In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a masterful account of the importance of the stereotype in English language South Asian literature. Mrinalini Chakravorty explores such tropes as the crowd ...

Blood. It is more than a thing and more than a metaphor. It is an effective concept, an element, with which, and through which, Christianity becomes what it is. Western Christianity – if there is such a thing as “Christianity” singular – embodies a dee...

Greg Barnhisel‘s new book, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (Columbia UP, 2015) examines how modernism was defanged, re-packaged, and resold during the Cold War. Barnhisel,

Recently, there have been various debates within the Muslim community over women’s mosque attendance. While contemporary questions of modern society structure current conversations, this question, ‘may a Muslim woman go to the mosque,

Nicholas B. Dirks‘ Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India (Columbia University Press, 2015) is a wonderful collection of essays, loosely arranged along the line’s of the author’s scholarly life.

Asaad al-Saleh is assistant professor of Arabic, comparative literature, and cultural studies in the Department of Languages and Literature and the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. His research focuses on issues related to autobiography an...

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press,

Two new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them. The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press...

What’s not to love about Jie Li‘s new book? Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2015) explores the history and culture of Shanghai alleyway homes by focusing on two physical spaces,

Wilt Idema‘s new book traces a story and its transformations through hundreds of years of Chinese literature. The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun (Columbia University Press, 2014) collects and translates variations of the tale of Master Z...

The quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states, on the assumption that these states are dependent on the brain. A very different way of exploring consciousnes...

In his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully translated sekkyō and ko-jōruri.

One of the most puzzling things about humans is their ability to manipulate symbols and create artifacts. Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom–apes–have only the rudiments of these abilities: chimps don’t have language and,

“This is a book that wants you to surpass and destroy it.” Eric Hayot‘s new book has the potential to transform how we teach and practice academic writing, and it invites the kind of reading and engagement that makes such a transformation possible.

Amrita Pande‘s Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press 2014) is a beautiful and rich ethnography of a surrogacy clinic. The book details the surrogacy process from start to finish,

Paul Copp‘s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on Chinese interpretations and uses of two written dharani during the last few centuries of the first ...

Any person who turns on CNN or Fox News today will see that the United States faces a number of critical problems in the Middle East. This reality should surprise few. Stunned by the Al-Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, the George W.

An interview with Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Exploring everything from the impact of her own psychoanalysis on her mode and mien to the effect of consumer culture on the psyche, the delightful Mari Ruti keeps the ball rolling.  We pondered with her so many things that the interview feels like xma...

In Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall and Progress of Mahometanism (Columbia University Press, 2014), Nabil Matar masterfully edits an important piece of scholarship from seventeenth-century England by scholar and physician,

In her fourth book, Lynne Huffer argues for a restored queer feminism to find new ways of thinking about sex and about ethics. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Columbia University Press,

Reading Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter‘s book Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade (Columbia Press, 2013) is the most fun I have had doing this podcast. Maguire makes a point during the interview that police officers...

Andrea Bachner‘s wonderfully interdisciplinary new book explores the many worlds and media through which the Chinese script has been imagined, represented, and transformed. Spanning literature, film, visual and performance art, design,

Erich Fromm, one of the most widely known psychoanalysts of the previous century, was involved in the exploration of spirituality throughout his life. His landmark book The Art of Loving, which sold more than six million copies worldwide,

Philip Kretsedemas is the author of The Immigration Crucible: Transforming Race, Nation, and the Limits of the Law (Columbia UP 2012). He is associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.