Books published by Columbia University Press

Richard Kearney offers a timely call for the cultivation of the basic human need to touch and be touched. Making the case for the complementarity of touch and technology, this book is a passionate plea to recover a tangible sense of community and the joys of life with others.

Ada Smailbegovic shows how twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds.

In the aftermath of the cataclysmic Maoist period, three Tibetan Buddhist scholars living and working in the People's Republic of China became intellectual heroes. Nicole Willock reveals how they negotiated the political tides of the twentieth century, shedding new light on Sino-Tibetan relations and Buddhism during this turbulent era.

Founded in 1676, Mindroeling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Dominique Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindroeling to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics.

The trauma experts Mark C. Russell and Charles Figley offer an impassioned and meticulous critique of the systemic failures in military mental health care in the United States. The book offers actionable prescriptions for change and a comprehensive approach to significantly improving military mental health.

Jennifer Egan described her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad as a combination of Proust and The Sopranos. In rereading the book, Ivan Kreilkamp takes Egan up on her comparison, showing how it blends a concern with the status of the novel today with an elegiac meditation on how we experience the passage of time.

Henning Hillmann examines the merchant community of Saint-Malo, Brittany, a key port in the French Atlantic economy, to shed light on the local networks that linked commerce and conflict in early modern Europe. He combines rich descriptions of privateering campaigns with quantitative network analysis of partnership ties over more than a century.

Yarden Katz reveals the ideology embedded in the concept of artificial intelligence, contending that it both serves and mimics the logic of white supremacy. Only by seeing the connection between artificial intelligence and whiteness can we prioritize alternatives to the conception of AI as an all-encompassing technological force.

Si Nae Park examines how the culture of Choson Seoul gave rise to a new vernacular literary form (yadam), anonymously and unofficially circulating tales. She focuses on the collection Repeatedly Recited Stories of the East, which was written in a new medium in which Literary Sinitic is hybridized with the vernacular realities of Choson society.

Zhou History Unearthed offers both a novel understanding of early Chinese historiography and a fully annotated translation of Xinian (String of Years), the most notable historical manuscript from the state of Chu. Yuri Pines details the importance of Xinian and other recently discovered texts for our understanding of history writing in Zhou China.

This book offers a lively exploration of the mathematics, physics, and neuroscience that underlie music. Written for musicians and music lovers with any level of science and math proficiency, including none, Music, Math, and Mind demystifies how music works while testifying to its beauty and wonder.

Sara Hsu and Jianjun Li explore the transformative potential of China's financial-technology industry, describing the risks and rewards for participants as well as the impact on consumers. Offering expert analysis of market potential, risks, and competition, as well as case studies of firms, China's Fintech Explosion is a must-read.

Hans Hansen offers readers a powerful model for creating significant organizational, social, and institutional change. He unpacks the lessons of the fight to change capital punishment in Texas, revealing how narratives shape our everyday lives and how we can construct new narratives to enact positive change.

In The Alchemy of Disease, John Whysner offers an accessible and compelling history of toxicology and its key findings. He details the experiments and discoveries that revealed the causal connections between chemical exposures and diseases.

Fandango and Other Stories presents a selection of essential short fiction by Alexander Grin, Russia's counterpart to Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alexandre Dumas. Grin's ingenious plots explore conflicts of the individual and society in a romantic world populated by a cast of eccentric, cosmopolitan characters.

Kaihan Krippendorff reveals how many of the modern world's most impactful creations were invented by passionate employee-innovators. He lays out a step-by-step playbook to unlock innovation from the inside, mapping the barriers that frustrate efforts to disrupt from within and providing tools to remove them.

Leor Halevi tells the story of the Islamic trials of technological and commercial innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shedding light on culture, commerce, and consumption in Cairo and other colonial cities, Modern Things on Trial is a groundbreaking account of Islam's material transformation in a globalizing era.

Barriers Down reveals the unexpected origins of freedom of information in political, economic, and cultural battles in the postwar period. Diana Lemberg traces how the United States shaped media around the world under the banner of the "free flow of information," showing how the push for global media access acted as a vehicle for American power.

Acclaimed philosopher Catherine Malabou traces the modern metamorphoses of intelligence, seeking to understand how neurobiological and neurotechnological advances have transformed our present-day view. She emphasizes the intertwined, networked relationships among the biological, the technological, and the symbolic.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein provides a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism "monstrous"-at once repellent and seductive-is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created.

Neuroscientist David E. Presti, with the assistance of other researchers, explores how evidence for anomalous phenomena-such as near-death experiences, apparent memories of past lives, apparitions, and other so-called psi or paranormal phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition-can influence the Buddhism-science conversation.

Mari Ruti combines theoretical reflection, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal anecdotes to analyze the prevalence of bad feelings in everyday life. Proceeding from a playful engagement with Freud's idea of penis envy, Ruti fans out to a broader consideration of neoliberal pragmatism and a trenchant critique of gender relations.

Literature, film, and television have become obsessed with the intersection of survival and choice. Jane Elliott analyzes this new and distinctive aesthetic phenomenon, which she calls the microeconomic mode, through close readings that show how an aesthetics of choice has reshaped contemporary understanding of what it means to be human.

The first English translation of this remarkable 1910 novel by Alexei Remizov, Sisters of the Cross is a masterpiece of early modernist fiction. It tell the story of a poor clerk who rebels against the suffering and humiliation afflicting his own life and the women he encounters in the tenement building where he lives in Petersburg.

In this Ming-era novel, historical narrative, raucous humor, and the supernatural are interwoven to tell the tale of an attempt to overthrow the Song dynasty. Quelling the Demons' Revolt is centered on the rebellion led by Wang Ze in 1047-48, warning of the vulnerability of a world plagued by demonic forces as well as mundane corruption.

This volume culls the most important and provocative research and policy analysis in the child welfare field and is an essential guide for understanding the burgeoning field of children's services.

Aimed at the general reader, this introduction to Japanese literature assumes no previous knowledge of Japanese culture. The author presents a series of essays which provide an overview of pre-modern Japanese poetry and fiction, as well as theatre and aesthetics.