Princeton University Press Blog
Mind over chatter since 1905
Michael Robertson – Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples
Read Chapter 1, here.
C.K. Williams – On Whitman
Read Chapter 1, here.
Helen Vendler – Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery
Read the Introduction, here.
This week’s book giveaway is To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism 
by Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary.
July Fourth, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Memorial Day, and the pledge of allegiance are typically thought of as timeless and consensual representations of a national, American culture. In fact, as Cecilia O’Leary shows, most trappings of the nation’s icons were modern inventions that were deeply and bitterly contested. While the Civil War determined the survival of the Union, what it meant to be a loyal American remained an open question as the struggle to make a nation moved off of the battlefields and into cultural and political terrain.
The most thought-provoking question of this complex book is, Who gets to claim the American flag and determine the meanings of the republic for which it stands?
“This study is not only well researched but also a sprightly written account of the development of modern American patriotism. . . . This is truly a work ‘to die for.’”–Choice
“Well written . . . O’Leary makes an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the vital role that rituals and symbols have played in the development of American nationalism.”–Journal of Military History
Check back Friday on our Facebook page when we make the draw for “To Die For.” If you have LIKED US on Facebook, you may be the winner. If you don’t win this week, you have plenty of other chances to win a PUP book in our weekly random draws. Thanks for taking the time to follow us.
To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism by Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary
In recent weeks, we’ve had tremendous good news. Not only has Create Dangerously won OCM Bocas Prize for Nonfiction, but author Edwidge Danticat was announced as the winner of the Harold Washington Literary Award joining earlier winners like Barbara Ehrenreich (2010), Walter Mosley (2007), Grace Paley (2002), Isabel Allende (1996), and Ralph Ellison (1992). This is an amazing honor and we extend our congratulations to Edwidge!
Thoreau on books:
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
Thoreau on love:
What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the voice of one we love?
Thoreau on life and death:
Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master’s chaise. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
Few writers are more quotable than Henry David Thoreau. The Quotable Thoreau, the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of Thoreau quotations ever assembled, gathers more than 2,000 memorable passages from this iconoclastic American author, social reformer, environmentalist, and self-reliant thinker. Including Thoreau’s thoughts on topics ranging from sex to solitude, manners to miracles, government to God, life to death, and everything in between, the book captures Thoreau’s profundity as well as his humor (“If misery loves company, misery has company enough”). Drawing primarily on The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, published by Princeton University Press, The Quotable Thoreau is thematically arranged, fully indexed, richly illustrated, and thoroughly documented. For the student of Thoreau, it will be invaluable. For those who think they know Thoreau, it will be a revelation. And for the reader seeking sheer pleasure, it will be a joy.
The Quotable Thoreau
Edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer
We invite you to read the introduction online: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9391.html
Also available:
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Edited by J. Lyndon Shanley
With a new introduction by John Updike
Cape Cod
Henry David Thoreau
Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer
With a new introduction by Robert Pinsky
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Henry David Thoreau
Edited by Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell
With a new introduction by John McPhee
The Higher Law:
Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform
Henry David Thoreau
Edited by Wendell Glick
With an introduction by Howard Zinn
The Maine Woods
Henry David Thoreau
Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer
With a new introduction by Paul Theroux
The Press is publishing a plethora of new poetry titles this April, so we have a lot to celebrate! We are pleased to announce two important translations, the first annotated critical edition of a major poem by W. H. Auden, and two books in the revived Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Don’t forget to join the Lewis Center for the Arts later this month for the second biennial Princeton Poetry Festival and you can check out the Press’s poetry offerings here.
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Poems Under Saturn: Poèmes saturniens
Paul Verlaine The first complete English translation of the collection that announced Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) as a poet who would come to be regarded as one of the greatest of nineteenth-century writers. This new translation, by respected contemporary poet Karl Kirchwey, faithfully renders the collection’s heady mix of classical learning and earthy sensuality in poems whose rhythm and rhyme represent one of the supreme accomplishments of French verse. |
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The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue
Edited and with an introduction by Alan Jacobs This volume–the first annotated, critical edition of the poem–introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs’s introduction and thorough annotations help today’s readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden’s most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry. |
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New Impressions of Africa
Raymond Roussel This bilingual edition of Raymond Roussel’s most extraordinary work, New Impressions of Africa, presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford’s lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem’s peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo. |
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At Lake Scugog: Poems
The eagerly awaited collection of new poems from the author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was hailed by the New York Times as a “snappy, entertaining book.” A triumphant follow-up, At Lake Scugog demonstrates why the San Francisco Chronicle has called Troy Jollimore “a new and exciting voice in American poetry.” |
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Carnations: Poems
Often taking titles from a biblical vocabulary, Anthony Carelli’s remarkable debut, Carnations, reminds us that unremarkable places and events–a game of Frisbee in a winter park, workers stacking panes in a glass factory, or the daily opening of a café–can, in a blink, be new. |
You didn’t pick up an Oscar this year at the Academy Awards? Well, with Hollywood films in mind, here’s a book you’ll want to pick up: Working-Class Hollywood by Steven J. Ross. In addition, it’s this week’s book giveaway on Facebook. 
Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people’s dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.
“Steve Ross has written an absorbing and important book about a time when working-class life and working-class filmmakers occupied a central place in American cinema. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in the politics of American film read this book.”–Michael Moore, Director of Roger and Me and TV Nation
Anyone who LIKES us on Facebook is automatically entered in our weekly draws. This Friday at 3:30 p.m. EST, check out our facebook page to find out, “And the winner is….”
Working-Class Hollywood by Steven J. Ross
Wystan Hugh Auden, had he lived an exceptionally long life, would have been 104 today. He died at the young age of 67 in 1973, leaving an ardent band of young poet followers – and the entire literary canon – bereft. To celebrate Auden’s 104th year, Princeton University Press has three new books out to mark the occasion; among them Aidan Wasley’s THE AGE OF AUDEN: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene. Though born in England, Auden moved to America in 1939 (becoming a U.S. citizen in 1946), where he exerted a profound influence on a generation of American poets like Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery.
Below you’ll find an interview Wasley had with Ashbery, one of America’s most distinguished poets, reflecting on his personal and poetic encounters with Auden. Enjoy!
Q: Do you recall your first meeting with Auden?
John Ashbery: I first met him when he gave a reading at Harvard, I think in the spring of ’47, perhaps. A friend of mine, who was also a poet, George Montgomery—he was a student who was a little older than I was, having been in the war and come back—had a party for Eliot and I met Auden there and chatted with him. All I can remember talking about was asking him whether he liked living in England better than living in America. He said he preferred America, though he preferred the English countryside because it was much tidier looking… And then I remember running into him about a year later at a lunch counter somewhere in Harvard Square and I reintroduced myself. I think at that time I was writing my Senior Paper on him. After I moved to New York, I think I met him maybe a year or so after that at the apartment of John Bernard Myers and then I sort of lost sight of him again. Then when I got to know James Schuyler I would occasionally go over to Auden’s apartment to see Chester [Kallman] because Schuyler and Chester were good friends… I was always a bit intimidated by him, as I think many people were.
Q: Are there any Auden poems that are touchstone poems for you?
JA: Well, I love The Orators and Paid on Both Sides. I can remember first lines: “Consider this and in our time.” Those ballads “Victor” and “Miss Gee” got me interested in rhythms of popular songs and ballads. “Taller to-day,” “Spain,” “Paysage Moralisé,” “A Bride in the 30’s.” In fact, I just wrote a cento that uses “Lay your sleeping head…” (“The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” Wakefulness, 1998). “As I Walked Out One Evening” was one of my favorites. Was “Musée des Beaux Arts” in that little book from “Four Weddings and A Funeral?” Because that was used in the movie “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” That’s a terrific movie actually, and that poem, as it’s used in the movie, is really worth watching… . “Canzone,” I liked. I always liked the line, “The mouse you banished yesterday / Is an enraged rhinoceros today.” I’ve had a lot of experience with students like that. And then The Age of Anxiety came out when I was fully launched into Auden’s poetry and I liked that. And I always liked his Anglo-Saxon moments.
–New York City, May 1997 – courtesy of Aidan Wasley
For more interesting commentary on Auden, check out Wasley’s 2007 essays for Slate’s Auden Centennial and of course, don’t miss THE AGE OF AUDEN: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene.
FACT: The Harlem riot of 1935 not only signaled the end of the Harlem Renaissance; it made black America’s cultural capital an icon for the challenges of American modernity.
Harlem Crossroads:
Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century
By Sara Blair
Luring photographers interested in socially conscious, journalistic, and aesthetic representation, post-Renaissance Harlem helped give rise to America’s full-blown image culture and its definitive genre, documentary. The images made there in turn became critical to the work of black writers seeking to reinvent literary forms. Harlem Crossroads examines their deep, sustained engagements with photographic practices. Arguing for Harlem as a crossroads between writers and the image, Sara Blair explores its power for canonical writers, whose work was profoundly responsive to the changing meanings and uses of photographs.
Read the introduction online at:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8510.html
For more books in our sale catalog, please visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/booksale/
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Writing in the Soapbox column of Publishers Weekly this week, Andrei Codrescu makes a new case for the elusive and exclusive author. He argues that Facebook and other social networking sites are ” giving away stupid prose for free!” and that familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed book sales.
He writes, “not only do you not sell books by being friendly, you won’t sell any because everyone in your ‘social network’ thinks they know you. Why buy your books, since you’ll tell them everything they want to know for free.”
So, what do you think? Is Facebook the marketing mecca we have been promised? Or are publishers and authors actually cannibalizing their sales by providing too much access to what we are selling?
The responses on Twitter are worth perusing for their range of support to disbelief.
We have now published two books with Andrei and have a third on the way. If you are a fan, check out his books The Poetry Lesson and The Posthuman Dada Guide. His next book Whatever Gets You through the Night will publish this June.
From a Swedish hotel made of ice to the enigma of UFOs, from a tragedy on Lake Minnetonka to the gold mine of cyberpornography, The Princeton Reader brings together more than 90 favorite essays by 75 distinguished writers. This collection of nonfiction pieces by journalists who have held the Ferris/McGraw/Robbins professorships at Princeton University offers a feast of ideas, emotions, and experiences–political and personal, light-hearted and comic, serious and controversial–for anyone to dip into, contemplate, and enjoy.
The volume includes a plethora of topics from the environment, terrorism, education, sports, politics, and music to profiles of memorable figures and riveting stories of survival. These important essays reflect the high-quality work found in today’s major newspapers, magazines, broadcast media, and websites.
The book’s contributors include such outstanding writers as:
• Ken Armstrong of the Seattle Times
• Jill Abramson, Jim Dwyer, and Walt Bogdanich of the New York Times
• Evan Thomas of Newsweek
• Joel Achenbach and Marc Fisher of the Washington Post
• Nancy Gibbs of Time
• Jane Mayer, John McPhee, Alex Ross and John Seabrook of the New Yorker
• Alexander Wolff, senior writer at Sports Illustrated
• Michael Dobbs, formerly of Washington Post, now a Cold War historian and author
• Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times‘ Beijing Bureau Chief
• James V. Grimaldi, Washington Post, Pulitzer prize-winner
• Roberta Oster Sachs, formerly ABC, CBS, and NBC news and Emmy Award winner, now University of Richmond School of Law
• Joel Stein, columnist and a regular contributor to Time
• Claudia Roth Pierpont, staff writer at New Yorker
• Greil Marcus, music and culture critic, author, has been a columnist for the New York Times, The Believer
For a complete listing, visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/TOCs/c9322.html
The perfect collection for anyone who enjoys compelling narratives, The Princeton Reader contains a depth and breadth of nonfiction that will inspire, provoke, and endure.
John McPhee’s many books include Annals of the Former World, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Carol Rigolot is executive director of the Humanities Council at Princeton University.
We invite you to read chapter one online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9322.pdf
The Princeton Reader:
Contemporary Essays by Writers and Journalists at Princeton University
Edited by John McPhee & Carol Rigolot
This photograph was taken at the mid-November launch for Lawrence P. Jackson’s new book, The Indignant Generation. Thank you to the New York Institute of Humanities for playing host and assembling a wonderful audience. We can’t imagine a better place or time to launch this new project. To view a video of Jackson describing the meticulous research he conducted while writing the book, please visit this web site.
Shown in the picture, left to right, are Mark Greif, Darryl Pinckney, Lawrence Jackson, and Rhoda Levine.
This was taped earlier this morning. Edwidge will also be on Leonard Lopate this afternoon.
At Goodreads, enter for a chance to win
Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy
by Mark P. Witton.
![j9967[1]](http://blog.press.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/j99671.gif)
For 150 million years, the skies didn’t belong to birds–they belonged to the pterosaurs. These flying reptiles, which include the pterodactyls, shared the world with the nonavian dinosaurs until their extinction 65 million years ago. This richly illustrated book takes an unprecedented look at these astonishing creatures, presenting the latest findings on their anatomy, ecology, and extinction.
Enter by July 9, 2013 for a chance to win!
Good luck!
These are the best-selling books for the past week.
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College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco |
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No Joke: Making Jewish Humor by Ruth R. Wisse |
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Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson |
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The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil |
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Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today’s Computers by John MacCormick |
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On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt |
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Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 by Italo Calvino Selected and with an introduction by Michael Wood Translated by Martin McLaughlin |
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Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica by T.J. Clark |
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Kafka: The Years of Insight by Reiner Stach Translated by Shelley Frisch |
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger & Michael Starbird |
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