New Books in Language and Translation

In this latest Books for Better Understanding video from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson facilitates a conversation between Marian Schwartz and Dan Mahoney about Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's  March 1917 The Red Wheel, Node III  available in English now for the first time. Schwartz and Mahoney discuss the historical, literary, and cultural significance of MARCH 1917. Hosted by Simplecast, an...

It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience  (Cambridge UP, 2025), written by renowned cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, explores of the influence of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in experiences of suffering and pr...

Today I’m speaking with David Bentley Hart about his book, A Gathering of Leaves: Extravagances and Ephemera , from the University of Notre Dame Press. David is a multi-faceted scholar who has contributed to the fields of philosophy, religious studies, and baseball, among others. The volume we will be discussing today is a collection of essays mostly originating from his website, Leaves in the Win...

This comprehensive history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—a groundbreaking American Jewish cultural organization, library, and research center—details its longstanding efforts to preserve eastern European Jewish culture during a century of genocide and mass emigration. Founded in 1925, YIVO was a global organization with headquarters in Vilna until World War II. It represented the symbo...

Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international o...

Engages with the life and ideas of the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu.  In his last, profoundly innovative work Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination , D. R. Nagaraj (1954-1998) engages with the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu, whose enigmatic writings have perplexed many and thus resisted analysis. Nagaraj situates Allama...

How does an independent press survive by publishing the books the Big Five overlook? Amherst College professor and Spanglish scholar Ilan Stavans joins Sarah Russo to talk about Restless Books, the press he founded to champion immigrant writers, literature in translation, and the books that live between languages. Ilan shares the origin of Restless Books (including the investor who told him to tak...

Featuring personal essay, manifesto, creative nonfiction, and poetry, Tsunami: Women’s Voices From Mexico  (Feminist Press, 2025) gathers the multiplicity of voices being raised in Mexico today against patriarchy and its buried structures. Tackling gender violence, community building, #MeToo, Indigenous rights, and more, these writings rock the core of what we know feminism to be, disman...

What does it mean for a modernist novel to fail? Modernism famously celebrates rupture, difficulty, and deviance from literary norms—but that very embrace of formal experimentation creates a paradox: how can we tell the difference between daring innovation and genuinely bad writing?   Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel (JHU Press, 2026) takes up this long-overlooked question and argues t...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick chats with Professor Dr. Natalia Filatkina , Dr. Kerstin Roth and Research Associate Miriam Hinterholzer . All three work at the University of Hamburg in Germany on a long-term research project, called FSL Digital , that investigates language history, language attitudes and everyday communication in the context of multilingualism in...

With senses that often seem alien to us, bees navigate complex decisions about where to find food, when to fight or flee, and how to work together.  The Language of Bees  (Princeton University Press, 2026) invites readers into the hidden world of bee communication, a realm where creatures less than an inch long use scent, vibration, movement, and sound to cooperate, share information, an...

Not Everything Unfolds as Anticipated: Selections from Yi Kyubo’s Tongguk Yi Sangguk Chip ( University of Hawaii Press , 2026) comprises translations of poems, tales, letters, epitaphs, and funeral orations by Yi Kyubo (1168–1241), the foremost writer and poet of the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392). Dr. Breuker’s translation and introduction humanize this celebrated poet, whom he reveals as not only...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast , Brynn Quick chats with Dr. Nicole Marinaro , a sociolinguist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg. Her work explores how language policies shape people's experiences of accessing healthcare and other public services. Dr. Marinaro’s research focuses on linguistic justice, examining how communication barriers affect patients w...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Yaron Matras about his new book Speech and the City . In this timely book, Yaron shows that cities can provide an important counter-weight to political polarization by forging civic identities that embrace diversity. The book traces the emergence of a city language narrative that embraces and celebrates multilingualism...

Why does the American flag use stars to represent the states? In The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation (U Virginia Press, 2025), Eran Shalev answers this and many other questions, considering the cosmic imagery—so familiar today but so peculiar on reflection—that suffused the United States’ early political culture. In this comprehensive study,...

Deciphering the Hidden Meaning: Language and the Highest Good in Early Advaita Vedānta (Oxford UP, 2026) presents a transformative history of one of the most significant ideas in Indian philosophy: liberation. Taking the great philosopher Śaṅkara as the focal point, Aleksandar Uskokov analyzes the relationship between liberation, language, and scripture. While modern portraits of Śaṅkara often cas...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast , Dr Agnes Bodis talks to Hannah Madin and Catherine White. Hannah is a Teaching and Learning Officer at the Department of Education in the Northern Territory (Australia), and Catherine White is a Teaching and Learning Coach in secondary education. We are zooming in on learning English as an additional language or dialect in remote communities in...

It is a curious fact that among the first Yiddish books ever printed was a translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1540, only 18 years after Luther's famous translation (which it shamelessly cribbed). In the centuries that followed, another dozen or so missionary translations directed to Yiddish-speaking Jews followed. This talk will explore a dramatic change in the character of these...

Are we currently experiencing a Yiddish renaissance? This is one of the questions we are often asked at YIVO. YIVO’s own community of Yiddish learners has expanded more than 10-fold in the last two years. Duolingo has added Yiddish as a language. Headline after headline touts Yiddish as unexpectedly alive and well. What does this all mean for Yiddish in the 21st century? Join YIVO for a conversati...

The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 196...

In this episode of the New Books Network, we talk with Jeremy Tiang about his English translation of The Formosa Exchange (Honford Star, 2026)—which will be released on September 18, 2026 (but is available for preorder ). Tiang is a novelist, playwright, and translator based in New York. He has translated more than thirty books from Chinese to English—including Zou Jingzhi's Ninth Building , longl...

The Red Wind Howls (Columbia UP, 2025) is an unsettling, gripping, and darkly funny novel by Tsering Döndrup, one of modern Tibet’s most celebrated writers. First self-published in 2006 after no publisher was willing to take the political risk, the novel traces Tibetan experiences under Mao Zedong’s rule, from the 1958 Amdo uprising and the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. Through a...

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Holocaust, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puz...

Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Returns to Marrakesh , co-translated by Claudia Esposito and Laura Reeck and published by Syracuse University Press in 2026, chronicles Meddeb’s successive visits to the Red City from 1968 through the 1990s, tracing both his personal journey and Marrakesh’s transformation across three pivotal decades. Through his distinctive blend of poetic prose and attentive observation, Medd...

Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms (Palgrave Macillan, 2026) by Dr. Galina Bogatova unpacks the hidden imperial logic behind Russia’s dominance over its neighbors, revealing how the Kremlin weaponizes "familial system" myths to justify control, including its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From the Tsarist empire to Putin’s digital propaganda, Dr. Bogatova examines how Russ...