Pre-Columbian Bestiary
An encyclopedic collaboration between award-winning Mexican American scholar Ilan Stavans and illustrator Eko, A Pre-Columbian Bestiary features lively and informative descriptions of forty-six religious, mythical, and imaginary creatures from the...
Quixote
2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha-an ageless masterpiece that is unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into "a knight in skirts...
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges (1899--1986) is one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. His short stories, poems, essays, and translations explore Argentine mythology, mysticism, philosophical ideas, and myriad other topics. This ...
Shamans/Neo-Shamans
In popular culture, such diverse characters as occultist Aleister Crowley, Doors musician Jim Morrison, and performance artist Joseph Beuys have been called shamans. In anthropology, on the other hand, shamanism has associations with sorcery, witc...
Statins
Most cholesterol doesn't come from foods -- it's made by the body itself! Statins work by interfering with the body's ability to manufacture cholesterol. Statins: Miracle or Mistake? explains both the pro and con sides of this incredible drug, usi...
Shamans
With their ability to enter trances, to change into the bodies of other creatures, and to fly through the northern skies, shamans are the subject of both popular and scholarly fascination. In Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imaginat...
Shamans
A visually compelling and panoramic analysis of the eclectic culture of shamanism. Entering trance states, healing body and soul, invoking animals as spirit guides and journeying to incorporeal realms – these skills have been central to shamanism over thousands of years and across much of the world, from the Evenki shamans of northern and central Asia to contemporary Neo-Shamans of the West. Join cultural and social anthropologist Max Carocci as he explores an eclectic array of shamanic artefacts and images, decoding the symbolism and explaining their extraordinary shamanic ritual practices. Marvel at the adornments of a Siberian shaman’s coat; examine the prehistoric rock art that depicts mystical transformations of shamans into animals; and discover the psychotropic plants that open our minds to interdimensional journeys of healing and wisdom. Carocci makes the manifold meanings encoded in the forms, colours and purposes of shamanic images and objects clear, painting a vibrant and
Reclaiming Travel
Based on a controversial opinion piece originally published in the New York Times, Reclaiming Travel is a provocative meditation on the meaning of travel from ancient times to the twenty-first century. Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison seek to under...
The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories
The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories
What is American Literature?
What is American Literature?
Conversations on Dictionaries
Conversations on Dictionaries
Latinos in the United States
As the largest and youngest minority group in the United States, the 60 million Latinos living in the U.S. represent the second-largest concentration of Hispanic people in the entire world, after Mexico. Needless to say, the population of Latinos ...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This long-awaited biography provides a fascinating and comprehensive picture of Garcia Marquez's life up to the publication of his classic 100 Years of Solitude. Based on nearly a decade of research, this biographical study sheds new light on the ...
Conversations on Dictionaries
How did dictionaries come to be? When and how did they originate in a specific language? Who was involved in that origin story? How have they evolved over time? What is the tension between scholarly and commercial, and between prescriptive and descriptive, dictionaries? What is the politics behind each dictionary? And what is the connection between dictionaries and nation-building? This fascinating book has the answers. It brings together a collection of conversations with leading lexicographers from around the world to explore the role dictionaries have played in history, comparing the parallel histories of lexicography in twenty different languages. The conversations explore the way dictionaries, which preserve language while contributing to their standardization, are always political in nature, prescribing some words while cancelling others. Covering major world languages, indigenous languages, and hybrid languages, this is essential reading for academic researchers and students of
Jewish Literature
The story of Jewish literature is a kaleidoscopic one, multilingual and transnational in character, spanning the globe as well as the centuries. In this broad, thought-provoking introduction to Jewish literature from 1492 to the present, cultural ...