Books

Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist Jose Maria Arguedas (1911-1969) was a highly conflicted figure. As a mestizo, both European and Quechua blood ran through his veins and into his cosmology and writing. Arguedas’s Marxist influences and ethnographic work placed him in direct contact with the subalterns he would champion in his stories. His exposes of the conflicts between Indians and creoles, and workers and elites were severely criticized by his contemporaries. In Rethinking Community from Peru, Irina Alexandra Feldman examines the deep political connotations and current relevance of Arguedas’s fiction to the Andean region.

Winner of the 2013 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

The poems of Best Bones allude to landscapes of history, fable, and childhood myth, yet are fraught with modern day predicaments that create an atmosphere at once familiar and strange, playful and haunted, and verging on disaster. With imaginative intelligence, Nordgren maintains a snow-globe control of the whole scene.

Winner of the 2013 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

The Dottery is a book of poetry arisen from a thought experiment—what if there was a school before birth where gender was taught?

This is the final book in the Plum Flower Trilogy by Afaa Michael Weaver, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The two previous books, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 and The Government of Nature, reveal similar themes that address the author’s personal experience with childhood abuse through the context of Daoist renderings of nature as a metaphor for the human body, with an eye to recovery and forgiveness in a very eclectic spiritual life. City of Eternal Spring chronicles Weaver’s travels abroad in Taiwan and China, as well as showing the limits of cultural influence.

Winner, 2015 Phillis Wheatley Book Award

New in Paper

Allegheny City, known today as Pittsburgh’s North Side, was the third-largest city in Pennsylvania when it was controversially annexed by the City of Pittsburgh in 1907. Dan Rooney, a longtime North Side resident, joins local historian Carol Peterson in creating this highly engaging history of the cultural, industrial, and architectural achievements of Allegheny City from its humble beginnings until the present day. The authors cover the history of the city from its origins as a colonial outpost to its emergence alongside Pittsburgh as one of the most important industrial cities in the world. Supplemented by historic and contemporary photos, the authors take the reader on a fascinating and often surprising street-level tour of this colorful, vibrant, and proud place.

In this groundbreaking study, Moises Arce exposes a long-standing climate of popular contention in Peru. Looking beneath the surface to the subnational, regional, and local level as inception points, he rigorously dissects the political conditions that set the stage for protest. Focusing on natural resource extraction and its key role in the political economy of Peru and other developing countries, Arce reveals a wide disparity in the incidence, forms, and consequences of collective action.

This study offers original perspectives on the politics of everyday life in the Soviet Union by closely examining the coping mechanisms individuals and leaders alike developed as they grappled with the political, social, and intellectual challenges the system presented before and after World War II. As Rittersporn shows, the “little tactics” people employed in their daily lives not only helped them endure the rigors of life during the Stalin and post-Stalin periods but also strongly influenced the system’s development into the Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras.

New in Paper

Janet Carey Eldred examines the rise of women magazine editors during the mid-twentieth century and reveals their unheralded role in creating a literary aesthetic for the American public.

Winner of the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Winner of the 2010 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award

A compelling collection of short stories set in Saudi Arabia linked by various characters over a 50-year span, from the end of WWII to the mid-1990s. They’re native Saudis and expatriates going about their lives and loves and losses and discovering who they are and where they belong.

Kinga Pozniak shows how the political, economic, and social upheavals in Nowa Huta, Poland have profoundly shaped the memory of these events in the minds of three generations of people who lived through them since the end of the Second World War.

New in Paper

Collection of essays by prominent historians, political scientists, and professors of literature that examine the political, social, and cultural impact of Zionism and Bundism on Jewish society.

New in Paper

Acampora details an inter-species morality by examining the underlying nature of bodily experience as animate creatures and as human beings.

Unsatisfied with current environmental philosophies, Brian G. Henning developed his own theory inspired by Alfred North Whitehead and several other classical American philosophers. In this work he discusses the theory’s most significant insight, “The Ethics of Creativity.”

Winner, John N. Findlay Book Prize from the Metaphysical Society of America

Voted one of the Top Ten Picks for university press books by Foreword Magazine in 2014.

Modern Belarusian nationalism emerged in the early twentieth century during a dramatic period that included a mass exodus, multiple occupations, seven years of warfare, and the partition of the Belarusian lands. In this original history, Per Anders Rudling traces the evolution of modern Belarusian nationalism from its origins in late imperial Russia to the early 1930s.

Winner, 2015 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)

Winner, 2016 Southern Cone Studies Section Social Sciences Book Award, Latin American Studies Association

This book examines the dramatic forms of social mobilization, state-directed repression, mass development projects, and socioeconomic exclusion that have marked struggles over low-income urban housing in Santiago, Chile, during the past half-century.