September 28, 2021

The Tip of the Iceberg: Why Pop Culture Creators Should Dig Deep in Research

By Jordan Mechner

When I build a fictional world for a book, video game, or film/TV project, I spend months doing research. Whether the setting is history, fantasy, or the present day, my research investments always pay huge creative dividends. People sometimes think...

September 23, 2021

You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity

A Quiz and Book Excerpt

More and more, we present ourselves and encounter others through profiles. A profile shows us not as we are seen directly but how we display ourselves to a broader public. As we observe how others observe us, we calibrate our...

September 23, 2021

Of Understanding Experience and the Experience of Understanding

By Sonam Kachru

Time was when the words of Vasubandhu, the influential Buddhist philosopher from Peshawar (fl. late fourth–early fifth centuries C.E.), could be imagined to be part of the ecology of a place—as when the Sanskrit poet Bāṇabhaṭṭa intimated that Vasubandhu’s Treasury...

September 23, 2021

Book Excerpt! A New Culture of Energy: Beyond East and West (introduction)

By Luce Irigaray and translated by Stephen Seely, Stephen Pluháĉek, and Antonia Pont

We are delighted to publish A New Culture of Energy: Beyond East and West  by philosopher/psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray. In her most accessible and personal work yet, she tells her own story of how she began to practice yoga and came...

September 23, 2021

Browse Our SPEP 2021 Virtual Exhibit Booth with Wendy Lochner

Welcome to the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP)’s first virtual meeting! Although I will miss seeing everyone in person, Zoom is a vast improvement on cancellation, and this meeting is a tribute to everyone who came together to...

September 23, 2021

A Unicorn in Moscow’s Boulevards

By Jonathan Stone

I’ve never spotted a centaur in Moscow. So far. And it hasn’t been for want of trying. Every time I walk around the serene lake at the Novodevichy Monastery (the same enchanted spot that inspired Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake), I scan...

September 22, 2021

The Presidents’ Dreams

From Chapter Six of Unnatural Disasters

Gonzalo Lizarralde

“If we do this housing properly,” said former U.S. president Bill Clinton in 2011, “it will lead to whole new industries being started in Haiti, creating thousands and thousands of new jobs and permanent housing.”1 Clinton was speaking from Zoranjé, a...

September 21, 2021

Yury Tynyanov’s The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar: A Deathless Novel

By Anna Kurkina Rush

The short life of Yury Tynyanov (1896-1943) spanned some of the most traumatic upheavals of the twentieth century: world wars, revolutions, the Russian Civil War, the dark years of military communism, the waves of Stalinist purges, and the Great Terror....

September 20, 2021

Announcing Our 2021-2022 Politics and International Affairs Catalog

Letter from the editors: Greetings and welcome to the Columbia University Press 2021–2022 catalog for politics and international affairs. In international relations, we are pleased to publish the first book in our series Columbia Studies in International Order and Politics,...

September 16, 2021

I-Novel, You-Novel, True-Novel, False-Novel

By Jeremy Tiang

“Compared to the world of novels—of the imagination—the real world was a letdown.”      ~Minae Mizumura, Inheritance from Mother (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter) Lo Yi-Chin’s Faraway tells the story of a man named Lo Yi-Chin, also a Taiwanese novelist, who...

September 14, 2021

Q&A: Ari Larissa Heinrich and Chi Ta-wei on The Membranes

First published in Taiwan in 1995, Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans...

September 13, 2021

Announcing Our 2021-2022 Philosophy Catalog

Letter from the Philosophy Editor: It is with great pleasure that I present the Columbia University Press philosophy catalog for 2022. These titles, which span subjects from critical theory to political philosophy to philosophy of religion, aesthetics, environmental and animal...