Stanford University Press Blog

Top Picks from the Winter Sale (Part Deux)

Through January 14th, take 30% off everything on our site, including these 5 staff picks.

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

In celebration of the year’s end, we’ve picked out a few of our favorite titles from 2017 to share with you—all of which are 30% off through January 14th as part of our site-wide Winter Sale. Hundreds of titles spanning dozens of disciplines are on offer: browse books by discipline, or check out our recent award winners and bestsellers, or, for those looking for a few quick recommendations, check out our list of staff picks below, and get ready to stuff your stockings or your book bags with titles guaranteed to entertain, enlighten and intrigue.

 

1

Us&Them »

by BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

RECOMMENDED BY:
Linda Stewart, Marketing Specialist

A novel that plays with voice and narration, Us&Them is a beautiful look at family life in all its intricacies, intimacies, and difficulties. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani takes us on a journey through Paris, Tehran, L.A., Germany, Australia, and beyond, opening our eyes to the ways immigration and alienation shift our ideas of belonging and home. The three generations of women at the heart of the novel come alive through strained interactions and rich inner monologues. Through a series of non-linear, interconnected stories, the novel unfolds into a witty, charming, and very familiar tale of the human connection that we all crave.

OTHER BOOKS YOU MAY LIKE: The Woman Who Read Too Much by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani and Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic Novel of Iran by Roxanne Varzi.

Top Picks from the Winter Sale

Through January 14th, take 30% off everything on our site, including these 5 staff picks.

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

In celebration of the year’s end, we’ve picked out a few of our favorite recent titles to share with you—all of which are 30% off through January 14th as part of our site-wide Winter Sale. Hundreds of titles spanning dozens of disciplines are on offer: browse books by discipline, or check out our recent award winners and bestsellers, or, for those looking for a few quick recommendations, check out our list of staff picks below, and get ready to stuff your stockings or your book bags with titles guaranteed to entertain, enlighten and intrigue.

 

1

The Manhattan Project »
A Theory of a City

by DAVID KISHIK

RECOMMENDED BY:
Max Shanley, Sales Assistant

What if Walter Benjamin did not in fact die in 1940 but, rather, changed his name, moved to New York, and lived on there until 1987? What if, in 1957, he began a sequel to his gargantuan The Arcades Project called The Manhattan Project, shifting his focus from Paris to New York? What if the composing of this text would become his sole occupation for his remaining 30 years? What if that manuscript found its way to the New York Public Library where it wasn't discovered again until 2008? This wildly imaginative book entertains this premise with edge, heart, and humor and, in doing so, breathes new life into Benjamin's ideas and body of work, broadening the possibilities of what writings on cities can accomplish.

OTHER BOOKS YOU MAY LIKE: Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory edited by Gerhard Richter and Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London by J. M. Tyree.

Taxing the Artist

What implications does the new GOP tax bill have for working artists?

by ALISON GERBER 

Photo by Mark Burnett. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

Today an opaque and as yet mostly unread GOP tax bill is hurtling towards the President’s desk. The media have mostly avoided a close look at the collective effects of the tax bill—the near-inevitable cuts to public services and national infrastructure that will affect all of us—and instead my feeds have been dripping for days with straightforward “ways to make the new tax bill work for you,” including a cynical guide to “hacking the tax plan” that promises to help you learn “ways to profit off the Republican tax bill.” A number of these pieces give the reader helpful hints on ways to turn themselves into business entities, as though setting up an LLC is something like getting a new set of business cards printed—do I go with a friendly diminutive like “Allie”, or the more formal “Alison”?—rather than a meaningful legal commitment with significant costs and responsibilities.

At the moment, it looks like artists’ abilities to end next year in the black will be tied up with one provision in particular: standardized deductions will double, but those who don’t file a Schedule C or set up a pass-through entity will lose the ability to deduct work-related expenses, a change that could hit performing artists especially hard. Musicians, dancers, and actors with steady gigs are often categorized as employees and receive W-2s; now it seems they’ll no longer be able to itemize and deduct expenses related to getting and doing those jobs, though most artists spend a significant proportion of their incomes on the costs of doing business (think: transportation costs; headshots; agents’ commissions; a dancer’s weekly supply of pointe shoes; that $19,000 tuba at the back of the orchestra and the extra $1,000 for the wheeled case its player needs to get it to work). Well, you might ask, why not just file a Schedule C? It’s not that easy, though.

It looks like artists’ abilities to end next year in the black will be tied up with one provision in particular: some artists may lose the ability to deduct work-related expenses.

 

The Failings of Economic Nationalism

Many fail to grasp how partnerships with Asian manufacturers benefit the United States.

by GARY G. HAMILTON and CHENG-SHU KAO

A Foxconn factory producing the iPhone 7. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

In his inaugural address, Donald Trump painted a moribund picture of American manufacturing, decrying the “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” across the country. This decline in manufacturing was part of what he termed “American carnage.” While Trump hung much of his presidential campaign on the promise to restore this sector of the economy, he has hardly been the only politician to make such pledges in recent years: Both conservative and progressive politicians and pundits have vowed to restore manufacturing jobs that the United States has lost to outsourcing. These activists, however, miss one fundamental fact: In the last four decades, capitalism in the United States, and indeed, throughout the world, has steadily changed. Today, the sellers and not the makers of consumer products are the firms that now drive the global economy.

Reliance on contract manufacturing has become a characteristic feature of capitalism today.

No longer can we say, “What is good for General Motors is good for America.” Instead, we champion merchandisers (like Apple and Nike), retailers (like Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy), and internet giants (like Google and Facebook), none of which make the products that they advertise and sell. Capitalism today is led by demand, that is, by the ability of merchandisers and retailers to use point-of-sales data to reliably calculate consumer demand for the products they sell and, based on that calculation, to order those products from contract manufacturers.

Reliance on contract manufacturing has become a characteristic feature of capitalism today, and contract manufacturing itself has become a highly specialized and advanced sector in the global economy. Even Boeing and Ford no longer make many of the parts that go into their planes and cars. They, too, each in their own way, have become merchandisers and assemblers. So who and where are these contract manufacturers?

The Erotic Image

What differentiates holy desires from pornographic ones?

by NATALIE CARNES

"Madonna of the Nursing Child" by Lorenzo di Credi.

Mary looks down toward her bared breast, which is shaped like a cone and placed rather high on her chest in Lorenzo di Credi’s Madonna of the Nursing Child. The Christ-child’s lips part to receive her breast. He seems moments from suckling, yet his eyes remain locked on the viewer.

Di Credi’s is one of many images of the nursing Mary (Maria lactans) that appear in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. (Byzantine iconographers had been producing them for centuries, calling images of the bare-breasted Mary Galaktotrophousa, the Milk-giver.) But by the seventeenth century, these once-popular images had become much less common. In 2008, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano responded to the decline of Maria lactans by calling for the rehabilitation of a semi-nude nursing Mary. Such images, it maintained, are important testimonies to the humanity of Christ, ways of nurturing desire for the God made flesh.

Later in 2008, Playboy in Mexico ran a December cover with a woman posing in front of stained glass, her hand cupping her exposed breast. The headline read, “Te Adoramos, María.” The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights denounced the image. This was not the kind of Mary the Catholic Church had in mind. It was certainly not the kind of desire it wanted to nurture.

Most of us, whether or not we identify with the Catholic Church’s line on pornography, can still discern a difference between di Credi’s Mary and Playboy’s María. But how, exactly, can one name it?