September 13, 2021

Announcing Our 2021-2022 Philosophy Catalog

Letter from the Philosophy Editor: It is with great pleasure that I present the Columbia University Press philosophy catalog for 2022. These titles, which span subjects from critical theory to political philosophy to philosophy of religion, aesthetics, environmental and animal...

September 9, 2021

Gender Bending and Homosexuality in an Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel

By Susan Chan Egan

What does one make of a male adolescent who is sometimes mistaken for a girl; fancies himself a calligrapher and aesthete; has excessive sympathy for all things pretty that extends even to fallen flower petals; indulges in affectionate sex play...

September 7, 2021

Q&A: Pai Hsien-yung on Chinese Notions of the Afterlife and The Story of the Stone

The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber) is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature. Embedded in the novel is a biting critique of imperial China’s political and social system. The...

September 3, 2021

What’s in a Word: An AUP RoundUP

By Olivia Treynor

With one month-long celebration of women in translation literature behind us and another month of commemorating world literature in progress, I’ve been thinking about language: how language shapes our perception of our reality, how language shifts, how we communicate as...

September 1, 2021

National Translation Month 2021! A Celebration of Diverse Voices

By Olivia Treynor

Welcome to National Translation Month 2021! Founded eight years ago, National Translation Month is an annual celebration of global literature. This September, we are excited to present an eclectic mix of books. Ranging from a beloved Persian epic to a...

August 31, 2021

Does Literature Have to Be Monolingual?

Ellen Jones on Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel and Multilingualism in Translation

Japanese writer Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel was originally published in 1995 under the title Shishōsetsu: From Left to Right, to huge uproar. It is a reworking of the traditional “shishōsetsu” or “I novel,” a modernist Japanese autofictional genre that is...

August 24, 2021

Q&A: Juliet Winters Carpenter on Translating Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel

Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel, published in 1995, radically broke with Japanese literary tradition by liberally incorporating English words and phrases and printing the entire text horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left....

August 17, 2021

Where Are the Women Writers?

The Missing Literature of Japan’s Edo Period

By G. G. Rowley

Writing by Japanese women flourished from the late tenth through the early fourteenth centuries. Almost all of the surviving works from this period have now been translated into English, some more than once, and many are available in editions suitable...

August 10, 2021

Mongolia’s Women Writers

By Simon Wickhamsmith

Since the Soviet-backed 1921 revolution, Mongolia’s writers have worked to find responses both to traditional genres and themes and to the Russian and Euro-American styles, and the three women writers whose work is translated in Suncranes and Other Stories—S. Udval...

August 3, 2021

An August Cemetery and the Ridiculous Task of the Translator

By Maria Vassileva

Maria Stepanova’s essay “Over Venerable Graves” is the very last text in our volume The Voice Over, but it opens the collection in which it was first published in Russian.[i] Its first paragraph serves as the cover image of that...