Columbia University Press

Shortlisted, 2024-2025 W.J.M. MacKenzie Book Prize, Political Studies Association

It is widely believed that Congress has broken down. Media accounts present the storied legislature as thoroughly gridlocked, paralyzed by partisan rancor. Political scientists find that Congress is passing fewer laws and spending less time on legislative work. Which parts of a supposedly dysfunctional legislature continue to function?

Maya L. Kornberg examines the legislative process beyond voting patterns, emphasizing the crucial role of congressional committee hearings. In committees, lawmakers hear from expert witnesses, legislators revise and discuss bills before bringing them to a vote, and the public has an opportunity to engage with Congress. Kornberg scrutinizes the inner workings of committees—the different types of witnesses who testify, the varied hearings Congress holds, and the distinct effects that committee work has on congresspeople. She deploys original mixed-methods datasets that span from insider interviews to sentiment analysis examining the language used in hearings. Kornberg evaluates how committees operate and the conditions affecting their performance, finding that committee work can be more deliberative and productive than the politics of the Congress floor.

Through a comprehensive exploration of who committees hear from and how they listen, this book demonstrates that Congress is not as dysfunctional as is often claimed. Inside Congressional Committees also suggests timely reforms based on these findings that can strengthen Congress.

Oil is an unusual commodity in that individual decisions can have an outsized effect on the market. OPEC+’s choice to increase production, for instance, might send prices falling, affecting both oil producers and consumers worldwide. What do the leading oil market players consider before making a fateful move?

Oil Leaders offers an unprecedented glimpse into the strategic thinking of top figures in the energy world from the 1980s through the recent past. Ibrahim AlMuhanna—a close adviser to four different Saudi oil ministers during that period—examines the role of individual and collective decision making in shaping market movements. He analyzes how powerful individuals made critical choices, tracking how they responded to the flow of information on pivotal market and political events and predicted reactions from allies and adversaries. AlMuhanna highlights how the media has played an increasingly important role as a conduit of information among multiple players in the oil market. Energy leaders have learned to manage the signals they send to the market and to other relevant players in order to avoid sending oil prices into a spiral.

AlMuhanna draws on personal familiarity with many of these individual decision makers as well as his participation in decades of closed-door sessions where crucial choices were made. Featuring revelatory behind-the-scenes perspective on pivotal oil market events and dynamics, this book is a must-read for practitioners and policy makers engaged with the global energy world.

What is the relationship between the ethical transformation of the self and the political transformation of the world? This book explores the ways several twentieth-century thinkers can help us relate the “care of the self” to the “care of the other,” tracing their accounts of how and why practices intended to change an individual can help spur social and political change, just as collective political action can produce a transformation of the self.

Daniel Louis Wyche examines the political implications of what he calls practices of ethical self-change. These include Pierre Hadot’s notion of “spiritual exercises”; what the French sociologist of labor Georges Friedmann calls the “interior effort”; Michel Foucault’s ethics of the “care of the self”; what Martin Luther King Jr. refers to as the work of “self-purification” integral to direct action; and Audre Lorde’s claim that caring for herself constitutes a form of “political warfare.” Wyche argues that these concepts can collectively provide an understanding that effaces distinctions between the care of the self, the other, and the community in a way that avoids reducing the political to the ethical. Ambitious and nuanced, The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other offers a framework for unifying individual moral action and collective political life.

Longlisted, 2025 Palestine Book Awards

In recent years, attitudes in the United States toward the Palestinian cause have shifted dramatically. Although Palestinians have long been demonized in U.S. media and politics, their struggle portrayed as illegitimate, emergent progressive voices increasingly challenge the status quo on Israel and Palestine and express solidarity with Palestinian resistance. What accounts for this change and its evolution?

This book provides a new lens on activism around Palestinian issues, demonstrating how the global Palestinian diaspora has driven transnational political movements. Karam Dana explores the ways that exile has shaped Palestinian identity and allowed for new forms of global activism. He examines the social, political, economic, and technological forces that have created space for Palestinian voices to be heard by wider audiences worldwide. Drawing on interviews with scholars and advocates—including members of the Palestinian diaspora and Jewish American activists—as well as public opinion data and media analysis, Dana traces how global Palestinian communities have influenced American views. He addresses the backlash against pro-Palestinian advocacy but argues that solidarity with Palestinians—both in the United States and globally—will continue to strengthen. Timely and insightful, To Stand with Palestine offers an inside look at how Palestinians have shared their story with the world and why sympathy for their plight is growing, with significant implications for the global political landscape.

Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. They are eager to learn local languages. Immigration is not a burden on social services. Border walls do not work. There is no unmanageable refugee crisis. Yet many such misinformed assumptions and harmful misconceptions pervade conversations about immigration.

This timely book is a practical, evidence-based primer on immigrants and immigration. Each chapter debunks a frequently encountered claim and answers common questions. Presenting the latest findings and decades of interdisciplinary research in an accessible way, Ernesto Castañeda and Carina Cione emphasize the expert consensus that immigration is vital to the United States and many other countries around the world. Featuring original insights from research conducted in El Paso, Texas, Immigration Realities considers a wide range of places, ethnic groups, and historical eras. It provides the key data and context to understand how immigration affects economies, crime rates, and social welfare systems, and it sheds light on contentious issues such as the safety of the U.S.-Mexico border and the consequences of Brexit. This book is an indispensable guide for all readers who want to counter false claims about immigration and are interested in what the research shows.

European intellectuals of the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. In response, American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. Through literary magazines, traveling art exhibits, touring musical shows, radio programs, book translations, and conferences, they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove—particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure—that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant.

Yet by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. They remade the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption. Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War. Drawing on interviews, previously unknown archival materials, and the stories of such figures and institutions as William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and Voice of America, Barnhisel reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, with profound implications for the art that followed and for the character of American identity.

Today, most Uyghurs are Muslims. For centuries, however, Uyghurs were Buddhists. By around 1000 CE, they, like many of their neighbors, had decisively turned toward the Dharma, and a golden age of Uyghur Buddhism flourished under the Mongol empire. Dwelling along the Silk Road in what is now northwestern China, they stood at the center of Buddhist Eurasia, linking far-flung regions and traditions. But as Muslim power grew, Uyghur Buddhists converted to Islam, rewriting their past and erasing their Buddhist history.

This book presents the first comprehensive history of Buddhism among the Uyghurs from the ninth to the seventeenth century. Johan Elverskog traces how the Uyghurs forged their distinctive tradition, considering a variety of social, political, cultural, and religious contexts. He argues that the religious history of the Uyghurs challenges conventional narratives of the meeting of Buddhism and Islam, showing that conversion took place gradually and was driven by factors such as geopolitics, climate change, and technological innovation. Elverskog also provides a nuanced understanding of lived Buddhism, focusing on ritual practices and materiality as well as the religion’s entanglements with economics, politics, and violence. A groundbreaking history of Uyghur Buddhism, this book makes a compelling case for the importance of the Uyghurs in shaping the course of both Buddhist and Asian history.

Winner, 2025 Donald W. Light Award for Applied Medical Sociology, Medical Sociology Section, American Sociological Association

Winner, 2025 Merton Book Award, Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section, American Sociological Association

Winner 2024 Sociology of Disability in Society Outstanding Publication Award, Disability in Society Section, American Sociological Association

Movements that take issue with conventional understandings of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability, have become increasingly visible. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with participants, Catherine Tan investigates two autism-focused movements, shedding new light on how members contest expert authority. Examining their separate struggles to gain legitimacy and represent autistic people, she develops a new account of the importance of social movements as spaces for constructing knowledge that aims to challenge dominant frameworks.

Spaces on the Spectrum examines the autistic rights and alternative biomedical movements, which reimagine autism in different and conflicting ways: as a difference to be accepted or as a sickness to treat. Both, however, provide a window into how ideas that conflict with dominant beliefs develop, take hold, and persist. The autistic rights movement is composed primarily of autistic adults who contend that autism is a natural human variation, not a disorder, and advocate for social and cultural inclusion and policy changes. The alternative biomedical movement, in contrast, is dominated by parents and practitioners who believe in the disproven idea that vaccines trigger autism and seek to reverse it with scientifically unsupported treatments. Both movements position themselves in opposition to researchers, professionals, and parents outside their communities. Spaces on the Spectrum offers timely insights into the roles of shared identity and communal networks in movements that question scientific and medical authority.

During the Republican period (1912–1949) and after, many Chinese Buddhists sought inspiration from non-Chinese Buddhist traditions, showing a particular interest in esoteric teachings. What made these Buddhists dissatisfied with Chinese Buddhism, and what did they think other Buddhist traditions could offer? Which elements did they choose to follow, and which ones did they disregard? And how do their experiences recast the wider story of twentieth-century pan-Asian Buddhist reform movements?

Based on a wide range of previously unexplored Chinese sources, this book explores how esoteric Buddhist traditions have shaped the Chinese religious landscape. Wei Wu examines cross-cultural religious transmission of ideas from Japanese and Tibetan traditions, considering the various esoteric currents within Chinese Buddhist communities and how Chinese individuals and groups engaged with newly translated ideas and practices. She argues that Chinese Buddhists’ assimilation of doctrinal, ritual, and institutional elements of Tibetan and Japanese esoteric Buddhism was not a simple replication but an active process of creating new meanings. Their visions of Buddhism in the modern world, as well as early twentieth-century discourses of nation building and religious reform, shaped the reception of esoteric traditions. By analyzing the Chinese interpretation and strategic adaptations of esoteric Buddhism, this book sheds new light on the intellectual development, ritual performances, and institutional formations of Chinese Buddhism in the twentieth century.

Winner, 2025 Lionel Trilling Book Award, Columbia College

Winner, 2024 Book Award, History Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication

From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China’s twentieth century. In Revolutionary Becomings¸ Ying Qian studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements.

With meticulous historical excavation and attention to intermedial practices and transnational linkages, Qian discusses how early media practitioners at the turn of the twentieth century intermingled with rival politicians and warlords as well as civic and business organizations. She reveals the foundational role documentary media played in the Chinese Communist Revolution as a bridge between Marxist theories and Chinese historical conditions. In considering the years after the Communist Party came to power, Qian traces the dialectical relationships between media practice, political relationality, and revolutionary epistemology from production campaigns during the Great Leap Forward to the “class struggles” during the Cultural Revolution and the reorganization of society in the post-Mao decade. Exploring a wide range of previously uninvestigated works and intervening in key debates in documentary studies and film and media history, Revolutionary Becomings provides a groundbreaking assessment of the significance of media to the historical unfolding and actualization of revolutionary movements.

Shortlist, 2024 Best in Business Book Awards, Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing

Today, every business is talking about digital transformation. With the acceleration of new technologies, every organization knows it must adapt to survive. But by their own admission, 70 percent of businesses are failing to transform. Across industries, established companies are held back by bureaucracy, inertia, and old ways of working. How can businesses break through to drive real change?

The Digital Transformation Roadmap provides every leader with the answer. Acclaimed author and C-suite advisor David L. Rogers argues that businesses must transform not just products and business models—they must transform the organization itself. Based on two decades of research and advising companies around the world, Rogers identifies the five biggest barriers to digital transformation: vision, priorities, experimentation, governance, and capabilities. He then shows how any business can evolve by heeding the lessons of companies such as Disney, Walmart, Mastercard, Air Liquide, and the New York Times Company.

The Digital Transformation Roadmap provides a practical blueprint for organizational change, illustrated with real-world case studies and step-by-step planning tools. Rogers shows every leader how to think beyond the churn of new technologies and rebuild their organization for a world of constant change.

The Tarikh-i Ḥamidi is an epic and tragic history from the region of Xinjiang in northwest China, the homeland of the Muslim-majority Uyghur people. Written in the early twentieth century, it chronicles a mass rebellion by the Muslims of Xinjiang against the China-based Qing empire from its beginnings in 1864 to the Qing reconquest of 1877 and its aftermath. Its author, Musa Sayrami, was an eyewitness to and participant in the rebellion, and he later became a servant to the state that arose from it: an emirate led by the Central Asian military commander Yaʿqub Beg.

Sayrami documents the optimism of the rebellion’s early days, when local Muslims rose up to demand justice, as well as the tragedies that resulted from its leaders’ hubris. Yaʿqub Beg’s state offered hope for Islamic rule, but he turned out to be a flawed ruler, and the Qing reconquered the region. The narrative alternates dramatic scenes of battles and intrigue with colorful legends and reflections on the nature of politics.

Sayrami wrote not only to record events being lost from memory three decades after the uprising but also to account for why the Islamic rebellion had failed. He draws on traditional Islamic scholarship to analyze the relationship between Qing and Islamic power, developing an incisive argument about politics and empire. Presenting a distinctly Uyghur perspective on China, Eurasia, and the world, the Tarikh-i Ḥamidi is at once an invaluable lens on a period of flux and a cornerstone of Uyghur writing.

Winner, 2024 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies, Modern Language Association

Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers—or threatens to boil over.

On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious—sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism.

On the Edge is highly interdisciplinary, fusing digital media, art history, literary criticism, and performance studies with citizenship, protest, and labor studies. It makes both the distinctive Chinese experience and the vital role of culture central to global understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract.

Honorable Mention, 2024 Ángel David Nieves Book Award, American Studies Association, Digital Humanities Caucus

Today, algorithms exercise outsize influence on cultural decision-making, shaping and even reshaping the concept of culture. How were automated, computational processes empowered to perform this work? What forces prompted the emergence of algorithmic culture?

Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet is a history of how culture and computation came to be entangled. From Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, by way of medieval Baghdad, this book pinpoints the critical junctures at which algorithmic culture began to coalesce in language long before it materialized in the technological wizardry of Silicon Valley. Revising and extending the methodology of “keywords,” Ted Striphas examines changing concepts and definitions of culture, including the development of the field of cultural studies, and stresses the importance of language in the history of technology.

Offering historical and interdisciplinary perspective on the relationship of culture and computation, this book provides urgently needed context for the algorithmic injustices that beset the world today.

Winner, 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Muslim people are found all over the world. Most live outside the Middle East, from Asia to the Americas. The vast majority of contemporary Muslims are not fluent in Arabic, and speakers of languages such as Persian, Urdu, and Turkish have made essential contributions to Islamic history and culture. However, typical courses on Islam tend to downplay areas beyond the Middle East, focusing on Arabic texts and elite theological and doctrinal arguments.

This book offers an inclusive view of the diversity and complexity of the many worlds of Islam, investigating ethics and aesthetics as much as scriptures and theology. By paying attention to Muslims who are socially, culturally, doctrinally, or politically marginalized, it provides a comprehensive and all-embracing vision of the religion and its many interrelated communities. Contributors from a range of personal and intellectual backgrounds explore the capaciousness of Muslim identities, helping readers achieve a broader understanding of the past, present, and future of the Muslim world. This book includes communities such as the Nation of Islam and Alevi Muslims, and it goes beyond rituals like prayer and fasting to consider a wider array of practices, such as tattooing.

Across the Worlds of Islam is at once student-friendly and cutting-edge, written with both introductory courses and general readers in mind. Examining Muslim identity and practice from the perspective of the margins, it offers nuanced portraits of Muslim life across geographic and sectarian divisions.

What does it mean to be a Muslim philosopher, or to philosophize in Islam? In Open to Reason, Souleymane Bachir Diagne traces Muslims’ intellectual and spiritual history of examining and questioning beliefs and arguments to show how Islamic philosophy has always engaged critically with texts and ideas both inside and outside its tradition. Through a rich reading of classical and modern Muslim philosophers, Diagne explains the long history of philosophy in the Islamic world and its relevance to crucial issues of our own time.

From classical figures such as Avicenna to the twentieth-century Sufi master and teacher of tolerance Tierno Bokar Salif Tall, Diagne explores how Islamic thinkers have asked and answered such questions as Does religion need philosophy? How can religion coexist with rationalism? What does it mean to interpret a religious narrative philosophically? What does it mean to be human, and what are human beings’ responsibilities to nature? Is there such a thing as an “Islamic” state, or should Muslims reinvent political institutions that suit their own times? Diagne shows that philosophizing in Islam in its many forms throughout the centuries has meant a commitment to forward and open thinking. A remarkable history of philosophy in the Islamic world as well as a work of philosophy in its own right, this book seeks to contribute to the revival of a spirit of pluralism rooted in Muslim intellectual and spiritual traditions.

Chimpanzees fascinate people for many reasons. We are struck by the apes’ resemblance to humanity, as seen in their use of tools and their complex social lives, and we are moved by the threats that human activity poses to them. Our awareness of our closest living relatives testifies to the efforts of the remarkable people who study these creatures and work to protect them. What motivates someone to dedicate their lives to chimpanzees? How does that reflect on our own species?

This book brings together a range of chimpanzee experts who tell powerful personal stories about their lives and careers. It features some of the world’s preeminent primatologists—including Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal—as well as representatives of a new generation from varied backgrounds. In addition to field scientists, the book features anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, veterinarians, conservationists, and the director of a chimpanzee sanctuary. Some grew up in the English countryside, others in villages in Congo; some first encountered chimpanzees in a zoo, others in the forests surrounding their homes. All are united by a common purpose: to study and understand chimpanzees in order to protect them in the wild and care for them in zoos and sanctuaries. Contributors share what inspired them, what shaped their career choices, and what motivates them to strive for solutions to the many challenges that chimpanzees face today.

This book is at once a guided introduction to Chinese nonfictional prose and an innovative textbook for the study of classical Chinese. It is a companion volume to How to Read Chinese Prose: A Guided Anthology, designed for Chinese-language learners.

How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese presents more than forty prose works, either excerpts or in full, from antiquity through the Qing dynasty. While teaching readers how to appreciate the rich tradition of Chinese prose in its original form, the book uses these texts to introduce classical Chinese to advanced learners, helping them develop reading comprehension and vocabulary. It offers a systematic guide to classical Chinese grammar and abundant notes on vocabulary, and features an extensive network of notes, exercises, and cross-references. The book includes modern translations of the forty prose works in simplified Chinese, presented alongside the original texts in traditional Chinese. It also includes expert commentaries on each text’s distinctive aesthetic qualities as well as historical and cultural contexts.

The book comprises thirty-eight lessons within eight units, organized chronologically to reflect the emergence of major prose genres. It is a major contribution to the teaching and study of classical Chinese language and literature.

Audio recordings of all forty texts are available online free of charge.

Born just one year before the United Nations itself, Ban Ki-moon came of age with the world body. His earliest memories are haunted by the sound of bombs dropping on his Korean village and the sight of fires consuming what remained. The six-year-old boy fled with his family, trudging for miles in mud-soaked shoes, suffering from incessant hunger, and wondering how they would survive—until the United Nations rescued them. Young Ban Ki-moon grew up determined to repay this lifesaving generosity.

Resolved is Ban Ki-moon’s personal account of his decade at the helm of the organization during a period of historic turmoil and promise. Meeting challenges and resistance with a belief in the UN’s mission of peace, development, and human rights, he steered the United Nations through a volatile period that included the Arab Spring, nuclear pursuits in Iran and North Korea, the Ebola epidemic, and brutal new conflicts in Central Africa. As secretary-general, Ban also forged global agreements to fight extreme poverty and address the climate crisis.

Ban performed what has been called “the most impossible job on this earth” with a genuine belief in collective action and global transformation. Freed from the diplomatic constraints of a lifetime of public service, he offers a candid assessment of the people and events that shape our era and a bracing analysis of what lies ahead.

Today, the People’s Republic of China is North Korea’s only ally on the world stage, a tightly knit relationship that goes back decades. Both countries portray their partnership as one of “brotherly affection” based on shared political ideals—an alliance “as tight as lips to teeth”—even though relations have deteriorated in recent years due to China’s ascendance and North Korea’s intransigence.

In A Misunderstood Friendship, leading diplomatic historians Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia draw on previously untapped primary source materials revealing tensions and rivalries to offer a unique account of the China–North Korea relationship. They unravel the twists and turns in high-level diplomacy between China and North Korea from the late 1940s to the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Based on unprecedented access to Chinese government documents, Soviet and Eastern European archives, and in-depth interviews with former Chinese diplomats and North Korean defectors, Shen and Xia reveal that the tensions that currently plague the alliance between the two countries have been present from the very beginning of the relationship. They significantly revise existing narratives of the Korean War, China’s postwar aid to North Korea, Kim Il-sung’s ideological and strategic thinking, North Korea’s relations with the Soviet Union, and the importance of the Sino-U.S. rapprochement, among other issues. A Misunderstood Friendship adds new depth to our understanding of one of the most secretive and significant relationships of the Cold War, with increasing relevance to international affairs today.

As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum.

Against the backdrop of the Sinophone Pacific, Chiang argues that the concept of transgender identity must be rethought beyond a purely Western frame. At the same time, he challenges China-centrism in the study of East Asian gender and sexual configurations. Chiang brings Sinophone studies to bear on trans theory to deconstruct the ways in which sexual normativity and Chinese imperialism have been produced through one another. Grounded in an eclectic range of sources—from the archives of sexology to press reports of intersexuality, films about castration, and records of social activism—this book reorients anti-transphobic inquiry at the crossroads of area studies, medical humanities, and queer theory. Timely and provocative, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific highlights the urgency of interdisciplinary knowledge in debates over the promise and future of human diversity.

With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power.

Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.

As the teaching of Chinese increasingly uses simplified characters, this new version of the popular A Primer for Advanced Beginners of Chinese fills an important gap in Chinese-language instruction.

The two-volume primer is addressed to meet the needs of the rapidly growing number of Chinese language students who were raised in the United States in Chinese-speaking homes and speak the language but cannot read or write it. This text develops lessons around readings on Chinese history, culture, geography, literature, folktales and mythology, customs, and cuisine.

Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical juncture in the career of Roland Barthes, in which he declared the intention, deeply felt, to write a novel. Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way.

Barthes's lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel. He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of François-René Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust.

This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes's unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic's views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-1978) and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volume provides an intensely personal account of the labor and love of writing.

Nothing fills us with a sense of wonder like fossils. What looks at first like a simple rock is in fact a clue that reveals the staggering diversity of ancient environments, the winding pathways of evolution, and the majesty of a vanished earth. But as much as one might daydream of digging a hole in the backyard and finding a Tyrannosaurus, only a few places contain these buried treasures, and when a scientist comes across a remnant of prehistoric life, great care must be taken. What do budding paleontologists need to know before starting their search?

In Fantastic Fossils, Donald R. Prothero offers an accessible, entertaining, and richly illustrated guide to the paleontologist’s journey. He details the best places to look for fossils, the art of how to find them, and how to classify the major types. Prothero provides expert wisdom about typical fossils that an average person can hope to collect and how to hunt fossils responsibly and ethically. He also explores the lessons that both common and rarer discoveries offer about paleontology and its history, as well as what fossils can tell us about past climates and present climate change. Captivating illustrations by the paleoartist Mary Persis Williams bring to life hundreds of important specimens. Offering valuable lessons for armchair enthusiasts and paleontology students alike, Fantastic Fossils is an essential companion for all readers who have ever dreamed of going in search of traces of a lost world.

New Russian Drama took shape at the turn of the new millennium—a time of turbulent social change in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Emerging from small playwriting festivals, provincial theaters, and converted basements, it evolved into a major artistic movement that startled audiences with hypernaturalistic portrayals of sex and violence, daring use of non-normative language, and thrilling experiments with genre and form. The movement’s commitment to investigating contemporary reality helped revitalize Russian theater. It also provoked confrontations with traditionalists in society and places of power, making theater once again Russia’s most politicized art form.

This anthology offers an introduction to New Russian Drama through plays that illustrate the versatility and global relevance of this exciting movement. Many of them address pressing social issues, such as ethnic tensions and political disillusionment; others engage with Russia’s rich cultural legacy by reimagining traditional genres and canons. Among them are a family drama about Anton Chekhov, a modern production play in which factory workers compose haiku, and a satirical verse play about the treatment of migrant workers, as well a documentary play about a terrorist school siege and a postdramatic “text” that is only two sentences long. Both politically and aesthetically uncompromising, they chart new paths for performance in the twenty-first century. Acquainting English-language readers with these vital works, New Russian Drama challenges us to reflect on the status and mission of the theater.

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles.

The Field of Cultural Production brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption.

Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority.

Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power.

The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power.

The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies.

In 1993, an astonishing discovery was made at a tomb in Guodian in Hubei province (east central China). Written on strips of bamboo that have miraculously survived intact since 300 B.C., the "Guodian Laozi," is by far the earliest version of the Tao Te Ching ever unearthed. Students of ancient Chinese civilization proclaimed the text a decisive breakthrough in the understanding of this famous text: it provides the most conclusive evidence to date that the text was the work of multiple authors and editors over hundreds of years, rather than the achievement of a single individual writing during the time of Confucius.

Robert Henricks now presents the first English translation of the "bamboo slip Laozi." Differing substantially from other versions we have of the text, the Guodian Laozi provides us with clues on how and when the text came into being. As Henricks's translation shows, many chapters are missing in this form of the text, and some chapters remain incomplete. All of this seems to suggest that the Tao Te Ching was not yet "complete" when these slips were copied.

In his translation, Henricks focuses attention on lines in each of the chapters that vary from readings in other editions. In addition, he shows how the sequence of chapters in this form of the text is totally unrelated to the sequence readers commonly see in the "standard" form of the text, i.e., in other translations.

Here are just a few of the noteworthy features of this new Tao Te Ching:

• A lucid introduction to the Guodian Laozi, offering background on the archaeological interpretation of the discovery

• Line-by-line comparisons of the Guodian Laozi against the Mawangdui and Wang Bi editions

• Extensive notes on each chapter describing the unique elements of the Guodian Laozi in comparison with other versions

• Transcriptions for each chapter, noting both the ancient and modern form of the characters in the chapter

• An appendix featuring the official biography of Laozi written by Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of China, as well as Henricks's commentary and notes on this biography

This groundbreaking work will lead to a reassessment of the history and significance of this well-known and critical work as well as a reevaluation of the role it played in the development of Taoism in early China.

Available for the first time in English, Azaleas is a captivating collection of poems by a master of the early Korean modernist style. Published in 1925, Azaleas is the only collection Kim Sowol (1902-1934) produced during his brief life, yet he remains one of Korea's most beloved and well-known poets. His work is a delightful and sophisticated blend of the images, tonalities, and rhythms of traditional Korean folk songs with surprisingly modern forms and themes. Sowol is also known for his unique and sometimes unsettling perspective, expressed through loneliness, longing, and a creative use of dream imagery-a reflection of Sowol's engagement with French Symbolist poetry.

Azaleas recounts the journey of a young Korean as he travels from the northern P'yongyang area near to the cosmopolitan capital of Seoul. Told through an array of voices, the poems describe the young man's actions as he leaves home, his experiences as a student and writer in Seoul, and his return north. Although considered a landmark of Korean literature, Azaleas speaks to readers from all cultures. An essay by Sowol's mentor, the poet Kim Ok, concludes the collection and provides vital insight into Sowol's work and life. This elegant translation by David R. McCann, an expert on modern Korean poetry, maintains the immediacy and richness of Sowol's work and shares with English-language readers the quiet beauty of a poet who continues to cast a powerful spell on generations of Korean readers.

What is the sentimental? How can we understand it by way of the visual and narrative modes of signification specific to cinema and through the manners of social interaction and collective imagining specific to a particular culture in transition? What can the sentimental tell us about the precarious foundations of human coexistence in this age of globalization?

Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ann Hui, Peter Chan, Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Li Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang) whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema. Approaching their works from multiple perspectives, including the question of origins, nostalgia, the everyday, feminine "psychic interiority," commodification, biopolitics, migration, education, homosexuality, kinship, and incest, and concluding with an account of the Chinese films' epistemic affinity with the Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback Mountain, Chow proposes that the sentimental is a discursive constellation traversing affect, time, identity, and social mores, a constellation whose contours tends to morph under different historical circumstances and in different genres and media. In contemporary Chinese films, she argues, the sentimental consistently takes the form not of revolution but of compromise, not of radical departure but of moderation, endurance, and accommodation. By naming these films sentimental fabulations—screen artifacts of cultural becoming with irreducible aesthetic, conceptual, and speculative logics of their own—Chow presents Chinese cinema first and foremost as an invitation to the pleasures and challenges of critical thinking.

Chaoyue: Advancing in Chinese covers the five Cs—communication, cultures, comparisons, connections, and communities—and follows three communicative modes in lesson design: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. The authors arrange their lessons around four topics intrinsically interesting to students: the self, schooling, social customs, and the global village, fostering a full appreciation of Chinese culture. Each lesson contains warm-up activities, mini-dialogues, authentic readings, conversational relays, a cultural unit, examples of sentence patterns, and a vocabulary list. Two review lessons are geared specifically toward synthesizing and reinforcing the language and culture skills taught throughout the book, and footnote glossaries assist in reading comprehension.

Written by experienced Chinese language instructors, Chaoyue helps students reach the preadvanced proficiency level within two semesters, or approximately 150 to 180 hours of course time. The preadvanced stage is comparable to a fourth-semester college Chinese course, or 250 hours of instruction. Unlike other language texts, Chaoyue is printed in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, as well as the phonetic systems used in China (pinyin) and Taiwan (zhuyin fuhao). It also includes a CD-ROM with additional assignments and review as well as an online teacher manual.

Lesson sections include: •Warm-up activities that articulate the lesson's theme and activate students' prior knowledge

•Short readings in the form of letters, e-mails, reports, dialogues, stories, and interviews

•Dialogue practice with key vocabulary and sentence patterns

•Interactive activities such as surveys, debates, and small group discussions

•Conversational relays that ask pairs to complete minidialogues

•Authentic readings in the form of advertisements, Web sites, maps, and signs, with multiple-choice review questions

•Common expressions that relate to the lesson theme

Loren Ghiglione recounts the fascinating life and tragic suicide of Don Hollenbeck, the controversial newscaster who became a primary target of McCarthyism's smear tactics. Drawing on unsealed FBI records, private family correspondence, and interviews with Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Charles Collingwood, Douglas Edwards, and more than one hundred other journalists, Ghiglione writes a balanced biography that cuts close to the bone of this complicated newsman and chronicles the stark consequences of the anti-Communist frenzy that seized America in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Hollenbeck began his career at the Lincoln, Nebraska Journal (marrying the boss's daughter) before becoming an editor at William Randolph Hearst's rip-roaring Omaha Bee-News. He participated in the emerging field of photojournalism at the Associated Press; assisted in creating the innovative, ad-free PM newspaper in New York City; reported from the European theater for NBC radio during World War II; and anchored television newscasts at CBS during the era of Edward R. Murrow.

Hollenbeck's pioneering, prize-winning radio program, CBS Views the Press (1947-1950), was a declaration of independence from a print medium that had dominated American newsmaking for close to 250 years. The program candidly criticized the prestigious New York Times, the Daily News (then the paper with the largest circulation in America), and Hearst's flagship Journal-American and popular morning tabloid Daily Mirror. For this honest work, Hollenbeck was attacked by conservative anti-Communists, especially Hearst columnist Jack O'Brian, and in 1954, plagued by depression, alcoholism, three failed marriages, and two network firings (and worried about a third), Hollenbeck took his own life. In his investigation of this amazing American character, Ghiglione reveals the workings of an industry that continues to fall victim to censorship and political manipulation. Separating myth from fact, CBS's Don Hollenbeck is the definitive portrait of a polarizing figure who became a symbol of America's tortured conscience.

"Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for humanism."

So writes Julia Kristeva in this provocative work, which skillfully upends our entrenched ideas about religion, belief, and the thought and work of a renowned psychoanalyst and critic. With dialogue and essay, Kristeva analyzes our "incredible need to believe"--the inexorable push toward faith that, for Kristeva, lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. Examining the lives, theories, and convictions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, and other individuals, she investigates the intersection between the desire for God and the shadowy zone in which belief resides.

Kristeva suggests that human beings are formed by their need to believe, beginning with our first attempts at speech and following through to our adolescent search for identity and meaning. Kristeva then applies her insight to contemporary religious clashes and the plight of immigrant populations, especially those of Islamic origin. Even if we no longer have faith in God, Kristeva argues, we must believe in human destiny and creative possibility. Reclaiming Christianity's openness to self-questioning and the search for knowledge, Kristeva urges a "new kind of politics," one that restores the integrity of the human community.

In The Preparation of the Novel, a collection of lectures delivered at a defining moment in Roland Barthes's career (and completed just weeks before his death), the critic spoke of his struggle to discover a different way of writing and a new approach to life. The Neutral preceded this work, containing Barthes's challenge to the classic oppositions of Western thought and his effort to establish new pathways of meaning. How to Live Together predates both of these achievements, a series of lectures exploring solitude and the degree of contact necessary for individuals to exist and create at their own pace. A distinct project that sets the tone for his subsequent lectures, How to Live Together is a key introduction to Barthes's pedagogical methods and critical worldview.

In this work, Barthes focuses on the concept of "idiorrhythmy," a productive form of living together in which one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other. He explores this phenomenon through five texts that represent different living spaces and their associated ways of life: Émile Zola's Pot-Bouille, set in a Parisian apartment building; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which takes place in a sanatorium; André Gide's La Séquestrée de Poitiers, based on the true story of a woman confined to her bedroom; Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, about a castaway on a remote island; and Pallidius's Lausiac History, detailing the ascetic lives of the desert fathers.

As with his previous lecture books, How to Live Together exemplifies Barthes's singular approach to teaching, in which he invites his audience to investigate with him—or for him—and wholly incorporates his listeners into his discoveries. Rich with playful observations and suggestive prose, How to Live Together orients English-speaking readers to the full power of Barthes's intellectual adventures.

Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler engages thinkers such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel's claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew.

Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler's startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy.

Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy.

Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book's ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics.

Wael B. Hallaq boldly argues that the "Islamic state," judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Comparing the legal, political, moral, and constitutional histories of premodern Islam and Euro-America, he finds the adoption and practice of the modern state to be highly problematic for modern Muslims. He also critiques more expansively modernity's moral predicament, which renders impossible any project resting solely on ethical foundations.

The modern state not only suffers from serious legal, political, and constitutional issues, Hallaq argues, but also, by its very nature, fashions a subject inconsistent with what it means to be, or to live as, a Muslim. By Islamic standards, the state's technologies of the self are severely lacking in moral substance, and today's Islamic state, as Hallaq shows, has done little to advance an acceptable form of genuine Shari'a governance. The Islamists' constitutional battles in Egypt and Pakistan, the Islamic legal and political failures of the Iranian Revolution, and similar disappointments underscore this fact. Nevertheless, the state remains the favored template of the Islamists and the ulama (Muslim clergymen).

Providing Muslims with a path toward realizing the good life, Hallaq turns to the rich moral resources of Islamic history. Along the way, he proves political and other "crises of Islam" are not unique to the Islamic world nor to the Muslim religion. These crises are integral to the modern condition of both East and West, and by acknowledging these parallels, Muslims can engage more productively with their Western counterparts.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique.

Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought.

Yi Mun-yol's Meeting with My Brother is narrated by a middle-aged South Korean professor, also named Yi, whose father abandoned his family and defected to the North at the outbreak of the Korean War. Many years later, despite having spent most of his life under a cloud of suspicion as the son of a traitor, Yi is prepared to reunite with his father. Yet before a rendezvous on the Chinese border can be arranged, his father dies. Yi then learns for the first time that he has a half-brother, whom he chooses to meet instead. As the two confront their shared legacy, their encounter takes a surprising turn.

Meeting with My Brother represents the political and psychological complexity of Koreans on both sides of the border, offering a complex yet poignant perspective on the divisions between the two countries. Through a series of charged conversations, Yi explores the nuances of reunification, both political and personal. This semiautobiographical account draws on Yi's own experience of growing up with an absent father who defected to the North and the stigma of family disloyalty. First published in Korea in 1994, Meeting with My Brother is a moving and illuminating portrait of the relationships sundered by one of the world's starkest barriers.

Ch’ae Manshik is one of the most accomplished modern Korean writers yet is underrepresented in English translation because of the challenges posed by his distinctive voice and colloquial style. Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader is the first English-language anthology of his works and features a variety of genres—novella, short fiction, anecdotal essay, travel writing, children’s story, one-act play, three-act play, and roundtable discussion.


This anthology moves beyond the usual “representative works” to provide a well-rounded selection of writing by one of Korea’s most innovative and memorable voices, drawing on Ch'ae's ten-volume Complete Works. This edition also provides a comprehensive introduction outlining the limitations of existing approaches to Ch'ae. It contextualizes the anthology's contents both in terms of the author's career and the rich Korean tradition of intertextuality and intermediality that he reflects from the country's earliest times to the new millennium.

Why do poets write about animals? What can poetry do for animals and what can animals do for poetry? In some cases, poetry inscribes meaning on animals, turning them into symbols or caricatures and bringing them into the confines of human culture. It also reveals and revels in the complexity of animals. Poetry, through its great variety and its inherently experimental nature, has embraced the multifaceted nature of animals to cross, blur, and reimagine the boundaries between human and animal.

In Poetry and Animals, Onno Oerlemans explores a broad range of English-language poetry about animals from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. He presents a taxonomy of kinds of animal poems, breaking down the categories and binary oppositions at the root of human thinking about animals. The book considers several different types of poetry: allegorical poems, poems about “the animal” broadly conceived, poems about species of animal, poems about individual animals or the animal as individual, and poems about hybrids and hybridity. Through careful readings of dozens of poems that reveal generous and often sympathetic approaches to recognizing and valuing animals’ difference and similarity, Oerlemans demonstrates how the forms and modes of poetry can sensitize us to the moral standing of animals and give us new ways to think through the problems of the human-animal divide.

Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing).

Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.

The Tale of Cho Ung is one of the most widely read and beloved stories of Chosŏn Korea. The anonymously written tale recounts the adventures of protagonist Cho Ung as he fearlessly confronts and overcomes obstacles and grows into a heroic young man. As a child, Ung flees a wicked tyrant who wrongfully killed his father and took advantage of the emperor’s death to seize the throne from the young prince. Driven by his passion, righteousness, and sense of duty, he pursues retribution and restores justice. His journey, from its innocent beginnings to his final triumph, unfolds as a complex tapestry of loyalty, honor, retribution, and love interspersed with threads of romance and the supernatural.

This first translation into English of The Tale of Cho Ung offers a glimpse into the vernacular and popular literature of the late Chosŏn period, exemplifying the types of stories and heroes that were favored by its reading public. The tale emphasizes individual affections and ethics between child and parent, husband and wife, subject and ruler, pupil and teacher, yet explores human life in all its complexity, even subtly dissenting against traditional Korean social norms. This unabridged translation draws upon the many surviving editions of the novel, which vary in length and format. In her introduction, Sookja Cho addresses how the novel evolved and changed over time, while her annotations help to reveal the depths of a text that conveys the richness and complexity of premodern Korean literature and culture.

Marching Through Suffering is a deeply personal portrait of the ravages of famine and totalitarian politics in modern North Korea since the 1990s. Featuring interviews with more than thirty North Koreans who defected to Seoul and Tokyo, the book explores the subjective experience of the nation's famine and its citizens' social and psychological strategies for coping with the regime.

These oral testimonies show how ordinary North Koreans, from farmers and soldiers to students and diplomats, framed the mounting struggles and deaths surrounding them as the famine progressed. Following the development of the disaster, North Koreans deployed complex discursive strategies to rationalize the horror and hardship in their lives, practices that maintained citizens' loyalty to the regime during the famine and continue to sustain its rule today. Casting North Koreans as a diverse people with a vast capacity for adaptation rather than as a monolithic entity passively enduring oppression, Marching Through Suffering positions personal history as key to the interpretation of political violence.

During the 1980s, as global antiapartheid sentiment grew, an international coalition of far-right activists arose to preserve racial hierarchy in South Africa and beyond. This groundbreaking book tells the story of how a transatlantic pro-apartheid movement attempted to defend white rule in South Africa—and forged enduring links between global conservatism and white power.

By mapping an international network of white supremacist organizations, Augusta Dell’Omo reveals a fundamental shift in far-right organizing in response to changing geopolitical realities. The pro-apartheid movement brought together a range of figures who sought to influence the conservative Western governments they saw as allies. As antiapartheid activism grew, the South African regime crumbled, and the post–Cold War order took shape, apartheid’s defenders adapted their ideology for a colorblind, human rights–centric, and neoliberal world. Their successes and failures shaped the antistatist trajectory of white supremacist organizing in the 1990s and beyond, planting the seeds for a global resurgence of the far right.

Saving Apartheid ranges from Reagan’s Oval Office to South Africa’s bantustans and from white women’s grassroots organizing to evangelical broadcasting, illuminating how an unlikely coalition reimagined white supremacy. Uncovering the surprising influence of apartheid’s defenders, this book offers a prehistory of the present.

Technology gets a bad rap. It is accused of being a dehumanizing force, a chief culprit in everything from mass commercialization to environmental crisis through the potential collapse of civilization. In Connection, Dan Turello reflects on the origins and limitations of such views. He offers a philosophical and literary meditation on what technology is and can be, arguing that it provides surprising ways to strengthen and deepen what makes us human.

Putting medieval Italian poets and Renaissance artists in conversation with contemporary philosophers and pop culture, this book traces the roots of our fascination with—and aversion to—technology. Turello shows how the moments that shaped Western views of technology offer perspective on our current predicaments, as figures such as St. Francis of Assisi and Dante grappled with problems that are strikingly reminiscent of the ones we face today. Challenging nostalgia for preindustrial innocence, he demonstrates that historically technology has enabled us to develop art, philosophy, religion, and culture. Today, technology can safeguard human creativity—if we choose self-awareness and community over consumption and exploitation. Wide-ranging and inviting, Connection makes a timely case for embodied experience in the age of AI.

While the United States was building the world’s largest prison system, Americans were reading crime novels. What did it mean to read crime fiction in a “tough-on-crime” era? How were fictional stories about crime linked to cultural narratives about criminality, class, and race? What did novels have to do with the making of mass imprisonment in America?

Theodore Martin offers a groundbreaking account of the ways that reading habits and crime politics intersected in the age of mass incarceration. He shows how the War on Crime was waged on the page, arguing that fiction made the policies and ideologies of crime control legible to diverse readerships. American Literature’s War on Crime analyzes dozens of novels—from best-sellers and prize winners to cult classics and forgotten mass-market paperbacks—by authors including Mary Higgins Clark, James Ellroy, Ralph Ellison, Donald Goines, Sue Grafton, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Walter Mosley, and Sister Souljah.

Rewriting the history of one of the past century’s most popular genres, this ambitious book reveals how the rise of mass incarceration transformed American crime fiction—and how crime fiction became a key battleground in the War on Crime.

Conventional journalistic norms discourage reporters from taking sides. They are supposed to remain neutral, impartial, and objective. Yet there is also a long tradition in journalism, dating back to the 1800s, that pursues truth by practicing solidarity for social justice.

Anita Varma offers a bold defense of reporting for social justice, showing what journalistic solidarity looks like in principle and in practice. She argues that solidarity is a longstanding yet unacknowledged journalistic norm that fosters truthful reporting when people’s basic dignity is at stake. Ethical journalism incorporates solidarity throughout the reporting process: deciding what is newsworthy, whom to include, how to approach them, what questions to ask, how to structure stories, and how to assess impact. Varma illustrates these practices through case studies of local and national reporting on homelessness, housing instability, and the cost of living.

Based on analysis of published journalism, in-depth interviews with journalists, and public engagement with people who aim to make journalism better, Solidarity in Journalism demonstrates how reporting can help society’s most vulnerable. Amid intense debate over the role of the media, this book makes an urgent case for solidarity in journalism as crucial for representing and addressing social division.

During the 1980s, as global antiapartheid sentiment grew, an international coalition of far-right activists arose to preserve racial hierarchy in South Africa and beyond. This groundbreaking book tells the story of how a transatlantic pro-apartheid movement attempted to defend white rule in South Africa—and forged enduring links between global conservatism and white power.

By mapping an international network of white supremacist organizations, Augusta Dell’Omo reveals a fundamental shift in far-right organizing in response to changing geopolitical realities. The pro-apartheid movement brought together a range of figures who sought to influence the conservative Western governments they saw as allies. As antiapartheid activism grew, the South African regime crumbled, and the post–Cold War order took shape, apartheid’s defenders adapted their ideology for a colorblind, human rights–centric, and neoliberal world. Their successes and failures shaped the antistatist trajectory of white supremacist organizing in the 1990s and beyond, planting the seeds for a global resurgence of the far right.

Saving Apartheid ranges from Reagan’s Oval Office to South Africa’s bantustans and from white women’s grassroots organizing to evangelical broadcasting, illuminating how an unlikely coalition reimagined white supremacy. Uncovering the surprising influence of apartheid’s defenders, this book offers a prehistory of the present.

While the United States was building the world’s largest prison system, Americans were reading crime novels. What did it mean to read crime fiction in a “tough-on-crime” era? How were fictional stories about crime linked to cultural narratives about criminality, class, and race? What did novels have to do with the making of mass imprisonment in America?

Theodore Martin offers a groundbreaking account of the ways that reading habits and crime politics intersected in the age of mass incarceration. He shows how the War on Crime was waged on the page, arguing that fiction made the policies and ideologies of crime control legible to diverse readerships. American Literature’s War on Crime analyzes dozens of novels—from best-sellers and prize winners to cult classics and forgotten mass-market paperbacks—by authors including Mary Higgins Clark, James Ellroy, Ralph Ellison, Donald Goines, Sue Grafton, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Walter Mosley, and Sister Souljah.

Rewriting the history of one of the past century’s most popular genres, this ambitious book reveals how the rise of mass incarceration transformed American crime fiction—and how crime fiction became a key battleground in the War on Crime.

Indigenous activism against telescope construction on Maunakea involves the deity of volcanoes and fire. In India, a village goddess is visited at her place of residence. Across Asia, ancestors are venerated at family shrines. In many places around the world, spiritual matters and practices are local and contextual. Yet philosophy of religion often takes universalizing monotheism as the norm and overlooks other traditions, which it categorizes with oversimplified terms such as polytheism and animism.

Leah Kalmanson offers a new approach to understanding the world’s varied religious traditions: a philosophy of spiritual diversity. Drawing on perspectives from Asian, Pacific, Indigenous American, and African traditions on engaging gods, ghosts, ancestors, and other types of spiritual agents and forces, Local Gods reimagines philosophy of religion from standpoints it typically neglects. A philosophy of spiritual diversity foregrounds the numinous, subtle, and supernormal factors that pervade many aspects of everyday life but slip through the cracks of discourse on religion. Instead of relying on theological frameworks, it turns to theories and methods that are internal to the traditions it considers. This radically plural philosophy highlights creativity and imagination while opening pathways for critique and political engagement. Exploring a vast range of approaches to spiritual matters, this book asks us to find ethical relations with not only the gods we might call our own but also the gods of others.

Technology gets a bad rap. It is accused of being a dehumanizing force, a chief culprit in everything from mass commercialization to environmental crisis through the potential collapse of civilization. In Connection, Dan Turello reflects on the origins and limitations of such views. He offers a philosophical and literary meditation on what technology is and can be, arguing that it provides surprising ways to strengthen and deepen what makes us human.

Putting medieval Italian poets and Renaissance artists in conversation with contemporary philosophers and pop culture, this book traces the roots of our fascination with—and aversion to—technology. Turello shows how the moments that shaped Western views of technology offer perspective on our current predicaments, as figures such as St. Francis of Assisi and Dante grappled with problems that are strikingly reminiscent of the ones we face today. Challenging nostalgia for preindustrial innocence, he demonstrates that historically technology has enabled us to develop art, philosophy, religion, and culture. Today, technology can safeguard human creativity—if we choose self-awareness and community over consumption and exploitation. Wide-ranging and inviting, Connection makes a timely case for embodied experience in the age of AI.

Indigenous activism against telescope construction on Maunakea involves the deity of volcanoes and fire. In India, a village goddess is visited at her place of residence. Across Asia, ancestors are venerated at family shrines. In many places around the world, spiritual matters and practices are local and contextual. Yet philosophy of religion often takes universalizing monotheism as the norm and overlooks other traditions, which it categorizes with oversimplified terms such as polytheism and animism.

Leah Kalmanson offers a new approach to understanding the world’s varied religious traditions: a philosophy of spiritual diversity. Drawing on perspectives from Asian, Pacific, Indigenous American, and African traditions on engaging gods, ghosts, ancestors, and other types of spiritual agents and forces, Local Gods reimagines philosophy of religion from standpoints it typically neglects. A philosophy of spiritual diversity foregrounds the numinous, subtle, and supernormal factors that pervade many aspects of everyday life but slip through the cracks of discourse on religion. Instead of relying on theological frameworks, it turns to theories and methods that are internal to the traditions it considers. This radically plural philosophy highlights creativity and imagination while opening pathways for critique and political engagement. Exploring a vast range of approaches to spiritual matters, this book asks us to find ethical relations with not only the gods we might call our own but also the gods of others.

Conventional journalistic norms discourage reporters from taking sides. They are supposed to remain neutral, impartial, and objective. Yet there is also a long tradition in journalism, dating back to the 1800s, that pursues truth by practicing solidarity for social justice.

Anita Varma offers a bold defense of reporting for social justice, showing what journalistic solidarity looks like in principle and in practice. She argues that solidarity is a longstanding yet unacknowledged journalistic norm that fosters truthful reporting when people’s basic dignity is at stake. Ethical journalism incorporates solidarity throughout the reporting process: deciding what is newsworthy, whom to include, how to approach them, what questions to ask, how to structure stories, and how to assess impact. Varma illustrates these practices through case studies of local and national reporting on homelessness, housing instability, and the cost of living.

Based on analysis of published journalism, in-depth interviews with journalists, and public engagement with people who aim to make journalism better, Solidarity in Journalism demonstrates how reporting can help society’s most vulnerable. Amid intense debate over the role of the media, this book makes an urgent case for solidarity in journalism as crucial for representing and addressing social division.

Classical Indian poetics prized the skillful use of alaṅkāras, or “ornaments”—literary figures of speech. Across more than a millennium, Sanskrit writers developed and elaborated an account of literary embellishment that is perhaps the world’s most complex and long-standing theory of figuration. Yet it remains the least studied of India’s major classical systems of thought.

An Alaṅkāra Reader is a groundbreaking panoramic overview of this tradition, presenting extensive and accessible translations of key works that span its history, from the sixth century CE to the eighteenth. These texts vividly show how Indian theorists analyzed simile, metaphor, allegory, and dozens of other figures that are distinctive to their world. Yigal Bronner’s commentary makes Sanskrit concepts of ornamentation approachable while placing them in historical context. He provides a new account of the history of Sanskrit poetics, showing how it underwent successive waves of theoretical revolutions and emerged as a prestigious field that attracted a variety of scholars in the early modern era.

Featuring many previously untranslated texts, An Alaṅkāra Reader is an essential resource for the study of classical Indian thought, the intellectual history of South Asia, and comparative literature. It reveals the depth and nuance of Sanskrit’s “science of ornaments” for anyone interested in poetic theory, figuration, and aesthetics across world traditions.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and took new names. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Marvin X incorporated Islamic words and expressions, references to the Qur’an, and Arabic script, as well as symbols like the crescent star and depictions of Islamic architecture and clothing. They connected places like Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Oakland to locales in the Muslim world such as Timbuktu, Songhai, and Mecca. These artists also played a pivotal role in developing Black studies and creating alternatives to the Eurocentrism of the American educational system.

Ellen McLarney explores how BAM writers identified with Islam as integral to the African American cultural, spiritual, and intellectual heritage. Examining poetry, visual art, music, drama, and mixed-media collaborations, she traces the emergence of a new kind of Islamic art rooted in the African American experience. Their works protested scientific racism, police brutality, colonial domination, and economic oppression while resurrecting a suppressed Islamic past and sharing spiritual visions of a new kind of future. Based on interviews, fieldwork, archival research, and close analysis of key works, this book reveals how BAM redefined Black art, Islamic poetics, and Black Muslim aesthetics in the struggle for racial justice.

It is widely thought that confessions from perpetrators of state violence promote accountability, reconciliation, and justice. Performing Public Confessions offers a challenge to this view through a critical examination of perpetrators’ narratives, analyzing them as performances that shape public perceptions of state violence and responsibility. With a focus on Turkey, this book develops new insights into the performative aspects of confessions and what they reveal about the dominant social, moral, and political order.

Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız explores public confessions by Turkish state actors implicated in atrocities against Kurds during the 1990s, showing that their accounts often function to obscure rather than clarify responsibility. Through close readings of perpetrators’ rhetorical strategies, audience reactions, and media representations, she demonstrates that confessions are rarely straightforward admissions of guilt. Instead, they frequently perpetuate mechanisms of denial, silence, evasion, and disavowal, normalizing atrocities, reinforcing impunity, and masking the structural nature of state violence. Yıldız argues that perpetrators’ narratives, when placed in their social contexts, illuminate the underlying moral and political frameworks that govern Turkish society. Bringing together theoretical reflections with rich analysis of case studies, this book uncovers the political and ethical limitations of public confessions.

In postwar Japan, a writer meets a small-town innkeeper who is obsessed with a tale from the nineteenth century. He relates the saga of Enomoto Takeaki, an admiral in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate who regained authority under the Meiji government. A former member of imperial Japan’s military police, the innkeeper dwells on the question of loyalty even as he struggles with his responsibility for the arrest and murder of his brother-in-law during the war. Later, he sends the writer a mysterious manuscript purporting to be the account of a peddler turned samurai whom Enomoto betrayed.

Part historical fiction, part detective story, The Traitor is a remarkable novel about navigating changing political landscapes by one of the most significant modern Japanese writers. In his only historical novel, Abe Kōbō turns to a pivotal moment in Japan’s past to explore profound questions about the nature of loyalty and the choices that people must make when they encounter forces beyond their control or understanding. Published in 1964, when a new generation had begun asking their parents about the war, Abe’s tale of betrayal sparked controversy across the political spectrum. The great writer’s most important previously untranslated novel, The Traitor displays Abe’s literary mastery from a new angle.

In postwar Japan, a writer meets a small-town innkeeper who is obsessed with a tale from the nineteenth century. He relates the saga of Enomoto Takeaki, an admiral in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate who regained authority under the Meiji government. A former member of imperial Japan’s military police, the innkeeper dwells on the question of loyalty even as he struggles with his responsibility for the arrest and murder of his brother-in-law during the war. Later, he sends the writer a mysterious manuscript purporting to be the account of a peddler turned samurai whom Enomoto betrayed.

Part historical fiction, part detective story, The Traitor is a remarkable novel about navigating changing political landscapes by one of the most significant modern Japanese writers. In his only historical novel, Abe Kōbō turns to a pivotal moment in Japan’s past to explore profound questions about the nature of loyalty and the choices that people must make when they encounter forces beyond their control or understanding. Published in 1964, when a new generation had begun asking their parents about the war, Abe’s tale of betrayal sparked controversy across the political spectrum. The great writer’s most important previously untranslated novel, The Traitor displays Abe’s literary mastery from a new angle.

It is widely thought that confessions from perpetrators of state violence promote accountability, reconciliation, and justice. Performing Public Confessions offers a challenge to this view through a critical examination of perpetrators’ narratives, analyzing them as performances that shape public perceptions of state violence and responsibility. With a focus on Turkey, this book develops new insights into the performative aspects of confessions and what they reveal about the dominant social, moral, and political order.

Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız explores public confessions by Turkish state actors implicated in atrocities against Kurds during the 1990s, showing that their accounts often function to obscure rather than clarify responsibility. Through close readings of perpetrators’ rhetorical strategies, audience reactions, and media representations, she demonstrates that confessions are rarely straightforward admissions of guilt. Instead, they frequently perpetuate mechanisms of denial, silence, evasion, and disavowal, normalizing atrocities, reinforcing impunity, and masking the structural nature of state violence. Yıldız argues that perpetrators’ narratives, when placed in their social contexts, illuminate the underlying moral and political frameworks that govern Turkish society. Bringing together theoretical reflections with rich analysis of case studies, this book uncovers the political and ethical limitations of public confessions.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and took new names. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Marvin X incorporated Islamic words and expressions, references to the Qur’an, and Arabic script, as well as symbols like the crescent star and depictions of Islamic architecture and clothing. They connected places like Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Oakland to locales in the Muslim world such as Timbuktu, Songhai, and Mecca. These artists also played a pivotal role in developing Black studies and creating alternatives to the Eurocentrism of the American educational system.

Ellen McLarney explores how BAM writers identified with Islam as integral to the African American cultural, spiritual, and intellectual heritage. Examining poetry, visual art, music, drama, and mixed-media collaborations, she traces the emergence of a new kind of Islamic art rooted in the African American experience. Their works protested scientific racism, police brutality, colonial domination, and economic oppression while resurrecting a suppressed Islamic past and sharing spiritual visions of a new kind of future. Based on interviews, fieldwork, archival research, and close analysis of key works, this book reveals how BAM redefined Black art, Islamic poetics, and Black Muslim aesthetics in the struggle for racial justice.

Does the lack of evidence mean that aliens don’t exist? Why does an unproven mathematical hypothesis have profound consequences? Are humans capable of grasping the nature of divinity? Is it ethical to give a patient a placebo? Why do people persist in demonstrably false beliefs like flat earth theory? Should someone want to know when they will die?

George G. Szpiro examines these questions and many others, offering an engaging and witty tour of what we can learn from ignorance. In a series of fast-paced chapters, he unravels problems ranging across science, mathematics, law, economics, politics, religion, psychology, and philosophy—some esoteric, others drawn from everyday life. Ignorance comes in many forms, Szpiro shows. Some questions are only temporarily unsolved; others are inherently answerable. Sometimes authorities keep answers from us, for good or ill. Often our assumptions and biases keep us from overcoming our ignorance, and occasionally we choose to remain ignorant—for surprisingly rational reasons.

Ultimately, Szpiro argues, ignorance is not purely negative. It can motivate the pursuit of learning and wisdom—as long as we acknowledge it. Presenting sophisticated topics in an accessible way, this book shows how ignorance sheds light on the nature of knowledge.

What would happen if you bought a handful of stocks and then left them alone for some time, like stashing valuables in a coffee can? If you picked the right ones, you might wake up one day with life-changing wealth.

Neeraj Khemlani introduces readers to this investing philosophy through the eye-opening story of a portfolio manager who has put it into practice. Matt Ankrum researched 100-baggers—stocks that have multiplied in value a hundred times over multiple decades—looking for what they have in common. Drawing on these clues, he hunts down and buys shares in what he thinks are tomorrow’s breakout companies, planning to gift his children a coffee can portfolio that could someday be worth half a billion dollars.

The Coffee Can Investor shares Ankrum’s process for identifying companies that can stand the test of time, as well as his stock picks. It explores the principles of long-term investing, emphasizing the power of compounding and why it pays to be patient. This book details the qualitative and quantitative aspects of 100-baggers, revealing that a surprising share are business-to-business companies, not just the business-to-consumer companies that typically grab headlines. Khemlani also recounts his own decision to make a coffee can of investments for his kids.

Engaging and fast-paced, this book is for anyone who wants to invest in enduring companies for the long term.

Around the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style—free jazz—that took inspiration from a vast range of sources, including figures such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane; African and Middle Eastern music; avant-garde modernism; and the politics and aesthetics of Black Power. How did this radical movement come about, and what explains its creativity and vitality?

Based on interviews with dozens of musicians, I Hear Freedom tells the story of free jazz and its connection to the broader Black experience. Cisco Bradley demonstrates that although this part of the free jazz movement arose in the Midwest, it is deeply rooted in the musical traditions and aesthetics that the Great Migration brought from the South. As postwar urban renewal projects fractured Black communities, musicians drew on this heritage to create new forms of expression. Figures such as Albert Ayler, Donald Ayler, Charles Tyler, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Charles Moore, and Faruq Z. Bey developed distinct artistic visions, often influenced by their involvement in Black liberation movements. I Hear Freedom chronicles the Cleveland and Detroit free jazz scenes, and it follows musicians to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and beyond. A revelatory oral history, this book shows that free jazz is a uniquely Black style shaped by mobility, community, and the struggle for freedom.

Stories about people and dogs saving one another are everywhere in US culture—on TV, in Hollywood movies, on social media, and even on bumper stickers. Yet these seemingly heartwarming stories of mutual rescue revolve around redemption through suffering, a narrative profoundly interwoven with Christian beliefs, white racial anxieties, and US national myths.

Katharine Mershon examines the unacknowledged religious underpinnings of stories about dogs, revealing deeply rooted cultural assumptions about who can be saved and how redemption ought to occur. She identifies the “canine redemption narrative” as the defining cultural script for the stories people in the United States tell about dogs and, in turn, the nation. Exposing unexamined assumptions about the relationships between people and dogs, Mershon sheds light on the central place of animals and religion in defining racial boundaries.

Dogs Save considers examples including the Michael Vick dogfighting case; Samuel Fuller’s controversial B-movie White Dog; the TV show The Dog Whisperer, from the celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan; Laurie Anderson’s film Heart of a Dog; and Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir). Bringing together religious studies and animal studies, this book shows that redemption narratives shape who is allowed to survive and thrive in US society.

Around the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style—free jazz—that took inspiration from a vast range of sources, including figures such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane; African and Middle Eastern music; avant-garde modernism; and the politics and aesthetics of Black Power. How did this radical movement come about, and what explains its creativity and vitality?

Based on interviews with dozens of musicians, I Hear Freedom tells the story of free jazz and its connection to the broader Black experience. Cisco Bradley demonstrates that although this part of the free jazz movement arose in the Midwest, it is deeply rooted in the musical traditions and aesthetics that the Great Migration brought from the South. As postwar urban renewal projects fractured Black communities, musicians drew on this heritage to create new forms of expression. Figures such as Albert Ayler, Donald Ayler, Charles Tyler, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Charles Moore, and Faruq Z. Bey developed distinct artistic visions, often influenced by their involvement in Black liberation movements. I Hear Freedom chronicles the Cleveland and Detroit free jazz scenes, and it follows musicians to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and beyond. A revelatory oral history, this book shows that free jazz is a uniquely Black style shaped by mobility, community, and the struggle for freedom.

Stories about people and dogs saving one another are everywhere in US culture—on TV, in Hollywood movies, on social media, and even on bumper stickers. Yet these seemingly heartwarming stories of mutual rescue revolve around redemption through suffering, a narrative profoundly interwoven with Christian beliefs, white racial anxieties, and US national myths.

Katharine Mershon examines the unacknowledged religious underpinnings of stories about dogs, revealing deeply rooted cultural assumptions about who can be saved and how redemption ought to occur. She identifies the “canine redemption narrative” as the defining cultural script for the stories people in the United States tell about dogs and, in turn, the nation. Exposing unexamined assumptions about the relationships between people and dogs, Mershon sheds light on the central place of animals and religion in defining racial boundaries.

Dogs Save considers examples including the Michael Vick dogfighting case; Samuel Fuller’s controversial B-movie White Dog; the TV show The Dog Whisperer, from the celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan; Laurie Anderson’s film Heart of a Dog; and Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir). Bringing together religious studies and animal studies, this book shows that redemption narratives shape who is allowed to survive and thrive in US society.

Over the past decade, social and political movements transformed the arts. From the streets of Chile and Iran to museums in Europe and the United States, and from questions of representation and repatriation to demands for equity and justice, protest and activism affected the creation, presentation, and interpretation of visual arts around the world.

Bringing together artists, scholars, activists, and museum professionals from varied fields and backgrounds, this book explores the intersections between visual art and social movements during the last tumultuous decade. Spanning themes of protest art, museum ethics, restitution, and institutional transformation, the collection considers how visual arts have both responded to and shaped politics and society. Contributors highlight the role of artists as catalysts for change and delve into how institutions grapple with their colonial pasts.

Featuring essays, case studies, and artist spotlights, this book not only documents a critical moment in the art world but also raises thought-provoking questions about its future. In the current moment of heightened global unrest and existential threats to the future of art institutions, it offers vital insight into art’s place in the politics of representation, memory, and resistance.

The field of palliative care promises support for a dying person’s physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs, as well as the needs of family and community. Has this powerful vision been achieved? This state-of-the-field book argues that palliative care has drifted away from its transformative goals—and shows what to do about it.

Bringing together leading international scholars and practitioners, Well-Being at the End of Life demonstrates how contemporary palliative care has slowly but surely strayed from its original values and practices. The provision of palliative care now reflects institutional, medicalized, and health-service priorities. Increasingly, it has become solely clinical, confined and constrained by clinical service considerations and limitations. Those at the end of life are all too often viewed as patients to be treated instead of people with whom care providers must create collaboration, participation, and partnerships.

Contributors call for a paradigm shift in the values and priorities of palliative care to emphasize the importance of community to personal well-being. Drawing on the concept of health promotion, they advance a shared vision that merges the principles of public health with those of palliative care. Reimagining the field to foreground compassion and interdependence, Well-Being at the End of Life offers a new approach that puts community and professional partnerships at the heart of its practice.

Over the past decade, social and political movements transformed the arts. From the streets of Chile and Iran to museums in Europe and the United States, and from questions of representation and repatriation to demands for equity and justice, protest and activism affected the creation, presentation, and interpretation of visual arts around the world.

Bringing together artists, scholars, activists, and museum professionals from varied fields and backgrounds, this book explores the intersections between visual art and social movements during the last tumultuous decade. Spanning themes of protest art, museum ethics, restitution, and institutional transformation, the collection considers how visual arts have both responded to and shaped politics and society. Contributors highlight the role of artists as catalysts for change and delve into how institutions grapple with their colonial pasts.

Featuring essays, case studies, and artist spotlights, this book not only documents a critical moment in the art world but also raises thought-provoking questions about its future. In the current moment of heightened global unrest and existential threats to the future of art institutions, it offers vital insight into art’s place in the politics of representation, memory, and resistance.

The field of palliative care promises support for a dying person’s physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs, as well as the needs of family and community. Has this powerful vision been achieved? This state-of-the-field book argues that palliative care has drifted away from its transformative goals—and shows what to do about it.

Bringing together leading international scholars and practitioners, Well-Being at the End of Life demonstrates how contemporary palliative care has slowly but surely strayed from its original values and practices. The provision of palliative care now reflects institutional, medicalized, and health-service priorities. Increasingly, it has become solely clinical, confined and constrained by clinical service considerations and limitations. Those at the end of life are all too often viewed as patients to be treated instead of people with whom care providers must create collaboration, participation, and partnerships.

Contributors call for a paradigm shift in the values and priorities of palliative care to emphasize the importance of community to personal well-being. Drawing on the concept of health promotion, they advance a shared vision that merges the principles of public health with those of palliative care. Reimagining the field to foreground compassion and interdependence, Well-Being at the End of Life offers a new approach that puts community and professional partnerships at the heart of its practice.

Between the Civil War and the Cold War, American literary modernism and philosophy both grappled with the challenge of novelty and the chance to make it new. Bringing together modern poetry’s aesthetic experimentation and modern philosophy’s attention to the problem of induction, Lyric Logic argues that poems use logical form as literary form. The modern poem can be characterized by its logic: details that appear fragmentary add up to sense-making.

Johanna Winant recasts the poetics of central figures as modeling and defending inductive reasoning: Walt Whitman makes lists, Emily Dickinson constructs analogies, Gertrude Stein presents facts, Marianne Moore investigates predictions, Elizabeth Bishop draws inferences, and Gwendolyn Brooks tests the limits of deduction. Winant offers in-depth close readings of canonical poems that show the sophistication of their philosophic logic. Although philosophers tend to see induction as flawed and unreliable, these poets display its strengths. Their work demonstrates how to make sense of the unpredictable modern world.

Between the Civil War and the Cold War, American literary modernism and philosophy both grappled with the challenge of novelty and the chance to make it new. Bringing together modern poetry’s aesthetic experimentation and modern philosophy’s attention to the problem of induction, Lyric Logic argues that poems use logical form as literary form. The modern poem can be characterized by its logic: details that appear fragmentary add up to sense-making.

Johanna Winant recasts the poetics of central figures as modeling and defending inductive reasoning: Walt Whitman makes lists, Emily Dickinson constructs analogies, Gertrude Stein presents facts, Marianne Moore investigates predictions, Elizabeth Bishop draws inferences, and Gwendolyn Brooks tests the limits of deduction. Winant offers in-depth close readings of canonical poems that show the sophistication of their philosophic logic. Although philosophers tend to see induction as flawed and unreliable, these poets display its strengths. Their work demonstrates how to make sense of the unpredictable modern world.

In the late 1970s, with relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China strained, the Carter administration saw an opening. The United States and its allies embarked on military and dual-use technology transfers to China as a counterweight to the USSR, transforming rapprochement into full-blown cooperation. Carter’s decision to pivot away from the United States’s traditional ally, the Republic of China on Taiwan, and embrace the People’s Republic redefined the Cold War from a struggle against communism to one against the Soviet Union. It not only complicated a variety of American objectives—from the security of Taiwan to US-Soviet détente—but also sowed the seeds of future tensions between China and the West.

This book is an international history of the Carter administration’s intricate relations with the two competing Chinese regimes, emphasizing the geopolitical significance and lasting implications of this crucial moment. Drawing extensively from previously untapped archives in several countries and languages, Sheng Peng uncovers the internal governmental debates across world capitals that affected Carter’s China policy. He examines how the Carter administration attempted to balance relations with both Chinese governments as well as how Chinese and Taiwanese leaders navigated global rivalries. Revealing how the Carter years profoundly reshaped the course of the Cold War, this book sheds new light on the strategic, technological, and ideological competition that continues today.

Jürgen Habermas is Germany’s most important postwar philosopher, the leading figure of the Frankfurt School in this period. He is best known for the concept of the public sphere, which forms the basis of his communicative understanding of democratic politics. Habermas has not only theorized the public sphere—he has also taken part in it through frequent commentary on current social, political, and cultural issues. Yet since Habermas’s extensive public-facing writings have been overlooked, his philosophy has often been criticized as apolitical.

This book transforms our understanding of Habermas by focusing on his work as a public intellectual, showing how he has shaped debates far beyond the ivory tower. Peter J. Verovšek argues that while Habermas maintains a strict separation between his academic and his public-facing writings, he has also ensured that these two aspects of his work are part of a consistent whole. The book highlights the development of Habermas’s views over time and the changing nature of his public interventions. His early political writings focused on questions tied to the particular situation of postwar West Germany, but since 1989 he has increasingly turned his attention to the future of Europe and global politics more broadly. Verovšek sheds light on the interrelationship between Habermas’s participation in the public sphere and his theoretical work, demonstrating that his political engagement is crucial to understanding his philosophy. In a moment when public debate is under threat, this book offers timely new insight into Habermas’s lifelong project of defending the public sphere—both in theory and in practice.

Jürgen Habermas is Germany’s most important postwar philosopher, the leading figure of the Frankfurt School in this period. He is best known for the concept of the public sphere, which forms the basis of his communicative understanding of democratic politics. Habermas has not only theorized the public sphere—he has also taken part in it through frequent commentary on current social, political, and cultural issues. Yet since Habermas’s extensive public-facing writings have been overlooked, his philosophy has often been criticized as apolitical.

This book transforms our understanding of Habermas by focusing on his work as a public intellectual, showing how he has shaped debates far beyond the ivory tower. Peter J. Verovšek argues that while Habermas maintains a strict separation between his academic and his public-facing writings, he has also ensured that these two aspects of his work are part of a consistent whole. The book highlights the development of Habermas’s views over time and the changing nature of his public interventions. His early political writings focused on questions tied to the particular situation of postwar West Germany, but since 1989 he has increasingly turned his attention to the future of Europe and global politics more broadly. Verovšek sheds light on the interrelationship between Habermas’s participation in the public sphere and his theoretical work, demonstrating that his political engagement is crucial to understanding his philosophy. In a moment when public debate is under threat, this book offers timely new insight into Habermas’s lifelong project of defending the public sphere—both in theory and in practice.

Leaders remain skeptical about the power of organizational culture even though extensive research shows that it is crucial to business success. Can a manager really influence an organization’s culture, or do executives just try to impose a culture on their employees? Is the concept of culture too vague to measure objectively and improve? What happens to valuable employees who feel left out by the prevailing culture? Even if a “good” culture makes team members happy, does it actually affect the bottom line?

This essential book answers the biggest questions about organizational culture, offering research-backed insights for leaders on shaping and managing an environment that spurs achievement. The management experts Jennifer A. Chatman and Glenn R. Carroll—a psychologist and a sociologist—draw on social-scientific findings to evaluate and debunk common misconceptions. They show how research on culture empowers managers to identify what really matters and deploy it productively. Chatman and Carroll also provide actionable levers to build and maintain organizational culture, from crafting a culture that supports strategic objectives to ensuring that it can adapt as conditions change.

Making Organizational Culture Great features compelling examples from companies and nonprofits including Apple, Genentech, Disney, Ford, Netflix, Maersk, Google, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and many others. A practical guide for current and aspiring leaders, this book reveals how to manage culture consistently, comprehensively, and coherently.

In the late 1970s, with relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China strained, the Carter administration saw an opening. The United States and its allies embarked on military and dual-use technology transfers to China as a counterweight to the USSR, transforming rapprochement into full-blown cooperation. Carter’s decision to pivot away from the United States’s traditional ally, the Republic of China on Taiwan, and embrace the People’s Republic redefined the Cold War from a struggle against communism to one against the Soviet Union. It not only complicated a variety of American objectives—from the security of Taiwan to US-Soviet détente—but also sowed the seeds of future tensions between China and the West.

This book is an international history of the Carter administration’s intricate relations with the two competing Chinese regimes, emphasizing the geopolitical significance and lasting implications of this crucial moment. Drawing extensively from previously untapped archives in several countries and languages, Sheng Peng uncovers the internal governmental debates across world capitals that affected Carter’s China policy. He examines how the Carter administration attempted to balance relations with both Chinese governments as well as how Chinese and Taiwanese leaders navigated global rivalries. Revealing how the Carter years profoundly reshaped the course of the Cold War, this book sheds new light on the strategic, technological, and ideological competition that continues today.

Leaders remain skeptical about the power of organizational culture even though extensive research shows that it is crucial to business success. Can a manager really influence an organization’s culture, or do executives just try to impose a culture on their employees? Is the concept of culture too vague to measure objectively and improve? What happens to valuable employees who feel left out by the prevailing culture? Even if a “good” culture makes team members happy, does it actually affect the bottom line?

This essential book answers the biggest questions about organizational culture, offering research-backed insights for leaders on shaping and managing an environment that spurs achievement. The management experts Jennifer A. Chatman and Glenn R. Carroll—a psychologist and a sociologist—draw on social-scientific findings to evaluate and debunk common misconceptions. They show how research on culture empowers managers to identify what really matters and deploy it productively. Chatman and Carroll also provide actionable levers to build and maintain organizational culture, from crafting a culture that supports strategic objectives to ensuring that it can adapt as conditions change.

Making Organizational Culture Great features compelling examples from companies and nonprofits including Apple, Genentech, Disney, Ford, Netflix, Maersk, Google, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and many others. A practical guide for current and aspiring leaders, this book reveals how to manage culture consistently, comprehensively, and coherently.

In one common view, the mind is immaterial, internal, and invisible. From this perspective, the mind is inherently individual and isolated: It is unknowable from the outside, separated from the world and from other minds. Anthony Chemero—both a philosopher and a cognitive scientist—offers a powerful challenge to this theory of mind. Bringing together philosophical insight and empirical data, he develops a new understanding of the mind that centers embodiment and social interaction.

According to Chemero, the mind is intertwined with the world: It depends on the body, the surrounding environment, and the people with whom an individual interacts. He shows that cutting-edge research in cognitive science provides striking experimental evidence for this concept of the intertwined self. Chemero explores the philosophical, moral, and political implications of the claim that the self is necessarily interwoven with the world and with others, drawing connections to phenomenology, critical theory, and feminist political theory. Deeply interdisciplinary and engagingly written, Intertwined Creatures makes an urgent case for seeing the self as social—especially in the age of AI—with radical consequences for ethics and politics.

In one common view, the mind is immaterial, internal, and invisible. From this perspective, the mind is inherently individual and isolated: It is unknowable from the outside, separated from the world and from other minds. Anthony Chemero—both a philosopher and a cognitive scientist—offers a powerful challenge to this theory of mind. Bringing together philosophical insight and empirical data, he develops a new understanding of the mind that centers embodiment and social interaction.

According to Chemero, the mind is intertwined with the world: It depends on the body, the surrounding environment, and the people with whom an individual interacts. He shows that cutting-edge research in cognitive science provides striking experimental evidence for this concept of the intertwined self. Chemero explores the philosophical, moral, and political implications of the claim that the self is necessarily interwoven with the world and with others, drawing connections to phenomenology, critical theory, and feminist political theory. Deeply interdisciplinary and engagingly written, Intertwined Creatures makes an urgent case for seeing the self as social—especially in the age of AI—with radical consequences for ethics and politics.

One of the most pressing issues in development today is the employment challenge in low- and middle-income countries. As more young people enter the labor force—and as structural transformation unfolds amid deindustrialization, technological disruption, and global competition—the question of how to create sufficient decent jobs has become central to the economic future of the Global South. Although this is a shared challenge across developing regions, it is particularly acute in Africa, where rapid demographic change and urbanization are colliding with limited industrial expansion.

Bringing together leading international scholars, The Future of Work in Developing Countries examines the employment problem from multiple perspectives. Early chapters develop conceptual frameworks around corporations and the global hierarchy of production. Subsequent contributions investigate the dynamics of structural transformation, the role of firms in linking production and labor to surplus, and the design of industrial and technology policies. Later chapters turn to detailed case studies—especially from Africa—that illustrate the possibilities and limits of different growth paths, and comparative insights from Asia and Latin America provide further perspective.

By combining rigorous theoretical analysis with grounded empirical research, this book demonstrates that employment creation is not an automatic byproduct of growth but a political and institutional project. It offers fresh insights for scholars of development, political economy, and economic history, as well as for policy makers seeking strategies to promote inclusive transformation in Africa and beyond.

Our ideas about Confucius come from the stories told about him. He often appears as the great sage of ancient China, handing down timeless moral precepts to his disciples and to posterity. Yet over the course of twenty-five centuries, Confucius has meant many different things to different people, representing varied views on political order, ethical behavior, and personal well-being.

This book explores enduring narratives about Confucius, shedding light on his role as a symbol of cultural ideals and a fulcrum of ideological debates across eras. Wai-yee Li translates and provides commentary on a wide range of key texts, examining how Confucius’s legacy was interpreted in different historical moments. Beginning with the canonical account by the historian Sima Qian, she canvasses Daoist and Legalist writings from the Warring States, a ballad about a homicidal Confucius from the Tang dynasty, an eighteenth-century anthology of jokes, modern writers such as Lu Xun, and contemporary rap music, among others. Focusing on how these stories are told, Li identifies continuities, ruptures, and unexpected connections in the representations of Confucius and considers the questions they raise. Suitable for a range of courses, this book offers new ways to understand Chinese cultural and intellectual history through Confucius and his transformations.

Our ideas about Confucius come from the stories told about him. He often appears as the great sage of ancient China, handing down timeless moral precepts to his disciples and to posterity. Yet over the course of twenty-five centuries, Confucius has meant many different things to different people, representing varied views on political order, ethical behavior, and personal well-being.

This book explores enduring narratives about Confucius, shedding light on his role as a symbol of cultural ideals and a fulcrum of ideological debates across eras. Wai-yee Li translates and provides commentary on a wide range of key texts, examining how Confucius’s legacy was interpreted in different historical moments. Beginning with the canonical account by the historian Sima Qian, she canvasses Daoist and Legalist writings from the Warring States, a ballad about a homicidal Confucius from the Tang dynasty, an eighteenth-century anthology of jokes, modern writers such as Lu Xun, and contemporary rap music, among others. Focusing on how these stories are told, Li identifies continuities, ruptures, and unexpected connections in the representations of Confucius and considers the questions they raise. Suitable for a range of courses, this book offers new ways to understand Chinese cultural and intellectual history through Confucius and his transformations.

Climate change is not only an environmental crisis but also a catalyst for worsening socioeconomic inequalities, leading to widespread calls for “climate justice.” Even though this term has become increasingly common, there remains no universally accepted definition. This challenge is compounded by the limitations of traditional scholarly frameworks, which struggle to encompass the dynamic and pervasive impact of the climate crisis across global, national, and local levels. The scope of the crisis requires ethical, social, and political considerations alongside scientific and environmental insights in order to shape equitable responses by states and societies.

This multidisciplinary book offers a comprehensive exploration of debates on climate justice across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Synthesizing these divergent approaches, it develops a new conceptual framework that transcends disciplinary divides, providing a deeper and richer understanding of climate justice. Contributors make an urgent case that climate justice must be centered within and across disciplines, creating a roadmap for multidisciplinary research and pedagogy on the climate crisis. Featuring a wide range of voices and actionable recommendations, this timely book illuminates how scholarship on climate change can become a call to action.

Climate change is not only an environmental crisis but also a catalyst for worsening socioeconomic inequalities, leading to widespread calls for “climate justice.” Even though this term has become increasingly common, there remains no universally accepted definition. This challenge is compounded by the limitations of traditional scholarly frameworks, which struggle to encompass the dynamic and pervasive impact of the climate crisis across global, national, and local levels. The scope of the crisis requires ethical, social, and political considerations alongside scientific and environmental insights in order to shape equitable responses by states and societies.

This multidisciplinary book offers a comprehensive exploration of debates on climate justice across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Synthesizing these divergent approaches, it develops a new conceptual framework that transcends disciplinary divides, providing a deeper and richer understanding of climate justice. Contributors make an urgent case that climate justice must be centered within and across disciplines, creating a roadmap for multidisciplinary research and pedagogy on the climate crisis. Featuring a wide range of voices and actionable recommendations, this timely book illuminates how scholarship on climate change can become a call to action.

Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.

Ainehi Edoro argues that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, knowledge, and power. Instead of treating the forest as a backdrop, these writers imagine it as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, technology, the magical, and creativity animate fictional worlds. Spanning indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, Forest Imaginaries traces the lineage of forest worlds in African literature: Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest in Wọle Ṣóyínká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. This book rethinks African literary history by showing how African writers draw on the forest—and the wealth of Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling it conjures—to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.

Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.

Ainehi Edoro argues that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, knowledge, and power. Instead of treating the forest as a backdrop, these writers imagine it as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, technology, the magical, and creativity animate fictional worlds. Spanning indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, Forest Imaginaries traces the lineage of forest worlds in African literature: Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest in Wọle Ṣóyínká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. This book rethinks African literary history by showing how African writers draw on the forest—and the wealth of Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling it conjures—to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.

An Indigenous hunter laments the decline in the flying squirrel population and reflects on how animals perceive the world. In a drought-stricken cyberpunk anytown, kids revolt against the grown-ups only to face off with stray dogs over water. During late-night diving sessions, a researcher encounters a mysterious group of ocean-dwelling people with gills. In an overpopulated future, marrying an AI spouse will raise a human’s credit score. A man follows the trail of an extinct leopard, seeking to unravel a metafictional mystery left behind by his late wife.

This anthology showcases cutting-edge works on ecological themes by essential and emerging Taiwanese authors, revealing the vitality of their engagements with environmental crises. Taiwan is a biodiversity hotspot and geopolitical flashpoint, home to both Indigenous peoples and settlers. The pieces collected in A Taiwanese Ecoliterature Reader give voice to this human and more-than-human diversity, telling tales that are disturbing yet hopeful, serious yet sensuous, speculative yet grounded, down to earth yet spanning the seas. They span Indigenous eco-writing, oceanic hybrid narratives, ecological sci-fi, and speculative Indigenous fiction. Together, these stories navigate the landscapes of Taiwanese ecoliterature, illuminating its past and pointing toward its future.

An Indigenous hunter laments the decline in the flying squirrel population and reflects on how animals perceive the world. In a drought-stricken cyberpunk anytown, kids revolt against the grown-ups only to face off with stray dogs over water. During late-night diving sessions, a researcher encounters a mysterious group of ocean-dwelling people with gills. In an overpopulated future, marrying an AI spouse will raise a human’s credit score. A man follows the trail of an extinct leopard, seeking to unravel a metafictional mystery left behind by his late wife.

This anthology showcases cutting-edge works on ecological themes by essential and emerging Taiwanese authors, revealing the vitality of their engagements with environmental crises. Taiwan is a biodiversity hotspot and geopolitical flashpoint, home to both Indigenous peoples and settlers. The pieces collected in A Taiwanese Ecoliterature Reader give voice to this human and more-than-human diversity, telling tales that are disturbing yet hopeful, serious yet sensuous, speculative yet grounded, down to earth yet spanning the seas. They span Indigenous eco-writing, oceanic hybrid narratives, ecological sci-fi, and speculative Indigenous fiction. Together, these stories navigate the landscapes of Taiwanese ecoliterature, illuminating its past and pointing toward its future.

Throughout 1905, an amateur photographer dedicated himself to capturing Broadway, from the bottom of Manhattan to the top. In sun, rain, and snow, at dawn and late at night, C. G. Hine depicted buildings that were threatened by rapid development: outmoded stores, hotels, and theaters, as well as workshops and shanties. His survey also foregrounded the street’s other holdouts against change, such as sex workers, pushcart vendors, horses, and the trees and wildflowers of upper Manhattan. Hine ultimately assembled more than three hundred photographs, along with numerous newspaper clippings and a typed essay, into a three-volume album, titled “From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower.”

Presenting striking images from Hine’s album, this book offers a rare glimpse into the transformation of New York’s built environment at the turn of the twentieth century. Nick Yablon explores Hine’s connections to—and divergences from—movements and trends of the time, such as historic preservation, Pictorialist photography, botany, and bicycling. He curates a selection of Hine’s photographs and investigates how they reveal deeper conflicts and tensions about urban development. From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower guides readers up Broadway block by block, casting light on New York’s changing landscape, where signs of the modern clashed with vestiges of earlier eras.

Healthcare is broken—but we can fix it. Our current system is plagued by staggering costs, inadequate outcomes, and pervasive inequities. How can we deliver long-overdue change and make this system work for everyone?

In this groundbreaking book, Halle Tecco provides an insider’s guide to transforming our healthcare system through innovation. Drawing from her extensive experience as an entrepreneur, investor, and professor, she delivers a practical roadmap for addressing the most pressing challenges. Combining personal narratives, compelling case studies, and actionable frameworks, Tecco explores how to identify opportunities for meaningful change and build sustainable, scalable solutions that align profit with purpose. She acknowledges the difficulties—such as regulatory hurdles, misaligned incentives, and resistance to change—but shows how entrepreneurs can turn obstacles into their competitive advantage.

Bridging the gap between Silicon Valley dynamism and healthcare’s evidence-based approach, Massively Better Healthcare offers a realistic yet optimistic view of what’s possible. Written for everyone from seasoned professionals to aspiring innovators, this book shares an inspiring and attainable vision of a better healthcare system and equips readers with the essential tools to succeed.

Throughout 1905, an amateur photographer dedicated himself to capturing Broadway, from the bottom of Manhattan to the top. In sun, rain, and snow, at dawn and late at night, C. G. Hine depicted buildings that were threatened by rapid development: outmoded stores, hotels, and theaters, as well as workshops and shanties. His survey also foregrounded the street’s other holdouts against change, such as sex workers, pushcart vendors, horses, and the trees and wildflowers of upper Manhattan. Hine ultimately assembled more than three hundred photographs, along with numerous newspaper clippings and a typed essay, into a three-volume album, titled “From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower.”

Presenting striking images from Hine’s album, this book offers a rare glimpse into the transformation of New York’s built environment at the turn of the twentieth century. Nick Yablon explores Hine’s connections to—and divergences from—movements and trends of the time, such as historic preservation, Pictorialist photography, botany, and bicycling. He curates a selection of Hine’s photographs and investigates how they reveal deeper conflicts and tensions about urban development. From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower guides readers up Broadway block by block, casting light on New York’s changing landscape, where signs of the modern clashed with vestiges of earlier eras.

Since the earliest days of the United States, some parents have felt moved to capture their political moment in their children’s names. A Massachusetts child received the name Federal Constitution in 1790. The nineteenth century saw the name States Rights crop up across the South. A younger brother of a boy called McKinley in the early twentieth century was disproportionately likely to be named Roosevelt. Residents of areas that supported Reagan were prone to choose the spelling “Meagan” over “Megan.” The name Hillary surged in popularity after the Clintons emerged on the political scene—then crashed just as dramatically. What do trends like these tell us about political identities and enthusiasms in the United States?

R. Urbatsch explores the politics of naming across American history, revealing the surprising ways parents’ choices shed light on public opinion past and present. He argues that naming is a weathervane for political attitudes: Names touch on every sort of identity, from race and gender to nationalism and religion. Tracing the rise and fall of names that evoked the leaders, ideas, and issues that fired political imaginations of their times, Urbatsch opens new windows onto a wide range of historical questions. By analyzing when politics-tinged names gained or lost popularity, this book offers an unconventional and illuminating new perspective on identity, public sentiment, and political behavior in the United States.