Events
Modern Language Association Annual Convention
January 5, 2024 | 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM
January 6, 2024 | 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM
January 7, 2024 | 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM
Visit us in the exhibit hall at booth 315A.
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Modernist Studies Association Annual Meeting
October 26, 2023 | 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM
October 27, 2023 | 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM
October 28, 2023 | 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM
October 29, 2023 | 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Visit us in the exhibit hall.
View Titles on Display
Featured Titles
Inliterary studies we publish books that examine how literature offers new ways of thinking about modern and contemporary history, politics, the global, gender, the environment, and our interaction with technology and media. We also publish books that explore the ways in which modern and contemporary literature and literary culture takes shape in institutions and society and how ideas and culture spread. In terms of approach, we are interested in books that mix archival work, aesthetic considerations, and a theoretical approach that emphasize an engagement with readers and a sense of literature’s engagement with the world.
Written in gripping and lively prose, Big Fiction recasts the past six decades of American fiction. This deeply original book features dazzling readings of a vast range of novelists, as well as vivid portraits of industry figures.
The Sisterhood tells the story of how this remarkable community of Black women writers transformed American writing and cultural institutions.
Turn the World Upside Downexplores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly—that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed.
Migrant Aesthetics shows how contemporary authors—Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Julie Otsuka, and Junot Díaz—expose the historical legacies and political injustices that produce forced migration through artistic innovation.
Writing Backwardsexplores what the dominance of historical fiction in the contemporary canon reveals about American literary culture.
Searching and conversational,Toneseeks immersion in literary affect to convey the experience of reading—and living—together.
In the Media
Big Publishing Killed the Author
The suggestion thatBeloved, Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel about slavery and its afterlives, is also a parable about the publishing industry would be bizarre, even offensive—if, that is, Morrison herself hadn’t explicitly suggested it. For years, Morrison had felt not merely penned in by her career as an editor at the publishing giant Random House; she had felt indentured, “held in contempt—to be played with when our masters are pleased, to be dismissed when they are not,” as she declared in a speech six years before publishingBeloved. Upon leaving her job at Random House to focus on writing full-time, she felt “free in a way I had never been, ever.… EnterBeloved.”
Reading Literary Success:On Dan Sinykin’sBig Fictionand Alexander Manshel’sWriting Backwards/ Omid Bagherli
Within the field of contemporary US novel studies, there is now a substantial body of work contributing to the “sociology of literary production.”1Perhaps the most interesting feature of such literary criticism is how it identifies the numerousinstitutional pressureswhich quietly impose themselves on today’s authors. Whether it’s a coercive nudge from an editor, a vague expectation internalized from a teachable text in the college classroom, or an observation about other book promos or prize announcements— such pressures are now seemingly relentless for any writer who wishes for some form of commercial or institutional success.
How Michele Wallace Sought Black Women’s Liberation Through Art
An extended community nurtured the achievements of The Sisterhood. Many other Black feminist groups and individual intellectuals in the 1970s and early 1980s shared The Sisterhood’s goals of publication and publicity for Black women writers, as well as the belief that political and social change could and should be made through culture. In this larger network of Black women literary activists, the group mattered to and benefited from the work of women who were not official members of The Sisterhood. Michele Wallace, Toni Cade Bambara, and Cheryll Y. Greene are especially important for understanding The Sisterhood’s impact. Wallace engaged, sharpened, and extended the group’s Black feminist ideas into literary and cultural criticism. Bambara extended their advocacy for Black women’s writing into the South and was an important friend and interlocutor, especially for Toni Morrison. Cheryll Y. Greene collaborated with Sisterhood members to get Black feminist thought into Black mainstream culture on the pages ofEssencemagazine.
Between the Covers Podcast
Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar: Tone
In Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar’sTonethey construct a shared voice, that of the “Committee to Investigate the Atmosphere.” Yes, they do this to investigate tone, in the writings of everyone from Nella Larsen to Clarice Lispector, W. G. Sebald to Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman to Bhanu Kapil. But in chasing the ever-elusive notion of tone, discovering its relational and atmospheric qualities, Zambreno & Samatar end up troubling the notion of selfhood and the individual, and in doing so, they trouble the notion of literary form as well.Tonebecomes an investigation not just of tone, but of the collective, of the communal, of the collaborative, and reveals the ways all writing is collaboration.
In this episode, Jeff O'Neal talks with Professor Courtney Thorsson about her new book, The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture.
This week, On The Media producer Eloise Blondiau speaks to Alexander Manshel, author ofWriting Backwards and authors Alexander CheeandMin Jin Leeabout how historical fiction became a rich resource for reckoning with our past.
Winston James speaks with Amanda Joyce Hall about his book Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik.
Edward Tyerman speaks with Julia Keblinska about his book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture.
BLACK LIVES IN THE DIASPORA: PAST / PRESENT / FUTURE SERIES
Published in partnership withHoward University’s College of Arts and SciencesandColumbia University’s African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, theseriesshowcases scholarship and writing that enriches our understanding of Black experiences in the past, present, and future with the goal of reaching beyond the academy to intervene in urgent national and international conversations about the experiences of people of African descent.Read about the editorial board.
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Literature Now
Literature Now, in its tenth anniversary, offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope, as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures.
Modernist Latitudes
Modernist Latitudes aims to capture the energy and ferment of modernist studies by continuing to open up the range of forms, locations, temporalities, and theoretical approaches encompassed by the field. The series celebrates the growing latitude (“scope for freedom of action or thought”) that this broadening affords scholars of modernism, whether they are investigating little-known works or revisiting canonical ones. Modernist Latitudes will pay particular attention to the texts and contexts of those latitudes (Africa, Latin America, Australia, Asia, Southern Europe, and even the rural United States) that have long been misrecognized as ancillary to the canonical modernisms of the global North.
Rereadings
Rereadings are short and accessible books by scholars, writers, and critics, each one revisiting a favorite post-1970 novel from the vantage point of the now. Taking a look at novels both celebrated and neglected, the series aims to display the full range of the possibilities of criticism, with books that experiment with form, voice, and method in an attempt to find different paths among scholarship, theory, and creative writing.
Award-Wining Titles: Literary Studies
Winner 2023-2024 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture
Torquil Duthie focuses on rendering the poetic language of theKokinshūas a whole, in such a way that readers can understand and experience how its poems work together to create a literary world.
Winner, 2022 National Book Critics Circle , Award for Criticism
Free Indirect develops a new theory of the novel for the twenty-first century. It contends that this self-awakening of contemporary fiction represents the most promising solution to the problem of thought today.
Winner, 2022 Tucholsky Prize, PEN Sweden
The Backstreets is an astonishing novel by a preeminent contemporary Uyghur author who was disappeared by the Chinese state. It is a stark fable about urban isolation and social violence, dehumanization and the racialization of ethnicity.
Winner, 2022 Best Book in Literary Studies, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL)
Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet cultural imagination.
Meet Our Editor
Philip Leventhal
English and Comparative Literature
If you would like to submit a book to Columbia University Press, please send aproposal containing a brief description of the content and focus of the book, a table of contents or chapter outline, a literature review and market analysis, and professional information about the author, including previous publications.
