Humanities

June Theme: Summer Reading

Whether you’re traveling far and wide or relaxing in your favorite patio chair this summer, no one can deny that extra leisure time is wonderfully filled with books. Here at Yale University Press, we’re boasting an exciting year of literary studies, including Bernard Avishai’s Promiscuous, a biography of Philip Roth’s

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Lest We Forget: How to Declare Our Beliefs

Sarah Underwood— Recent events have reminded us how difficult it was in the past, and often still is today, for people to speak openly about their ideas. From the Occupy Wall Street movement to the Arab Spring, public declaration of belief and protest continue to appear regularly in headlines. It

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Submit to The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs

When three heads are put together, the results can be shockingly revelatory. Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, and Fred R. Shapiro have now compiled The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, the first proverb dictionary to be based on electronic research from full-text databases. With more than 1,400 entries, this exhaustive collection

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Summer Vegetable Recipes from the Monticello Gardens

As summer begins, new cooking and eating habits begin to form: fresh produce from gardens and orchards become more widely available, but how have our practices changed alongside technological and economic developments? For most Americans, the store racks, and now even online grocers, have eliminated the agricultural pleasures, ponderings, and

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John Baldessari Cometh

Introduction for a man who needs no introduction We are excited to share the news that the gorgeous, monumental Volume One of the John Baldessari Catalogue Raisonné, featuring 500 color illustrations of work from the early, formative years of the artist’s career, is on the verge of being released.  And though

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Lost Without Translation: Ellen Elias-Bursać on “A Marriage Made in Translation”

Ellen Elias-Bursać, editor of Vlada Stojiljkovic‘s translation of Ranko Marinkovic‘s 1965 novel Cyclops, writes on the special and playful relationship formed between author and translator by their respective attentions to wit, banter, and humor, along with excerpts from the text. Like many previously published titles in the Margellos World Republic of

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Voices for Tolerance Raised Above Religious Conflict

Richard Dawkins famously argues that religion is “the root of all evil,” leading inevitably to intolerance, violence, and worse. Yet in Abraham’s Children: Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Religious Conflict, the collection’s editor Kelly James Clark sets himself firmly against such arguments. “How does one determine,” Clark asks,

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A True Literary Event: Terry Eagleton on Literature

For Terry Eagleton, writing is “exploratory.” “The act of writing is both a great delight to me in itself,” he explained in a recent interview on London’s Yale Books Blog, but it “also is constitutive of my thought.” As the author of more than forty books, which span the fields

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Lost Without Translation: Peter Cole on The Poetry of Kabbalah

The latest Margellos World Republic of Letters interview features acclaimed poet and translator Peter Cole on The Poetry of Kabbalah, the first English-language collection of poems from the Kabbalistic tradition. In the excerpt below, Cole discusses the history, culture, language, and identities that have shaped over a millennium of tradition in

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Notes from the Field: Schiaparelli and Prada at The Met’s Costume Institute

“Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” which opens today, May 10, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been long awaited by those eager to see firsthand the ties that bind these two women from very different generations. Elsa Schiaparelli came to fame in Paris amidst the Surrealist milieu of the

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