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...

September 9, 2021

Gender Bending and Homosexuality in an Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel

By Susan Chan Egan

What does one make of a male adolescent who is sometimes mistaken for a girl; fancies himself a calligrapher and aesthete; has excessive sympathy for all things pretty that extends even to fallen flower petals; indulges in affectionate sex play...

September 7, 2021

Q&A: Pai Hsien-yung on Chinese Notions of the Afterlife and The Story of the Stone

The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber) is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature. Embedded in the novel is a biting critique of imperial China’s political and social system. The...

September 3, 2021

What’s in a Word: An AUP RoundUP

By Olivia Treynor

With one month-long celebration of women in translation literature behind us and another month of commemorating world literature in progress, I’ve been thinking about language: how language shapes our perception of our reality, how language shifts, how we communicate as...

September 1, 2021

National Translation Month 2021! A Celebration of Diverse Voices

By Olivia Treynor

Welcome to National Translation Month 2021! Founded eight years ago, National Translation Month is an annual celebration of global literature. This September, we are excited to present an eclectic mix of books. Ranging from a beloved Persian epic to a...

August 31, 2021

Does Literature Have to Be Monolingual?

Ellen Jones on Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel and Multilingualism in Translation

Japanese writer Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel was originally published in 1995 under the title Shishōsetsu: From Left to Right, to huge uproar. It is a reworking of the traditional “shishōsetsu” or “I novel,” a modernist Japanese autofictional genre that is...

August 24, 2021

Q&A: Juliet Winters Carpenter on Translating Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel

Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel, published in 1995, radically broke with Japanese literary tradition by liberally incorporating English words and phrases and printing the entire text horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left....