Another book in our Icons of America series has just been published: The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon, by Leo Braudy. Braudy, University Professor and Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature at the University of Southern California, has written the first comprehensive history
No image of prerevolutionary Russian Jewish life is more iconic than the fiddler on the roof. But in the half century before 1917, Jewish musicians were actually descending from their shtetl roofs and streaming in dazzling numbers to Russia’s new classical conservatories. At a time of both rising anti-Semitism and
The New York Times ran a story on the changing leadership at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Asian art galleries: the new head will be Maxwell Hearn, author of a number of YUP books on Chinese painting and calligraphy, published in association with The Met. Watch below as Hearn talks
Janet Malcolm’s feature interview, titled “The Art of Nonfiction,” in the new issue of the Paris Review is only the fourth nonfiction interview in the publication’s history. She discusses with Katie Roiphe her career as a journalist, the relationships to her subjects, and the presence of court cases and trials
Marilyn Monroe figures prominently among iconography—her hair, her dress, her lovers, her status as a sex symbol—under the scrutiny of the public eye, she lived as one of mid-century America’s most famous women. Jerome Charyn, author of the new Icons of America biography: Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil, now out in
Before her NBCC win, Clare Cavanagh already had events lined up at the 92nd Street Y. The first on Sunday, March 20 is a conversation with Edith Grossman titled “Why Translation Matters,” and Grossman’s book of the same name has just been published in paperback from YUP. Both authors are
CAESAR Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music, Cry ‘Caesar!’ Speak; Caesar is turn’d to hear. SOOTHSAYER Beware the ides of March. Some might say that the death of Caesar on this day in 44 BCE was the
The wait for the National Book Critics Circle Awards is over, and YUP is pleased to announce and congratulate Clare Cavanagh for her award in the Criticism category for Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland and the West. Her exploration of poetry and national life in Poland and Russia
It’s hard to imagine a history of women in American film and literature without remembering Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. First published in 1936, iconic female characters like Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Hamilton Wilkes are fixed in our memory; the book itself was a Pulitzer-Prize winner and remains one