The 2024 solar eclipse might be an omen, but what does it portend? April 18, 2024 As the warmest winter in human history draws to a close, many of us are unsure about what comes next. At least celestial mechanics are unaffected. Read More
James Marcus on Glad to the Brink of Fear April 15, 2024 James Marcus introduces us to Emerson as a visionary and a skeptic, an ardent lover and a fiery political activist. Read More
Beyond bestiaries: the cats and dogs of Old English February 12, 2024 The words for ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ are virtually the same in Old English – hund (from which we get ‘hound’) and cat or catte (pronounced COT-tuh). Read More
Exploring Black Experiences February 01, 2024 First proposed by Black educators and the Black United Students at Kent State University in 1969, Black History Month, celebrated annually in February in the US, is an opportunity to celebrate Black voices, achievements, and to reflect on the central role of African Americans throughout US history. Princeton University Press is proud to publish books that engage with serious issues and ideas relating to Black experiences. Read More
Turning language inside out January 05, 2024 We know that words wield immense power. They express, represent, inspire, provoke, evoke. They can wound, figuratively, and also literally. Read More
Books for finding balance December 26, 2023 Research shows conclusively that overwork can be harmful to employees and humans at large, and yet it can be hard to find public examples of choices that support true balance, or guidance that puts health ahead of hustle. Read More
The long history of the chapter book November 14, 2023 Very few adult readers are likely to remember it, but imagine, if you will, your first experience reading a book divided into chapters. What confronted you was a story that unexpectedly stuttered. Read More
Lingering, longing at dawn October 23, 2023 In a mountain town whose name I’ve forgotten, about fifty miles from Marrakech, I remembered an old woman sitting alone in a field. She had lost her home. Read More
Simon West on Prickly Moses October 13, 2023 An uncanny blend of the external and the intimate has been a hallmark of Simon West’s poetry for nearly twenty years. In this new collection, the Australian poet and Italianist delights in the transforming and endlessly varied powers of naming and speaking. Read More
In Praise of Good Bookstores September 07, 2023 Jeff Deutsch—the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world—pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. Read More
Emily Hauser on How Women Became Poets August 24, 2023 Women, as Virginia Woolf recognized, need rooms of their own to write. So, too, have women writers throughout history needed a term to describe what it is they do. Read More
In dialogue: Women in translation August 16, 2023 In recent years, “Women in Translation” month has emerged as a critical platform for questioning the underrepresentation of women authors in translated literature and exploring the significance of bringing their works to a global audience. At its core lie the vital and pressing questions: Why aren’t more works by women being translated, and why are women in translation so important? Read More
Pleasure and Efficacy July 30, 2023 Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one’s sex. Read More
The vanishing lives of coral July 17, 2023 At least in the twenty-first-century popular imagination, coral alternately symbolizes either a blissful day at the beach or the end of our planet as we know it. In the nineteenth century, however, coral had many other lives. Read More
Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die April 30, 2023 Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. Read More