Stanford University Press Blog

Association for Asian Studies: Virtual Exhibit 2014

 

Going to AAS 2014? Stop by booth 102! Not going to AAS 2014? Don't worry—we've got you covered.

 

The annual Association for Asian Studies conference kicks off today in the City of Brotherly Love. If you're attending be sure to stop by booth 102 to say hello to some SUPians, where you can grab a few discounted books and meet our Asian Studies editor, Michelle Lipinski.  

All of the books featured at the conference (also listed below) will be available for 20-30% off (20% on paperbacks, 30% on cloth and ebook). If you couldn't make it to the conference, not to fret—you can still take advantage of the conference discount right here. If any of the books below suit your fancy, click on the cover to be redirected to that book's page on our website. From there you can add the book to your cart and enter this discount code: S14XAAS, to grab the conference discount.

Also, don't miss the last week of our March Madness sale for even steeper discounts ($10 hardcovers and $5 paperbacks).

Browse our featured AAS Conference titles below (60+ books from which to choose):

 

 

 

International Studies Association: Virtual Exhibit 2014

Whether you're at ISA 2014 or you wish you were, we've got some discounts to hand out: take 20% off paper and 30% off cloth and ebooks on any and all of the 53 International Studies books listed below.

In Toronto for ISA 2014? Make sure to pencil in a visit to SUP's booth where you can say hello to our International Studies & Politics editor, Geoffrey Burn (he's a delight, and he has an accent to boot).

You can also browse through our offerings in International Studies titles, and grab a few discounted books—20% off paper, 30% off cloth and ebooks. We're also honoring that discount right here. Gathered below are the titles we're featuring at ISA 2014—click on any cover that grabs your interest to learn more. If you like what you see, add it to your cart and enter this promo code at checkout: S14XISA.

(Psst—have you heard about our March Madness sale? There's one week left to grab $1o cloth and $5 paperbacks and over 600 titles from which to choose . . .)

 

 

 

Nietzsche: Tanned, Rested, Back in Print

Volume 8 of SUP’s Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche features the seminal texts of Beyond Good and Evil & On the Genealogy of Morality

Supposing that truth is a woman—well? is the suspicion not founded that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, poorly understood women? that the ghastly earnest and the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they tended to approach truth so far were inept and indecent means for nothing more than charming a female for themselves? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be charmed:—and every kind of dogmatism stands there today with a gloomy and despondent look. If it stands at all anymore!

 

So begins Nietzsche's colorful opening argument in Beyond Good and Evil, in which he envisions truth as a coy woman, not to be wooed by blunt and unbending philosophical doctrines. Rejecting much of the accepted wisdom of 19th century philosophy and its antecedents earned Nietzsche the oft-cited credit as one of the most important precursors to postmodern thought. Unsurprisingly, countless contemporary philosophers—from Freud to Derrida—are indebted to Nietzsche, whose philosophy and works were decidedly avant-garde. As a result of his celebrity, countless editions and translations of his writings have circulated through both scholarly and popular pipelines—including this ambitious poster, in which the entire text of Beyond Good and Evil is rendered into a graphic depiction of a sheep herd:

 

(Poster via Litographs) 

Stanford University Press' edition of this text (regrettably, not rendered in poster format) is translated from the the Colli-Montinari critical student edition—described as the "German-language 'gold standard'". Stanford's ongoing series, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, reaches the midpoint of its projected 15 volumes with the publication of this book. This volume, Beyond Good and Evil/On the Genealogy of Morality, pairs these two treatises—two of Nietzsche’s most well-known—into a single annotated and accessible book. 

Though he coined some of most categorical statements of the 19th century (“God is dead” being chief among them) Nietzsche takes philosophy to task for dogmatism, and explores the origins of our conceptions of good and evil in these writings. Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, both watershed texts in their own right, develop a critique of universal and discrete moral categories, opting instead for a dash of moral relativism. The origins of such classically Nietzschean concepts as slave morality, herd mentality, and will to power, these canonical publications serve as excellent entry points not only into Nietzsche’s philosophy, but to contemporary thought more broadly. 

Read the full Preface of 
Beyond Good and Evil

See the Table of Contents 

See the other volumes in
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

 

 

March Madness: Staff Picks

 
In case you haven’t heard the buzz . . .

. . . we’re running a little sale at SUP.

Through the end of March, over 600 titles will be available for $10 and $5. To help you sift through this bountiful bevy of scholarly books we tapped a few shoulders around the SUP office and asked which titles they thought were the best bargains. Here’s what they had to say: 

Margo, our senior Business and Economics editor recommends:
The Handbook of Transformative Cooperation
Edited by Sandy Kristin Piderit, Ronald E. Fry, and David L. Cooperrider 

At 5% of the list price, the Handbook of Transformative Cooperation is a bargain not to be missed.  Business readers will continue to see a call for work across sectors, strategy that speaks to the triple bottom line, and leadership and team practices that rely on relationship building and sense-making. This cheap and cheerful volume takes a forward thinking approach that considers these trends.  The chapters are written by some of the best minds tackling these issues today, including SUP authors Nadya Zhexembayeva, Paul Shrivastava, and Ted London.  Shoppers who like this book may also appreciate Negotiating Genuinely and The Co-Creation Paradigm.  So, on top of being a worthy purchase, this handbook is a great jumping off point for exploring our business list.

Frances, associate editor in Sociology suggests:
The New Entrepreneurs
by Zulema Valdez

Think the American Dream is open to everybody? Not so fast, Zulema Valdez argues in The New Entrepreneurs. Valdez introduces us to a diverse contingent of entrepreneurs—such as Doña Toña, the epicurean behind the Houston-based eatery La Pambazo—to provocatively undermine our dominant understanding of “ethnic entrepreneurship,” which presumes that members of the same ethnic group have the same resources and thus reap the same entrepreneurial payouts. But by revealing differences in outcomes within and across not only ethnicity, but also gender and class, she reveals very real constraints on certain people’s agency and, accordingly, potential to “make it big.” This eye-opening book also asks us to consider the nuances that define success.

Kalie, SUP's digital media speicalist, recommends:
New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller
Edited by Hsiao-Yun Chu and Roberto G. Trujillo

The Fuller Archive at Stanford University Libraries is a staggering 750-volume collection of ephemera meticulously collected by the famous futurist and inventor, Buckminster Fuller, over the course of his life. In essence, the archive is a collection of mental breadcrumbs that includes manuscripts, news clippings, blueprints, and business cards as well as love letters and overdue library notices, which Fuller kept in an attempt to map the origins of his ideas. It is around this corpus that New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller is pivoted. The book features a series of insightful essays penned by "Bucky" scholars dissecting his vast personal archive and the result is a surprisingly intimate scholarly portrayal of one of the most eccentric and prodigious thinkers of recent times.

Michelle, acquisitions editor in Law, Asian Studies, & Anthropology suggests:
All Judges Are Political--Except When They're Not
by Ketih Bybee

It seems you can’t finish reading a news story on the Supreme Court without encountering the phrase “splitting along ideological lines,” in some form—usually involving speculation about whether the Roberts court will adhere to their trademark 5-4 split or whether various justices will “go rogue,” and vote against what many believe to be their personal political positions. This book explores the tension between whether or not judges are politically motivated, and why that tension is so important. As Bybee lucidly explains, the Court’s survival depends on judges fulfilling both roles as “apolitical oracles and ideological politicians” (as aptly characterized by Dahlia Lithwick in her review of the book). 

Ryan, SUP's advertising and direct mail coordinator, recommends:
Beyond the Acropolis
by Tjeerd H. van Andel and Curtis Runnels

Published in 1987, Beyond the Acropolis takes readers away from the iconic sites of ancient Greece. Instead, the two authors, Tjeerd H. Van Andel and Curtis Runnels, lead us through an extensive history of the rural and relatively isolated southern Argolid peninsula. The image we get is one of a difficult but seemingly persistent period of settlement and resettlement over the last 50,000 years. Runnels and van Andel paint a bleak picture of life, with the threat of soil erosion hanging over the heads of the region to this day. It’s not all dreary, though, as there are charming line-drawn illustrations of the region dispersed throughout the book.

 

To see the full sale offerings, where you can browse by discipline, go to sup.org/marchmadness

 

Clocks and subterranean curiosities: trains and modernity

Professor Steven Cassedy, originally of Great Neck New York, reflects on Penn Station, Grand Central, and the making of modern icons.

If you were to ask anyone to name a truly iconic example of an American train station—certainly a New York train station, I’m willing to bet—a lot—that most would volunteer “Grand Central Terminal” (or, more likely, erroneously say “Grand Central Station”). I’m pretty sure that, even if the once-magnificent Penn Station were still standing, that answer would be no different. Who would ever take “Meet me under the clock” to refer to a clock in Penn Station?

 PBS’ recent, fascinating documentary, The Rise and Fall of Penn Station, reminded me of the countless Saturdays in my teen years when I took the Long Island Railroad into the city because I had music lessons—and because, let’s face it, I was a train freak and loved riding the train—and then riding the subways once I got into the city.  Back then, my father once shared this little factoid with me: as you ride the Long Island Railroad into Penn Station, having passed Sunnyside Yards in Queens and having entered the tunnel under the East River, you know you’re about to enter the station, even before you see the lights over the platform, when you detect a rumbling sound overhead in the tunnel.  OK, it’s a faint rumble—not everyone can detect it. I never did till my father pointed it all those years ago.  A scientist to the bone, with a preternaturally acute sense of his surroundings, he noticed the sound and immediately figured out what it was: at that moment, you were passing underneath the 34^th Street Station of the Seventh Avenue IRT line.  Train passengers in the tunnel below would have heard this rumbling ever since the subway station above was built in 1917.

My father, the engineering professor, must surely have marveled at the technological genius it took to dig a network of tunnels that connected New Jersey and Queens to Manhattan’s Penn Station in the first decade of the 20^th century and then, a few years later, to construct a subway line above it. For him, all these underground causeways converging below Penn Station must have stood as a symbol of turn-of-the-century ingenuity, of modernity, of progress. 

A clip from The Rise and Fall of Penn Station, based in part on Jill Jonnes’ Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels

But back to Grand Central: if I’m right about Grand Central, the clock may very well be the explanation. In the PBS documentary, historian Albert Churella notes that railroads in the era when Penn Station was built were “symbols of progress, symbols of modernity.” Of course he’s right. But all the classic train stations you can think of from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are, in a very tangible sense, monuments to the modern conception of time—itself a product of railroad culture.

Starting way back in 1884, with the adoption of a worldwide standard of time using the observatory in Greenwich, England, as Prime Meridian, all railroad companies in the United States ran on the same time. That meant that stations of any size that serviced more than one company would no longer feature more than one clock displaying more than one time—it also meant that now there would be far fewer grisly train crashes. Now there could be a single clock in the waiting room or, if the room was big enough, many clocks but all displaying the same time. Penn Station certainly had its big clocks, as the PBS documentary clearly shows, both over the main entrance and in the cavernous waiting room. But none of these was the clock, the gorgeous four-faced one atop the kiosk in the waiting room of Grand Central, made by the “Self-Winding Clock Co., Inc., New York.”

The clock of Grand Central Terminal

It’s that four-faced clock inside the terminal that appears to have captured the American imagination. It’s under that clock that you’ll “meet me.” And, with apologies to the fans of the old Penn Station, let’s be honest: those images of the sunlight streaming down stairwells are definitely stunning, and what replaced the old station is a hideous abomination, but Grand Central Terminal on the inside was simply more beautiful. At least I think so. Whatever you think of the long-vanished station on 34^th Street, evidence of its iconic import is hidden from all but a few discerning observers, like my father.  But everybody knows the four-faced clock in Grand Central Terminal.

See images of Penn Station Then & Now via Buzzfeed

Steven Cassedy is Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at University of California, San Diego. He is the author of several books, including Dostoevsky’s Religion, Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory, and most recently, Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and A Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.

Without Precedent: Helen Tartar

Stanford University Press remembers an outstanding editor and intellectual.

Helen Tartar in her Stanford University Press office, summer 1988.

In her time at the Press—from 1981 until 2002—Helen brought on board a remarkably impressive list of books across a broad range of the humanities, including religion and philosophy, but especially in literary studies and literary theory.  Her energetic acquisitions efforts during a period of intellectual upheaval within a number of humanities disciplines enabled the Press to play a leading role in advancing critical scholarship in those areas throughout the English-speaking academic world. 

Part of this success came from the caliber of the works that she acquired from individual scholars across the United States, including many from Stanford (far too many to try to name in this short notice)—scholars who responded to Helen’s remarkable command of the intellectual issues at stake in their work.  Another part of the success of Helen’s endeavors derived from a group of intellectually provocative and challenging book series that she recruited and helped to shape.  Finally, Helen’s work was distinguished by a number of widely influential translation projects that she commissioned or acquired from leading French, German, and Italian authors—including new or recent work by Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Pierre Bordieu, Jean Baudrillard, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Niklas Luhmann, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Werner Hamacher, Mieke Bal, and Hent de Vries, as well older works by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, and Ernst Bloch. 

Unsurprisingly, the books that Helen acquired for Stanford University Press won many awards, including the James Russell Lowell Prize, Christian Gauss Award, Rene Wellek Prize, National Jewish Book Award, Kurt Weill Prize, Salo Baron Book Award, Harry Levin Prize, Perkins Prize, Barricelli Prize, AATSEEL Award, Marraro Prize, Arisawa Memorial Award, and many MLA prizes, including three for the best first book.

’sup? - March 2014

March is a month chock-full of big announcements at Stanford University Press. First off, we're welcoming a new face to the press this week—our new history and Jewish Studies editor, Eric Brandt. Secondly, we've got a handful of new titles to spotlight; joblessness, American foreign policy, and botched executions are what's on the docket this month. As the final order of business: March Madness is in full swing! (We're not talking about basketball—we're talking about books, very cheap books). 

 

Meet Eric Brandt: 

Our new Executive Editor, Eric Brandt, starts this week. Eric, a Polar Vortex survivor, comes to us from Connecticut, windswept and thick-blooded (see his guest post from last week, California Dreamin’). In the past, Eric has worked for HarperCollins and two other UPs—Yale and Columbia—serving in both publicity and editorial capacities. With a Doctorate in Philosophy and Religion, and a long history in non-fiction and humanities editing, we’re excited to see how the history and Jewish Studies lists evolve under his stewardship.

Out this month:

“Mary manages to discuss the problems that unemployed women face in finding work, not only from a practical point of view, but also from a personal standpoint.”
—Congressman Frank Pallone, Jr.

“The Politics of American Foreign Policy is a treasure trove of interesting findings on the deep rooted opinions of Americans and will appeal to a wide audience.”
—Professor Brian C. Rathburn (USC)

“America has no more incisive scholar of capital punishment than Austin Sarat, who always has something fresh to say. Gruesome Spectacles offers readers new and provocative insights.” 
—Scott Turow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March Madness Sale: 5 Timely Titles

The sports fans can keep basketball; this month we’re talking about a different March Madness, one book lovers will appreciate. For the month of March we’ll be running a sale featuring some deep discounts: $10 cloth and $5 paperbacks on over 600 titles.

Throughout the month we'll curate a few choice titles from the sale—staff picks and top bargains—spotlighting them here on the blog (so stay tuned). First up to bat is a list of titles culled for their current timeliness—recent backlist books with of-the-moment relevance.

 

5 Timely Titles from the March Madness Sale

 

Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession
by Haggai Ram
$55.00 cloth, now $10.00

As tensions between Israel and Iran crackle with talks of Iran’s nuclear program, journalists continue to predict a seemingly inevitable confrontation between the two regional rivals; an event which, according to most spectators’ predictions, is invariably instigated by Israel to parry the specter of a nuclear-capable Iran. In Iranophobia, Israeli scholar, Haggai Ram, explores anti-Iranian sentiment amongst Israelis—and how that national phobia plays out domestically and internationally. 

Read an excerpt from the Introduction.

The Difference “Difference” Makes: Women and Leadership
Edited by Deborah L. Rode
$55.00 cloth, now $10.00

In 2013 Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg urged women to “lean in” at the boardroom; today Hillary Clinton is regarded as a shoe-in for the Democrats’ 2016 Presidential ticket. Yet, despite seeming strides toward professional equality, women still constitute a minority in formal leadership, whether in business, law, or politics. In this collection of papers from “heavy-hitters”—women at the top of their careers, describe how they achieved success, what obstacles they overcame along the way, and the difference that “difference” made for them.

The Paradox of a Global USA
Edited by Bruce Mazlish, Nayan Chanda, and Kenneth Weisbrode
$50.00 cloth, now $10.00

Drawing from history, political science, economics and cultural studies, The Paradox of A Global USA addresses the awkward tension that arises from the United States’ enthusiastic pursuit of economic globalization, and its simultaneous recalcitrance in deferring to global institutions of authority (for example, opposing the Kyoto Protocol, and invading Iraq without the approval of the UN). 

See the Table of Contents, read the Foreword and the Introduction here.

Other sale titles that contend with globalization include Islam in a Globalizing World ($29.95, now $5.00) & Global California ($60.00, now $10.00)

Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora
by Nico Israel
$52.50, now $10.00

With novels the likes of Americanah, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Namesake topping fiction bestseller lists, it is clear that the transnational writer is fast becoming a new cornerstone of the American literary canon. In Outlandish, Nico Israel delves into the works of three transnational writers who have captured imaginations across the globe—Joseph Conrad, Theodor Adorno, and Salman Rushdie. Through these writers he explores themes of increasing importance in a globalizing and transitory world: race, national belonging, exile, and migration. 

The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims and the Egyptian State
by Rachel M. Scott
$65.00, now $10.00

In the wake of the Egyptian uprising and the precipitous rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood, Rachel M. Scott’s book offers a fascinating exposition to the rise and nature of Islamism in Egypt. She delves into the minds of Egyptian Islamists—including members of the Muslim Brotherhood—to understand the changing perceptions of Islamists regarding the viability of non-Muslim citizens in an Islamic state. Perhaps most poignantly, The Challenge of Political Islam dismantles the assumption that secularism is a precondition for tolerance.

See the Table of Contents and read the Introduction.

 

March Madness: A Month-Long Spree of Discounted Books

 

Announcing the March Madness Sale: A Month-Long Spree of Discounted Books across a variety of disciplines—Business, Middle East Studies, Literary Criticism and more! 

 

Spring is in the air (at least in California, it is) and it's time for a little seasonal sprucing. In an effort to dust off warehouse shelves, SUP is throwing an overstock sale beginning March 3rd and lasting through the end of the month! Over 600 titles will be available at deep discounts—$10 hardcovers, and $5 paperbacks. 

On March 3rd this handy link will be populated with a long list of discounted books. Here you can peruse sale titles and filter books by discipline for targeted browsing. Discounted prices will be noted on the right of the book page and these discounts will be automatically applied at checkout—no coupon code necessary.

Happy Spring shopping!