Columbia University Press

Congratulations to Ross Melnick author of American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908-1935 for receiving the 2013 “Book of the Year” Award from the Theatre Historical Society of America.

For more on the book: An interview with Ross Melnick; Ross Melnick on how Roxy changed the movie industry; and the birth of Radio City Music Hall

Congratulations to our design department for being selected by jurors of Association of American University Press’s Book, Jacket, and Journal Show as the very best examples … of excellent design.”

The winners included Let the Meatballs Rest: And Other Stories About Food and Culture by Massimo Montanari; translated by Beth A. Brombert for scholarly typographic and LoveKnowledge: The Life Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida, by Roy Brand for its jacket. The book’s jacket (see below) also won an award in the 2013 New York Book Show in the category of Professional and Scholarly Books:

We were very excited to learn that several Columbia University Press titles and those of our distributed press Edinburgh were winners of the prestigious CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012.

Here’s the list and congratulations to the authors:

Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam
Shahzad Bashir

In Defense of Religious Moderation
William Egginton

Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier
Theodore Hughes

Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context
Edited by Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi

Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism
Jonathan Lyons

Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters
Gordon Shepherd

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts
Haruo Shirane

When More Is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan
Astri Suhrke

A History of Namibia: From the Beginning to 1990
Marion Wallace; with John Kinahan

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Congratulations to Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who have been awarded the 2013 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order for their work on Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. From the official award announcement:

“The implications of their work are enormous,” said award director Charles Ziegler. “Not only do their findings validate the work done by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., but they shed new light on the political change we’re seeing today, such as the Arab Spring process in Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations.”

The book by Chenoweth and Stephan also won the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for best book published in the United States on government, politics or international affairs.

UofL presents four Grawemeyer Awards each year for outstanding works in music composition, world order, psychology and education. The university and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary jointly give a fifth award in religion. This year’s awards are $100,000 each.

Again, congratulations to Professors Chenoweth and Stephan on this latest honor, and thanks to the University of Louisville and the Grawemeyer Awards judges for recognizing the hard work that went into Why Civil Resistance Works!

Congratulations to Stephen Schryer, whose book Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction has won the 2012 Robert K. Martin Book Prize!

The Robert K. Martin Book Prize is “is awarded for the best book published by a CAAS member in a calendar year,” and we are very proud that Professor Schryer’s work, along with Tess Chakkalakal’s Novel Bondage, has been recognized. The CAAS blog reports that “[prize committee members] describe Dr. Schryer’s study as ‘a rich and provocative study of the emergent aesthetics, politics, and sociology of postwar professionalism, one that leaves little doubt as to the cultural significance of the ideological formations you trace.’”

Congratulations again to Professor Schryer and to Philip Leventhal, the book’s editor!

Congratulations to Kenneth Goldsmith, whose book Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age was recently awarded Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (A.S.A.P) Book Award.

Here is the announcement from A.S.A.P.

Uncreative Writing was praised by prize committee members for its clear and engaging prose, its theoretical savvy, and its unique and riveting perspective on teaching creating writing by turning to the internet and digital environments that allow students to practice and analyze the implications of techniques such as cutting and pasting, databasing, identity ciphering, and programming. Goldsmith uses sources as diverse as courtroom testimony, robo-poetics, and Twitter to teach students fundamentals of poetic form. As noted in book commentary, Goldsmith substitutes for authenticity a method of appropriation, which he says deals “a knockout blow to notions of traditional authorship.” It does not, however, deal a knockout blow to art: the results are in fact astounding, and book prize committee members noted the sophistication of the formal lessons the author was able to draw from his radical artistic practice that connects writing education to theory and praxis by Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Andy Warhol, and others. ASAP offers congratulations to Kenneth Goldsmith, winner of our 2011 Book Prize!

Congratulations to Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie authors of Designing for Growth: A Design Toolkit for Managers, which was named as a Best Business Book for 2011 in the management category by 800-CEO-READ.

From 800CEOREAD:

Most managers probably don’t consider themselves designers—they manage people and processes. But consider this: Instead of just thinking about who does what, how and when, what if managers began to think about how these tasks interact with customers, how the space these activities are done in (both the real space and metaphorical space) create efficiency, buy-in, job fulfillment, and profitability? By treating management as a design process, managers can create systems that have quality built in rather than simply offering rules and guidelines for employees to follow. This book is the guide to making that shift, and is an important resource for those who lead people.

For more on the book here is Tim Ogilvie discussing Designing for Growth:

We were very excited to learn that two of our authors will be receiving awards at this year’s Modern Language Association’s annual conference. And the winners are:

Donna V. Jones for her book The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. From the citation for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies

Donna V. Jones’s Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity is a groundbreaking study of négritude and its major theorists, the poets Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, that examines their adaptation and transformation of the philosophies of vitalism proposed by Henri Bergson. Carefully tracing the tradition of Western modernity that posits the mechanical state and mechanism as its dominant forms, Jones shows how Senghor and Césaire rework “vital force” in their metaphysics and poetics and how—even as it is implicated in forms of racism and colonialism—vitalism remains an important influence on modern discourses of postcolonialism and racial emancipation. Expansive in its range and precise in its readings, the book invites a significant rethinking of important movements and philosophies of the twentieth century.

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Congratulations to Charles Egan, who recently was awarded the 2011 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) for Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown: Poems by Zen Monks of China .

The jury for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize praised Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown for “not only the high quality of its translations, which strive to keep a handsome formal ease even when observing in English the demands of syntactic parallelism, but also the considerable scholarship that Egan employs with admirable accessibility.”

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A belated congratulations to Patrick Keating’s whose book Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir was selected by the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) as the Best First Book in 2011. The award was presented to Keating this past weekend at the SCMS annual conference.

Congratulations also to Peter Decherney, author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American, who won the service award which honors individuals who have demonstrated sustained commitment to the Society.

Congratulations to the 10 books named as Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010!

Every year, Choice subject editors single out for recognition the most significant print and electronic works reviewed in Choice during the previous calendar year. Appearing annually in Choice’s January issue, this prestigious list of publications reflects the best in scholarly titles and attracts extraordinary attention from the academic library community. The 2010 feature includes 668 titles in 54 disciplines and subsections. Here are the Columbia University Press titles that won:

Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdjik
The International Politics of Intelligence Sharing by James Igoe Walsh
Virus Alert by Stefan Elbe
Impaled Upon a Thistle by Ewen A. Cameron
Triassic Life on Land by Hans-Dieter Sues and Nicholas C. Fraser
Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth by Stephen Phillips
Everyday Ethics and Social Change by Anna L. Peterson
The Moral Fool by Hans-Georg Moeller
Pragmatism as Transition by Colin Koopman
Firestorm by Stephen Prince

To see a complete list of all our award winning titles click here.

Smart Growth: Building an Enduring Business by Managing the Risks of Growth, by Edward Hess has been receiving a variety of year-end accolades. Inc. Magazine listed it as one of the year’s best for business owners. In recommending the book, Bo Burlingham wrote:

The definitive rebuttal to the myth of “grow or die.” Professor Hess’s examples in Smart Growth come mainly from public companies, but his insights, conclusions, and advice apply equally to privately owned businesses of all shapes and sizes.

The book was also selected one of The top 10 business reads of 2010 by the Toronto Globe and Mail, which wrote:

[Hess] debunks the prevailing belief, inspired by Wall Street, that companies must grow or die. He shows how rare it is for companies to continually grow, and offers a more sensible, nuanced approach, based on a thoughtful, detailed consideration of what type of growth is best for your company.

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Congratulations to Alexander C. Y. Huang who recently won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies for his book, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange.

The committee’s citation for Huang’s book reads:

Alexander C. Y. Huang’s Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange maps new territory for the most promising project in comparative literature today. Huang’s object is the movement of cultural forms across geographical space, but he regards such movement not as mere diffusion or even as exchange. Instead he examines the way movement across geographical and geopolitical fault lines reaches into cultural forms and changes their meanings from the inside, often revealing possibilities that had lain dormant, unnoticed, or submerged in the texts’ cultures of origin. Remarkable not only for its sophistication but also for its scholarly depth, Chinese Shakespeares is a landmark in the renewal of comparative literature as a discipline.

For more on Chinese Shakespeares, watch a video of highlights of four adaptations of “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “Lear,” on screen and stage with commentary by Alexander Huang:

We were very excited to learn that Siddharth Kara won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery.

The prize goes to the best book written in English on slavery or abolition. Sex Trafficking is the first winner to examine contemporary slavery. Martha Hodes, the 2010 Douglass Prize Jury Chair and Professor of History at New York University, wrote:

[Sex Trafficking] carefully and compassionately convinces us to understand the phenomenon of modern-day human sex trafficking as part of the history of slavery and abolition. For his research, Kara posed as a customer across Asia, Europe, and the United States, entangling himself with perpetrators and speaking confidentially with victims. Sidestepping sensationalism and absent any delusion of casting himself as a rescuer, Kara relates wrenching stories in lucid prose, thereby shedding a strong and steady beam of light on a widespread and ongoing global crime. With an exemplary mixture of courage and humility, the author combines a gripping first-person narrative with trenchant economic analysis and clear-eyed proposals for change. In the end, this book prevents us from consigning slavery to the past.

For more on the book: Watch a video of Kara discussing the book | Read an interview with Siddharth Kara | Read excerpts from the book or look inside the book.

Congratulations to Kenneth Posner’s whose Stalking the Black Swan: Research and Decision Making in a World of Extreme Volatility won the prize for the best foreign book in business at the Sharjah International Book Fair.

For more on the book browse the book via Google Preview, read the introduction, or watch Kenneth Posner on Tech Ticker.

The Triumph Of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London, by Lisa Keller has been selected as a co-recipient of the Kenneth Jackson Book Award.

Congratulations to Lisa Keller. For more on the book browse the book using Google Preview, read blog posts by Lisa Keller, or read the book’s introduction.

Congratulations to Ted Striphas, whose Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control recently won the 2010 Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association’s Critical Cultural Studies Division.

For more on the book read an excerpt | Visit the blog The Late Age of Print | Watch a video for the book.

Congratulations to Patrick Manning, whose book The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture was recently named the winner of the 2010 Association of Third World Studies Toyin Falola Africa Book Award.

Here’s what the judges of the book had to say about the book:

“The author is adept at tying together what are seemingly separate and unconnected phenomena. Integrating such a complexity (six centuries and several continents) was challenging enough, but it was done with an almost elegant simplicity….”

“Manning challenges three paradigms that have shaped the study of African peoples: (1) their exclusion from studies on modernity, (2) their exclusion from a global integrated study as a group, and (3) their absence of clearly defined thematic structures that encapsulate the experiences of the Africana. Through a new approach to the study of the African Diaspora, Manning shows how African peoples in the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Mediterranean contributed to modernity through Diasporas, networks, mixes, hinterlands, and exchanges on the roads between centers….”

For more on the book read the epilogue, The Future of the African Diaspora .

The Washington Institute announced that From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust has won the Gold Prize.

The Washington Institute Book Prize, now in its third year, was established to highlight new nonfiction books on the Middle East and is among the world’s most lucrative literary awards.

The following is from the prize jury commendation:

From Empathy to Denial is the definitive exposé of a deeply held prejudice obscured by politics and partisanship. Through painstaking sifting of Arabic sources, the authors carefully measure the psychological barriers that block Arab comprehension of the Holocaust’s significance for Israel, Jewry, and the world. In so doing, Meir Litvak and Esther Webman tell a neglected story behind the persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Silver Prize went to The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle, by Michael Young (Simon & Schuster)

The Bronze Prize was awarded to: Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, by Jeffrey Herf (Yale University Press)

Those are words we are hoping to hear soon as a number of Columbia University Press books have made it to the final rounds of award competitions and we are waiting to hear if we are the lucky winner.

Yesterday Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition announced that Siddharth Kara’s book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery is a finalist for the 2010 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

We are especially proud of the strength of our translation program, which has produced two finalists in recent months.

Translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, Hwang Sunwon’s short story collection Lost Souls has made it to the final round of the American Literary Translators Association’s 2010 National Translation Award.

The French-American Foundation Translation Prize proudly choose Beverley Bie Brahic’s translation of Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need to Believe as a Finalist in the Non-Fiction category.

And last but not least, Chinese Shakespeares by Alexander C.Y. Huang won an Honorable Mention from the Joe A. Callaway Prize for 2008-09 for the best book on drama or theatre. The award is presented by New York University’s Department of English.

Congratulations to the authors and translators of these outstanding books. Keep your fingers crossed that we win!