Books published by Columbia University Press

Classical Japanese: A Grammar is a comprehensive, and practical guide to classical Japanese. It includes detailed explanations of basic grammar and explains how classical Japanese is related to modern Japanese. This companion volume includes exercise answers and tables.

Now in its second edition, The Classic Hundred Poems presents the most anthologized poems in the English language in chronological order. Complete with detailed, informative notes; bibliographic information on poems and poets; a glossary of terms; and author, title, and first line indexes, The Classic Hundred Poems is a treasured resource for students, teachers, and poetry enthusiasts.

A collection of English-language readings on Japan. Containing materials on history, society, politics, education, philosophy, and religion, this book features an introduction to Japanese civilization. It covers the Tokugawa period to 1868 and addresses the spread of neo-Confucianism and Buddhism and the initial encounters of Japan and the West.

Offers an overview of 20th-century writing from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Containing stories from the colonial period in Taiwan, literature by Tibetan authors, samplings from the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, and others, this book gives an introduction to Chinese society and culture.

Distinguished philosophers, Buddhist scholars, physicists, and cognitive scientists examine the contrasts and connections between the worlds of Western science and Buddhism. Contributors, the Dalai Lama among them, assess not only the fruits of inquiry from East and West, they shed light on the underlying assumptions of these disparate world views.

This strategy, derived from Newtonian mechanism, is embodied in reductionism: break what is complicated into simpler pieces, understand the pieces themselves, and reconstruct organisms from this understanding. In Life Itself, Robert Rosen argues that such a view is neither necessary nor sufficient to answer the question.

A collection of primary readings on the social, intellectual, and religious traditions of China, this text provides a resource for scholars and students and an introduction for general readers.

Music videos have ranged from simple tableaux of a band playing its instruments to multimillion dollar, high-concept extravaganzas. Born of a sudden expansion in new broadcast channels, music videos continue to exert an enormous influence on popular music. They help to create an artist's identity, to affect a song's mood, to determine chart success: the music video has changed our idea of the popular song.Here at last is a study that treats music video as a distinct multimedia artistic genre, different from film, television, and indeed from the songs they illuminate-and sell. Carol Vernallis describes how verbal, musical, and visual codes combine in music video to create defining representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and performance. The book explores the complex interactions of narrative, settings, props, costumes, lyrics, and much more. Three chapters contain close analyses of important videos: Madonna's "e;Cherish,"e; Prince's "e;Gett Off,"e; and Peter Gabriel's "e;Mercy St."e;

A provocative guide to Deleuze by Deleuze, this collection traces the intellectual journey of one of the most important French philosophers and clarifies the key critical concepts in the work of this vital figure who has had an impact on aesthetics, film theory, psychoanalysis and cultural studies.

Richard John Lynn presents an English translation of the commentary on the "I Ching" written by Wang Bi (226-249), who was regarded as the chief authority on the work for some 700 years.

-- Burton Watson

An exploration into the "strange science of writing", in which the author reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for "great" writing: the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration; the importance of depth; and the notion of death.

The Buddhist priest Kenko clung to tradition, Buddhism, and the pleasures of solitude, and the themes he treats in his Essays, written sometime between 1330 and 1332, are all suffused with an unspoken acceptance of Buddhist beliefs.

The only English translation available of the most important first-hand account of the "Northern Crusades" in the Baltic states has finally been reprinted, with additional maps and a revised introduction by James A. Brundage. Henry's chronicle is the only surviving evidence for many episodes in the early stages of Christendom in the Eastern Baltic.