Columbia University Press: 2355 books
Joothan
An Untouchable's Life
Language: English
Release Date: July 2, 2008
Omprakash Valmiki describes his life as an untouchable, or Dalit, in the newly independent India of the 1950s. "Joothan" refers to scraps of food left on a plate, destined for the garbage or animals. India's untouchables have been forced to accept and eat joothan for centuries, and the word...
The Weave of My Life
A Dalit Woman's Memoirs
Language: English
Release Date: July 15, 2009
"My mother used to weave aaydans, the Marathi generic term for all things made from bamboo. I find that her act of weaving and my act of writing are organically linked. The weave is similar. It is the weave of pain, suffering, and agony that links us."
Activist and award-winning writer...
Emperor of Japan
Meiji and His World, 1852-1912
Language: English
Release Date: June 14, 2005
When Emperor Meiji began his rule, in 1867, Japan was a splintered empire, dominated by the shogun and the daimyos, who ruled over the country's more than 250 decentralized domains and who were, in the main, cut off from the outside world, staunchly antiforeign, and committed to the traditions of...
by Burton Watson, Haruo Shirane
Language: English
Release Date: June 27, 2006
Language: English
Release Date: June 27, 2006
The Tales of the Heike is one of the most influential works in Japanese literature and culture, remaining even today a crucial source for fiction, drama, and popular media. Originally written in the mid-thirteenth century, it features a cast of vivid characters and chronicles the epic Genpei war,...
by Akinari Ueda
Language: English
Release Date: December 24, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: December 24, 2008
First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan's finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the period's fascination with the strange and the grotesque. They were...
An Imperial Concubine's Tale
Scandal, Shipwreck, and Salvation in Seventeenth-Century Japan
Language: English
Release Date: December 18, 2012
Japan in the early seventeenth century was a wild place. Serial killers stalked the streets of Kyoto at night, while noblemen and women mingled freely at the imperial palace, drinking saké and watching kabuki dancing in the presence of the emperor's principal consort. Among these noblewomen was an...
Gorbachev
On My Country and the World
Language: English
Release Date: October 20, 1999
Here is the whole sweep of the Soviet experiment and experience as told by its last steward. Drawing on his own experience, rich archival material, and a keen sense of history and politics, Mikhail Gorbachev speaks his mind on a range of subjects concerning Russia's past, present, and future place...
Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality
Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2015
America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839–1897) published a radical critique...
Chow Chop Suey
Food and the Chinese American Journey
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2016
Chinese food first became popular in America under the shadow of violence against Chinese aliens, a despised racial minority ineligible for United States citizenship. The founding of late-nineteenth-century "chop suey" restaurants that pitched an altered version of Cantonese cuisine to white...
by Nabil Matar
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2000
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2000
During the early modern period, hundreds of Turks and Moors traded in English and Welsh ports, dazzled English society with exotic cuisine and Arabian horses, and worked small jobs in London, while the "Barbary Corsairs" raided coastal towns and, if captured, lingered in Plymouth jails or...
The End of the Soul
Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France
Language: English
Release Date: December 20, 2005
On October 19, 1876 a group of leading French citizens, both men and women included, joined together to form an unusual group, The Society of Mutual Autopsy, with the aim of proving that souls do not exist. The idea was that, after death, they would dissect one another and (hopefully) show a direct...
Roberto Bolaño's Fiction
An Expanding Universe
Language: English
Release Date: July 29, 2014
Since the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed by literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolaño's work into English, explores the singular achievements of the author's oeuvre, engaging...
Incomparable Empires
Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2016
The Spanish-American War of 1898 seems to mark a turning point in both geopolitical and literary histories. The victorious American empire ascended and began its cultural domination of the globe in the twentieth century, while the once-mighty Spanish empire declined and became a minor state in the...
Thinking Animals
Why Animal Studies Now?
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2012
Kari Weil provides a critical introduction to the field of animal studies as well as an appreciation of its thrilling acts of destabilization. Examining real and imagined confrontations between human and nonhuman animals, she charts the presumed lines of difference between human beings and other species...