Columbia University Press: 2355 books
Burnin' Down the House
Home in African American Literature
Language: English
Release Date: December 29, 2004
Home is a powerful metaphor guiding the literature of African Americans throughout the twentieth century. While scholars have given considerable attention to the Great Migration and the role of the northern city as well as to the place of the South in African American literature, few have given specific...
Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln
The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed
Language: English
Release Date: May 3, 2016
On April 15, 1837, a "long, gawky" Abraham Lincoln walked into Joshua Speed's dry-goods store in Springfield, Illinois, and asked what it would cost to buy the materials for a bed. Speed said seventeen dollars, which Lincoln didn't have. He asked for a loan to cover that amount until Christmas....
Unlikely Collaboration
Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma
Language: English
Release Date: September 13, 2011
In 1941, the Jewish American writer and avant-garde icon Gertrude Stein embarked on one of the strangest intellectual projects of her life: translating for an American audience the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of state for the collaborationist Vichy government. From 1941 to 1943, Stein...
Fitzgerald and Hemingway
Works and Days
Language: English
Release Date: July 22, 2009
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway might have been contemporaries, but our understanding of their work often rests on simple differences. Hemingway wrestled with war, fraternity, and the violence of nature. Fitzgerald satirized money and class and the never-ending pursuit of a material tomorrow....
The Art of Philosophy
Wisdom as a Practice
Language: English
Release Date: October 2, 2012
In his best-selling book You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk argued exercise and practice were crucial to the human condition. In The Art of Philosophy, he extends this critique to academic science and scholarship, casting the training processes of academic study as key to the production of...
The Frontier Within
Essays by Abe Kobo
Language: English
Release Date: June 25, 2013
Abe Kobo (1924–1993) was one of Japan's greatest postwar writers, widely recognized for his imaginative science fiction and plays of the absurd. However, he also wrote theoretical criticism for which he is lesser known, merging literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives into keen reflections...
Four Jews on Parnassus—a Conversation
Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, Schönberg
Language: English
Release Date: November 25, 2008
This book features a CD of rarely performed music, including a specially commissioned rap by Erik Weiner of Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History."
Theodor W. Adorno was the prototypical German Jewish non-Jew, Walter Benjamin vacillated between German Jew and Jewish...
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers
A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America
Language: English
Release Date: February 21, 2012
As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks...
Business, Not Politics
The Making of the Gay Market
Language: English
Release Date: January 5, 2005
In a hard-hitting book that refutes conventional wisdom, Katherine Sender explores the connection between the business of marketing to gay consumers and the politics of gay rights and identity. She disputes some marketers'claims that marketing appeals to gay and lesbian consumers are a matter of "business,...
Mad for Foucault
Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory
Language: English
Release Date: November 5, 2009
Michel Foucault was the first to embed the roots of human sexuality in discipline and biopolitics, therefore revolutionizing our conception of sex and its relationship to society, economics, and culture. Yet over the past two decades, scholars have limited themselves to the study of Foucault's History...
by Joseph Boone
Language: English
Release Date: March 25, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: March 25, 2014
One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions...
Are the Lips a Grave?
A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2013
Lynne Huffer's ambitious inquiry redresses the rift between feminist and queer theory, traversing the space of a new, post-moral sexual ethics that includes pleasure, desire, connection, and betrayal. She begins by balancing queer theorists' politics of sexual freedoms with a moralizing feminist politics...
When Heroes Love
The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2005
Toward the end of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh King Gilgamesh laments the untimely death of his comrade Enkidu, "my friend whom I loved dearly." Similarly in the Bible, David mourns his companion, Jonathan, whose "love to me was wonderful, greater than the love of women."...
Second Skins
The Body Narratives of Transsexuality
Language: English
Release Date: April 7, 1998
Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's...