Washington University Press Search Results Page

Aiiieeeee!

An Anthology of Asian American Writers

By Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong, Tara Fickle

In the eyes of mid-twentieth-century white America, “Aiiieeeee!” was the one-dimensional cry from Asian Americans, their singular expression of all emotions—it signified and perpetuated the idea of Asian Americans as inscrutable, foreign, self-hating, undesirable, and...

The Grief of a Happy Life

By Christopher Howell

In Christopher Howell’s twelfth collection of poems, his gifts for elegy, humor, and lyricism are on full display. The Grief of a Happy Life explores the interplay between memory and imagination, celebrating the ways that...

Two Centuries of Manchu Women Poets

An Anthology

By Wilt L. Idema

This anthology presents substantial selections from the work of twenty Manchu women poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The poems, inspired by their daily life and reflections, provide fascinating insights into the experiences and...

Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor

A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Story Collection

By Aina the Layman. With Ziran the Eccentric Wanderer. Robert E. Hegel

Written around 1660, the unique Chinese short story collection Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor (Doupeng xianhua), by the author known only as Aina the Layman, uses the seemingly innocuous setting of neighbors swapping yarns...

Oceans of Longing

Nine Stories

By Sitor Situmorang. Translated by Harry Aveling, Keith Foulcher, and Brian Russell Roberts

Born into a high-status family of the Batak ethnic group indigenous to North Sumatra, Sitor Situmorang (1924–2014) was a Dutch-educated Indonesian nationalist who experienced firsthand the transition from the Dutch East Indies of his youth...

Red Gerberas

Short Stories

By Sitor Situmorang. Translated by Harry Aveling

Sitor Situmorang, one of the most celebrated Indonesian literary voices of the twentieth century, claimed that all his work dealt with a single theme—“love and wanderlust,” which are “two aspects of one and the same...

From the Fifty Jātaka

Selections from the Thai Paññāsa Jātaka

By Chris Baker, Pasuk Phongpaichit

For over two thousand years, jātaka—tales of the Buddha’s previous lives—have been popular as teaching and entertainment. Apart from the classical Indian jātaka, many others in Southeast Asia were assembled in collections known as the...

The Propeller under the Bed

A Personal History of Homebuilt Aircraft

By Eileen A. Bjorkman

On July 25, 2010, Arnold Ebneter flew across the country in a plane he designed and built himself, setting an aviation world record for aircraft of its class. He was eighty-two at the time and...

Shapes of Native Nonfiction

Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers

By Elissa Washuta, Theresa Warburton

Just as a basket’s purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology...

The Nuosu Book of Origins

A Creation Epic from Southwest China

By Mark Bender, Qingchun Luo, Jjivot Zopqu

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295745701.s01

The Nuosu people, who were once overlords of vast tracts of farmland and forest in the uplands of southern Sichuan and neighboring provinces, are the largest division of the Yi ethnic group...

Pangs of Love and Other Writings

By David Wong Louie. Foreword by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Afterword by King-Kok Cheung

An apprentice sushi chef and a mysterious blue-eyed woman share a bottle of wine inside a climate-controlled otter tank. The Great Wall of China grumbles as workers forego construction to watch an imperial game of...

Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature

Tales and Commentary

By Wilt L. Idema, Haiyan Lee

In literatures worldwide, animal fables have been analyzed for their revealingly anthropomorphic views, but until now little attention has been given to the animal tales of China. The complex, competitive relationship between rodents (vilified as...

Thieve

By Joe Wilkins

Thieve is a pointed, political book, though the politics here are local, particular, physically felt. The central sequence of poems—subtitled “Poem against the Crumbling of the Republic”—was written in direct response to the poet’s own...

Agnostic

Poems

By Christopher Buckley

Specters as various as Vallejo, Szymborska, Neruda, Fidel Castro, and Groucho Marx guide and support the elegies in Christopher Buckley’s new collection. A god that may or may not be there as well as politics,...

Hair of the Dog

An Anthology

By Christopher Howell

Hair of the Dog, edited by poet Christopher Howell, is the second installment of The Acme Poem Company’s Zodiac Poetry Anthology Series. Hair of the Dog contains work collected from regional and national poets alike,...

Pray to the Empty Wells

By Iryna Shuvalova. Translated by Olena Jennings

Pray to the Empty Wells is a bilingual collection of poems by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian author Iryna Shuvalova. The forty-four poems reflect the central section of Shuvalova’s forthcoming book of Ukrainian-language poems of the same...

The Lord of Everywhere

By John Hodgen

The poems in The Lord of Everywhere are about strength and courage and the will to hold on, about home and homelessness, and the tension that floats like Emily’s feather between knowing what home means...

The Time Machine

By Laura Kasischke

The Time Machine is Laura Kasischke’s eleventh book of poetry. The Time Machine offers us surreal and transformative explorations of maternity, mortality, and memory. In the opening poem, Laura tells us: “This is what it...

From Turtle Island to Gaza

By David Groulx

With a sure voice, Groulx, an Anishnaabee writer, artistically weaves together the experiences of Indigenous peoples in settler Canada with those of the people of Palestine, revealing a shared understanding of colonial pasts and presents.

Unforgetting Private Charles Smith

By Jonathan Locke Hart

Private Charles Smith had been dead for close to a century when Jonathan Hart discovered the soldier’s small diary in the Baldwin Collection at the Toronto Public Library. The diary’s first entry was marked 28...