Literary Collections

Timeless fables of loyalty and betrayal

Like Aesop’s Fables, Kalīlah and Dimnah is a collection designed not only for moral instruction, but also for the entertainment of readers. The stories, which originated in the Sanskrit Panchatantra and Mahabharata, were adapted, augmented, and translated into Arabic by the scholar and state official Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ in the second/eighth century. The stories are engaging, entertaining, and often funny, from “The Man Who Found a Treasure But Could Not Keep It,” to “The Raven Who Tried To Learn To Walk Like a Partridge” and “How the Wolf, the Raven, and the Jackal Destroyed the Camel.”

Kalīlah and Dimnah is a “mirror for princes,” a book meant to inculcate virtues and discernment in rulers and warn against flattery and deception. Many of the animals who populate the book represent ministers counseling kings, friends advising friends, or wives admonishing husbands. Throughout, Kalīlah and Dimnah offers insight into the moral lessons Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ believed were important for rulers—and readers.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

The first and only book to gather the voices and perspectives of Vietnamese diasporic authors from across the globe.
 
Edited by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan P. Duong, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Cleaving brings together Vietnamese artists and writers from around the world in conversation about their craft and how their work has been shaped and received by mainstream culture and their own communities. This collection highlights how Vietnamese diasporic writers speak about having been cleaved—a condition in which they have been separated from, yet still hew to, the country that they have left behind.
 
Composed of eighteen dialogues among thirty-seven writers from France, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Australia, Israel, and the United States, the book expands on the many lives that Vietnamese writers inhabit. The dialogues touch on family history, legacies of colonialism and militarism, and the writers' own artistic and literary achievements. Taken together, these conversations insist on a deeper reckoning with the conditions of displacement. 

Featured writers: Hoai Huong Aubert-Nguyen, Amy Quan Barry, Doan Bui, Thi Bui, Lan Cao, Cathy Linh Che, André Dao, Duy Đoàn, Lan P. Duong, Dương Vân Mai Elliott, Le Ly Hayslip, Matt Huynh, Violet Kupersmith, Thanhhà Lại, Vincent Lam, T.K. Lê, Tracey Lien, Marcelino Trương Lực , Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Anna Möi, Beth (Bich) Minh Nguyen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Hoa Nguyen, Philip Nguyễn, Thảo Nguyễn, Vaan Nguyen, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Andrew X. Pham, Aimee Phan, Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood, Bao Phi, Dao Strom, Kim Thúy, Paul Tran, Monique Truong, Minh Huynh Vu, Ocean Vuong

A literary tour of Christian monasteries of the medieval Middle East

The Book of Monasteries takes readers on an engaging tour of the monastic centers of the medieval Middle East, illustrated with a rich variety of poetry and prose. Starting with monasteries in Baghdad, readers are taken up the Tigris into the mountains of south-eastern Anatolia before moving to Palestine and Syria, along the Euphrates down to the old Christian center of Ḥīrah and onward to Egypt. For the literary anthologist al-Shābushtī, who was Muslim, monasteries were important sites of interactions between Abbasid elites and the Christian communities that made up about half the population of the Abbasid Empire at the time.

Each section in this anthology covers a specific monastery, beginning with a discussion of its location and the reason for its name. Al-Shābushtī presents poems, anecdotes, and historical reports related to each site. He selects heroic and spectacular incidents, illustrations of caliphal extravagance, and occasions that gave rise to memorable verse. Important political personalities and events that were indirectly linked with monasteries also appear here, as do scenes of festive court life and gruesome murders. Through these accounts, al-Shābushtī offers readers a meditation on the splendor of Abbasid culture as well as moral and philosophical lessons: the ephemerality of power; the virtues of generosity and tolerance; the effectiveness of eloquence in prose and poetry; and the fleeting nature of pleasure and beauty. Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Monasteries offers an entertaining panorama of religious, political, and literary life during the Abbasid era.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Uplifting tales from one of the most influential Arabic books of the Middle Ages

One of the most popular and influential Arabic books of the Middle Ages, Deliverance Follows Adversity is an anthology of stories and anecdotes designed to console and encourage the afflicted. Regarded as a pattern-book of Arabic storytelling, this collection shows how God’s providence works through His creatures to rescue them from tribulations ranging from religious persecution and medical emergencies to political skullduggery and romantic woes.

A resident of Basra and Baghdad, al-Tanukhi (327–84/939–94) draws from earlier Arabic classics as well as from oral stories relayed by the author’s tenth-century Iraqi contemporaries, who comprised a wide circle of writers, intellectuals, judges, government officials, and family members. This edition and translation includes the first three chapters of the work, which deal with Qur'anic stories and prayers that bring about deliverance, as well as general instances of the workings of providence. The volume incorporates material from manuscripts not used in the standard Arabic edition, and is the first translation into English. The complete translation, spanning four volumes, will be the first integral translation into any European language.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

An exhilarating journey through the world of books, featuring personal reflections on Susan Sontag, Huey Newton, Barbra Streisand, W. G. Sebald, and Christopher Hitchens.

"A troublemaker of the good kind since his youth, Wasserman continues to inspire with his vigorous dedication to the life of the mind, exhibited with clarity and grace in this book." —Viet Thanh Nguyen

Born on the West Coast, the son of Bronx-born parents, Steve Wasserman is a generalist and public intellectual but is perhaps less well known as a cultural essayist and social critic of the first rank. In thirty splendid essays, originally published in such diverse publications as The New Republic and The Nation, The American Conservative and The Progressive, The Village Voice and The Economist, Wasserman delivers a riveting account of the awakening of an empathetic sensibility and a lively mind. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of his enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, and the tumults of a world in upheaval.

These essays include the remarkable tale of a bookstore owner who wouldn't let him buy the books he wanted, to his brave against-the-grain take on the Black Panthers, to his shrewd assessment of the fast-changing world of publishing. Here is, as Joyce Carol Oates notes, "arguably the very best concise history of Cuba and the legendary Fidel Castro; beautifully composed eulogies for two close friends, Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens; sharply perceptive commentary on Daniel Ellsberg; a thrillingly candid interview with W. G. Sebald."

A collection of poems from a changing Bedouin world

Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert features poetry from three poets of the Ibn Rashīd dynasty–the highwater mark of Bedouin culture in the nineteenth century. Khalaf Abū Zwayyid, ʿAdwān al-Hirbīd, and ʿAjlān ibn Rmāl belonged to tribes based around the area of Jabal Shammar in northern Arabia. A cultural and political center for the region, Jabal Shammar attracted caravans of traders and pilgrims, tribal shaykhs, European travelers (including T.E. Lawrence), illiterate Bedouin poets, and learned Arabs. All three poets lived at the inception of or during modernity’s accelerating encroachment. New inventions and firearms spread throughout the region, and these poets captured Bedouin life in changing times. Their poems and the accompanying narratives showcase the beauty and complexity of Bedouin culture, while also grappling with the upheaval brought about by the rise of the House of Saud and Wahhabism.

The poems featured in Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert are often humorous and witty, yet also sentimental, wistful, and romantic. They vividly describe journeys on camelback, stories of family and marriage, thrilling raids, and beautiful nature scenes, offering a window into Bedouin culture and society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

A modern translation of a foundational document of Islamic jurisprudence

The Epistle on Legal Theory is the oldest surviving Arabic work on Islamic legal theory and the foundational document of Islamic jurisprudence. Its author, Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i (d. 204/820), was the eponym of the Shafi'i school of legal thought, one of the four rites in Sunni Islam. This fascinating work offers the first systematic treatment in Arabic of key issues in Islamic legal thought. These include a survey of the importance of Arabic as the language of revelation, principles of textual interpretation to be applied to the Qur'an and prophetic Traditions, techniques for harmonizing apparently contradictory precedents, legal epistemology, rules of inference, and discussions of when legal interpretation is required. The author illustrates his theoretical claims with numerous examples drawn from nearly all areas of Islamic law, including ritual law, commercial law, tort law, and criminal law. The text thus provides an important window into both Islamic law and legal thought in particular and early Islamic intellectual history in general.

The Arabic text has been established on the basis of the two most important critical editions and includes variants in the notes, while the English text is a new translation by a leading scholar of Shafi'i and his thought. The Epistle on Legal Theory represents one of the earliest complete works on Islamic law, one that is centrally important for the formation of Islamic legal thought and the Islamic legal tradition.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

A collection of poems about nature and power

To Ibn al-Muʿtazz and his Abbasid contemporaries, the hunt was more than a diversion—it was the theater for their poetic and political endeavors, captured here in fifty-nine Arabic hunting poems, or ṭardiyyāt. The poems of In Deadly Embrace describe hunting expeditions with animals trained to hunt, including saluki hounds and birds of prey. Many were composed after these outings, when the hunting party gathered to enjoy the game they caught.

Poetry was central to Abbasid society and served as a method of maintaining networks of patronage and friendship; the poems in this collection reflect these power dynamics and allowed Ibn al-Muʿtazz—prince of the realm and in line for the caliphate—to explore his own relationship to social and political power and to demonstrate his fitness to rule.

Ibn al-Muʿtazz was an influential poet and literary theorist of the Modernist school of poetry. In Deadly Embrace merges the Modernists’ new techniques and styles with age-old themes: military prowess and wisdom, fitness to rule and comradeship, the camaraderie of the hunt and the cult of heroic masculinity. Groundbreaking and evocative, the poems paint vivid pictures of hunting scenes while posing deep questions about our attentiveness to the natural world and the relationship of the human to the nonhuman.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

A groundbreaking exposition of Islamic mysticism

The Essence of Reality was written over the course of just three days in 514/1120, by a scholar who was just twenty-four. The text, like its author ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which that it is in all likelihood the earliest philosophical exposition of mysticism in the Islamic intellectual tradition. This important work would go on to exert significant influence on both classical Islamic philosophy and philosophical mysticism.

Written in a terse yet beautiful style, The Essence of Reality consists of one hundred brief chapters interspersed with Qurʾanic verses, prophetic sayings, Sufi maxims, and poetry. In conversation with the work of the philosophers Avicenna and al-Ghazālī, the book takes readers on a philosophical journey, with lucid expositions of questions including the problem of the eternity of the world; the nature of God’s essence and attributes; the concepts of “before” and “after”; and the soul’s relationship to the body. All these discussions are seamlessly tied into ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s foundational argument—that mystical knowledge lies beyond the realm of the intellect.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

A witty satire of the medical profession

The Doctors’ Dinner Party is an eleventh-century satire in the form of a novella, set in a medical milieu. A young doctor from out of town is invited to dinner with a group of older medical men, whose conversation reveals their incompetence. Written by the accomplished physician Ibn Buṭlān, the work satirizes the hypocrisy of quack doctors while displaying Ibn Buṭlān’s own deep technical knowledge of medical practice, including surgery, blood-letting, and medicines. He also makes reference to the great thinkers and physicians of the ancient world, including Hippocrates, Galen, and Socrates.

Combining literary parody with social satire, the book is richly textured and carefully organized: in addition to the use of the question-and-answer format associated with technical literature, it is replete with verse and subtexts that hint at the infatuation of the elderly practitioners with their young guest. The Doctors’ Dinner Party is an entertaining read in which the author skewers the pretensions of the physicians around the table.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Collecting 635 meticulous recipes, Scents and Flavors invites us to savor an inventive cuisine that elevates simple ingredients by combining the sundry aromas of herbs, spices, fruits, and flower essences.

This popular thirteenth-century Syrian cookbook is an ode to what its anonymous author calls the “greater part of the pleasure of this life,” namely the consumption of food and drink, as well as the fragrances that garnish the meals and the diners who enjoy them.

Organized like a meal, it opens with appetizers and juices and proceeds through main courses, side dishes, and desserts, including such confections as candies based on the higher densities of sugar syrup—an innovation unique to the medieval Arab world. Apricot beverages, stuffed eggplant, pistachio chicken, coriander stew, melon crepes, and almond pudding are seasoned with nutmeg, rose, cloves, saffron, and the occasional rare ingredient like ambergris to delight and surprise the banqueter. Bookended by chapters on preparatory perfumes, incenses, medicinal oils, antiperspirant powders, and after-meal hand soaps, this comprehensive culinary journey is a feast for all the senses.

With the exception of four extant Babylonian and Roman specimens, cookbooks did not appear on the world literary scene until Arabic speakers began compiling their recipe collections in the tenth century, peaking in popularity in the thirteenth century. Scents and Flavors quickly became a bestseller during this golden age of cookbooks, and remains today a delectable read for epicures and cultural historians alike.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Fantastic tales of magic and wonder

Edited and translated into English for the first time, A Hundred and One Nights is a marvelous example of the rich tradition of popular Arabic storytelling. Like its more famous sibling, the Thousand and One Nights, this collection opens with the frame story of Shahrazad, the gifted vizier’s daughter who recounts imaginative tales night after night in an effort to distract the murderous king from taking her life. A Hundred and One Nights features an almost entirely different set of stories, however, each one more thrilling, amusing, and disturbing than the last. In them, we encounter tales of epic warriors, buried treasures, disappearing brides, cannibal demon women, fatal shipwrecks, and clever ruses, where human strength and ingenuity play out against a backdrop of inexorable, inscrutable fate.

Although these tales draw on motifs and story elements that circulated across cultures, A Hundred and One Nights is distinctly rooted in Arabic literary culture and the Islamic tradition. It is also likely much older than Thousand and One Nights, drawing on Indian and Chinese antecedents. This careful edition and vibrant translation of A Hundred and One Nights promises to transport readers, new and veteran alike, into its fantastical realms of magic and wonder.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

The Ramáyana epic centers around Rama, the crown prince of the city of Ayódhya, providing a profound meditation on the paradox of the hero as both human and divine. After rescuing a sage from persecution by demons. Rama attends a tournament in the neighboring city of Míthila where he wins the prize and the hand of Sita, the princess of Míthila. But a court intrigue involving one of the king’s junior wives and a maidservant forces Rama into a fourteen-year banishment to the jungle with his wife, Sita, and his loyal brother Lákshmana. When Sita is abducted by the demon king Rávana, Rama goes to the monkey capital of Kishkíndha to seek help in finding her. It is there that he meets Hánuman, the greatest of the monkey heroes. In exchange for the assistance of the monkey troops in discovering where Sita is held captive, Rama has to help Sugríva win the monkey throne over his brother, Valin. In the final book of the set, Hánuman leaps across the ocean to the island citadel of Lanka, where he scours the city for the abducted Princess Sita. But when Hánuman reveals himself to the princess and offers to carry her back to Rama, she nevertheless insists that Rama must come himself to avenge the abduction.
Included in this set:
Ramáyana Book I: Boyhood
By Valmíki. Translated by Robert Goldman.
424 pages / 978-0-8147-3163-5
Ramáyana Book II: Ayódhya
By Valmíki. Translated by Sheldon I. Pollock.
652 pages / 978-0-8147-6716-0
Ramáyana Book III: The Forest
By Valmíki. Translated by Sheldon I. Pollock.
436 pages / 978-0-8147-6722-1
Ramáyana Book IV: Kishkíndha
By Valmíki. Translated by Rosalind Lefeber.
415 pages / 978-0-8147-5207-4
Ramáyana Book V: Súndara
By Valmíki. Translated by Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland Goldman.
538 pages / 978-0-8147-3178-9

Uncovering the professional secrets of con artists and swindlers in the medieval Middle East

The Book of Charlatans is a comprehensive guide to trickery and scams as practiced in the thirteenth century in the cities of the Middle East, especially in Syria and Egypt. The author, al-Jawbarī, was well versed in the practices he describes and may well have been a reformed charlatan himself. Divided into thirty chapters, his book reveals the secrets of everyone from “Those Who Claim to be Prophets” to “Those Who Claim to Have Leprosy” and “Those Who Dye Horses.”

The material is informed in part by the author’s own experience with alchemy, astrology, and geomancy, and in part by his extensive research. The work is unique in its systematic, detailed, and inclusive approach to a subject that is by nature arcane and that has relevance not only for social history but also for the history of science. Covering everything from invisible writing to doctoring gemstones and quack medicine, The Book of Charlatans opens a fascinating window into a subculture of beggars’ guilds and professional con artists in the medieval Arab world.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Maqāmāt Abī Zayd al-Sarūjī is a scholarly, Arabic-only edition of the celebrated work by al-Ḥarīrī, which is also available in English translation from the Library of Arabic Literature as Impostures. Al-Ḥarīrī's text consists of fifty stories about the adventures of the itinerant con man and master of persuasion Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī, as told by the equally itinerant and often gullible narrator al-Ḥārith ibn Hāmmam. Al-Ḥarīrī was a virtuoso writer of the rhymed prose narrative genre known as the maqāmah, which would continue as a popular literary form into the twentieth century.

An Arabic edition with an Arabic foreword and English scholarly apparatus.

The Buddhist monk Ashva·ghosha composed Life of the Buddha in the first or second century CE probably in Ayódhya. This is the earliest surviving text of the Sanskrit literary genre called kavya and probably provided models for Kali·dasa's more famous works. The most poignant scenes on the path to his Awakening are when the young prince Siddhártha, the future Buddha, is confronted by the reality of sickness, old age, and death, while seduced by the charms of the women employed to keep him at home. A poet of the highest order, Ashva·ghosha's aim is not entertainment but instruction, presenting the Buddha's teaching as the culmination of the Brahmanical tradition. His wonderful descriptions of the bodies of courtesans are ultimately meant to show the transience of beauty.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Poems and tales of a literary forefather of the United Arab Emirates

Love, Death, Fame features the poetry of al-Māyidī ibn Ẓāhir, who has been embraced as the earliest poet in what would later become the United Arab Emirates. Although little is known about his life, he is the subject of a sizeable body of folk legend and is thought to have lived in the seventeenth century, in the area now called the Emirates. The tales included in Love, Death, Fame portray him as a witty, resourceful, scruffy poet, at times combative and at times kindhearted.

His poetry primarily features verses of wisdom and romance, with scenes of clouds and rain, desert migrations, seafaring, and pearl diving. Like Arabian Romantic and Arabian Satire, this collection is a prime example of Nabaṭī poetry, combining vernacular language of the Arabian Peninsula with archaic vocabulary and images dating to Arabic poetry’s very origins. Distinguished by Ibn Ẓāhir’s unique voice, Love, Death, Fame offers a glimpse of what life was like four centuries ago in the region that is now the UAE.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

The adventures of the man who created Aladdin

The Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account of his travels as a young man from his hometown of Aleppo to the court of Versailles and back again, which forever linked him to one of the most popular pieces of world literature, the Thousand and One Nights.

Diyāb, a Maronite Christian, served as a guide and interpreter for the French naturalist and antiquarian Paul Lucas. Between 1706 and 1716, Diyāb and Lucas traveled through Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, Tripolitania, Tunis, Italy, and France. In Paris, Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, who added to his wildly popular translation of the Thousand and One Nights several tales related by Diyāb, including “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” When Lucas failed to make good on his promise of a position for Diyāb at Louis XIV’s Royal Library, Diyāb returned to Aleppo. In his old age, he wrote this engaging account of his youthful adventures, from capture by pirates in the Mediterranean to quack medicine and near-death experiences.

Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Travels introduces readers to the young Syrian responsible for some of the most beloved stories from the Thousand and One Nights.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, wielding an authority second only to the Qur'an.

The words of Muhammad (d. 11/632), God's messenger and prophet of Islam, have a special place in the hearts of his followers. Wielding an authority second only to the Qur'an, Muhammad’s hadith are cited by scholars as testimonial texts in a vast array of disciplines—including law, theology, metaphysics, poetry, grammar, history, and medicine—and are quoted by Muslims to one another in their daily lives.

Assembling Muhammad’s words has been a major preoccupation for scholars throughout the fourteen centuries since his death, resulting in an abundance of compilations. Among the legally-grounded collections, which aimed to guide the community in its practice of religious law and ritual worship, one which stands out in particular is Light in the Heavens (Kitab al-Shihab) by al-Qadi al-Quda'i, a Shafi'i judge in the Fatimid court in Egypt. The collection’s overall conceptualization is distinctively ethical and pragmatic, and offers humanitarian lessons and practical insights with universal appeal.

From North Africa to India, generations have used Light in the Heavens as a teaching text for children as well as adults, and many of its 1200 sayings are familiar to individuals of diverse denominations and ethnicities. For Muslims—who consider Muhammad’s teachings the fount of wisdom and the beacon of guidance in all things, mundane and sublime—these sayings provide a direct window into the inspired vision of one of the most influential humans to have walked the Earth.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

The adventures of the man who created Aladdin

The Book of Travels is Ḥannā Diyāb’s remarkable first-person account of his travels as a young man from his hometown of Aleppo to the court of Versailles and back again, which forever linked him to one of the most popular pieces of world literature, the Thousand and One Nights.

Diyāb, a Maronite Christian, served as a guide and interpreter for the French naturalist and antiquarian Paul Lucas. Between 1706 and 1716, Diyāb and Lucas traveled through Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, Tripolitania, Tunis, Italy, and France. In Paris, Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, who added to his wildly popular translation of the Thousand and One Nights several tales related by Diyāb, including “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” When Lucas failed to make good on his promise of a position for Diyāb at Louis XIV’s Royal Library, Diyāb returned to Aleppo. In his old age, he wrote this engaging account of his youthful adventures, from capture by pirates in the Mediterranean to quack medicine and near-death experiences.

Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Travels introduces readers to the young Syrian responsible for some of the most beloved stories from the Thousand and One Nights.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

The Excellence of the Arabs is a spirited defense of Arab identity—its merits, values, and origins—at a time of political unrest and fragmentation, written by one of the most important scholars of the early Abbasid era.

In the cosmopolitan milieu of Baghdad, the social prestige attached to claims of being Arab had begun to decline. Although his own family originally hailed from Merv in the east, Ibn Qutaybah locks horns with those members of his society who belittled Arabness and vaunted the glories of Persian heritage and culture. Instead, he upholds the status of Arabs and their heritage in the face of criticism and uncertainty.

The Excellence of the Arabs is in two parts. In the first, Arab Preeminence, which takes the form of an extended argument for Arab privilege, Ibn Qutaybah accuses his opponents of blasphemous envy. In the second, The Excellence of Arab Learning, he describes the fields of knowledge in which he believed pre-Islamic Arabians excelled, including knowledge of the stars, divination, horse husbandry, and poetry. And by incorporating extensive excerpts from the poetic heritage—“the archive of the Arabs”—Ibn Qutaybah aims to demonstrate that poetry is itself sufficient corroboration of Arab superiority.

Eloquent and forceful, The Excellence of the Arabs addresses a central question at a time of great social flux at the dawn of classical Muslim civilization: what did it mean to be Arab?

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? considers issues pertaining to a corpus of several hundred short poems written in Middle English between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. The chapters draw on perspectives from varied disciplines, including literary criticism, musicology, art history, and cognitive science. Since the early 1900s, the poems have been categorized as “lyrics,” the term now used for most kinds of short poetry, yet neither the difficulties nor the promise of this treatment have received enough attention. In one way, the book argues, considering these poems to be lyrics obscures much of what is interesting about them. Since the nineteenth century, lyrics have been thought of as subjective and best read without reference to cultural context, yet nonetheless they are taken to form a distinct literary tradition. Since Middle English short poems are often communal and usually spoken, sung, and/or danced, this lyric template is not a good fit. In another way, however, the very differences between these poems and the later ones on which current debates about the lyric still focus suggest they have much to offer those debates, and vice versa.

As its title suggests, this book thus goes back to the basics, asking fundamental questions about what these poems are, how they function formally and culturally, how they are (and are not) related to other bodies of short poetry, and how they might illuminate and be illuminated by contemporary lyric scholarship. Eleven chapters by medievalists and two responses by modernists, all in careful conversation with one another, reflect on these questions and suggest very different answers. The editors’ introduction synthesizes these answers by suggesting that these poems can most usefully be read as a kind of “play,” in several senses of that word. The book ends with eight “new Middle English lyrics” by seven contemporary poets.

This set of plays provides an array of Sanskrit drama and satire, with plots that vary from the “strikingly Shakespearian” (as H. H. Wilson described it ) “Little Clay Cart” to a dramatization of and amendment to the “Ramáyana” in “Rama’s Last Act.” In addition to its scope of genre, the set covers a large period of time (the “Three Satires” by Bhállata, Ksheméndra, and Nila·kan alone were written over a period of nearly a thousand years) and also includes several works traditionally given less modern attention, such as “Málavika and Agni·mitra” by Kali·dasa, in order to provide a multifaceted view of Sankskrit theater.
Included in this set:
“The Lady of the Jewel Necklace” & “The Lady who Shows her Love”
By Harsha. Translated by Wendy Doniger.
514 pages / 978-0-8147-1996-1
Little Clay Cart
By Shúdraka. Translated by Diwakar Acharya. Foreword by Partha Chatterjee.
640 pages / 978-0-8147-0729-6
Málavika and Agni·mitra
Kali·dasa. Translated by Dániel Balogh and Eszter Somogyi.
350 pages / 978-0-8147-8702-1
Rákshasa’s Ring
By Vishákha·datta. Translated by Michael Coulson
385 pages / 978-0-8147-1661-8
Rama Beyond Price
By Murári. Edited and translated by Judit Törzsök.
638 pages / 978-0-8147-8295-8
Rama’s Last Act
By Bhava·bhuti. Translated by Sheldon Pollock. Fore­word by Girish Karnad.
458 pages / 978-0-8147-6733-7
The Recognition of Shakúntala (Kashmir Recension)
By Kali·dasa. Edited and translated by Somadeva Vasudeva.
419 pages / 978-0-8147-8815-8
Three Satires
By Bhállata, Ksheméndra, and Nila·kantha. Edited and translated by Somadeva Vasudeva.
403 pages / 978-0-8147-8814-1

"The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance."
—Willis G. Regier, The Chronicle Review
"No effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience."
—The Times Higher Education Supplement
"The Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot. . . . Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes."
—New Criterion
"Published in the geek-chic format."
—BookForum
"Very few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs."
—Tricycle
”Now an ambitious new publishing project, the Clay Sanskrit Library brings together leading Sanskrit translators and scholars of Indology from around the world to celebrate in translating the beauty and range of classical Sanskrit literature. . . . Published as smart green hardbacks that are small enough to fit into a jeans pocket, the volumes are meant to satisfy both the scholar and the lay reader. Each volume has a transliteration of the original Sanskrit text on the left-hand page and an English translation on the right, as also a helpful introduction and notes. Alongside definitive translations of the great Indian epics — 30 or so volumes will be devoted to the Maha·bhárat itself — Clay Sanskrit Library makes available to the English-speaking reader many other delights: The earthy verse of Bhartri·hari, the pungent satire of Jayánta Bhatta and the roving narratives of Dandin, among others. All these writers belong properly not just to Indian literature, but to world literature.”
—LiveMint
”The Clay Sanskrit Library has recently set out to change the scene by making available well-translated dual-language (English and Sanskrit) editions of popular Sanskritic texts for the public.”
—Namarupa
The frame narrative in “The Ocean of the Rivers of Story” is so swamped in the flood of stories that it is not until volume two of the CSL edition, 3,000 verses into the text, that Nara·váhana·datta, the protagonist, is born. Shiva has foretold his birth and said that he is a partial incarnation of the god of love and will become the emperor of the sorcerers. From here on the main narrative and many of the tales pouring into it describe the exploits of sorcerers and lovers. This volume ends with the events preceding the birth of Mádana·máñchuka, Nara·váhana·datta’s first and greatest love.

A brilliant exposition of Arabic literary culture

In 11th-century Córdoba, the celebrated poet Ibn Zaydūn found himself jockeying for the affections of Wallādah, accomplished poet and free-spirited daughter of an Umayyad caliph. Looking to embarrass a rival suitor, Ibn Zaydūn mischievously wrote and publicized an eloquent, erudite, and searing rejection letter in Wallādah’s name, which went on to become one of the most widely read works of Arabic literature. His letter was so rich with historical references and sophisticated metaphors that it became a cultural touchstone among the literary elite. One could not belong in refined circles if one did not understand Ibn Zaydūn’s letter.

Three centuries later, the Egyptian litterateur Ibn Nubātah wrote a guide to this widely-admired text. In The Genius of Invective, a brilliant work of explication, Ibn Nubātah supplements Ibn Zaydūn’s complete letter with concise biographies of every figure referenced in it and glosses arcane Arabic terms. This wide-ranging volume offered readers a veritable encyclopedia of the key cultural and literary references that peppered Ibn Zaydūn’s famous letter.

As impressive in its own right as the remarkable letter that inspired it, The Genius of Invective is a peerless example of the breadth, depth, and complexity of the Arabic classical literary tradition.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

'A'ishah al-Ba'uniyyah (d. 923/1517) of Damascus was one of the great women scholars in Islamic history. A mystic and prolific poet and writer, 'A'ishah composed more works in Arabic than any other woman before the twentieth century. Yet despite her extraordinary literary and religious achievements, 'A'ishah al-Ba'uniyyah
remains largely unknown. For the first time her key work, The Principles of Sufism, is available in English translation.

The Principles of Sufism is a mystical guide book to help others on their spiritual path. She recounts the fundamental stages and states of the spiritual novice’s transformative journey, emphasizing the importance of embracing both human limitations and God’s limitless love. Drawing on lessons and readings from centuries-old Sufi tradition, 'A'ishah advises the seeker to repent of selfishness and turn to a sincere life of love. In addition to his lucid translation, Th. Emil Homerin provides an insightful introduction, notes and a glossary to 'A'ishah al-Ba'uniyyah’s remarkable account of the pursuit of mystical illumination.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

One of California’s leading writers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, presents her first nonfiction volume on writing since 2005’s best-selling Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

"Smiley gives educators, readers, and writers much to discuss. Highly recommended." —Library Journal, starred review

"Line for line, Smiley delivers such clear, vibrant, precise prose—handed forth as calmly and equitably as an ice cream cone, even when she’s incensed—that a reader feels smarter just taking it in." —The Boston Globe

Long acclaimed as one of America’s preeminent novelists, Jane Smiley is also an unparalleled observer of the craft of writing. In The Questions That Matter Most this Pulitzer Prize-winning writer offers steady and penetrating essays on some of the aesthetic and cultural issues that mark any serious engagement with reading and writing. Beginning with a personal introduction tracing Smiley’s migration from Iowa to California, the author reflects on her findings in the varied literature of the Golden State, whose writers have for decades litigated the West’s contested legacies of racism, class conflict, and sexual politics through their pens.

As she considers the ambiguity of character and the weight of history, her essays provide new entry points into literature, and we lucky readers can see how Smiley draws inspiration from across the literary spectrum to invigorate her own writing. With enthusiasm and meticulous attention, Smiley dives beneath surface-level interpretations to examine the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halldór Laxness, and Jessica Mitford. Throughout, Smiley seeks to think harder and, in her words, with “more clarity and nuance” about the questions that matter most.

Each of the ten princes has several adventures on his quest to be reunited with the crown-prince. Variegated violence and sorcery figure in their exploits, but love affairs are even more prominent. Commentators have lambasted Dandin's heroes for their antiheroic, apparently random, escapades, while in fact the architecture of his plot reveals an elegant, instructive construction.

What Ten Young Men Did is a coming-of-age novel from the seventh century CE. In combat and in the bedroom, ten individuals juggle virtue and vice on their heroic progress from adolescence to maturity. Dandin’s work is autobiographical in two senses: each of the young men narrates their personal experiences, while the author could not have written with such confident realism had he not had many of the same picaresque adventures in his native South India and beyond.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

This court epic describes events leading up to the birth of Kumára, the war god who will defeat the demon Táraka. The gods try to use Kama, the Indian Cupid, to make the ascetic god Shiva fall in love with the daughter of the Himalaya mountain. Kama fails, and is burnt to ashes by the angry Shiva. Then Parvati, the daughter of the mountain, herself turns to asceticism to win the husband she longs for. She is successful, and the climax of the poem is the marriage and lovemaking of Shiva and Parvati, parents of the universe.

The greatest long poem in classical Sanskrit, by the greatest poet of the language, Kali·dasa's The Birth of Kumára is not exactly a love story but a paradigm of inevitable union between male and female, played out on the immense scale of supreme divinity. In this court-epic, the events are described leading up to but not including the birth of Kumára, the war god destined to defeat the demon Táraka.

The Little Clay Cart is, for Sanskrit theatre, atypically romantic, funny, and thrilling. This most human of Sanskrit plays is Shakespearian in its skilful drawing of characters and in the plot’s direct clarity. One of the earliest Sanskrit dramas, The Little Clay Cart was created in South India, perhaps in the seventh century CE. Set in the city of Ujjain, so secular and universal is the story that it can be situated in any society, and it has, including in Bollywood film and by the BBC.

Charu•datta, a bankrupt married merchant, is extramaritally involved with a wealthy courtesan, Vasánta•sena. The king’s vile brother-in-law, unable to win Vasánta•sena’s love, strangles her, and accuses Charu•datta. The court decides the case hastily, condemning Charu•datta to death. Fortunately, our heroine rises from the dead to save her beloved, and all applaud their love. At this climax, the regime changes, and the rebel-turned-king makes Charu•datta lord of an adjacent city.

Bhanu is probably the most famous Sanskrit poet that no one today has ever heard of. His “Bouquet of Rasa” and “River of Rasa,” both composed in the early sixteenth century, probably under the patronage of the Nizam of Ahmadnagar in western India, attracted the attention of the most celebrated commentators in early modern India. Some of the greatest painters of Mewar and Basohli vied to turn his subtle poems into pictures. And his verses were prized by poets everywhere: Abu al-Fazl, the preeminent scholar at Akbar’s court, translated them into Persian, and, Kshetráyya, the great Andhra poet of the next century, adapted them into Telugu. Many writers have described the types of heroines and heroes of Sanskrit literature (the subject of the “Bouquet of Rasa”) or explained the nature of aesthetic emotion (that of the “River of Rasa”), but none did so in verse of such exquisite and subtle artistry.

Vedanta Deshika (1268-1369) was perhaps the most outstanding Sanskrit author in the South Indian tradition focused on Vishnu and one of the most original poets in all of Sanskrit literature. Two of his best-known works appear here. "The Mission of the Goose," in the genre of messenger-poems modeled on Kali dasa’s famous "Cloud Messenger," has Rama send a goose with a message for Sita, flying to Lanka over graphically described Tamil temples. "Compassion" is a meditation about the compassionate aspect of Vishnu, particularly as embodied in the great temple of Tirupati. Appayya Dikshita (1520 -1592) and Nila kantha Dikshita (1580 1644) belong to one family as well as to the same religious world centered on Shiva. Appayya’s "Self-Surrender" to his deity is the most personal of the polymath’s works. In "Peace" his great-nephew Nila kantha, political high achiever as well as poet, reevaluates renunciation and transcendence in a skeptical, intimate, and deeply unsettling voice.

One of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Books of the Year

Winner, 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, Translation Category

Shortlist, 2021 National Translation Award

Finalist, 2021 PROSE Award, Literature Category


Fifty rogue’s tales translated fifty ways

An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together in Impostures, a groundbreaking new translation of a celebrated work of Arabic literature.

Impostures follows the roguish Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī in his adventures around the medieval Middle East—we encounter him impersonating a preacher, pretending to be blind, and lying to a judge. In every escapade he shows himself to be a brilliant and persuasive wordsmith, composing poetry, palindromes, and riddles on the spot. Award-winning translator Michael Cooperson transforms Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English.

Featuring picaresque adventures and linguistic acrobatics, Impostures brings the spirit of this masterpiece of Arabic literature into English in a dazzling display of translation.

An English-only edition.

Wide-ranging essays on Moroccan history, Sufism, and religious life

Al-Hasan al-Yusi was arguably the most influential and well-known Moroccan intellectual figure of his generation. In 1084/1685, at the age of roughly fifty-four, and after a long and distinguished career, this Amazigh scholar from the Middle Atlas began writing a collection of short essays on a wide variety of subjects. Completed three years later and gathered together under the title Discourses on Language and Literature (al-Muhadarat fi l-adab wa-l-lughah), they offer rich insight into the varied intellectual interests of an ambitious and gifted Moroccan scholar, covering subjects as diverse as genealogy, theology, Sufism, history, and social mores.

In addition to representing the author’s intellectual interests, The Discourses also includes numerous autobiographical anecdotes, which offer valuable insight into the history of Morocco, including the transition from the Saadian to the Alaouite dynasty, which occurred during al-Yusi’s lifetime. Translated into English for the first time, The Discourses offers readers access to the intellectual landscape of the early modern Muslim world through an author who speaks openly and frankly about his personal life and his relationships with his country’s rulers, scholars, and commoners.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Love poems from late nineteenth-century Arabia

Arabian Romantic captures what it was like to live in central Arabia before the imposition of austere norms by the Wahhabi authorities in the early twentieth century: tales of robbery and hot pursuit; perilous desert crossings; scenes of exhaustion and chaos when water is raised from deep wells under harsh conditions; the distress of wounded and worn-out animals on the brink of perdition; once proud warriors who are at the mercy of their enemy on the field of battle. Such images lend poignancy to the suffering of the poet’s love-stricken heart, while also painting a vivid portrait of typical Bedouin life.

Ibn Sbayyil (ca. 1853–1933), a town dweller from the Najd region of the Arabian Peninsula, was a key figure in the Nabati poetic tradition. His poetry, which is still recited today, broke with the artifice of the preceding generation by combining inherited idiom and original touches reflecting his environment. Translated into English for the first time by Marcel Kurpershoek, Arabian Romantic will delight readers with a poetry that is direct, fluent, and expressive, and that has entertained Arabic speakers for over a century.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Insights into a life of integrity by a master of Arabic eloquence

A Treasury of Virtues is a collection of sayings, sermons, and teachings attributed to 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 40/661), the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, the first Shia Imam and the fourth Sunni Caliph. An acknowledged master of Arabic eloquence and a sage of Islamic wisdom, 'Ali was renowned for his eloquence: his words were collected, quoted, and studied over the centuries, and extensively anthologized, excerpted, and interpreted.

Of the many compilations of 'Ali’s words, A Treasury of Virtues, compiled by the Fatimid Shafi'i judge al-Quda'i, arguably possesses the broadest compass of genres and the largest variety of themes. Included are aphorisms, proverbs, sermons, speeches, homilies, prayers, letters, dialogues, and verse, all of which provide instruction on how to be a morally upstanding human being. The shorter compilation included here, One Hundred Proverbs, is attributed to the eminent writer al-Jahiz (d. 255/869). This volume presents the first English translation of both of these important collections.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Letters of Great Women is a beautiful collection of the most inspiring and compelling correspondence from remarkable women throughout history.

Including 50 letters from figures in the arts, politics, entertainment, activism and the military, historian Lucinda Hawksley has carefully selected diverse, extraordinary dispatches from women across all walks of life, from all around the world.

Composed of biographical synopses, fascinating images, and the transcribed letters themselves, Letters of Great Women opens a portal to some of the most significant moments and burning issues in global history, as well as the everyday joys, sorrows and struggles of women's lives.

The Complete Poetry of Du Fu presents a complete scholarly translation of Chinese literature alongside the original text in a critical edition. The English translation is more scholarly than vernacular Chinese translations, and it is compelled to address problems that even the best traditional commentaries overlook.
The main body of the text is a facing page translation and critical edition of the earliest Song editions and other sources. For convenience the translations are arranged following the sequence in Qiu Zhao’an’s Du shi xiangzhu (although Qiu’s text is not followed). Basic footnotes are included when the translation needs clarification or supplement. Endnotes provide sources, textual notes, and a limited discussion of problem passages. A supplement references commonly used allusions, their sources, and where they can be found in the translation.
Scholars know that there is scarcely a Du Fu poem whose interpretation is uncontested. The scholar may use this as a baseline to agree or disagree. Other readers can feel confident that this is a credible reading of the text within the tradition. A reader with a basic understanding of the language of Chinese poetry can use this to facilitate reading Du Fu, which can present problems for even the most learned reader.

A new edition of the Aeneid requires not only a systematic and reliable assessment of the text, but also a satisfactory and complete description of the manuscripts’ transmission. Here, the seven Late Antique codices were studied anew; the recensio also draws on sources from the Carolingian Age. To this end eight Carolingian testimonies never studied before were collated. The editio altera contains several corrections and additional conjectures.

Adventure, conquest, romance, comedy, suspense, and tragedy are just a few of the themes woven together by the range of styles represented in this set of classical Sanskrit literature. The set brings together classics like the Aesop’s fables which originated in Vishnu·sharman’s “Five Discourses on Worldly Wisdom” with the less traditional, such as the adventures of Dandin’s “What Ten Young Men Did,” written uncharacteristically in prose rather than verse.
Included in this set:
The Emperor of the Sorcerers
Volume 1
By Budha·svamin. Edited and translated by Sir James Mallinson.
452 pages / 978-0-8147-5701-7

The Emperor of the Sorcerers
Volume 2
By Budha·svamin. Edited and translated by Sir James Mallinson.
467 pages / 978-0-8147-5707-9
Five Discourses on Worldly Wisdom
By Vishnu·sharman. Edited and translated by Patrick Olivelle.
562 pages / 978-0-8147-6208-0
“Friendly Advice” by Naráyana & “King Víkrama’s Adventures”
Translated by Judit Törzsök.
742 pages / 978-0-8147-8305-4
How Úrvashi Was Won
Kali·dasa. Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman.
300 pages / 978-0-8147-4111-5
The Ocean of the Rivers of Story
Volume 1
By Soma·deva. Translated by Sir James Mallinson.
556 pages / 978-0-8147-8816-5
The Ocean of the Rivers of Story
Volume 2
By Soma·deva. Translated by Sir James Mallinson.
580 pages / 978-0-8147-9558-3
The Quartet of Causeries
By Shúdraka, Shyamílaka, Vara·ruchi, and Íshvara·datta. Edited and translated by Csaba Dezsö and Somadeva Vasudeva.
450 pages / 978-0-8147-1978-7
What Ten Young Men Did
By Dandin. Translated by Isabelle Onians.
651 pages / 978-0-8147-6206-6

Epic: Maha·bhárata
The Maha·bhárata tells the tale of the epic battle between the Pándavas and the Káuravas for the throne. It begins with the famous game of dice between the Pándavas and the Káuravas, which sets the scene for the war that will lie at the center of the Maha·bhárata epic. Even after the war is ostensibly over when the heroic but flawed king of the Káuravas is dishonor­ably defeated in battle, the extended family is still wracked in conflict leaving survivors, victors and vanquished struggling to comprehend their loss. Perhaps the most enigmatic philosophical text from ancient India, the final book in the set, “The Book of Liberation” is presented as the teachings of Bhishma as he lies dying on the bat­tlefield in the aftermath of war.

Included in this set:
Maha·bhárata Book II: The Great Hall
Translated by Paul Wilmot.
588 pages / 978-0-8147-9406-7

Maha·bhárata Book III: The Forest
Volume 4
Translated by William Johnson.
374 pages / 978-0-8147-4278-5

Maha·bhárata Book IV: Viráta
Translated by Kathleen Garbutt.
516 pages / 978-0-8147-3183-3

Maha·bhárata Book V: Preparations for War
Volume 1
Translated by Kathleen Garbutt. Foreword by Gurcharan Das.
720 pages / 978-0-8147-3191-8

Maha·bhárata Book V: Preparations for War
Volume 2
Translated by Kathleen Garbutt.
760 pages / 978-0-8147-3202-1

Maha·bhárata Book VI: Bhishma
Translated by Alex Cherniak. Foreword by Ranajit Guha.

Volume 1 (Including the “Bhagavad Gita” in Context)
615 pages / 978-0-8147-1696-0

Maha·bhárata Book VI: Bhishma
Volume 2
Translated by Alex Cherniak.
550 pages / 978-0-8147-1705-9

Maha·bhárata Book VII: Drona
Volume 1
Translated by Vaughan Pilikian.
473 pages / 978-0-8147-6723-8

Maha·bhárata Book VII: Drona
Volume 2
Translated by Vaughan Pilikian.
470 pages / 978-0-8147-6776-4

Maha·bhárata Book VIII: Karna Volume 1
Translated by Adam Bowles
604 pages / 978-0-8147-9981-9

Maha·bhárata Book VIII: Karna Volume 2
Translated by Adam Bowles.
684 pages / 978-0-8147-9995-6

Maha·bhárata Book IX: Shalya Volume 1
Translated by Justin Meiland.
371 pages / 978-0-8147-5706-2

Maha·bhárata Book IX: Shalya Volume 2
Translated by Justin Meiland.
470 pages / 978-0-8147-5737-6

Maha·bhárata Books X & XI: “Dead of the Night” and “The Women”
Translated by Kate Crosby.
350 pages / 978-0-8147-1727-1

Maha·bhárata Book XII: Peace (Part 2: The Book of Liberation) Volume 3
Translated by Alex Wynne.
540 pages / 978-0-8147-9453-1

When Go·várdhana composed his "Seven Hundred Elegant Verses" in Sanskrit in the twelfth century CE, the title suggested that this was a response to the 700 verses in the more demotic Prakrit language traditionally attributed to King Hala, composed almost a thousand years earlier. Both sets of poems were composed in the arya metre. Besides being the name of a metre, in Sanskrit arya means a noble or elegant lady, and Go·várdhana wished to reflect and appeal to a sophisticated culture. These poems each consist of a single stanza, almost as condensed and allusive as a Japanese haiku. They cover the gamut of human life and emotion, though the favorite topic is love in all its aspects.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Sanskrit Messenger Poems evokes the pain of separated sweethearts through the formula of an estranged lover pleading with a messenger to take a message to his or her beloved. The plea includes a lyrical description of the route the messenger will take and the message itself. The first was the Cloud Messenger, composed by Sanskrit’s finest poet, Kali·dasa, in the fifth century CE. This inspired the next, the Wind Messenger, composed in praise of King Lákshmana·sena of Gauda (Bengal) in the twelfth century by Dhoyi, one of his court poets. Numerous more followed, including the third in the CSL selection, the sixteenth-century Swan Messenger, composed in Bengal by Rupa Go·svamin, a devotee of Krishna.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

The short lyric poem appears with great frequency in Sanskrit collections and displays a wide range of themes. Bhartri·hari was the most famous composer. Ámaru and Bílhana also offer excellent examples.

This anthology of the Love Lyrics of three Indian poets conjures up an atmosphere of love both sensual and social, ever in tension with love's rejection or repression. The flavor of all these poems—Ámaru’s seventh-century C.E. “Hundred Poems,” Bhartri·hari's anthology “Love, Politics, Disenchantment,” from the fourth century, and Bílhana's eleventh-century “Fifty Stanzas of a Thief”—is the universalized aesthetic experience of love.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Nanda has it all: youth, money, good looks and a kittenish wife who fulfills his sexual and emotional needs. He also has the Buddha, a dispassionate man of immense insight and self-containment, for an older brother. When Nanda is made a reluctant recruit to the Buddha's order of monks, he is forced to confront his all-too-human enslavement to his erotic and romantic desires. Dating from the second century CE, Ashva·ghosha’s Handsome Nanda portrays its hero’s spiritual makeover with compassion, psychological profundity, and great poetic skill.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

A scholarly edition of a classic textbook on logic

Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī’s al-Risālah al-Shamsiyyah is a scholarly edition and translation of The Rules of Logic, with commentary and notes. Composed by Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī, a scholar of the Shāfiʿī school of law, al-Risālah al-Shamsiyyah is the most widely read introduction to logic in the Arabic-speaking world. It has probably enjoyed a longer shelf-life than any other logic textbook ever written, having been in use by madrasah students from the early eighth/fourteenth century up until the present day. Building on the theories of Avicenna, al-Rāzī, and other pioneers of logic, al-Kātibī discusses the many pitfalls of building arguments and setting out unambiguous claims in natural language. The enduring nature of the text is a testament to al-Kātibī and his impact on concepts of formal discourse and argument.

An Arabic edition with English scholarly apparatus.

Flora, fauna, and famine in thirteenth-century Egypt

A Physician on the Nile begins as a description of everyday life in Egypt at the turn of the seventh/thirteenth century, before becoming a harrowing account of famine and pestilence. Written by the polymath and physician ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī, and intended for the Abbasid caliph al-Nāṣir, the first part of the book offers detailed descriptions of Egypt’s geography, plants, animals, and local cuisine, including a recipe for a giant picnic pie made with three entire roast lambs and dozens of chickens. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s text is also a pioneering work of ancient Egyptology, with detailed observations of Pharaonic monuments, sculptures, and mummies. An early and ardent champion of archaeological conservation, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf condemns the vandalism wrought by tomb-robbers and notes with distaste that Egyptian grocers price their goods with labels written on recycled mummy-wrappings.

The book’s second half relates his horrific eyewitness account of the great famine that afflicted Egypt in the years 597–598/1200–1202. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was a keen observer of humanity, and he offers vivid first-hand depictions of starvation, cannibalism, and a society in moral free-fall.

A Physician on the Nile contains great diversity in a small compass, distinguished by the acute, humane, and ever-curious mind of its author. It is rare to be able to hear the voice of such a man responding so directly to novelty, beauty, and tragedy.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

This lively volume collects poems by Hmedan al-Shwe'ir, who lived in Najd in the Arabian Peninsula shortly before the hegemony of the Wahhabi movement in the early eighteenth century.

A master of satire known for his ribald humor, self-deprecation, and invective verse (hija'), Hmedan was acerbic in his criticisms of society and its morals, voiced in in a poetic idiom that is widely referred to as “Nabati,” here a mix of Najdi vernacular and archaic vocabulary and images dating back to the origins of Arabic poetry. In Arabian Satire, Hmedan is mostly concerned with worldly matters, and addresses these in different guises: as the patriarch at the helm of the family boat and its unruly crew; as a picaresque anti-hero who revels in taking potshots at the established order, its hypocrisy, and its moral failings; as a peasant who labors over his palm trees, often to no avail and with no guarantee of success; and as a poet recording in verse how he thinks things ought to be.

The poems in Arabian Satire reveal a plucky, headstrong, yet intensely socially committed figure—representative of the traditional Najdi ethos—who infuses his verse with proverbs, maxims, and words of wisdom expressed plainly and conversationally. Hmedan is accordingly quoted by historians of the Gulf region and in anthologies of popular sayings. This is the first full translation of this remarkable poet.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded combines a mordant satire on seventeenth-century Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day.

In Volume One, al-Shirbīnī describes the three rural “types”—peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion and rural dervish—offering numerous anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, illiteracy, lack of proper religious understanding, and criminality of each. He follows it in Volume Two with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abū Shādūf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes and bewails, above all, the lack of access to delicious foods to which his poverty has condemned him. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbīnī responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire of the ignorant rustic with numerous digressions into love, food, and flatulence.

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Brains Confounded belongs to an unrecognized genre from an understudied period in Egypt’s Ottoman history, and is a work of outstanding importance for the study of pre-modern colloquial Egyptian Arabic, pitting the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” and urbane in a contest for cultural and religious primacy, with a heavy emphasis on the writing of verse as a yardstick of social acceptability.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

The Sword of Ambition belongs to a genre of religious polemic written for the rulers of Egypt and Syria between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. Unlike most medieval Muslim polemic, the concerns of this genre were more social and political than theological. Leaving no rhetorical stone unturned, the book’s author, an unemployed Egyptian scholar and former bureaucrat named 'Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi (d. 660/1262), poured his deep knowledge of history, law, and literature into the work. Now edited in full and translated for the first time, The Sword of Ambition opens a new window onto the fascinating culture of elite rivalry in the late-medieval Islamic Middle East. It contains a wealth of little-known historical anecdotes, unusual religious opinions, obscure and witty poetry, and humorous cultural satire. Above all, it reveals that much of the inter-communal animosity of the era was conditioned by fierce competition for scarce resources that were increasingly mediated by an ideologically committed Sunni Muslim state. This insight reminds us that seemingly timeless and inevitable “religious” conflict must be considered in its broader historical perspective.

The Sword of Ambition is both the earliest and most eclectic of several independent works composed in medieval Egypt against the employment of Coptic and Jewish officials, and is vivid testimony to the gradual integration of Islamic scholarship and state administration that was well underway in its day.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded combines a mordant satire on seventeenth-century Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day.

In Volume One, al-Shirbīnī describes the three rural “types”—peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion and rural dervish—offering numerous anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, illiteracy, lack of proper religious understanding, and criminality of each. He follows it in Volume Two with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abū Shādūf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes and bewails, above all, the lack of access to delicious foods to which his poverty has condemned him. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbīnī responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire of the ignorant rustic with numerous digressions into love, food, and flatulence.

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Brains Confounded belongs to an unrecognized genre from an understudied period in Egypt’s Ottoman history, and is a work of outstanding importance for the study of pre-modern colloquial Egyptian Arabic, pitting the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” and urbane in a contest for cultural and religious primacy, with a heavy emphasis on the writing of verse as a yardstick of social acceptability.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), renowned for his profound knowledge of hadith—the reports of the Prophet’s sayings and deeds—is a major figure in the history of Islam. Ibn Ḥanbal’s piety and austerity made him a folk hero, especially after his principled resistance to the attempts of two Abbasid caliphs to force him to accept rationalist doctrine. His subsequent imprisonment and flogging became one of the most dramatic episodes of medieval Islamic history. Ibn Ḥanbal’s resistance influenced the course of Islamic law, the rise of Sunnism, and the legislative authority of the caliphate.

Virtues of the Imam Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal is a translation of the biography of Ibn Ḥanbal penned by the Baghdad preacher, scholar, and storyteller, Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201). It includes insights into Ibn Ḥanbal’s childhood, travels, and teachings, as well as descriptions of his way of life. This second and final volume gives a vivid account of Ibn Ḥanbal’s legendary confrontation with the caliphal Inquisition, including his imprisonment, trial, and flogging. Ultimately, it recounts how the people of Baghdad came to admire him as a symbol of Sunni Islam.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

A major translation achievement, this anthology presents a rich assortment of classical Arabic poems and literary prose from pre-Islamic times until the eighteenth century, with short introductions to guide non-specialist students and informative end notes and bibliography for advanced scholars. Both entertaining and informative, Classical Arabic Literature ranges from the early Bedouin poems with their evocation of desert life to refined urban lyrical verse, from tender love poetry to sonorous eulogy and vicious lampoon, and from the heights of mystical rapture to the frivolity of comic verse. Prose selections include anecdotes, entertaining or edifying tales and parables, a fairy-tale, a bawdy story, samples of literary criticism, and much more.

With this anthology, distinguished Arabist Geert Jan van Gelder brings together well-known texts as well as less familiar pieces new even to scholars. Classical Arabic Literature reveals the rich variety of pre-modern Arabic social and cultural life, where secular texts flourished alongside religious ones. This masterful anthology introduces this vibrant literary heritage—including pieces translated into English for the first time—to a wide spectrum of new readers.

An English-only edition.

This new translation of Montaigne's immortal Essays received great acclaim when it was first published in The Complete Works of Montaigne in the 1957 edition. The New York Times said, "It is a matter for rejoicing that we now have available a new translation that offers definite advantages over even the best of its predecessors," and The New Republic stated that this edition gives "a more adequate idea of Montaigne's manner, his straight and unpretentious style, than any of the half-dozen previous English translations."

In his Essays Montaigne warns us from the outset that he has set himself "no goal but a domestic and private one"; yet he is one author whose modernity and universality have been acclaimed by each age since he wrote. Probing into his emotions, attitudes, and behavior, Montaigne reveals to us much about ourselves.

As new editions of the Essays were published during his lifetime, Montaigne interpolated many new passages—often of considerable length. This volume indicates the strata of composition, so that the reader may follow the development of Montaigne's thought over the years. The detailed index provides a convenient means of locating the many famous passages that occur throughout the work.

Naráyana’s best-seller gives its reader much more than “Friendly Advice.” In one handy collection—closely related to the world-famous Pañcatantra or Five Discourses on Worldly Wisdom— numerous animal fables are interwoven with human stories, all designed to instruct wayward princes. Tales of canny procuresses compete with those of cunning crows and tigers. An intrusive ass is simply thrashed by his master, but the meddlesome monkey ends up with his testicles crushed. One prince manages to enjoy himself with a merchant’s wife with her husband’s consent, while another is kicked out of paradise by a painted image.

This volume also contains the compact version of King Víkrama’s Adventures, thirty-two popular tales about a generous emperor, told by thirty-two statuettes adorning his lion-throne.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

• The original cover
• High-quality reproductions of the interior layout

• Structures the story in nine parts around the Greek Muses
• Deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry
• Links the women’s stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes

Due to their popularity with the American counterculture, the poems attributed to Hanshan, Shide and Fenggan have been translated several times in recent decades. However, previous translations have either been broadly popular in nature or have failed to understand fully the colloquial qualities of the originals. This new version provides a complete Chinese/English edition of the poems, aimed at combining readability with scholarly accuracy. It will prove useful to students of Chinese poetry and of Chinese religion, as well as anyone interested in a better understanding of works that have proved so influential in the history of East Asian Buddhism and in world literature.

No existing edition of the Odyssey provides users with adequate information about the readings of the best manuscripts or about the indirect tradition. This new one, designed to stand beside the author’s existing edition of the Iliad (BT 1998-2000), aims to meet the need. The Prolegomena include a comprehensive survey of doubtful points of Homeric orthography in the light of modern linguistic knowledge. The text is based on fresh collations of selected medieval manuscripts and makes use of over 500 papyrus fragments (more than half of them unpublished), with a careful reappraisal of all questions arising. Below the text there appear an extensive register of testimonia and a detailed critical apparatus. The volume is completed by an index of names. This is likely to be the standard edition of reference for decades to come.

This play was one of the first examples of Indian literature to be seen in Europe; it attracted considerable attention (among others, from Goethe), and indeed pained surprise that such a sophisticated art-form could have developed without the rest of the world noticing. A good deal of that surprise will be revived by the hitherto untranslated Kashmirian recension.
Kali·dasa's The Recognition of Shakúntala is a play that scarcely needs introduction. Among the first works of Sanskrit literature translated into European languages, its skilful plot of thwarted love and eventual redemption has long charmed audiences around the world. Shakúntala's story is a leitmotiv that recurs in many works of Indian literature and culminates in the master Kali·dasa's drama for the stage.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Written in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside.

The interest in the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right that is hinted at in this work may be unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. As such, the work provides a companion piece to its slightly younger contemporary, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, which also takes examples of mock-rural poems and subjects them to grammatical analysis. The overlap between the two texts may indicate that they both emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems—another popular genre of the day—and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbī.

Taken as a whole, Risible Rhymes offers intriguing insight into the critical concerns of mid-Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics that dominated discussions of poetry in al-Sanhūrī's day and shedding light on the literature of this understudied era.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

At once a subversive autobiography of a mercurial woman and a mesmerizing history of the body as a site of resistance to power.

“I bite my friends to heal them.”—Diogenes the Cynic, c. 350 BCE

From a Roman amphitheater where 4th century martyrs are fed to wild beasts to the S&M leather bars of New York in the 1970s, this sinuous and illuminating book by novelist and cultural critic Fernanda Eberstadt explore the lives of uncommonly brave men and women—saints, philosophers, artists--who have used their own wounded or stigmatized bodies to challenge society’s mores and entrenched power structures.

The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes who lived “a dog’s life,” sleeping, teaching, having sex in the public square; Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, two early Christian martyrs; twentieth-century prophets of bodily freedom like filmmaker-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini and philosopher Michel Foucault; Russian punk feminist group Pussy Riot; the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny; these are the outrageous, uncommon, but deeply committed activists featured through original interviews and careful case studies in Eberstadt’s immensely readable book, which is part political treatise, part manifesto, part memoir.

Running through her narrative of the Body Militant is Eberstadt’s own story and the story of her mother, a New York writer and glamor figure of the 1960s, whose illness-scarred body first led Eberstadt to seek connections between beauty, belief, and the truths taught through the body.

Eberstadt asks crucial questions for our time: what drives certain individuals to risk pain, disgrace, even death, in the name of freedom? And, what can we learn from their example to become braver ourselves?

Meng Haoran (689-740) was one of the most important poets of the "High Tang" period, the greatest age of Chinese poetry. In his own time he was famous for his poetry as well as for his distinctive personality. This is the first complete translation into any language of all his extant poetry. Includes original Chinese texts and English translation on facing pages.

To the Reader:
This little book, reader, that we give you now has at once the taste of gall and honey mixed with salt. If it pleases your palate, come as a guest. This feast has been prepared for you. If not, please go away. I did not mean to invite you to the feast.

Joachim du Bellay (1522-60) was one of the most important poets of the Renaissance and remains a cornerstone of the French literary tradition. In this monumental bilingual edition Richard Helgerson collects The Regrets and The Antiquities of Rome, two sonnet sequences du Bellay wrote during the more than four years he spent in Rome and that he published immediately on his return to France in 1558, along with three Latin elegies he also wrote in Rome and The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language, his earlier manifesto for the new poetry he and his friend Pierre de Ronsard were then about to launch. The Regrets is a vibrant, often moving, and by turns nostalgic and satiric account of du Bellay's stay at the papal court. The Antiquities is also concerned with Rome, but in a very different way: not as a quotidian record of the poet's experience of the modern city but as a profound meditation on the ruin of an ancient empire.

In imitation of Petrarch, sonnet sequences were a prime marker of the new poetry all over Europe. But there are no other sequences like du Bellay's, none that leave love aside and express such a varied range of emotions and ideas. And du Bellay's Defense is in its own way no less remarkable and no less preoccupied with the classical heritage and its Rome: a bold call for a new French poetry that would rival and even surpass that of antiquity.

The Quartet of Causeries have been handed down as a collection of the most ancient monologue farces in classical Sanskrit. Though stylistically divergent, they share a common plot: the hero is an inept, bungling procurer, who mismanages his client's love-affairs to an unexpectedly successful completion. A wide spectrum of India's urban society is scandalized, from respected judges to clumsy poetasters, from hypocritical Buddhist monks to greedy madams, from spoiled scions of wealthy houses to criminal low-life.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Volume Two continues this fast-paced tale of mystery and sorcery up to canto 28. Nara·váhana·datta's epic quest to become the human emperor of the sorcerers leads him and his companions to win yet more wives. Unfortunately, the surviving manuscripts of the text break off while he is in pursuit of his sixth wife. The primary narrative is punctuated by diverting subplots.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

The Epitome of Queen Lilávati tells the stories of the lives of a group of souls as they pass through a series of embodiments on their way to final liberation from the continual cycle of death and rebirth. Told as a means to promote the non-violent ethic of Jainism, it abounds in memorable incidents and characters, such as Dhana, the rich merchant who attempted to justify cheating in trade, Padmaratha, who while invisible attempted to seduce the ladies of the royal household, and Vasundhara, the bogus holy man who was caught in a compromising position with a female dog.
Written in 1297 CE by the Jain poet-monk Jina·ratna, The Epitome of Queen Lilávati is undeservedly almost unknown outside India. In the stories, embodied souls undergo all too human adventures in a succession of lives, as they advance to final release. The book abounds in memorable incidents and characters, related to Queen Lilávati and her husband, King Simha, by the teacher-monk Sámara·sena.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Budha·svamin tells the epic tale of the youthful exploits of prince Naravahanadatta. The reader is taken from royal palaces to flying sorcerers' mountain fastnesses via courtesans' bedrooms and merchant ships. A fast and witty narrative which provides a fascinating insight into ancient India.

Budha·svamin's The Emperor of the Sorcerers is a racy telling of the celebrated lost Indian narrative cycle The Long Story, framed by Nara·váhana·datta's magical adventures on his quest to become Emperor of the Sorcerers. It is indeed a great story, as its Sanskrit title declares. Epic in scope and scale, it has everything that a great story should: adventure, romance, suspense, intrigue, tragedy and comedy.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Religion
A diverse set, the religion set includes works from the biographical narratives of Buddha and stories of his past rebirths, to the lyrical account of love affair between gods, to a play that satirized religions to make a laughingstock of their followers and their tenets.
Included in this set:
The Epitome of Queen Lilávati
By Jina·ratna. Edited and translated by Richard Fynes.
Volume 1
543 pages / 978-0-8147-2741-6
The Epitome of Queen Lilávati
Volume 2
By Jina·ratna. Edited and translated by Richard Fynes.
650 pages / 978-0-8147-2742-3
Garland of the Buddha’s Past Lives
Volume 1
By Arya·shura. Translated by Justin Meiland.
550 pages / 978-0-8147-9581-1
Garland of the Buddha’s Past Lives
Volume 2
By Arya·shura. Translated by Justin Meiland.
543 pages / 978-0-8147-9583-5
Gita·govínda: Love Songs of Radha and Krishna
By Jaya·deva. Translated by Lee Siegel.
200 pages / 978-0-8147-4078-1
Handsome Nanda
By Ashva·ghosha. Translated by Linda Covill.
392 pages / 978-0-8147-1683-0
Heavenly Exploits: Buddhist Biographies from the Dívyavadána
Edited and translated by Joel Tatelman.
444 pages / 978-0-8147-8288-0
“How the Nagas Were Pleased” & “The Shattered Thighs”
By Harsha and Bhasa. Translated by Andrew Skilton.
350 pages / 978-0-8147-4066-8
Life of the Buddha
By Ashva·ghosha. Translated by Patrick Olivelle
561 pages / 978-0-8147-6216-5
Much Ado about Religion
By Bhatta Jayánta. Edited and translated by Csaba Dezsö.
320 pages / 978-0-8147-1979-4

Rama Beyond Price, a dramatized remake of the Ramáyana, is one of the most challenging pieces of Sanskrit poetry to read. Because of its elegant style, learned allusions, and often striking imagery, the poem has been a favorite among pundits. The well-known epic story of Rama’s exploits is presented as a series of political intrigues and battles, and contrasted with lyrical passages of various kinds: on love and war, pride and honor, gods and demons, rites and myths, regions and cities of ancient India. This is the first English translation of the only surviving work by Murári, a brahmin court poet, who lived some time between the eighth and tenth century CE, perhaps in Orissa or in neighboring South India.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

The Book of Liberation is perhaps the most enigmatic philosophical text from ancient India. Presented as the teachings of Bhishma as he lies dying on the battlefield, after the epic war between the Pándavas and Káuravas, it was composed by unknown authors in the last centuries BCE, during the early period of world-renunciation, when peripatetic sages meditated under trees and practiced austerities in forest groves, and wandering sophists debated in the towns and cities. There has been no time like it before or since: such freedom of thought and expression is unparalleled in the history of the world.

The freedom enjoyed by these ancient thinkers was not an end in itself. Above all this animated work is the record of philosophers seeking liberation (moksha) from a world they believed unsatisfactory. The speculation herein is but a means to an end, for its authors believed they could attain freedom from the world by knowing philosophical truths.

Rama’s Last Act by Bhava·bhuti is counted among the greatest Sanskrit dramas. The work at once dramatizes the “Ramáyana”—it is one of the earliest theatrical adaptations of Valmíki’s epic masterpiece— and revises its most intractable episode, the hero’s rejection of his beloved wife. Human agency in the face of destiny, the power of love, and the capacity of art to make sense of such mysteries are the themes explored in this singular literary achievement of the Indian stage.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

With What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us, the Library of Arabic Literature brings readers an acknowledged masterpiece of early twentieth-century Arabic prose. Penned by the Egyptian journalist Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, this exceptional title was first introduced in serialized form in his family’s pioneering newspaper Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq (Light of the East), on which this edition is based, and later published in book form in 1907. Widely hailed for its erudition and its mordant wit, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us was embraced by Egypt’s burgeoning reading public and soon became required reading for generations of Egyptian school students.

Bridging classical genres and the emerging tradition of modern Arabic fiction, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us is divided into two parts, the second of which was only added to the text with the fourth edition of 1927. Sarcastic in tone and critical in outlook, the book relates the excursions of its narrator ʿĪsā ibn Hishām
and his companion, the Pasha, through a rapidly Westernized Cairo at the height of British occupation, providing vivid commentary of a society negotiating—however imperfectly—the clash of imported cultural values and traditional norms of conduct, law, and education. The “Second Journey” takes the narrator to Paris to visit the Exposition Universelle of 1900, where al-Muwayliḥī casts the same relentlessly critical eye on European society, modernity, and the role of Western imperialism as it ripples across the globe.

Paving the way for the modern Arabic novel, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us is invaluable both for its sociological insight into colonial Egypt and its pioneering role in Arabic literary history.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

The essence of Americana, Route 66 is called the Mother Road but it’s America’s Main Street, embodying small-town values with its local stores, vintage service stations, neon signs, ghost towns, roadside attractions, motels and diners.

 Stretching from Chicago to Santa Monica over 2,400 miles and crossing three time zones, it’s the road for pioneering Americans migrating West for a more prosperous life, and thus represents freedom, possibility, new horizons and the intrepid American spirit. The best road trip of them all, Route 66 is all about the journey, not the destination.

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.

Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

Did you hear the one about the newlywed who rushes off for legal advice before the honeymoon is over? Or the husbands who arrange for an enormous tub in which to cure their sugary wives with a pinch of salt? How about a participatory processional toward marriage so sacrilegious that it puts Chaucer's pilgrimage to shame? And who could have imagined a medieval series of plays devoted to spouse-swapping? Jody Enders has heard and seen all this and more, and shares it in her second volume of performance-friendly translations of medieval French farces. Carefully culled from more than two hundred extant farces, and crafted with a wit and contemporary sensibility that make them playable half a millennium later, these dozen bawdy plays take on the hilariously depressing and depressingly hilarious state of holy wedlock.

In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century comedy, love and marriage do not exactly go together like a horse and carriage. What with all the arranged matches of child brides to doddering geezers, the frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, disappointment, and despair are matched only by the eagerness with which everybody sings, dances, and cavorts in the pursuit of deception, trickery, and adultery. Easily recognizable stock characters come vividly to life, struggling to negotiate the limits of power, class, and gender, each embodying the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce. Whether the antics play out on the fifteenth-century stage or the twenty-first-century screen, Enders notes, comedy revels in shining its brightest spotlight on the social and legal questions of what makes a family. Her volume defines and redefines love and marriage with a message that no passage of time can tear asunder: social change finds its start where comedy itself begins—at home.

Winner of the Southern Book Prize
Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/TODAY Show book club pick Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

“People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.

In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.

From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

A collection of insightful and personal essays on the role of food in our lives

In an age of mass factory farming, processed and pre-packaged meals, and unprecedented food waste, how does one eat ethically?

Featuring a highly diverse ensemble of award-winning writers, chefs, farmers, activists, educators, and journalists, Good Eats invites readers to think about what it means to eat according to individual and collective values. These essays are not lectures about what you should eat, nor an advertisement for the latest diet. Instead, the contributors tell stories of real people—real bellies, real bodies—including the writers themselves, who seek to understand the experiences, cultures, histories, and systems that have shaped their eating and their ethics.

A wide array of themes, topics, and perspectives inform the selections within Good Eats, contributing to an enhanced understanding of how we eat as individuals and in groups. From factory farming and the exploitative labor practices surrounding chocolate production, to Indigenous foodways and home and community gardens, the topics featured in this collection describe the wider context of sustenance and ethical choices.

Good Eats will encourage you to become more mindful of what and how you eat—and to consider the larger systems and cultures that shape that eating. These essays turn mundane meals into remarkable symbols of how we live, encouraging each of us to find food that is both sustaining and sustainable.

Contributors include Ross Gay, DeLyssa Begay, Lynn Z. Bloom, Michael P. Branch, Nikky Finney, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Barbara J. King, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Leah Penniman, Adrienne Su, Ira Sukrungruang, Tina Vasquez, Nicole Walker, Thérèse Nelson, Lisa Knopp, Jane Brox, Maureen Stanton, Taté Walker, and many others.

The Clay Sanskrit Library, co-published by NYU Press and the JJC Foundation, has been created to introduce classical Sanskrit literature to a wide international readership. This literature combines great beauty, enormous variety and more than three thousand years of continuous history and development.

The Library is now also available as a 56-volume complete set, as well as in six thematic mini-sets, grouped for readers interested in specific areas of the world of classical Sanskrit literature.

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.

Bei den Mitte des 4. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. verfaßten Commenta in Ciceronis Rhetorica des römischen Rhetorikprofessors Marius Victorinus handelt es sich um den einzigen vollständig erhaltenen antiken Kommentar zum rhetorischen Jugendwerk Ciceros De inventione, das in Spätantike und Mittelalter zu den wichtigsten Handbüchern der Rhetorik gehörte. Die Bedeutung der Commenta manifestiert sich in der reichen handschriftlichen Überlieferung (etwa 60 Textzeugen), die für diese Edition erstmals vollständig berücksichtigt ist. Dabei kommt eine bisher unbekannte italienische Handschriftenfamilie zum Vorschein, die einen unabhängigen Zugang zum Archetyp hatte und an zahlreichen Stellen den richtigen Text bewahrt. Die neuen Einsichten in die Überlieferung und eine erstmals durchgeführte kritische examinatio des überlieferten Textes führen zu einer grundlegenden Neuedition, die die seit 150 Jahren maßgebliche Ausgabe Karl Halms ersetzen wird.

Eine Neuedition der augustinischen Frühdialoge ist ein Desiderat für alle Forscher/innen, die sich mit der Fortwirkung der paganen literarischen und philosophischen Tradition in der christlichen Spätantike bzw. ihrer Rezeption durch die frühchristlichen Autoren befassen.

Innerhalb des umfangreichen Gesamtwerks Augustins sind die drei ersten erhaltenen Schriften Contra Academicos, De beata vita und De ordine von besonderem Interesse, weil hier deutlich wird, wie stark der spätere Bischof und katholische Dogmatiker in der Zeit unmittelbar nach seiner ‚Bekehrung‘ im Jahre 386 antiken Traditionen verpflichtet war. In der abendländischen Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte sind die Dialoge ein Zeugnis für die Transformation der von Cicero geprägten literarischen Formen und der Fragestellungen der hellenistischen Philosophie sowie die Möglichkeiten einer Integration von christlicher und platonischer Lehre.

Die Dialoge sind deshalb ein zentraler Gegenstand von Forschung und Lehre der Klassischen Philologie, Philosophie und (Kirchen-)Geschichte. Die Edition bietet erstmals einen nach streng wissenschaftlichen Kriterien und unter angemessener Berücksichtigung des gesamten Handschriftenbestands edierten Text.