Literary Studies - Columbia University Press Blog

September 11, 2009

Two new looks at cinematic and literary representations of 9/11

As Stephen Prince author of Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism points out in a recent interview in Rorotoko, “shortly after the attacks, many people predicted that storytelling … would be changed forever.” Prince’s book explores a range...

August 14, 2009

"Nick Carraway is a snob."

“The Great Gatsby is a novel that has made a difference in the lives of many who have or will read it. One does not have to like Nick Carraway to discover something about oneself in the tale he tells.”—Scott...

August 6, 2009

Zhu Wen’s filthy fiction

Julia Lovell, translator of Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars and Other Stories, has a great article on China Beat that discusses the author’s currently untranslated novella My Little Brother’s Performance (Didi de yanzou). The novella recounts, in often graphic detail,...

July 29, 2009

Well Titled, Well Covered features There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night

The New Yorker‘s blog The Book Bench recently featured Cao Naiqian’s There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night in their “Well Titled, Well Covered” feature. Here’s how they explain their criteria for their well...

July 28, 2009

The Los Angeles Times on Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Work and Days

July 17, 2009

Summer reading recommendations from PRI’s The World

Looking for a good summer novel that goes beyond your conventional beach reading? Well, Bill Marx from PRI’s The World offers four recommendations of fiction in translation. The list includes The Halfway House, by Guillermo Rosales, In the United States...

July 10, 2009

Interview with John Balcom, Translator of "There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night"

We had meant to post this earlier but PRI’s The World recently interview John Balcom, the translator of the just-published There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night by Chinese writer Cao Naiqian. You can...

June 30, 2009

Shakespeare in China

In his new book Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange, Alexander Huang examines “the transnational imaginary of China in Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare’s place in Chinese cultural history from the first Opium War in 1839 to our times.” Huang...

June 16, 2009

Celebrate Bloomsday with Marilyn Monroe

The image of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses is from the cover to James Joyce: A Critical Guide, by Lee Spinks and since it is Bloomsday today, we thought we would point out a few Joyce-related titles from our list. In...

June 3, 2009

The Valve Continues Its Discussion of Jenny Davidson's Breeding

“Jenny Davidson’s new book of cultural criticism, entitled Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, is one of the strangest and most elliptical works of its kind I’ve ever read.”—Joseph Kugelmass “After challenging the reader’s expectations about the forms...

May 27, 2009

The Valve Begins Its Book Event/Discussion on Jenny Davidson's "Breeding"

The Valve has begun its eagerly anticipated discussion of Jenny Davidson’s Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. Davidson, it should be noted, is an academic, novelist, YA author, and blogger. Given the many genres in which she works,...

May 14, 2009

Interview with Marian Ronan, author of Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism

Marian Ronan is the author of Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism . This interview originally appeared in EqualwRites (EwR) EwR: Can we begin by asking the significance of its title, Tracing...

Category: Literary Studies