Time again for the university to shut off the lights and turn down the heat, forcing us all to our homes for a bit of rest and reading. As blogging will be light for a spell, we thought we’d leave you with a look back at just some of what we’ve been up to this year; maybe you’ll see something you missed the first time through.
Way back in January, we shared an excerpt from our volume of Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures, The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, in which the Nobel Laureate considered what takes place in our minds when we read novels.
Also in January, amidst the controversy of a publisher’s plan to release a censored version of Huck Finn, we posted the full text of Ishmael Reed’s New Literary History of America essay on Twain’s classic.
And we closed out the month with a trio of short videos featuring David Blight, who spoke with us about the enduring significance of the American Civil War, just as the nation began to mark the conflict’s sesquicentennial.
We heard from two long-time HUP Editors after the death of Daniel Bell, the pioneering social scientist who for years helped to oversee the Press. Michael Aronson wrote of his memories of Bell, and Lindsay Waters remembered Bell’s impact on the direction of HUP.
In February, as the world watched events unfold in Egypt, we looked back at a book by Timur Kuran titled Private Truths, Public Lies. Kuran, currently a professor of Economics and Islamic Studies at Duke, presented in the book a model for understanding the seemingly sudden process of social and political breakthrough. It’s a book we’ve thought back on many times throughout this year of global political uprising.
Also in February, as we began our celebration of the Loeb Classical Library’s 100th anniversary, we asked you to show us your Loebs. And you did! In May, and then again this week, we shared your pictures from all over the world.
We also heard from Nicholas Frankel, editor of our beautiful new annotated, uncensored edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, about the history of Wilde’s novel, and why it’s taken so long for this original version to finally see publication.
In March, we presented the Interlude from one of our best-titled books of the year, Seo-Young Chu’s Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation.
Also in March, after the entire Harvard community was saddened by the passing of Harvard Law School Professor William J. Stuntz, HUP Editor Elizabeth Knoll wrote about Stuntz’s work to finish The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, a book we proudly published in September.
In April, we shared an excerpt from Umerto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist, in which the not-actually-so-young Eco pondered why we weep for fictional characters.
Later in the month, HUP Editor Sharmila Sen marked the publication of The Essential Tagore with a story about the collection of Tagore’s poems that she carried with her as a child when her family moved to the United States.
May was busy! We looked at the Keynes-Hayek rap battle, noted the creation by Pitzer College of the nation’s first department of secular studies (and recommended some books for them), and marked the paperback publication of Paul Gilroy’s Darker than Blue by sharing a song that’s been on heavy rotation in these halls all this year and last.
And we rounded out May by posting our video of Martha Nussbaum discussing the Capabilities Approach to Human Development.
In June we got lost in Errol Morris’s amphibian levitation tweets, shared Ovid’s opinions on hairstyles, via David Slavitt’s new translation, and pondered culturomics and Isaac Casaubon.
Later in the summer, we re-posted a piece from Jo Guldi, author of Roads to Power, in which she wrote of making a conscious shift in her relationship to the sea of information in which we all swim.
In September, we ran a Q&A on anti-intellectual populism and Evangelical self-understanding with Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson, authors of The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, one of the more attention-grabbing books we published this year.
Also in September, we revisited The Collapse of American Criminal Justice to look at Stuntz’s research on the function of the death penalty as a tool to extract pleas, rather than to execute murderers.
We ended the month with an interview with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, in which we discussed Douglas-Fairhurst’s approach to biography.
In October, we couldn’t resist sharing some pictures of our lovely new mosaic-making paperback editions of seven Stephen Jay Gould classics.
We also shared a podcast conversation with Denise Gigante, author of The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George, the only university press title to make the New York Times Notable 100 Books list of 2011.
We closed out the month by hearing from Patricia Meyer Spacks, HUP staff and some bookseller friends about their rereading habits, and also by gushing over the 50th birthday of the great Seminary Co-op Bookstore.
In November, HUP Production Editor Adriana Kirilova wrote about the various challenges of completing a project with a decades-long history, The Image of the Black in Western Art.
Also in November, we celebrated the John Hope Franklin Prize-winning book The Condemnation of Blackness by filming a little conversation with its author, Schomburg Center Director Khalil Gibran Muhammad.
Then came December, which we began by sharing some really interesting thoughts on the Occupy movement from Bernard Harcourt, author of The Illusion of Free Markets.
We then took a look at the connection between our two big fall books on China, Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, and No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of essays and poems from the Nobel Prize-winning imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo.
And then here we are, end of the year. Thanks for spending some of your time thinking with us about the ideas in the books that we publish. We’ll be back in January to do it all again.
