Books

This is a book with a soundtrack/playlist. The poems use a range of popular songs and music as a starting point for lyrical daydreams, serious narratives, personal and political reflections, as well as pop culture mash-ups that may seem random but in the end merge to create a performance-on-page ...

Andrew Motion’s new collection gives a moving account of the friction and interplay between past and present. In the opening elegies for friends and former versions of the self, and in the long title sequence which completes the book, he explores the ways in which regrets compete with hope, ...

Sitting at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers where they join to flow into the Ohio, the city of Pittsburgh has been shaped by its material environment—the rocky, grimy, watery base on which it stands. It has also been shaped by industrial activity, as the city has ...

The poems in Voyage to the Center, by the contemporary Catalan poet Gemma Gorga and lucidly translated by the American poet Sharon Dolin, are extreme acts of compression, which explore the ways a poem may use very few words to convey meaning. Gorga understands both the power and the limits ...

As human societies grapple with a future marked by ecological disaster, climate change is often conceived as a technological, economic, or political problem with a corresponding solution. In this first-of-its-kind book, Muhammad Faruque reframes the crisis as not simply a problem to be solved but rather a profound crisis of ...

Affective Economies of Migration examines the emotional and sentimental dimensions of the Chinese diaspora in Peru and offers a nuanced analysis of how affective relationships—romantic love, friendship, trust, kinship, and more—were converted into forms of economic capital. Estimates suggest that around five percent of Peruvians have Chinese ancestry ...

Auguste Comte’s doctrine of positivism was both a philosophy of science and a political philosophy designed to organize a new, secular, stable society based on positive or scientific, ideas, rather than the theological dogmas and metaphysical speculations associated with the ancien regime. Love, Order, and Progress offers the most ...

Old Age, New Science explores how a group of American and British life scientists contributed to gerontology’s development as a multidisciplinary field. It examines the foundational “biosocial visions” they shared, a byproduct of both their research and the social problems they encountered. Hyung Wook Park reveals how these visions ...

Throughout the nineteenth century, cholera was a global scourge against human populations. Practitioners had little success in mitigating the symptoms of the disease, and its causes were bitterly disputed. What experts did agree on was that the environment played a crucial role in the sites where outbreaks occurred. In this ...

This volume of poetry from Alicia Suskin Ostriker is one of her most ambitious, ranging from laments and celebrations for a flawed world to meditations on art and artists, to a powerful exploration of illness and healing.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) was once the largest country in Europe—a multicultural republic that was home to Belarusians, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Ruthenians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and other ethnic and religious groups. Although long since dissolved, the Commonwealth remains a rich resource for mythmaking in its descendent modern-day states, but also ...

Over the past two decades, Latin America has seen an explosion of experiments with autonomy, as people across the continent express their refusal to be absorbed by the logic and order of neoliberalism. The autonomous movements of the twenty-first century are marked by an unprecedented degree of interconnection, through their ...

A bold, erotic,and spiritual collection of poetry from well-respected poet and critic Alicia Suskin Ostriker, whose previous two books were both National Book Award finalists.

The Holocaust in Croatia recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein grounded their study in extensive research in previously closed archives, aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich ...

At the end of the nineteenth century, Pittsburgh led the nation in glass production. Glass bottle plants relied heavily on adolescent boys for their manufacturing process. These “glass house boys” worked both day and night, as plants ran around the clock to meet production demands and remain competitive with their ...