Books

Star Journal is a selection of poems from Christopher Buckley’s twenty previous collections, 1980-2014. Buckley’s poetry is unique in its use of current science and cosmology, recent facts and theories mixed in with a lyrical underpinning.

Despite Cultures examines the strategies and realities of the Soviet state-building project in Tajikistan during the 1920s and 1930s. As Kassymbekova reveals, the local ruling system was built upon an intricate network of individuals, whose stated loyalty to Communism was monitored through a chain of command that stretched from Moscow through Tashkent to Dushanbe/Stalinabad.

Winner of The 2015 Donald Hall Prize for PoetrySelected by Crystal Ann Williams

Hour of the Ox examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.

Winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

WInner of the 2017 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Teaxs Institute of Letters

In the Volcano’s Mouth is a traditional American road narrative rewritten for the new century, centering women—for so long victims or mute sidekicks in these types of stories—as the powerful central figures in a journey that is unequivocally feminist yet universal.

Many of the poems draw from conversations and informal interviews with hobos, hitchhikers, and other American nomads the author met over the course of nearly a decade spent on and off the road. This book continues an investigation into poetry’s role as a documentary or ethnographic form, in the legacy of Charles Reznikoff and CD Wright.

In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief?

Smith’s poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive.

Mortality in Smith’s work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world.

The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.

An in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. His research into the nervous system and the relationship between language and the brain broke new ground.

Finalist, 2016 National Jewish Book Award (Holocaust category)

Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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. The authors’ accessible narrative, here available in English for the first time, has been praised for its objectivity, and is complemented by a large bibliography offering an outstanding referential source to archival materials. As such, this book stands as the definitive account of the Jews in Croatia, up to and including the criminal acts perpetrated by the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime, and adds significantly to our knowledge of the Holocaust.

This is the first English translation of an important Russian social novel (published in 1865) that enjoyed great popularity in its day, the period of Tsar Alexander’s great reforms. Sleptsov deals with complex political issues such as the abolition of serfdom, political repression, women’s rights, and the conflict between liberalism and radicalism among intellectuals. Highly readable, it provides important historical insights on the political and social climate of a volatile and transformative period in Russia history.

The poems in Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake.

A prose poetry/flash fiction collection that interrogates Bertrand Russell’s classic A History of Western Philosophy through scathing wit and acute observation.

The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The technological marvel highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This frenzy for balloon experiments fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together. This book explores how this flying machine not only expanded the audience for science but also inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon was a people-machine that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent archival revolution, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous “literary investigation” The Gulag Archipelago was the most authoritative overview of the Stalinist system of camps. This volume develops a much more thorough and nuanced understanding of the Gulag. It brings a greater awareness of the wide variety of camps, the forced labor system, and the Gulag as viewed in a global historical context, among many other topics. It also offers fascinating new interpretations of the interrelationship and importance of the Gulag to the larger Soviet political and economic system, and how they were in fact, parts of the same entity.

Montgomery presents a rich ethnographic study on the practice and meaning of Islamic life in Kyrgyzstan. Through his years of on-the-ground research, he assembles both an anthropology of knowledge and an anthropology of Islam, demonstrating how individuals make sense of and draw meanings from their environments. This book offers the most thorough English-language study to date of Islam in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

Winner of the Marc-Auguste Pictet Prize, 2010

The textbooks written by Adolphe Ganot (1804-1887) played a major role in shaping the way physics was taught in the nineteenth century. Ganot’s books were translated from their original French into more than ten languages, including English, allowing their adoption as standard works in Britain and spreading their influence as far as North America, Australia, India and Japan.

Simon’s Franco-British case study looks at the role of Ganot’s two textbooks: Traite elementaire de physique experimentale et appliquee (1851) and Cours de physique purement experimentale (1859), and their translations into English by Edmund Atkinson. The study is novel for its international comparison of nineteenth-century physics, its acknowledgement of the role of book production on the impact of the titles and for its emphasis on the role of communication in the making of science.

Daniel French examines the American social perceptions of electricity as an energy technology between the mid-19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Arguing that both technical and cultural factors played a role, French shows how electricity became an invisible and abstract form of energy in American society, leading Americans to culturally construct electricity as unlimited and environmentally inconsequential—a newfound “basic right” of life in the United States.