A cultural history of race, resistance, and representation in a city divided by politics and play

When outfielder Bernie Carbo joined the Red Sox in 1974, he brought with him a toy gorilla named Mighty Joe Young that became the team’s unofficial mascot for several players and many in the local press. This seemingly innocent stuffed animal was introduced within a baseball team notorious for its stubborn discrimination, and during a particularly fraught era of racial discord in Boston. That June, after years of activism from the city’s Black community, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that Boston must address the segregation of its schools through redistricting and busing. The ensuing racial animus to these policies led some of the city’s white residents to throw bananas and chant monkey sounds at African American students as they integrated the predominantly white South Boston High School. In this agitated atmosphere, cultural symbols like the Red Sox’s Mighty Joe Young mirrored and amplified the heightened racial tensions of Boston’s busing crisis.

Situated at the intersection of US cultural and social history, Segregation Games examines the surprising ties in 1970s Boston between the racial segregation of the city’s schools and the racial controversies expressed on and off the field of “Red Sox Nation.” “I found out in the black community why they don’t come out [to Fenway Park],” explained Black player Reggie Smith of his experiences with the Red Sox and the city during this period. “The team was the last to get Black players, and some of the things I hear out in the stands make me sick.” To understand these connections, Faflik erases the lines between politics and sport, which routinely blurred in a city suffused with an anti-Black racism that was both deceptively subtle and fiercely overt.

Drawing upon deep archival research from sources that have largely been ignored, such as the Black press of the time, Faflik offers a carefully nuanced portrait of Boston’s cultural life at a pivotal moment in the city’s history. 

A cultural history of race, resistance, and representation in a city divided by politics and play

When outfielder Bernie Carbo joined the Red Sox in 1974, he brought with him a toy gorilla named Mighty Joe Young that became the team’s unofficial mascot for several players and many in the local press. This seemingly innocent stuffed animal was introduced within a baseball team notorious for its stubborn discrimination, and during a particularly fraught era of racial discord in Boston. That June, after years of activism from the city’s Black community, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that Boston must address the segregation of its schools through redistricting and busing. The ensuing racial animus to these policies led some of the city’s white residents to throw bananas and chant monkey sounds at African American students as they integrated the predominantly white South Boston High School. In this agitated atmosphere, cultural symbols like the Red Sox’s Mighty Joe Young mirrored and amplified the heightened racial tensions of Boston’s busing crisis.

Situated at the intersection of US cultural and social history, Segregation Games examines the surprising ties in 1970s Boston between the racial segregation of the city’s schools and the racial controversies expressed on and off the field of “Red Sox Nation.” “I found out in the black community why they don’t come out [to Fenway Park],” explained Black player Reggie Smith of his experiences with the Red Sox and the city during this period. “The team was the last to get Black players, and some of the things I hear out in the stands make me sick.” To understand these connections, Faflik erases the lines between politics and sport, which routinely blurred in a city suffused with an anti-Black racism that was both deceptively subtle and fiercely overt.

Drawing upon deep archival research from sources that have largely been ignored, such as the Black press of the time, Faflik offers a carefully nuanced portrait of Boston’s cultural life at a pivotal moment in the city’s history. 

Correspondence of a Church Father.

Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.

From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.

Correspondence of a Church Father.

Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus), ca. 345–420, of Stridon, Dalmatia, son of Christian parents, at Rome listened to rhetoricians, legal advocates, and philosophers, and in 360 was baptized by Pope Liberius. He traveled widely in Gaul and in Asia Minor; and turned in the years 373–379 to hermetic life in Syria. Ordained presbyter at Antioch in 379 he went to Constantinople, met Gregory of Nazianzus and advanced greatly in scholarship. He was called to Rome in 382 to help Pope Damasus, at whose suggestion he began his revision of the Old Latin translation of the Bible (which came to form the core of the Vulgate version). Meanwhile he taught scripture and Hebrew and monastic living to Roman women. Wrongly suspected of luxurious habits, he left Rome (now under Pope Siricius) in 385, toured Palestine, visited Egypt, and then settled in Bethlehem, presiding over a monastery and (with help) translating the Old Testament from Hebrew. About 394 he met Augustine. He died on 30 September 420.

Jerome’s letters constitute one of the most notable collections in Latin literature. They are an essential source for our knowledge of Christian life in the fourth–fifth centuries; they also provide insight into one of the most striking and complex personalities of the time. Seven of the eighteen letters in this selection deal with a primary interest of Jerome’s: the morals and proper role of women. The most famous letter here fervently extols virginity.

Personal records from the sands of Egypt.

This is the first of two volumes giving a selection of Greek papyri relating to private and public business. They cover a period from before 300 BC to the eighth century AD. Most were found in rubbish heaps or remains of ancient houses or in tombs in Egypt. From such papyri we get much information about administration and social and economic conditions in Egypt, and about native Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine law, as well as glimpses of ordinary life.

This volume contains: Agreements, 71 examples; these concern marriage, divorce, adoption, apprenticeship, sales, leases, employment of laborers. Receipts, 10. Wills, 6. Deed of disownment. Personal letters from men and women, young and old, 82. Memoranda, 2. Invitations, 5. Orders for payment, 2. Agenda, 2. Accounts and inventories, 12. Questions of oracles, 3. Christian prayers, 2. A Gnostic charm. Horoscopes, 2.

The three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of Select Papyri also includes a volume of poetry.

Official records from the sands of Egypt.

This volume presents papyri relating to public business of various kinds in Egypt from the middle of the 3rd century BC to AD 710, thus including affairs in that country first when it was ruled by the Greek Ptolemaic kings, secondly when it was a Roman province. The earliest examples date from the reign of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus and the latest from the government by the Arabs after their conquest of Egypt in AD 639–641.

The papyri chosen were all sent by persons in office (from king, Roman emperor, or governor downwards) or addressed to them or sent for their information: Codes and Regulations, 6 examples. Edicts and Orders, 26. Public Announcements, 6. Reports of Meetings, 3. Official Acts and Inquiries, 5. Judicial Business, 18. Petitions and Applications, 44. Declarations to Officials, 30. Appointments and Nominations, 7. Tenders and Contracts, 19. Receipts, 26. Orders for Payment, 6. Accounts and Registers or Lists, 12. Letters, 16. Notes on the systems of dating and of money in Egypt as well as a glossary of technical terms are provided.

The three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of Select Papyri also includes a volume of poetry and one of private documents.

Scraps of verse from the sands of Egypt.

The papyri found in Egypt have yielded fragments large and small of ancient literary authors. We include in this volume from the 5th–4th centuries BC fragments of two tragedies (one a satyr play) by Aeschylus; of five by Sophocles; of ten by Euripides; of one by Ion; and of some plays not assignable. From Old Comedy, 5th century, we have fragments of one play each of Epicharmus, Cratinus, Pherecrates, Eupolis, and Plato; some fragments of Aristophanes; and unassignable fragments. From Middle Comedy and New Comedy, 4th and 3rd centuries, are twenty-six items including at least three by Menander and one each by Philemon, Timocles, and Straton. From mimes there are a fragment of Sophron and six unassignable, including 112 lines of clownish doings by the Indian Ocean. The lyric poetry, 7th century BC–4th AD, twenty-one mostly anonymous items, includes some of Sappho, Corinna, Pindar, Philicus, fragments of dithyrambic poetry, hymns, songs and so on. There are seventeen examples of elegiac and iambic, 7th century BC–3rd AD, including some Mimnermus, Amyntas, Leonidas, Antipater of Sidon, and Posidippus. The thirty items of hexameter poetry, 5th century BC–6th AD are mostly unassignable but include Panyasis, Erinna (a lovely fragment of her “Distaff”), Euphorion, Pancrates, and Dionysius (the “Bassarica”).

The three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of Select Papyri also includes volumes of public and private documents.

The finest ghazals of Mir Taqi Mir, the most accomplished of Urdu poets.

Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir (1723–1810) is widely regarded as the most accomplished poet in the Urdu language. His massive output—six divans—was produced in Delhi and Lucknow during the high tide of Urdu literary culture.

Selected Ghazals and Other Poems offers a comprehensive collection of Mir’s finest ghazals, extended lyrics composed of couplets, and of his masnavis, narrative works of a romantic or didactic character. The ghazals celebrate earthly and mystical love through subtle wordplay, vivid descriptions of the beloved, and a powerful individual voice. The sometimes satirical masnavis highlight everyday subjects: domestic pets, monsoon rains, the rigors of travel. They also include two astonishing love stories: one about young men whose relationship is shattered when one marries; the other about a queen, her peacock lover, and the jealous king who seeks to drive them apart.

The Urdu text, presented here in the Nastaliq script, accompanies new translations of Mir’s poems, some appearing in English for the first time.

A wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind selection of Berryman’s correspondence with friends, loved ones, writers, and editors, showcasing the turbulent, fascinating life and mind of one of America’s major poets.

The Selected Letters of John Berryman assembles for the first time the poet’s voluminous correspondence. Beginning with a letter to his parents in 1925 and concluding with a letter sent a few weeks before his death in 1972, Berryman tells his story in his own words.

Included are more than 600 letters to almost 200 people—editors, family members, students, colleagues, and friends. The exchanges reveal the scope of Berryman’s ambitions, as well as the challenges of practicing his art within the confines of the publishing industry and contemporary critical expectations. Correspondence with Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Adrienne Rich, Saul Bellow, and other writers demonstrates Berryman’s sustained involvement in the development of literary culture in the postwar United States. We also see Berryman responding in detail to the work of writers such as Carolyn Kizer and William Meredith and encouraging the next generation—Edward Hoagland, Valerie Trueblood, and others. The letters show Berryman to be an energetic and generous interlocutor, but they also make plain his struggles with personal and familial trauma, at every stage of his career.

An introduction by editors Philip Coleman and Calista McRae explains the careful selection of letters and contextualizes the materials within Berryman’s career. Reinforcing the critical and creative interconnectedness of Berryman’s work and personal life, The Selected Letters confirms his place as one of the most original voices of his generation and opens new horizons for appreciating and interpreting his poems.

The letters of John Keats are, T. S. Eliot remarked, "what letters ought to be; the fine things come in unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown out, but between trifle and trifle." This new edition, which features four rediscovered letters, three of which are being published here for the first time, affords readers the pleasure of the poet's "trifles" as well as the surprise of his most famous ideas emerging unpredictably.

Unlike other editions, this selection includes letters to Keats and among his friends, lending greater perspective to an epistolary portrait of the poet. It also offers a revealing look at his "posthumous existence," the period of Keats's illness in Italy, painstakingly recorded in a series of moving letters by Keats's deathbed companion, Joseph Severn. Other letters by Dr. James Clark, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Richard Woodhouse--omitted from other selections of Keats's letters--offer valuable additional testimony concerning Keats the man.

Edited for greater readability, with annotations reduced and punctuation and spelling judiciously modernized, this selection recreates the spontaneity with which these letters were originally written.

This revised and enlarged edition of A Selected List of Books and Articles on Japan in English, French, and German, first published in 1940, contains more than seventeen hundred titles which have been carefully chosen to guide the general reader and to aid the serious student of Japanese civilization in his research. Certain items included in the first edition have been eliminated, and hundreds of new entries, including material published during and after World War II, have been added. The list is divided into section which deal with bibliography, geography, history, political and social sciences, religion and philosophy, language, literature, art, et cetera. Subdivision of these sections facilitates the search for books and articles on a particular subject. The entries are arranged alphabetically by author and are individually numbered. An author, title, and subject index also contributes to the usefulness of the book.

There is no other convenient selected list of this sort on Japan. Scholars, journalists, government personnel, and other who wish to obtain information concerning books and articles on Japan will find this book an invaluable guide.

Pagans’ advocate.

Libanius (AD 314–393) was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism. His story, as presented in his Autobiography and the Life by Eunapius, is supplemented by information from a correspondence of over 1500 items and sixty-four extant orations. A native of Antioch, he began his teaching career in Constantinople in 340, but soon had to retire to Nicomedeia, where he became acquainted with St. Basil and influential in the development of Julian’s paganism. After a second tenure at Constantinople he returned home to become professor in Antioch in 354, a position which he held, through many vicissitudes, for the rest of his life.

As sophist of Antioch and a devoted exponent of the traditional Hellenic system of education, Libanius remained deliberately and contemptuously unacquainted with Latin, and deplored its growing influence. Naturally humane in outlook and sympathizing with the local bourgeoisie, he criticized bitterly the encroachments and oppressions of the central administration, and the general cruelty of his day. Sincerely pagan in an increasingly aggressive Christian society, he became an influential voice against religious persecution, official or unofficial. The orations on Julian, to whose memory he remained devoted all his life, were composed between 362 and 365, and present Libanius with a congenial subject, revealing him at the height of his powers and influence.

Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Autobiography and Selected Letters.

Pagans’ advocate.

Libanius (AD 314–393) was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism. His story, as presented in his Autobiography and the Life by Eunapius, is supplemented by information from a correspondence of over 1500 items and sixty-four extant orations. A native of Antioch, he began his teaching career in Constantinople in 340, but soon had to retire to Nicomedeia, where he became acquainted with St. Basil and influential in the development of Julian’s paganism. After a second tenure at Constantinople he returned home to become professor in Antioch in 354, a position which he held, through many vicissitudes, for the rest of his life.

As sophist of Antioch and a devoted exponent of the traditional Hellenic system of education, Libanius remained deliberately and contemptuously unacquainted with Latin, and deplored its growing influence. Naturally humane in outlook and sympathizing with the local bourgeoisie, he criticized bitterly the encroachments and oppressions of the central administration, and the general cruelty of his day. Sincerely pagan in an increasingly aggressive Christian society, he became an influential voice against religious persecution, official or unofficial. The orations on Julian, to whose memory he remained devoted all his life, were composed between 362 and 365, and present Libanius with a congenial subject, revealing him at the height of his powers and influence.

Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Autobiography and Selected Letters.

Artfully annotated, The Selected Papers of Jane Addams offers an evocative choice of correspondence, photographs, and other primary documents, presenting a multi-layered narrative of Addams's personal and emerging professional life. Themes inaugurated in the previous volume are expanded here, including dilemmas of family relations and gender roles; the history of education; the dynamics of female friendship; religious belief and ethical development; changes in opportunities for women; and the evolution of philanthropy, social welfare, and reform ideas.

The third volume in this acclaimed series documents Addams’s creation of Hull-House and her rise to worldwide fame as the acknowledged female leader of progressive reform. It also provides evidence of her growing commitment to pacifism. Here we see Addams, a force of thought, action, and commitment, forming lasting relationships with her Hull-House neighbors and the Chicago community of civic, political, and social leaders, even as she matured as an organizer, leader, and fund-raiser, and as a sought-after speaker, and writer. The papers reveal her positions on reform challenges while illuminating her strategies, successes, and responses to failures. At the same time, the collection brings to light Addams’s private life. Letters and other documents trace how many of her Hull-House and reform alliances evolved into deep, lasting friendships and also explore the challenges she faced as her role in her own family life became more complex.

Fully annotated and packed with illustrations, The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, Volume 3 is a portrait of a woman as she changed—and as she changed history.

This volume focuses on Sanger from her groundbreaking overseas advocacy during the interwar years through her postwar role in creating the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The documents reconstruct Sanger's dramatic birth control advocacy tours through early 1920s Germany, Japan, and China in the midst of significant government and religious opposition to her ideas. They also trace her tireless efforts to build a global movement through international conferences and tours. Letters, journal entries, writings, and other records reveal Sanger's contentious dealings with other activists, her correspondence with the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sanger's own dramatic evolution from gritty grassroots activist to postwar power broker and diplomat.

A powerful documentary history of a transformative twentieth-century figure, The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 4 is a primer for the debates on individual choice, sex education, and planned parenthood that remain all-too-pertinent in our own time.

Nikos Engonopoulos (1907–1985) was one of the most prominent representatives of Greek Surrealist poetry and painting. Closely associated with Andreas Embeirikos, the “patriarch” of Surrealism in Greece, and with Nicolas Calas, an influential figure of the European and American avant-garde, Engonopoulos developed highly experimental pictorial and poetic aesthetics. In both his paintings and poems, he engaged in a critical, often ironic dialogue with Greek history and cultural traditions and their ideological appropriations in established cultural and political discourses. Engonopoulos was arguably the keenest advocate of Surrealist black humor and irony in Greece. His overall approach to the Greek past, informed as it was by the socio-aesthetic principles of French Surrealism, constitutes one of the most ingenious and provocative cases of artistic mythogenesis in the European avant-garde.

This volume offers a collection of his most representative poems, including his long poem Bolivár, which was written in the winter of 1942–1943 and soon acquired the status of an emblematic act of resistance against the Nazis and their allies (Italians and Bulgarians), who had occupied Greece in 1941.

Selected Poems is compiled from the best works in Jean Garrigue's eight published collections. Garrigue (1914-72) is recognized as a leading American poet of the fifties and sixties. Among her awards and honors were a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant.

Unlike Whitman, Dickinson, or Wordsworth, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873) never wanted to start a revolution in poetry. Nor did he—like Longfellow or his friend Tennyson—capture or ever try to represent the spirit of his age. Yet he remains one of America’s most passionate, moving, and technically accomplished poets of the nineteenth century: a New Englander through and through, a poet of the outdoors, wandering fields and wooded hillsides by himself, driven to poetry and the solitude of nature by the loss of his beloved wife. This is the persona we encounter again and again in Tuckerman’s sonnets and stanzaic lyric poetry.

Correcting numerous errors in previous editions, this is the first reliable reading edition of Tuckerman’s poetry. Ben Mazer has painstakingly re-edited the poems in this selection from manuscripts at the Houghton Library. Included in this generous selection are several important poems omitted in The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. In her introduction to the volume, Stephanie Burt celebrates an extraordinary poet of mourning and nature—an anti-Transcendental—who in many ways seems closer to writers of our own century than to, say, Emerson or even Thoreau. Readers who enjoy the verse of Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, or Mary Oliver will find much to admire in Tuckerman’s poetry.

Along with his childhood friend Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville (1554–1628) was an important member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Although his poems, long out of print, are today less well known than those of Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare, Greville left an indelible mark on the world of Renaissance poetry, both in his love poems, which ably work within the English Petrarchan tradition, and in his religious meditations, which, along with the work of Donne and Herbert, stand as a highpoint of early Protestant poetics.

Back in print for a new generation of scholars and readers, Thom Gunn’s selection of Greville’s short poems includes the whole of Greville’s lyric sequence, Caelica, along with choruses from some of Greville’s verse dramas. Gunn’s introduction places Greville’s thought in historical context and in relation to the existential anxieties that came to preoccupy writers in the twentieth century. It is as revealing about Gunn himself, and the reading of earlier English verse in the 1960s, as it is about Greville’s own poetic achievement. This reissue of Selected Poems of Fulke Greville is an event of the first order both for students of early British literature and for readers of Thom Gunn and English poetry generally.

Toward the close of the last century, the poetry of the Spanish-speaking world was pallid, feeble, almost a corpse. It needed new life and a new direction. The exotic, erratic, revolutionary poet who changed the course of Spanish poetry and brought it into the mainstream of twentieth-century Modernism was Félix Rubén García Sarmiento (1867-1916) of Nicaragua, who called himself Rubén Darío.

Since its original publication in 1965, this edition of Darío's poetry has made English-speaking readers better acquainted with the poet who, as Enrique Anderson Imbert said, "divides literary history into 'before' and 'after.'" The selection of poems is intended to represent the whole range of Darío's verse, from the stinging little poems of Thistles to the dark, brooding lines of Songs of the Argentine and Other Poems. Also included, in the Epilogue, is a transcript of a radio dialogue between two other major poets, Federico García Lorca of Spain and Pablo Neruda of Chile, who celebrate the rich legacy of Rubén Darío.

The first Latin American to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature, the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is often characterized as a healing, maternal voice who spoke on behalf of women, indigenous peoples, the disenfranchised, children, and the rural poor. She is that political poet and more: a poet of philosophical meditation, self-consciousness, and daring. This is a book full of surprises and paradoxes. The complexity and structural boldness of these prose-poems, especially the female-erotic prose pieces of her first book, make them an important moment in the history of literary modernism in a tradition that runs from Baudelaire, the North American moderns, and the South American postmodernistas. It's a book that will be eye-opening and informative to the general reader as well as to students of gender studies, cultural studies, literary history, and poetry.

This Spanish-English bilingual volume gathers the most famous and representative prose writings of Gabriela Mistral, which have not been as readily available to English-only readers as her poetry. The pieces are grouped into four sections. "Fables, Elegies, and Things of the Earth" includes fifteen of Mistral's most accessible prose-poems. "Prose and Prose-Poems from Desolación / Desolation [1922]" presents all the prose from Mistral's first important book. "Lyrical Biographies" are Mistral's poetic meditations on Saint Francis and Sor Juana de la Cruz. "Literary Essays, Journalism, 'Messages'" collects pieces that reveal Mistral's opinions on a wide range of subjects, including the practice of teaching; the writers Alfonso Reyes, Alfonsina Storni, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Pablo Neruda; Mistral's own writing practices; and her social beliefs. Editor/translator Stephen Tapscott rounds out the volume with a chronology of Mistral's life and a brief introduction to her career and prose.

Dark, weird, psychologically complex, Hawthorne’s short fiction continues to fascinate readers. Brenda Wineapple has made a generous selection of Hawthorne’s stories, including some of his best-known tales as well as other, less-often anthologized gems. In her introduction, she explores a writer whose best stories, as Wineapple has elsewhere observed, “penetrate the secret horrors of ordinary life, those interstices in the general routine where suddenly something or someone shifts out of place, changing everything.”

The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative texts of Hawthorne’s stories in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

A Spectator Best Book of the Year

“It’s an extremely handsome, well-designed book, and you couldn’t ask for a better introduction to Kafka…If you’ve never read Kafka before or if you already love him, you’ll still want Harman’s Selected Stories.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

A superb new translation of Kafka’s classic stories, authoritatively annotated and beautifully illustrated.

Selected Stories presents new, exquisite renderings of short works by one of the indisputable masters of the form. Award-winning translator and scholar Mark Harman offers the most sensitive English rendering yet of Franz Kafka’s unique German prose—terse, witty, laden with ambiguities and double meanings. With his in-depth biographical introduction and notes illuminating the stories and placing them in context, Harman breathes new life into masterpieces that have often been misunderstood.

Included are sixteen stories, arranged chronologically to convey a sense of Kafka’s artistic development. Some, like “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” and “The Transformation” (usually, though misleadingly, translated as “The Metamorphosis”), represent the pinnacle of Kafka’s achievement. Accompanying annotations highlight the wordplay and cultural allusions of the original German, pregnant with irony and humor that English readers have often missed.

Although Kafka has frequently been cast as a loner, in part because of his quintessential depictions of modern alienation, he had a number of close companions. Harman draws on Kafka’s diaries, extensive correspondence, and engagement with early twentieth-century debates about Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and Zionism to construct a rich portrait of Kafka in his world. A work of both art and scholarship, Selected Stories transforms our understanding and appreciation of a singular imagination.

In a world of mutually exclusive nation-states, international migration constitutes a fundamental anomaly. No wonder that such states have been inclined to select migrants according to their origins. The result is ethnic migration.

But Christian Joppke shows that after World War II there has been a trend away from ethnic selectivity and toward non-discriminatory immigration policies across Western states. Indeed, he depicts the modern state in the crossfire of particularistic and universalistic principles and commitments, with universalism gradually winning the upper hand. Thus, the policies that regulate the boundaries of states can no longer invoke the particularisms that constitute these boundaries and the collectivities residing within them.

Joppke presents detailed case studies of the United States, Australia, Western Europe, and Israel. His book will be of interest to a broad audience of sociologists, political scientists, historians, legal scholars, and area specialists.

The materials of this case-book are, in the main, familiar; but they have been organized upon a novel plan. Starting with the medieval actions of debt and covenant, the book traces the evolution of the ideas underlying these two actions through the more flexible action of assumption to the form which they have assumed in modern law. It next deals with the interpretation of both formal and informal contracts, with the remedies of specific performance, damages, and rescission, with the all-pervasive policy against forfeitures, and finally with the methods by which contract obligations may be altered or released. After contracts involving two parties only have been thus examined, the book proceeds to contracts which involve three parties, including promises for the benefit of strangers, assignments, and promises addressed in general terms to persons to be thereafter ascertained. There is a final chapter on illegal contracts. The book was prepared with an eye to the revised curriculum announced in the 1938 catalogue of the Harvard Law School, and with the hope that it would serve as an effective introduction to later courses in the fields of commercial, banking, and insurance law.

Though he died as Benito Mussolini's prisoner, leaving only newspaper articles and fragmentary notes, Antonio Gramsci is now seen as the most significant Marxist thinker since Lenin. This volume is the first English translation of his writings on culture, organically and coherently edited from his journalism and his Prison Notebooks.

Gramsci writes about the popular and the great artists from Jules Verne to Dante, but not as so many timeless monuments. He sees artworks in the context of their reception and their absorption in particular cultures and histories. He is sensitive to the politics of culture as well as to the demands of philological scholarship, as his superb work on Dante in this volume shows. We have in this book Gramsci's changing views on particular literary movements and authors, as well as his ideas on the nature of proletarian and popular cultural criticism. Throughout he is concerned with cultural analysis and strategy rather than literary criticism by itself. The headnotes and footnotes prepared by Forgacs and Nowell-Smith address themselves both to the circumstances surrounding the composition of each segment and to the central problems of contemporary Gramsci scholarship. Antonio Gramsci is the twentieth-century writer who has most brilliantly and suggestively explored the ties that bind culture and politics. The publication of this collection is an event of major significance for theorists of all sorts.

A literary collection honoring and memorializing Selena, the Queen of Tejano.

Thirty years after her death, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez remains a cherished figure of Mexican American popular culture, her music and celebrity resounding across the decades. This unique collection of creative and scholarly works traces Selena’s lasting impact as an entertainer and focal point of community and identity.

Assembling essays, memoir, short stories, and poems, The Selena Reader memorializes a beloved singer while also exploring the politics and personal meaning of what we remember. Selena’s eloquent admirers tell us what they took from her lyrics and stage presence, the official and fan tributes, and the media and products she inspired. In one essay, Tejana coming-of-age is sharply refracted through the prism of Selena’s art and social status. Another piece considers how Selena’s body and distinctive clothing have shaped the author’s sense of queer self. Honey Andrews, the renowned Selena impersonator, shares vivid recollections of her hero. A father and daughter describe how their conversations about Selena changed their relationship and contributed to Chicana feminist consciousness in their lives. All told, this anthology amplifies the gratitude of generations who have loved, and learned from, Selena.

An ARTery Best Book of the Year
An Art of Manliness Best Book of the Year

In a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul.

“An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard…Throughout Self and Soul, Edmundson writes with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor…[A] powerful, heartfelt book.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“[Edmundson’s] bold and ambitious new book is partly a demonstration of what a ‘real education’ in the humanities, inspired by the goal of ‘human transformation’ and devoted to taking writers seriously, might look like…[It] quietly sets out to challenge many educational pieties, most of the assumptions of recent literary studies—and his own chosen lifestyle.”
—Mathew Reisz, Times Higher Education

“Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living.”
—Kirkus Reviews

In what kind of world and for what kind of thought is time real, history open, and novelty possible? In what kind of world and for what kind of thought does it make sense for a human being to look for trouble rather than to stay out of trouble?In this long-awaited work of general philosophy, Roberto Mangabeira Unger proposes a radical reorientation of established ideas about nature, mind, society, politics, and religion. He shows how we have to change our beliefs if we are to succeed in doing justice to our most distinctive contemporary experiences, discoveries, and ideals.

The Self Awakened mobilizes the resources of several philosophical traditions, and develops the unrecognized revolutionary implications of the most influential of these traditions today--pragmatism. Avoiding technical jargon and needless complication, this book makes a case for philosophy as the supreme activity of the intellect at war, insisting on its power to deal with what matters most.

The topic of this book is self-consciousness, which is a kind of knowledge, namely knowledge of oneself as oneself, or self-knowledge. Sebastian Rödl's thesis is that self-knowledge is not empirical; it does not spring from sensory affection. Rather, self-knowledge is knowledge from spontaneity; its object and its source are the subject's own activity, in the primary instance its acts of thinking, both theoretical and practical thinking, belief and action.

The chapters of this book cover action and belief, freedom and reason, receptive knowledge and the second person. Each of these topics deserves its own book. And yet they would all be books on self-consciousness, for self-consciousness is the principle of their respective subject matters. Contemporary theories have been badly served by failing to acknowledge this. Taking the full measure of this insight requires a major conceptual reorientation in action theory, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology, which is begun in this book. As it can be said to be the principal thought animating Kant and his Idealist successors that self-consciousness occupies this central position, the book can be read as an attempt to recover and rejuvenate the achievement of the German Idealist tradition.