Literary Studies

Translated by Sherif Hetata 'Against the white sand, the contours of my father's body were well defined, emphasized its existence in a world where everything was liquid, where the blue of the sea melted into the blue of the sky with nothing between. This independent existence was to become the outer world, the world of my father, of land, country, religion, language, moral codes. It was to become the world around me. A world made of male bodies in which my female body lived.' Nawal El Saadawi...

Forgotten Women is a new series of books that uncover the lost herstories of influential women who have refused over hundreds of years to accept the hand they've been dealt and, as a result, have formed, shaped and changed the course of our futures. The Writers celebrates 48 unsung genius female writers from throughout history and across the world, including the Girl Stunt Reporters, who went undercover to write exposés on the ills of 1890s America; Aemilia Lanyer, the contemporary of Shakesp...

Leo Braudy, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has won accolades for revealing the complex and constantly shifting history behind seemingly unchanging ideas of fame, war, and masculinity. Continuing his interest in the history of emotion, this book explores how fear has been shaped into images of monsters and monstrosity. From the Protestant Reformation to contemporary horror films and fiction, he explores four major types: the monster from...

Translated by Ingvild Burkey The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University. Administered by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the series publishes works based on the lecture given by the event’s keynote speaker. The series launched in 2017 with the release of Devotion, by renowned musician, artist, and author Patti Smith. This new volu...

Who doesn't love haiku? It is not only America's most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere--Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, Hallmark's made millions off them, first-grade students across the count...

Writer and artist Shubigi Rao has been working on 'Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book', a ten-year long film, book, visual art, and exhaustive research project about the history of book destruction, censorship and cultural genocide, as well as the book as symbol and resistance. Travelling and filming solo across the world, collecting fragments, ephemera, anecdotes, and buried secrets, she visits public and private collections, libraries and archives, institutions and individuals tha...

A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium. Drawing deeply on this res...

Fleeing Russia amid the chaos of the 1917 revolution and subsequent Civil War, many writers went on to settle in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere. In exile, they worked as taxi drivers, labourers and film extras, and wrote some of the most brilliant and imaginative works of Russian literature. This new collection includes stories by the most famous émigré writers, Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin, and introduces powerful lesser known voices, some of whom have never been available in English before....

Edited by Bill Morgan A unique history of the Beats, in the words of the movement's most central member, Allen Ginsberg, based on a seminal series of his lectures. In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem 'Howl', Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation - partly to preserve his own memories of those years. The Best Minds of My Generation presents the best of these candid, intimate and illuminating lectures, rev...

In 26 conversations with 26 naysayers, this book is aimed at reflecting the spectrum of naysaying in Singapore's civil society. Each person is interviewed against the backdrop of his or her bookcase, putting front and centre a life of ideas and imagination. This is a book club for curious minds. Featuring: Tan Tarn How / Constance Singam / Tay Kheng Soon / Yeoh Lam Keong / Cherian George / Claire Leow / Remy Choo Zheng Xi / Teo Soh Lung / Thirunalan Sasitharan / Jennifer Teo / Dan Wong / Chua...

From clay tablets to the printing press. From the pencil to the internet. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. This is the true story of literature -- of how great texts and technologies have shaped cultures and civilizations and altered human history. The inventions of paper, the printing press and the world wide web are usually considered the major influences on the way we share stories. Less well known is the influence of Greek generals, Japanese court ladies, Spanish adventurers, M...

An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs's This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes's lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts th...

This Young Monster is a hallucinatory celebration of artists who raise hell, transform their bodies, anger their elders and show their audience dark, disturbing things. What does it mean to be a freak? Why might we be wise to think of the present as a time of monstrosity? And how does the concept of the monster irradiate our thinking about queerness, disability, children and adolescents? From Twin Peaks to Leigh Bowery, Harmony Korine to Alice in Wonderland, This Young Monster gets high on a ...

'Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.' Nawal El Saadawi is one of the greatest writers to come out of the Arab world. Born in a small Egyptian village in 1931, her life and writings have shown an extraordinary strength of character and a unique ability to create new worlds in the fight against oppression. Saadaw...

With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty questions of ever-changing word usage. Filled with fun facts--for example, the first documented usage of "OMG" was in a letter to Winston Churchill--and Stamper's own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America's foremost "irregardless" apologist, despite loathing the word), Wo...