Stanford University Press Blog

6 New Beach Reads from SUP

A novel, a genre-bender, and some quick 100-pagers for your summer reading lists.

Photo by Josué Goge. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

If there’s anything that a California-based publishing house knows how to do, its summer (take that New York)—and beach-reading happens to be a particular forte of ours. Whether lounging poolside or in the sand (or simply wishing you were), here are a few books guaranteed to entertain, enlighten, and intrigue.

 

1

The Woman Who Read Too Much »

by BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

RECOMMENDED READING FOR:
feminists, bibliophiles, and fans of Hilary Mantel

Written by three-time novelist, Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, The Woman Who Read Too Much swirls around the mysterious Poetess of Qazvin and the intrigues of 19th-century Qajar Iran. A graceful blend of history, allegory, and literary invention, the book is the first novel published under SUP’s new trade imprint, Redwood Press. The French translation was lauded by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the “best three novels of the year” in 2007, while its 2015 debut in English was hailed by Kirkus as one of 10 new novels to lose yourself in.

“The Woman Who Read Too Much reminds us all that whether Tudor, Qajar, or Clinton, behind every throne is a queen mother, wife, and sister who runs the show.”

—The Washington Independent Book Review

 

Hashtag Solidarity in Iran

How the Green Movement mobilized social media in the interest of social change.

by NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH

Mousavi supporters, gathered in Tehran on June 18th, protesting against the election results. Photo by Hamed Saber, CC-BY-2.0 via Wikipedia.

A sense of euphoria and unprecedented freedom dominated national politics during the presidential campaigns in Iran in the spring of 2009. In the course of the thirty-year history of the theocratic state, no one could remember another time when Iranian state television had broadcast such lively debates among the presidential candidates.

Six years ago today Iranians went to the polls to elect a new president. Millions believe that their votes were never counted.

After leaving a rally for the then-sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Time magazine correspondent Joe Klein described a crowd of tens of thousands: “They began to filter in to downtown,” he recalled. The Ahmadinejad rally was ending around the same time that the reformist leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s rally was also finishing up. Mousavi’s supporters made their way downtown, flooding the streets and squares. The scene, as Klein recalled it with obvious awe, was one of camaraderie, of playfulness. Describing the intermingling of the two camps, Klein observed, “they were just kind of joking with each other. It seemed as if someone had opened a magic door and an entire country had spilled out.”

This wasn’t just a feeling. Things looked lively too. Color was everywhere. Campaign paraphernalia, campaign headquarters, and campaigners themselves were clearly differentiated using predesigned graphic coding based on the colors of their chosen candidate’s campaign.

A New Solidarity for Freedom in Turkey

What recent protests and Erdoğan’s defeat at the ballot box tell us about Turkey.

by BERNA TURAM

Photo of the 2013 Taksim Gezi Park protests in Taksim Square, Istanbul. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.

This Sunday Turkey voted a majority-less Parliament into office in a strategic attempt to block the ambitions of the increasingly authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. To defeat Erdogan’s hegemony, voters shifted votes away not only from the secularist opposition party, the People’s Republican Party, but most importantly also from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). This is pivotal: it shows that previous supporters of AKP and Erdogan,religious not, are also beginning to disagree and divide, like the secular opposition has split from within. Defecting voters, wary of Erdoğan’s aim to change Turkey into a presidential system, put aside traditional ethnic and ideological identity politics and pushed the pro-Kurdish party into the parliament. The result is being hailed as a triumph of Turkish democracy in particular, as well as a victory against autocracy in general. The Economist Espresso already came up with a festive title: “So Long, Sultan: After Turkey’s Election.”

Although there is a long way to go for either the formation of a coalition government or for a potential early election in the near future, freedom-seekers have come a long way. Decreasing tolerance for Erdoğan’s heavy-handed governing style and increasing unity amongst his opponents have been brewing for years in cities, even many years before the 2013 Gezi protests erupted in Istanbul and expanded around the world. 

Gezi at its peak was a remarkable experience, a breaking point in Turkish history and a crucial precursor to this week’s national elections.

Hollywood’s Billion-Dollar Club

In defense of the imaginative potential of the franchise.

by J.D. Connor

21 films have grossed over 1 billion dollars at the box office.

In the history of the world, there have been twenty-one movies that have earned more than a billion dollars at the box office. Two-thirds of them have debuted since 2010, two of which—Furious 7 and Avengers 2—came out just this year. Jurassic World and Minions might join the billion-dollar movie club this summer, the newest James Bond and the final Hunger Games might join in the fall, and the Star Wars installment to be released at Christmas certainly will.

What makes me so confident in these predictions? It’s easy to extrapolate from recent film history what the winning recipe of a blockbuster film looks like today. All twenty-one of the billion-dollar movies hail from Hollywood, most are episodes within larger franchises, and all can boast an international fan base. The trends behind these mega-hits are pronounced and consistent—what can they tell us about movies today?

The Metaphoric Roots of Maker Culture

On the tension and the ground of object repurposing.

by RAYMOND MALEWITZ

A 2008 Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif. Photo by Jon Davis, CC BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

People have long been fascinated by the creative ways that humans repurpose objects to suit their particular needs and desires. Recently, a number of artists, historians, and critics have begun to document the myriad cases of object repurposing and the impulses behind them—myself included. In The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture, I examined some of these practices as they surfaced in literature, art, and other cultural artifacts within the United States from the 1960s to the present. I spent the majority of the book outlining the strange interrelationships that arise among object repurposing, contemporary “Maker” communities such as Instructables, post-apocalyptic literature, and American left- and right-libertarian politics.

If I had to do it over again, I’d add the hit television series Project Runway, which issues an annual “unconventional challenge” asking contestants to fashion clothing out of material scrounged from a hardware store, a grocery store, or a candy store.