. The Inherited Wish 1. Prometheus Bound 2. The Darkness Between the Stars 3. A Teller of Tales 4. The Prisoner of Gravity 5. Witness and Celebrate 6. The Sleep of Reason 7. The Inherited Wish 8. Long After Midnight 9. A Mailbox on Mars Part II. Beyond Eden 10. The God in Science Fiction 11. Infinite Worlds 12. Abandon in Place 13. Beyond Eden 14. Robot Museums 15. The Great Shout of the Universe 16. A Eureka Year 17. One-Way Ticket Man Part III. 1984 Will Not Arrive 18. “My Name Is Dark” 19. A Most Favorite Subject 20. Memories of Murder 21. 1984 Will Not Arrive 22. Death Is a Lonely Business 23. A Poet’s Heart 24. Forms of Things Unknown 25. Time Flies 26. Beyond the Iron Curtain Part IV. Graveyard for Lunatics 27. A Graveyard for Lunatics 28. Disputed Passage 29. Green Shadows, White Whale 30. The ABCs of Science Fiction 31. An American Icon 32. Harvest Time 33. A Promise of Eternity 34. Séances and Ghosts 35. An Evening on Mars Part V. Closing the Book 36. “Make Haste to Live” 37. Messages in a Bottle 38. The Fire Within 39. A Child’s Imagination 40. Farewell Summer 41. Samurai Kabuki 42. “Nothing Has to Die” 43. Visions of Mars 44. Remembrance 45. Closing the Book Notes Index
£25.19
University of Illinois Press Roger Zelazny
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Cox consistently brings great critical acumen to bear on his readings, which are sensitively attuned to Zelazny’s specifics but never lose sight of the broader literary context, and he organizes an imposing array of material in insightful and intuitive ways. He captures the excitement of Zelazny’s work, the thrill of its evolution, the astonishing panache of its heights." --Locus"Well-researched, well-organized, and well-written, this is an exemplary entry in the University of Illinois Press's Modern Masters of Science Fiction series, and it deserves the attention of all fans and scholars of Zealzny's work, and of modern sf generally." --Science Fiction Studies"Zelazny fans will enjoy comparing their opinions of various Zelazny titles with Cox’s opinions, and getting tips from Cox on worthy titles they may have overlooked." --Sandusky Register"Roger Zelazny is a thorough and sympathetic review of the life, career, and work of one of the seminal creators in science fiction and fantasy of the last half of the 20th century. It takes into account the prior work of reviewers, critics, and biographers as well as commentary by his peers and fans, from every period of his sadly shortened life and since." --SFRA Review
£77.35
University of Illinois Press Brian W. Aldiss
Book SynopsisTrade Review"As Kincaid’s elegant overview makes clear, Aldiss’s work is not only a paean to ceaseless creativity, but a testament to an almost compulsive preoccupation with generating new problems towards whose solution that same sparkling creativity may be directed." --Locus"A level-headed assessment. " --Times Literary Supplement "Brian Aldiss was science fiction’s most gifted stylist: innovative, elegant, mercurial and always highly readable. He was tirelessly prolific, producing not only stories of adventure in space, travelers through time and several noxious alien beings, but also experimental literary fiction and thoughtful memoir. Paul Kincaid’s superb and closely attentive account of his life and work covers the full Aldiss range, responding sympathetically not only to the extraordinary variety but also the level of ambition." --Christopher Priest, four-time winner of the BSFA Award"Paul Kincaid's cogent, career-spanning study of Brian Aldiss's life and work is a valuable contribution to SF studies. He expertly covers the many books in Aldiss's canon, shedding new light on areas that have received little scholarly attention while enumerating the author’s importance to the SF megatext. Accessible and illuminating, Brian W. Aldiss should be read by anybody writing about Aldiss, but it's also an enjoyable biography."--D. Harlan Wilson, author of J. G. Ballard"Kincaid affirms Aldiss as a crucial figure in postwar British sf, author of a handful of indisputable classics, and deeply involved in the aesthetic and critical evolution of the field." --Science Fiction Studies
£77.35
University of Illinois Press Academic Tribes
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A delicious chowder of quips and ironies. One may have heard individual lines at faculty cocktail parties, but listening to all the disparate voices of the university together, one realizes how much we sound like a thousand Franz Kafkas trying to sing a madrigal."--Chronicle of Higher Education"An enjoyable description (and vivisection!) of the various people in Academe. Essential for anyone who extracts his livelihood from the forests primeval of Academe and who periodically suffers fits on the meaning of it all."--ChoiceTable of ContentsPreface to the Second Edition vii Preface to the First Edition ix 1 A Primer of Academic Politics 1 2 Stereotypics 31 3 Tribes: Les Purs et les Appliques 63 4 Rites de Passage: Coming of age in Academe 77 5 The Rhythm of the Year: Solar Rituals 97 6 Styles and the Decay of Style 109 7 Bureaucriticism: What's Wrong and Why It Isn't Likely to Be Fixed 121 8 Confessio Amantis 139 A Triptych of Appendixes 145 1) A Political Primer for the Chair of English: Form and Content 147 b) How Departments Commit Suicide 161 c) Definition and/as Survival 179
£16.14
University of Illinois Press CONTESTED CASTLE
Book SynopsisThe Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole''s Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley''s Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture--the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic--and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place. Linking terror -- the most important ingredient of the Gothic novel -- to acts of transgression, Ellis shows how houses in Gothic fiction imprison those inside them, while those locked outside wander the earth plotting their return and their revenge. Trade Review"An ambitious, readable, and well-argued book, The Contested Castle ... presents useful, sometimes radical re-readings of familiar and unfamiliar gothic texts; it also takes important steps toward demonstrating, as Ellis puts it, 'that popular literature can be a site of resistance to ideological positions as well as a means of propagating them'--an argument of considerable importance for scholars in and advanced students of critical theory." -- Choice "Ellis sheds special light on the way capitalist relations and the culture of capitalism influenced the way women lived, envisioned, wrote, and read their own narratives. It's a story at least as gripping and at least as terrifying as the male and female Gothics that Ellis so gracefully presents and interprets." -- Lillian S. Robinson, author of Sex, Class, and Culture "The strength of Ellis's The Contested Castle is in its linking of the Gothic novel with a bourgeois ideology that specified the role and place of women in its system... In the light of her work, not only the Gothic novel but the rise of the novel and the realist novel will be reread as well." -- Mary O'Connor, Eighteenth-Century Fiction
£18.99
University of Illinois Press Iain M. Banks
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewBSFA Award for Best Non-Fiction, British Science Fiction Association, 2018 Finalist, Hugo Award for Best Related Work, 2018 Locus Recommended Reading List, 2017— British Science Fiction Association BSFA Award for Best Non-Fiction, British Science Fiction Association, 2018 Finalist, Hugo Award for Best Related Work, 2018 Locus Recommended Reading List, 2017— Hugo Award BSFA Award for Best Non-Fiction, British Science Fiction Association, 2018 Finalist, Hugo Award for Best Related Work, 2018 Locus Recommended Reading List, 2017— LocusTable of ContentsCoverTitleContentsAcknowledgmentsChapter 1. Crossing the BridgeChapter 2. Backing into the CultureChapter 3. Outside Context ProblemsChapter 4. Approaching the WorldGodChapter 5. AftermathA Few Questions on the Culture by Jude RobertsAn Iain M. Banks BibliographyNotesBibliography of Secondary SourcesIndex
£16.14
University of Illinois Press J. G. Ballard
Book SynopsisProphetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.Trade ReviewLocus Recommended Reading List, 2017 "Elegantly argued, intuitively organized, and sure to be relevant to Ballardian scholars. . . . A testament to Ballard's continued relevance."--Library Journal"Scholars and fans of Ballard will find this study comprehensive and stimulating."--Publisher's Weekly"J. G. Ballard is an engaging and comprehensive study that marshals a constellation of insights around a single, robust argument. No scholar writing on Ballard in future will want to be without it. The book would also serve as an ideal introduction to Ballard for undergraduates or others coming to his work for the first time."--The British Society for Literature and Science"Wilson interweaves the biographical elements with rich and insightful analysis of Ballard's oeuvre, from the novels to the short stories, plus commentary on his non-fiction work."--Amazing Stories"A comprehensive and intelligent overview of the author's work, it is critically engaged, well-informed in terms of existing scholarship, and written in a lively and accessible style. This is an excellent introduction to Ballard's work for scholars new to the author, as well as for fans and general readers." --Science Fiction Studies"Energetically written and deeply informed, Wilson's study is a highly recommended resource for readers needing either a convenient refresher of Ballard's entire oeuvre or a singular entry point into Ballard's fascinating life work." --SFRA Review"Wilson has put together an impressive book. There is something intuitive and effortless in his assessment of Ballard's work, and around every corner are oh-my-goodness-how-could-anyone-have-possibly-missed-that moments of discovery. For fans and critics alike, this is a must-read." --American Book Review"A new comprehensive standard. Wilson's insights reach to the furthest ends of J. G. Ballard's bookshelf, complicate easy assumptions about the location of the 'autobiographical' in his novels, and, best of all, assert that if there is a science fiction worth advancing into the twenty-first century, Ballard is at the center, not the periphery, of that project."--Jonathan Lethem "In this wide-ranging and accessible work, D. Harlan Wilson argues that J. G. Ballard is a writer who remained true to science fiction even as he claimed to abandon the genre. With clear-eyed intelligence and a deep understanding of his subject, Wilson builds a compelling case for Ballard as perhaps SF’s most radical innovator."--Simon Sellars, coeditor of Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967–2008 "Did J. G. Ballard protest too much? In this engaging work, Wilson makes a compelling case that, though Ballard often distanced himself from science fiction, his entire oeuvre belongs to the genre, even if Ballard fundamentally changed the genre along the way to include the terrain of inner space and the science-fictionalization of everyday life. A wonderful reading of one of late modernity’s greatest imaginative writers."--David Ian Paddy, author of The Empires of J. G. Ballard: An Imagined Geography "Both interested and academic readers will appreciate the delicate balance Wilson achieves between the breadth of his palate and the depth of each shade, all the while amused by Wilson’s snappy prose and ever-unfolding insights that reveal with appeal in this unique and compelling study of the Seer of Shepperton. What comes after highly recommended?"--Rick McGrath, editor of Deep Ends: The J. G. Ballard Anthology
£16.14
University of Illinois Press Arthur C. Clarke
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The book offers a fresh perspective on Clarke and some thought-provoking readings of his fiction. . . . This study should prompt other scholars to follow up on Westfahl's interesting opening assertions about the unique nature of Clarke's storytelling skills and prose style. " --Fafnir"This is the most insightful analysis of Clarke I have seen. It has many gems, such as this irresistible pearl: 'Clarke's characters anticipate the way that more and more people now live their lives. Clarke's characters, then, may someday be regarded as his most significant prediction of the future, making him seem more like a twenty-first century writer than a twentieth-century writer--perhaps the greatest compliment one can imagine for a science fiction writer.' His scaffold leading to this is of the highest quality."--Gregory Benford"The legacy of Sir Arthur has finally been given justice, and therefore this guide is to be wholeheartedly recommended."--SFFWorld"Gary Westfahl's compact critical biography closely yet succinctly examines everything from Clarke's British childhood through his last years on the island of Sri Lanka, his juvenilia through the numerous 'collaborations' that fill the last pages of his bibliography." --Shepherd Express“A well-considered reevaluation of Arthur C. Clarke’s legacy. . . . His analysis is most valuable in its scope, ranging beyond Clarke’s major works and considering his myriad stories, his less successful novels, his nonfiction, and even his juvenilia.”--Booklist"Westfahl successfully relocates the context of Clarke's work, which in turn allows him to bring a fresh perspective even to oft-analyzed texts." --InterGalactic Medicine Show"Gary Westfahl's Arthur C. Clarke (2018) fills the gap by offering a much-needed survey of Clarke's entire oeuvre, from his juvenilia to his many collaborations. This book will provide a useful starting place for future conversations about Clarke." --Science Fiction Studies
£17.99
University of Illinois Press Alice in Pornoland
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[Marks's] book will certainly be of interest to porn studies scholars. It also provides solid accounts of the ways that pornographers generate new erotic energies from classic texts. " --Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books"Through its in-depth investigation of the dialogue between the porn industry and the world of our supposedly 'prudish' forefathers, Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic represents an important contribution to the analysis of a cinematic genre (neo-Victorian porn) that has been partially neglected in scholarly works." --Neo-Victorian Studies"A giddy pleasure to read the future of porn studies unfolding in these pages."--Celine Parreñas Shimizu, author of The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene"Laura Helen Marks offers a persuasive exploration of the complexities of porn’s love affair with all things Victorian, particularly the fantasy invocations and reimaginings of Gothic sexualities. Her account moves across the pornographic genre and its seeming obsession with the earlier historical period in order to open some very contemporary concerns about sex, desires and technology."--Clarissa Smith, coauthor of Studying Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Cultures
£17.99
University of Illinois Press Joanna Russ
Book SynopsisExperimental, strange, and unabashedly feminist, Joanna Russ's groundbreaking science fiction grew out of a belief that the genre was ideal for expressing radical thought. Her essays and criticism, meanwhile, helped shape the field and still exercise a powerful influence in both SF and feminist literary studies.Award-winning author and critic Gwyneth Jones offers a new appraisal of Russ's work and ideas. After years working in male-dominated SF, Russ emerged in the late 1960s with Alyx, the uber-capable can-do heroine at the heart of Picnic on Paradise and other popular stories and books. Soon, Russ's fearless embrace of gender politics and life as an out lesbian made her a target for male outrage while feminist classics like The Female Man and The Two of Them took SF in innovative new directions. Jones also delves into Russ's longtime work as a critic of figures as diverse as Lovecraft and Cather, her foundational place in feminist fandom, important essays like Amor Vincit Foeminam, aTrade ReviewA PopMatters Best Non-Fiction Book of 2019 A Locus 2019 Recommended Read Finalist, non-fiction category 2020 Locus Awards, 2020 "The primary and secondary bibliographies, along with the interviews and the through coverage of Russ's work that Jones offers make this volume one that libraries public, academic, and personal should possess, especially if they have an interest in feminist literature and/or science fiction. . . . This book is a fine tool for continuing Joanna Russ's legacy." --Science Fiction Studies"In Joanna Russ,” a new survey of Russ’s work, the writer and critic Gwyneth Jones provides a helpful window into Russ’s early life." --New Yorker"An important and compact new study. . . Russ was an unfairly neglected writer, and Jones’ introduction is a great place to start learning about her." --Seattle Times"Essential reading for those interested in the history and evolution of sci-fi as a genre, and in the continued fight for diversity, inclusion, and visibility of sci-fi and pop culture more broadly." --Popmatters"It is time [Russ],was remembered and honored for her gallant, elegant and witty contribution." --Times Literary Supplement"This overview would be a particularly good introduction for undergraduates (or any interested reader) looking for a way into Russ’s career and into the gender-in-SF issues of her time." --Locus"A rigorous biography of Russ’s mind. . . . Every writer must dream of someday having a reader who reads their work the way Gwyneth Jones reads Joanna Russ." --Fantasy & Science Fiction"Gwyneth Jones's study of Russ's life and work is important reading for anyone interested in feminism, science fiction, or terrific writing. With insight and warmth, she reveals Russ to us as a brilliant, impossible person and as a groundbreaking, uncompromising writer."--Julie Phillips, author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon "Jones’s concise, thorough survey successfully traces the tensions and confluences between Russ’s various fields of work. Her positions as genre writer, academic, and feminist are in flux, in conversation; by creating illustrative juxtapositions within a chronological framework as well as integrating analysis with biographical detail, Jones offers insight and clarity into the difficulties that drove Russ’s career trajectory and eventual retirement from the SF field."--Brit Mandelo, author of We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling
£16.14
University of Illinois Press Kim Stanley Robinson
Book SynopsisAward-winning epics like the Mars Trilogy and groundbreaking alternative histories like The Days of Rice and Salt have brought Kim Stanley Robinson to the forefront of contemporary science fiction. Mixing subject matter from a dizzying number of fields with his own complex ecological and philosophical concerns, Robinson explores how humanity might pursue utopian social action as a strategy for its own survival. Robert Markley examines the works of an author engaged with the fundamental question of how weas individuals, as a civilization, and as a speciesmight go forward. By building stories on huge time scales, Robinson lays out the scientific and human processes that fuel humanity's struggle toward a more just and environmentally stable world or system of worlds. His works invite readers to contemplate how to achieve, and live in, these numerous possible futures. They also challenge us to see that SF's literary, cultural, and philosophical significance have made it the preeminent liteTrade Review"Kim Stanley Robinson crafts scientifically grounded speculative fictions in which the utopian impulse is a matter of thinking deeply about problems that most literary fiction has not yet even bothered to register. Robert Markley has done us readers of KSR an immense service in tracking the evolution of methods and themes across the wounded galaxy of this writer's work. This is the essential guide to the world KSR has made."--McKenzie Wark, author of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century "Robert Markley’s book makes it clear that there’s much, much, more to Kim Stanley Robinson than the conquest of the high frontier." --Amazing Stories"Kim Stanley Robinson's formidable expanse of science fiction leaves many of us wondering where to begin. Begin here. Having studied Kim Stanley Robinson's work for decades, Robert Markley presents a cogent and inviting introduction to one of the most important figures in twentieth century SF. Markley gracefully traces the 'slurry' of Marxism, Buddhism, and ecology running throughout the novels, highlighting the survival strategies Robinson envisions for present and future peoples. For Robinson and for Markley, literature becomes, ideally, a mode of action—as well as an ethical and political intervention for more carefully considered, just, and livable worlds."--Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times "Each tale is an attempt to move closer to some idea settling of the issues of eco-economics and cooperative living that the author sees as utopian. In the end, Robinson is both nihilistic and optimist, understanding that utopia, like enlightenment, may be achievable but not sustainable." --SFRevu
£17.99
