Annelise Finegan Wasmoen— Across interviews and essays, the experimental writer Can Xue characterizes her fiction in two ways that speak to what are also questions about translation: as, at once, the embodied performance of freedom, and, at the same time, as an automatic process predicated by a logic or mechanism.
Hubert Haddad; Translated by Alyson Waters— One autumn morning, Cédric awoke with a start and sat up in bed as daylight filtered through the blinds. He must have been dreaming about the woman he loved, but her name escaped him. Had they broken up? Even though he had difficulty imagining
Feed your book cravings with a book about book, it’s International Book Lovers Day! This list features books about reading books, writing books, studying books, and the history of the book format itself. Book yourself some time to book up in a comfy chair and book out. (How many times
John Sutherland’s A Little History of Literature tackles a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. In this excerpt from the book, Sutherland addresses a fundamental question: what exactly is literature? Most of us encounter
Read an excerpt from The Shadow of a Great Rock The recent furor over a newly discovered Coptic text in which Jesus appears to refer to his own wife has put the Bible and Biblical interpretation back in the news. Scholars, skeptics, and believers are weighing on how to understand this
Follow @yaleARTbooks Congratulations to Junot Díaz on being recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation genius grant! Díaz is the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as well as two acclaimed short story anthologies, Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012). Praising Díaz
Robert Frost holds a coveted position in the category of Poets that (Almost) Everyone Knows. Many first recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in grade school. Its use of chain rhyme and simple imagery provide a nice introduction to poetry, even for the youngest readers. And really, no
There is no American novel with a success story more contentious than that of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. First published in 1969 amid scathing condemnations, it sold over three million copies in its first six years. Even more remarkable is that after four decades, the novel’s commercial and critical success
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
Defining a Change: Literary Theory, Truth, and Fiction in the Digital Age
Terry Eagleton’s newest book The Event of Literature addresses literary theory and tackles the question—what is literature—utilizing a variety of theories. Each theory has its own historical perspective that is formed by morals, values, and events. It is this ever-changing standard used to define literature that Eagleton grapples with in
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