Hydra medusa

​A book of poetry, dreams and speculative talks, collected from the psychic detritus of living in the US-Mexico borderlands.Part coping mechanism, part magical act, Hydra Medusa was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child—during bus commutes, before bed, at sunris...

Vernacular english

How English has become a language of the people in India—one that enables the state but also empowers protests against itAgainst a groundswell of critiques of global English, Vernacular English argues that literary studies are yet to confront the true political import of the English language in t...

Monkey new writing from japan

For readers who love Haruki Murakami and want to be introduced to other exciting contemporary Japanese writers, especially women writers

Yamamba

Women, Magic, Wisdom: Explore a Japanese myth through the words and images of key scholars and artists.

Seeing like a child

Winner, 2022 Senior Book Prize, Association for Feminist AnthropologyFinalist, 2022 Victor Turner PrizeAn utterly original and illuminating work that meets at the crossroads of autobiography and ethnography to re-examine violence and memory through the eyes of a child.Seeing Like a Child is a dee...

Antiman

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman is an impassioned, genre-blending memoir that navigates the fraught constellations of race, sexuality, and cultural heritage that have shaped his experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the U...

The face: a time code

“Ruth Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, sets herself the task of staring at her face in a mirror for three full, uninterrupted hours; her ruminations ripple out from personal and familial memories to wise and honest meditations on families and aging, race and the body.” —Minneapolis Star TribuneWhat ...

City on fire

A long-term resident and expert observer of dissent in Hong Kong takes readers to the frontlines of Hong Kong’s revolution. Through the long, hot summer of 2019, Hong Kong burned. Anti-government protests, sparked by a government proposal to introduce a controversial extradition law, grew into a ...

How to read chinese drama in chinese

This book is at once a guided primer on Chinese drama and an innovative textbook. A companion to How to Read Chinese Drama designed for Chinese-language learners, it provides a versatile introduction to traditional Chinese plays for readers who want to experience Chinese drama in the original lan...

Yoshitsune and the thousand cherry trees

This book carefully translates a seminal work of Japanese puppet theater, written in 1747, during the the genre's golden age. The editor includes background information on the play and a bibliography.

In the shelter of the pine

In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ōgimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Elegant, poetic, and revealing, In the Shelter of the Pine is the most significant work of literature by a woman of Japa...

Four major plays of chikamatsu

Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) wrote some 130 plays, chiefly for the puppet theater, many of which are still performed today by puppet operators and Kabuki actors. Chikamatsu is thought to have written the first major tragedies about the common man. This edition of four of his most important pl...

The orphan of zhao and other yuan plays

The zaju in this volume explore the consequences of loyalty and betrayal, ambition and enlightenment, and piety and drunkenness.

The beggar lama

The Beggar Lama is the story of the Gyalrong Kuzhap, a Tibetan Buddhist polymath and reincarnated lama who has led a remarkable life through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century.

The columbia companion to modern chinese literature

The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature features more than fifty short essays on specific writers and literary trends from the Qing period (1895–1911) to the present. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for mastering modern lite...

Joy, despair, illusion, dreams

Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams presents a selection of Nō plays, magnificently rendered in English by Royall Tyler, an eminent scholar and translator of classical Japanese literature.

Wondrous brutal fictions

Wondrous Brutal Fictions presents eight seminal works from the seventeenth-century Japanese sekkyō and ko-jōruri puppet theaters, many translated into English for the first time.

Top graduate zhang xie

Top Graduate Zhang Xie is the first extant play in the Chinese southern dramatic tradition and a milestone in the history of Chinese literature. Dating from the early fifteenth century, but possibly composed earlier, it relates the story of a talented scholar who sets off for the capital to take ...

Performing the socialist state

Xiaomei Chen offers a new account of the origins, evolution, and legacies of key trends in twentieth-century Chinese theater. Instead of seeing the Republican, high socialist, and postsocialist periods as radically distinct, she identifies key continuities in theatrical practices and shared aspir...

How to read chinese drama

This book is a comprehensive and inviting introduction to the literary forms and cultural significance of Chinese drama as both text and performance. Each chapter offers an accessible overview and critical analysis of one or more plays—canonical as well as less frequently studied works—and their ...

Sugawara and the secrets of calligraphy

A complete translation of a major Japanese puppet drama written in 1746, with an investigation into the play's many authors and the use of bunraku puppets.

Staging personhood

Staging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming-Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic texts and performances against Qing sartorial regulations, Guojun Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglemen...

A topsy-turvy world

A Topsy-Turvy World presents English translations of shorter late Ming and early Qing plays. Satirical and often earthy, these mostly one-act plays provide a glimpse of Chinese daily life and mores even as they question or subvert the boundaries of social, moral, and political order.

Portraits in white

Kaori Lai’s Portraits in White explores everyday life in Taiwan under the White Terror, illuminating how the violence of martial law pervades even the most mundane moments.

Fu ping

Fu Ping is a keenly observed portrait of the lives of lower-class women in Shanghai in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Wang Anyi, one of contemporary China’s most acclaimed authors, explores the daily lives of migrants from rural areas and other people on the margins of urban l...

The resurrected skeleton

The first book in English to trace the resurrected skeleton, this text translates major adaptations while drawing parallels to Jesus’s encounter with a skull and the European tradition of the Dance of Death.

Luxuriant gems of the spring and autumn

A major resource expanding the study of early Chinese philosophy, religion, literature, and politics, the first complete English-language translation of the Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu fanlu), one of the key texts of early Confucianism

The drunkard

The Drunkard is one of the first full-length stream-of-consciousness novels written in Chinese. As the unnamed narrator, a writer at odds with a philistine world, sinks to his drunken nadir, his plight can be seen to represent that of a whole intelligentsia, a whole culture, degraded by the bruta...

The columbia sourcebook of literary taiwan

Contains more than 160 documents and writings that reflect the development of Taiwanese literature from the early modern period to the twenty-first century

Between two shores

This is a story that begins in California and ends in China—a detective tale with a subtle love interest. After a Chinese American man dies in mysterious circumstances near Hangzhou, his wife, an Irish American, goes to China to find out what really happened.

Wandering from china to america

This autobiography offers a tale of the joys and hardships of simple living in Chinese and American societies.

Wittgenstein, a one-way ticket, and other unforeseen benefits of studying chinese

This is a collection of essays by some of the world’s most renowned China experts, who share recollections of their time in China and reflect on what learning Chinese has meant to them. They share how Chinese has removed barriers, built rapport, opened doors, and led them down entirely unexpected...

Keywords in chinese culture

Like every culture, Chinese has its set of keywords: pivotal terms of political, ethical, literary, and philosophical discourse. This volume analyzes some of these keywords from different disciplinary and temporal perspectives, offering a new integrative study of their semantic richness, developm...

The matchmaker, the apprentice, and the football fan

The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan moves between anarchic campuses, maddening communist factories, and the victims of China's economic miracle to showcase the absurdity, injustice, and socialist Gothic of everyday Chinese life. In "The Football Fan," readers fall in with an intr...

Three plays by kobo abe

The columbia anthology of chinese folk and popular literature

In The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, two of the world's leading sinologists, Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender, capture the breadth of China's oral-based literary heritage. This collection presents works drawn from the large body of oral literature of many of China's rec...

The columbia anthology of traditional chinese literature

The best china

This anthology of essays from Hong Kong and the diaspora, ranging across the past hundred and seventy years, presents the Chinese tradition of free-thinking discursive prose. It records the intellectual ferment that has characterized the city since its founding, buoyed by an all-pervasive and ind...