May 5, 2009

Siddharth Kara on the Take Part Blog

Siddharth Kara, author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, has begun writing for the new social activism Web site and blog Take Part. In an ongoing series of blogs, Kara will provide detailed information on why the...

May 5, 2009

Hard-Boiled Sentimentality Receives a Macavity Award Nomination

Congratulations to Leonard Cassuto, author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories, for receiving a Macavity award nomination in the category of Best Nonfiction/Critical book. The Macavity awards are selected by Mystery Readers International. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality was...

May 1, 2009

Mark Taylor in the New York Times and His Forthcoming Book

Mark C. Taylor’s recent New York Times Op-ed, End the University as We Know It continues to be one of the most popular stories on the NYT Web site and has been widely discussed on the Internet. (The University of...

May 1, 2009

Buy Indie Day!

May 1st has been declared Buy Indie Day. The idea: buy one book—paperback, hardcover, audiobook, whatever you want (it doesn’t even have to be a Columbia University Press title)—at an independent bookstore near you. There are tons of great independent...

May 1, 2009

David Bordwell on Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The noted film scholar and critic David Bordwell recently featured the book Apichatpong Weerasethakul, edited by James Quandt on his Web site (scroll down a bit for the review of the book.) Apichatpong Weerasethakul is first English language study of...

April 30, 2009

Joseph Kip Kosek at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has recently posted a video of Joseph Kip Kosek discussing his recent book Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy. Here is a description of the talk from the Library of Congress: According to...

April 30, 2009

Farzana Shaikh: The Vacuum That Rules Pakistan

Farzana Shaikh, author of the forthcoming Making Sense of Pakistan, recently argued in a recent op-ed in The Independent that “there is now an almost fateful inevitability that a major terrorist attack in the UK will carry a Pakistani imprint.”...

April 29, 2009

The Quarterly Conversation Reviews The Late Age of Print & The Late Age of Print on "Amazonfail"

Two worthwhile items relating to Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control: A few weeks ago Scott Esposito, published an interview with Ted Striphas and has now followed that up with a review...

April 29, 2009

Herve This and Pierre Gagnaire on Synthetic Foods

A recent article in the Times of London discusses how Herve This, author of the recently published Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism, and legendary chef Pierre Gagnaire have created the first entirely synthetic gourmet dish. Created...

April 28, 2009

Mere Fondness for the Beautiful — A Post by Stephen Burt

Stephen Burt teaches in the English Department at Harvard University. He is most recently the author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry and The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence. He has also written three books of...

April 28, 2009

More from William Logan — An Excerpt from Our Savage Art

As Poetry Month winds to a close and with Sunday’s NYT review still fresh in our minds, we thought it appropriate to return once again to William Logan’s Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue. In the opening essay...

April 27, 2009

The New York Times Reviews William Logan's Our Savage Art

Given William Logan’s sharp criticisms of contemporary poets (see examples here and here), one could only wonder how he might fare under the scrutiny of another critic. So, how would the New York Times Book Review assess William Logan’s new...