Books

Through this study of the province of Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century, far from the power centers of Petersburg or Moscow, Evtuhov demonstrates how almost everything we thought we knew about Russian society was wrong. Instead of ignorant peasants, we find skilled farmers, artisans and craftsmen, and tradespeople. Instead of a powerful central state, we discover effective local projects and initiative in abundance. Instead of universal ignorance we are shown a lively cultural scene. Most of all, instead of an all-defining Russian exceptionalism we find a world similar to many other European societies.

Winner of the 2012 ASEEES Vucinich Book Prize

Advancements in computing, instrumentation, robotics, digital imaging, and simulation modeling have changed science into a technology-driven institution. Government, industry, and society increasingly exert their influence over science, raising questions of values and objectivity. These and other profound changes have led many to speculate that we are in the midst of an epochal break in scientific history. This edited volume presents an in-depth examination of these issues from philosophical, historical, social, and cultural perspectives. It offers arguments both for and against the epochal break thesis.

This volume chronicles the changing forms of indigenous engagement with the Ecuadorian state since the early nineteenth century that grew into the strongest unified indigenous movement in Latin America. Nine case studies examine how indigenous peoples have attempted to claim control over state formation in order to improve their position in society. It concludes with four comparative essays that place indigenous organizational strategies in Ecuador within a larger Latin American historical context.

A captivating history of consumer culture in Russia from the 1880s to the early 1930s. Hilton highlights the critical role of consumerism as a vehicle for shaping class and gender identities, modernity, urbanism, and as a mechanism of state power in the transition from tsarist autocracy to Soviet socialism.

“A Song of Songs, which is not Solomon’s but Alicia Ostriker’s. A great age-old hymn to life, to flesh, to memory, is revised again on these pages, with gusto, with passion, with clarity, with eros, with grief. If there is God, it is the mourner’s or the mystic’s God; if there is faith, it is the faith in our future. This is gorgeous poetry, as Jewish as it is universal.”—Ilya Kaminsky

Winner of the 2013 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement.

White Papers is a series of untitled poems that explore race from a variety of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives, questioning what it means to be “white” in a multi-racial society.

Winner of the 2013 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry

Foreword by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Translated by Parmen Leontovitsch

In this highly original study, Victor Leontovitsch offers a reinterpretation of liberalism in a uniquely Russian form. He documents the struggles to develop civil society and individual liberties in imperial Russia up until their ultimate demise in the face of war, revolution, and the collapse of the old regime.

This is the first English-language translation of Leontovitsch’s monumental work, which was originally published to critical acclaim in German in 1957.

Frederico Garcia lived in Manhattan from 1929 to 1930, and the poetry he wrote about the city, Poet in New York, was posthumously published in 1940. Eighty years after Lorca’s sojourn to America, Nathalie Handal, a poet from New York, went to Spain to write Poet in Andalucia. Handal recreated Lorca’s journey in reverse.

In republican Colombia, salt became an important source of revenue not just to individuals, but to the state, which levied taxes on it and in some cases controlled and profited from its production. Focusing his study on the town of La Salina, Joshua M. Rosenthal presents a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the early Colombian state, its institutions, and their interactions with local citizens during this formative period.

Looking for The Gulf Motel offers a genealogy of the heart: how Blanco’s family’s emotional legacy has shaped—and continues shaping—his Latino identity, sexual identity, and understanding of the big questions of life and death.

More than 250 years separate the publication of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses, Aristides Baltas contends that these works bear a striking similarity based on the idea of “radical immanence.” He analyzes the structure and content of each treatise, the authors’ intentions, the limitations and possibilities afforded by scientific discovery in their respective eras, their radical opposition to prevailing philosophical views, and draws out the particulars, as well as the implications, of the arresting match between the two.

Winner of the 1996 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

To author Edith Pearlman, “The stories in Vaquita aim at an intimacy between writer and reader. That imagined reader wants to know who loves whom, who drinks what, and, mostly, who answers to what summons. Thank Heavens for Spike Lee! Before his movies writers and critics had to natter about moral stances; now I can say with a more tripping tongue that my characters are people in peculiar circumstances, aching to Do The Right Thing if only they can figure out what The Right Thing is. If not, they’ll at least Do Their Own Right Thing Right.”

Sanders examines the rise of environmental activism in Seattle amidst the “urban crisis” of the 1960s and its aftermath. Seattle’s activists came to influence everything from industry to politics, planning, and global environmental movements.

Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states “It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves.”

Winner of the 2013 Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas

Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly

While the illness narrative is now a staple of the publishing industry, the genre itself has posed a problem for literary studies. What is the role of criticism in relation to personal accounts of suffering? Can these narratives be judged on aesthetic grounds? Are they a collective expression of the lost intimacy of the patient-doctor relationship? Is their function thus instrumental—to elicit the reader’s empathy?

To answer these questions, Ann Jurecic turns to major works on pain and suffering by Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Eve Sedgwick and reads these alongside illness narratives by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Reynolds Price, and Anne Fadiman, among others. In the process, she defines the subgenres of risk and pain narratives and explores a range of critical responses guided, alternately, by narrative empathy, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the practice of reparative reading.