Books published by Columbia University Press

Homeward from Heaven is Boris Poplavsky's masterpiece, written just before his life was cut short by a drug overdose at the age of thirty-two. Set in Paris and on the French Riviera, it recounts the escapades, malaise, and love affairs of a bohemian group of Russian expatriates.

In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ogimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Elegant, poetic, and revealing, In the Shelter of the Pine is the most significant work of literature by a woman of Japan's early modern era.

In the late eighteenth century, Muhammad Sadiq Kashghari wrote an account of religious and political conflicts in the Tarim Basin, part of present-day Xinjiang, on the eve of the Qing conquest. This volume presents the complete, long recension of In Remembrance of the Saints, translated for the first time into any language.

After a Choson faction realigned Korea with the Ming dynasty, the Manchu attacked in 1627 and again a decade later, forcing Korea to support the newly founded Qing dynasty. The Korean scholar-official Na Man'gap (1592-1642) recorded the second Manchu invasion in the only first-person account chronicling the dramatic Korean resistance.

Resolved is Ban Ki-moon's personal account of his ten years at the helm of the world body at a time of historic turmoil and promise. He explores past flashpoints to offer the story of diplomatic lessons learned.

The Brain and Pain explores the present and future of pain management, providing a comprehensive understanding based on the latest discoveries from many branches of neuroscience. Current and thorough, it will be invaluable for a range of people seeking to understand their options for treatment as well as students in neuroscience and medicine.

Michael J. Green provides a groundbreaking and comprehensive account of Japan's strategic thinking under Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. He explains the foundational logic and the worldview behind this approach, from key precedents in Japanese history to the specific economic, defense, and diplomatic priorities shaping contemporary policy.

Virginia C. Gildersleeve was the most influential dean of Barnard College, which she led from 1911 to 1947. In this biography, historian Nancy Woloch explores Gildersleeve's complicated career in academia and public life.

Martin Crowley argues that a new conception of agency as both distributed and decisive is necessary in the Anthropocene. A major intervention into ongoing debates in posthumanism, political ecology, and political theory, Accidental Agents reshapes our understanding of political agency in and for a more-than-human world.

Matthew W. King offers a groundbreaking account of the literary, social, and political history of the circulation, translation, and interpretation of Faxian's The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms. He reads its many journeys at multiple levels, contrasting the textual and interpretative traditions of the European academy and the Inner Asian monastery.

Ellen Jones offers a new framework for understanding literary multilingualism, emphasizing how authors and translators can use its defamiliarizing and disruptive potential. She examines the connection between translation and multilingualism and considers its significance for the theory, practice, and publishing of literature in translation.

In Kill the Documentary, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking. In place of the conventional documentary, she advocates for a "postrealist" cinema.

Leon Fink examines key cases of progressive influence on postwar U.S. foreign policy, tracing the tension between liberal aspirations and the political realities that stymie them. A diplomatic history that emphasizes the roles of class, labor, race, and grassroots activism, this book suggests new directions for progressive foreign policy.

Mark Shirk examines historical and contemporary state responses to transnational violence to develop a new account of the making of global orders. He considers a series of crises that plagued the state system: piracy in the eighteenth century, anarchist "propagandists of the deed" at the turn of the twentieth, and al Qaeda in recent years.

The scholarly culture of Ming dynasty China is often seen as prioritizing philosophy over concrete textual study. Nathan Vedal uncovers the preoccupation among Ming thinkers with specialized linguistic learning, a field typically associated with the intellectual revolution of the eighteenth century.

Nicole Iturriaga offers an ethnographic examination of how Spanish human rights activists use forensic methods to challenge dominant histories, reshape collective memory, and create new forms of transitional justice. Exhuming Violent Histories sheds new light on how science and technology intersect with human rights and collective memory.

This book tells the dramatic story of the Wuhan lockdown in the voices of the city's own people. Using a vast archive of more than 6,000 diaries, the sociologist Guobin Yang vividly depicts how the city coped during the crisis.

Sophie Volpp considers fictional objects of the late Ming and Qing that defy being read as illustrative of historical things. Instead, she argues, fictional objects are often signs of fictionality themselves, calling attention to the nature of the relationship between literature and materiality.

Two internationally recognized experts use newly available documents from al-Qaeda and ISIS to explain how jihadist groups think, grow, and adapt. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Thomas Joscelyn recast militant groups as learning organizations, detailing their embrace of strategic, tactical, and technological innovation.

Buried Beneath the City uses urban archaeology to retell the history of New York, working backward chronologically from the topsoil of recent history down to the deeper layers of the past. The book explores the ever-evolving city and the day-to-day world of its residents through artifacts.

David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Roberto Bolano's life and work have obscured his achievements-and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. He explores the novel as an epic of social structure and its decomposition.

This book is a comprehensive survey of the theories, principles, methods, and formats that are most appropriate and applicable to teaching in the field of social work. Drawing from her extensive classroom and field experience, Jeane W. Anastas identifies the factors that produce effective educational outcomes.

The years after World War I have often been seen as an era when Republican presidents and business leaders brought the growth of government in the United States to a halt. Jesse Tarbert reveals a forgotten effort by business-allied reformers to expand federal power-and how that effort was foiled by Southern Democrats and their political allies.

Profitably Healthy Companies lays out ten essential principles of organizational development for sustained success. Bringing together practical and academic expertise, W. Warner Burke and Michael O'Malley detail proven methods for every organization at each level.

This book is a comprehensive and inviting introduction to the literary forms and cultural significance of Chinese drama as both text and performance. Each chapter offers an accessible overview and critical analysis of one or more plays-canonical as well as less frequently studied works-and their historical contexts.

Hollywood has long enjoyed a "special relationship" with Israel. This book offers a groundbreaking account of this relationship, both on and off the screen. Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman investigate the many ways in which Hollywood's moguls, directors, and actors have supported or challenged Israel for more than seven decades.

In The Soft City, the ethnographer Terry Williams ventures deep into the underground world of sex in New York. The book explores different aspects of the "perverse space" of the city: porn theaters, sex shops, peep shows, restroom cruising, sadomasochism clubs, swingers' events, and many more.

Lawrence D. Brown presents five case studies of cities that have promoted active living with varying success through a range of approaches. He shows how and why the transformation of a call for public intervention into projects, programs, and policies is inescapably political.

This book brings together a broad selection of Siegfried Kracauer's work on media and political communication, much of it previously unavailable in English. It features writings spanning more than two decades, from the 1930s to the early Cold War period.

This book is a wide-ranging and accessible account of the interplay between Buddhism and medicine over the past two and a half millennia. C. Pierce Salguero traces the intertwining threads linking ideas, practices, and texts from many different times and places.