Columbia University Press: 2355 books
by Alan Sinfield
Language: English
Release Date: December 22, 2004
Language: English
Release Date: December 22, 2004
It is widely supposed that the most suitable partner will be someone very much like oneself; gay fiction and cinema are often organized around this assumption. Nonetheless, power differentials are remarkably persistent—as well as sexy. What are the personal and political implications of this insight?
Sinfield...
The Wheel
Inventions and Reinventions
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2016
In this book, Richard W. Bulliet focuses on three major phases in the evolution of the wheel and their relationship to the needs and ambitions of human society. He begins in 4000 B.C.E. with the first wheels affixed to axles. He then follows with the innovation of wheels turning independently on their...
Inventing English
A Portable History of the Language, revised and expanded edition
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2015
Seth Lerer tells a masterful history of the English language from the age of Beowulf to the rap of Eminem. Many have written about the evolution of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, but only Lerer situates these developments within the larger history of English, America, and literature. This...
Home in Hollywood
The Imaginary Geography of Cinema
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2004
Who can forget Dorothy's quest for the great and powerful Oz as she tried to return to her beloved Kansas? She thought she needed a wizard's magic, only to discover that home—and the power to get there—had been with her all along. This engaging and provocative book proposes that Hollywood has...
The Impossible State
Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament
Language: English
Release Date: November 20, 2012
Wael B. Hallaq boldly argues that the "Islamic state," judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Comparing the legal, political, moral, and constitutional histories of premodern Islam and Euro-America, he...
Thai Stick
Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade
Language: English
Release Date: November 12, 2013
Located on the left bank of the Chao Phya River, Thailand's capital, Krungthep, known as Bangkok to Westerners and "the City of Angels" to Thais, has been home to smugglers and adventurers since the late eighteenth century. During the 1970s, it became a modern Casablanca to a new generation...
Deaths in Venice
The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach
Language: English
Release Date: November 12, 2013
Published in 1913, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice is one of the most widely read novellas in any language. In the 1970s, Benjamin Britten adapted it into an opera, and Luchino Visconti turned it into a successful film. Reading these works from a philosophical perspective, Philip Kitcher connects the...
by Brian Boyd
Language: English
Release Date: November 8, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: November 8, 2011
At the age of twenty-one, Brian Boyd wrote a thesis on Vladimir Nabokov that the famous author called "brilliant." After gaining exclusive access to the writer's archives, he wrote a two-part, award-winning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American...
by Jeffrey Broughton
Language: English
Release Date: May 14, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: May 14, 2009
Japanese Zen often implies that textual learning (gakumon) in Buddhism and personal experience (taiken) in Zen are separate, but the career and writings of the Chinese Tang dynasty Chan master Guifeng Zongmi (780-841) undermine this division. For the first time in English, Jeffrey Broughton presents...
A Woman Soldier's Own Story
The Autobiography of Xie Bingying
Language: English
Release Date: September 18, 2001
For the first time, a complete version of the autobiography of Xie Bingying (1906-2000) provides a fascinating portrayal of a woman fighting to free herself from the constraints of ancient Chinese tradition amid the dramatic changes that shook China during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s.
Xie's attempts...
The Fate of Ideas
Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals
Language: English
Release Date: September 8, 2015
As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers...
Bollywood's India
A Public Fantasy
Language: English
Release Date: March 3, 2015
Bollywood is India's most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. Its blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation's dispersed anxieties, and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes "India." Written by an award-winning scholar of popular...
by Satyajit Ray
Language: English
Release Date: April 2, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: April 2, 2013
Satyajit Ray, one of the greatest auteurs of twentieth century cinema, was a Bengali motion-picture director, writer, and illustrator who set a new standard for Indian cinema with his Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) (1955), Aparajito (The Unvanquished) (1956), and Apur Sansar...
Viewers Like You
How Public TV Failed the People
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2012
How "public" is public television if only a small percentage of the American people tune in on a regular basis? When public television addresses "viewers like you," just who are you? Despite the current of frustration with commercial television that runs through American life,...