The Life of a Text offers a vivid portrait of one community's interaction with its favorite text—the epic Ramcaritmanas—and the way in which performances of the epic function as a flexible and evolving medium for cultural expression. Anthropologists, historians of religion, and readers interested in the culture of North India and the performance arts will find breadth of subject, careful scholarship, and engaging presentation in this unique and beautifully illustrated examination of Hindi culture. The most popular and influential text of Hindi-speaking North India, the epic Ramcaritmanas is a sixteenth century retelling of the Ramayana story by the poet Tulsidas. This masterpiece of pre-modern Hindi literature has always reached its largely illiterate audiences primarily through oral performance including ceremonial recitation, folksinging, oral exegesis, and theatrical representation. Drawing on fieldwork in Banaras, Lutgendorf breaks new ground by capturing the range of performance techniques in vivid detail and tracing the impact of the epic in its contemporary cultural context.

Lakota Texts is a treasure trove of stories told in the original language by modern Lakota women who make their home in Denver, Colorado. Sometimes witty, often moving, and invariably engaging and fascinating, these stories are both autobiographical and cultural. The stories present personal experiences along with lessons the women have learned or were taught about Lakota history, culture, and legends. The women share aspects of their own lives, including such rituals as powwows, the sweatlodge, and rites of puberty. The women also include details of the older Lakota world and its customs, revered myths, more recent stories, and jokes. In addition to the valuable light Lakota Texts sheds on the lives of modern Lakota women, these stories also represent a significant contribution to American Indian linguistics. Regina Pustet has meticulously transcribed and translated the stories in a detailed, interlinear format that makes the texts a rich source of information about modern Lakota language itself.

Winner NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award A crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm—from personal transgressions to our culture’s most painful and unresolved issues American culture focuses on letting go of grudges and redemption narratives instead of the perpetrator’s obligations or recompense for harmed parties. As survivor communities have pointed out, these emphases have too often only caused more harm. But Danya Ruttenberg knew there was a better model, rooted in the work of the medieval philosopher Maimonides. For Maimonides, upon whose work Ruttenberg elaborates, forgiveness is much less important than the repair work to which the person who caused harm is obligated. The word traditionally translated as repentance really means something more like return, and in this book, returning is a restoration, as much as is possible, to the victim, and, for the perpetrator of harm, a coming back, in humility and intentionality, to behaving as the person we might like to believe we are. Maimonides laid out 5 steps: naming and owning harm; starting to change/transformation; restitution and accepting consequences; apology; and making different choices. Applying this lens to both our personal relationships and some of the most significant and painful issues of our day, including systemic racism and the legacy of enslavement, sexual violence and harassment in the wake of #MeToo, and Native American land rights, On Repentance and Repair helps us envision a way forward. Rooted in traditional Jewish concepts while doggedly accessible and available to people from any, or no, religious background, On Repentance and Repair is a book for anyone who cares about creating a country and culture that is more whole than the one in which we live, and for anyone who has been hurt or who is struggling to take responsibility for their mistakes.

The beginning of the golden age of Spanish literature and the particular socio-political circumstances of early 16th century Spain made fertile ground for the emergence of the picaresque novel, an early form of the first-person narrative novel relating the adventures of a rogue or lowborn traveler (Spanish picaro) as he drifts through the Spanish countryside from one social milieu to another in an effort to survive. Influenced largely by the medieval tradition of the fabliaux and by the early Italian Renaissance, and structured upon a foundation of anecdotes, proverbs, popular beliefs, and folk tales, the picaro's discourse becomes a satirical survey of the hypocrisies and corruptions of society. The picaresque novel is exemplified by the prototypical and anonymously written Lazarillo de Tormes, published in 1554, in which the poor boy Lazaro describes his services under seven successive lay and clerical masters, each of whom hides a dubious character beneath a mask of hypocrisy. So piercing are its deliberate social criticisms, irreverent wit, anticlerical attitude and string of mischievous misadventures that Lazarillo was an entry in the 1559 Index of Prohibited Books. For the modern reader, the choice of characters and the backdrop for Lazarillo de Tormes reveal the heart of Spain's national dilemma after the crucial events of the 1520s. This dual-language, annotated critical edition of Lazarillo de Tormes presents the complete text of the novel in both English and Spanish. The translation attempts to capture in modern English not only the meaning of the historical text, but also the qualities of its original style.

As seen in Real Simple's 2017 Gift Guide An illustrated guide to the challenges and pleasures of the introverted life Introversion is "in." But there are still many misconceptions about introverts in the world. They're shy. Anti-social. They don't want to have close relationships. They're all cat people. They don't like big parties (okay, that last one might be true). INFJoe, the cartoon persona of artist and introvert Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, is here to set the record straight. Filled with charming comic book style illustrations, this book provides invaluable insights into the introverted life with plenty of humor and wit. Full of moments that will make introverts say, "That's so me!" as well as helpful tips on surviving at parties and in the workplace, Text, Don't Call is the perfect gift for your quiet friends, or the extroverted ones who could use some help to better understand the introverts in their lives.

J.M. Coetzee is one of the world's most intriguing authors. Compelling, razor-sharp, erudite: the adjectives pile up but the heart of the fiction remains elusive. Now, in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, David Attwell explores the extraordinary creative processes behind Coetzee's novels from Dusklands to The Childhood of Jesus. Using Coetzee's manuscripts, notebooks, and research papers--recently deposited at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin--Attwell produces a fascinating story. He shows convincingly that Coetzee's work is strongly autobiographical, the memoirs being continuous with the fictions, and that his writing proceeds with never-ending self-reflection. Having worked closely with him on Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews and given early access to Coetzee's archive, David Attwell is an engaging, authoritative source. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing is a fresh, fascinating take on one of the most important and opaque literary figures of our time. This moving account will change the way Coetzee is read, by teachers, critics, and general readers.

This book examines the relationship between words and images in various life-writing works produced by nineteenth to twenty-first century American and British women. It addresses the politics of images in women’s life writing, contending that the presence or absence of images is often strategic. Including a range of different forms of life writing, chapters draw on traditional (auto)biographies, travel narratives, memoirs, diaries, autofiction, cancer narratives, graphic memoirs, artistic installations, quilts and online performances, as life writing moves from page to screen and other media. The book explores a wide range of women who have crossed the boundary between text and image: painters who have become writers, novelists who have become painters, writers who hesitate between images and words, models who seize the camera, and artists who use the frame as a page.