Princeton University Press: 2605 books
The Hedgehog and the Fox
An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History - Second Edition
Language: English
Release Date: June 2, 2013
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War...
On Conan Doyle
Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling
Language: English
Release Date: October 10, 2011
A passionate lifelong fan of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars—the most famous and romantic of all Sherlockian groups. Combining memoir and appreciation, On Conan Doyle is a highly engaging personal introduction...
by Alexander McCall Smith
Language: English
Release Date: September 22, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: September 22, 2013
When facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie--Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and title character of a series of novels by best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith--often refers to the great twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden. This is no accident: McCall Smith has long been fascinated...
No Joke
Making Jewish Humor
Language: English
Release Date: May 21, 2013
Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer,...
by Colm Tóibín
Language: English
Release Date: March 22, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: March 22, 2015
In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences—the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing...
Forms
Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2015
Forms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today—how to connect form to political, social, and historical context. Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life—and our attempts...
Between Women
Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
Language: English
Release Date: July 10, 2009
Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other...
by David Joselit
Language: English
Release Date: October 28, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: October 28, 2012
Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted...
The Roots of Romanticism
Second Edition
Language: English
Release Date: June 2, 2013
In The Roots of Romanticism, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers dissects and assesses a movement that changed the course of history. Brilliant, fresh, immediate, and eloquent, these celebrated Mellon Lectures are a bravura intellectual performance. Isaiah Berlin surveys the...
Alan Turing: The Enigma
The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game - Updated Edition
Language: English
Release Date: November 10, 2014
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented...
Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future
The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers
Language: English
Release Date: December 27, 2011
Every day, we use our computers to perform remarkable feats. A simple web search picks out a handful of relevant needles from the world's biggest haystack: the billions of pages on the World Wide Web. Uploading a photo to Facebook transmits millions of pieces of information over numerous error-prone...
Coding Freedom
The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
Language: English
Release Date: November 25, 2012
Who are computer hackers? What is free software? And what does the emergence of a community dedicated to the production of free and open source software--and to hacking as a technical, aesthetic, and moral project--reveal about the values of contemporary liberalism? Exploring the rise and political...
The Unpredictable Species
What Makes Humans Unique
Language: English
Release Date: April 21, 2013
The Unpredictable Species argues that the human brain evolved in a way that enhances our cognitive flexibility and capacity for innovation and imitation. In doing so, the book challenges the central claim of evolutionary psychology that we are locked into predictable patterns of behavior that were...
Madness in Civilization
A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2015
The loss of reason, a sense of alienation from the commonsense world we all like to imagine we inhabit, the shattering emotional turmoil that seizes hold and won't let go—these are some of the traits we associate with madness. Today, mental disturbance is most commonly viewed through a medical lens,...