Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

And the winner is...

Congratulations to Charles Taylor, whose 2007 book A Secular Age has won Christianity Today's Book Award for History/Biography.

HUP honored with "oddest book title" nod

When we wrote about this contest last year, never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that we would be honored with a nomination the very next year!! Hopes are high for an HUP win in the "oddest book title of the year" contest run each year by British publishing magazine The Bookseller, although Jasper McCutcheon's I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen has a few of us worried about our chances. We're nominated for Catharine MacKinnon's latest essay collection, titled Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues. Maybe it's a little early to order the champagne, but one can always browse.

Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that Are Women Human? is of course a serious book dealing with serious issues--a critique of the transnational status quo that also envisions the transforming possibilities of human rights for women across the globe.

Greil Marcus is a knight

Well he is now, at least. Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, The Dustbin of History, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession, and In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992, among others, was made Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Government in order to honor his extraordinary contributions to arts and literature.

The award was presented at a ceremony in San Francisco at which Pierre-François Mourier, the French Consul General, spoke at length about Lipstick Traces and its reception in France, where it maintains a well-deserved place as a benchmark of cultural scholarship. According to a press release from the French Consulate:

The publication in France of “Lipstick Traces” by Allia Publisher, in 1998, had a huge impact on French readers and was highly celebrated in the press. The book, an investigation on rebellion in the XXth century, is one of the best and most precise studies of intellectual and artistic movements in France during this century: from the Dada to the Lettristes, from Isidore Isou to Guy Debord.

Lipstick Traces is currently available in a good-looking paperback edition, but the exciting news is that HUP will be publishing a special 20th-anniversary edition of the book in Fall 2009, timed to coincide with the appearance of the long-awaited and mammoth A New Literary History of America, co-edited by Marcus and Werner Sollors.