We are pleased to announce the publication of these news books and paperbacks this month.
July 3, 2018
Now in Paperback
Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin’s Secret Police
Alexander Vatlin
Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Seth Bernstein
Foreword by Oleg Khlevniuk
“Groundbreaking. In the first detailed description of Stalin’s mass terror, Vatlin unfolds the day-to-day working of the Soviet political police who carried out orders to select, arrest, interrogate, and often murder their fellow citizens. An absorbing, heartrending account.”—David Shearer, author of Policing Stalin’s Socialism
“A sensationally significant, detailed microhistory of Stalin’s Great Terror, based on the criminal files of NKVD agents who were arrested as scapegoats at the end of the terror—what some historians have called the purge of the purgers.”—Lynne Viola, author of The Unknown Gulag
July 3, 2018
Now in Paperback
The Athenian Adonia in Context: The Adonis Festival as Cultural Practice
“Persuasively reinterprets the Adonia as a ritual that brought Athenian women’s dissenting voices into the public arena to critique male social institutions and values. This innovative work draws on an immense range of ancient sources—literary, documentary, artistic, and material.”—Laura McClure, series editor
“Uncovers remarkable and unsuspected depths in the works of such figures as Aristophanes and Plato. This is the most compelling and sophisticated study available of any single Athenian ritual and the most challenging to received notions about the wider role of religion in city-state society.”—Richard P. Martin, Stanford University
July 3, 2018
Freedom in White and Black: A Lost Story of the Illegal Slave Trade and Its Global Legacy
Emma Christopher
“By following the paper trail of a single West African slave-trading business, Christopher opens a window onto the shadowy world of illicit slavers and those they enslaved after the British abolition of the trade in 1807. Indeed, she has found the only known first-hand accounts from Africans employed in Sierra Leone’s slave factories. An extraordinary achievement.”—Randy J. Sparks, author of Where the Negroes Are Masters
“A compelling and entirely unique glimpse into the daily operation of a slave-trading business, including accounts of individual British and American slavers, enslaved Africans employed on the coast, and captive Africans who narrowly escaped the middle passage.”—Rebecca Shumway, author of The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
July 10, 2018
Now in Paperback
Anna Karenina and Others: Tolstoy’s Labyrinth of Plots
Liza Knapp
“Makes an invaluable contribution to Tolstoy studies and the theory of the novel. Knapp’s comparative readings highlight biographical, philosophical, religious, and literary roots of the ‘hidden labyrinth of linkages’ that connect the two plots of Anna Karenina.”—Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, Bryn Mawr College
“Knapp’s keen eye for prodding out books that play off one another illuminates not only the multiplot novel in its various guises, but the adultery novel as Tolstoy reinvented it, where sexual transgression is forced to serve the quest for God and faith. A mind-expanding book.”—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
July 10, 2018
Now in Paperback
Trauma, Taboo, and Truth-Telling: Listening to Silences in Postdictatorship Argentina
“Opens our ears to silences and their meanings. Gates-Madsen persuasively shows how the unsaid shapes memories of the traumatic past. An outstanding contribution to the study of human rights memory.”—Rebecca J. Atencio, author of Memory’s Turn: Reckoning Dictatorship in Brazil
“This richly insightful analysis makes perceptible the way silence shifts, from being imposed by a military regime to silence as a legacy of this era.”—Cynthia Milton, Université de Montréal
July 17, 2018
Bread, Justice, and Liberty: Grassroots Activism and Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile
“A critical contribution to understanding human rights politics during the Cold War in South America.”—Jessica Stites Mor, University of British Columbia
“The extremely rich ethnographic content provides a unique bird’s-eye view of activism and lived experience in two of Santiago’s most famous working-class neighborhoods.”—Heidi Tinsman, University of California, Irvine
July 17, 2018
Now in Paperback
Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice after Genocide
“Rigorous and reliable. It has much to say about the difficulties of reconciliation politics.”—Choice
“Warns of the dangers of romanticizing . . . local processes of transitional justice: notions of authenticity, tradition, and ‘truth’ are continually contested.”—African Studies Review
“An exhaustively researched, thoroughly analyzed, and beautifully written trove of data on one of the most ambitious and controversial legal experiments of the twenty-first century.”—Canadian Journal of African Studies
July 24, 2018
Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia
Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World
“A theoretically rich and vividly written ethnography that provocatively embraces larger questions of social theory and philosophy. Introducing English-speaking readers to a wide range of European and Russian folklore scholarship, Feinberg brings fresh and challenging perspectives to long-held ideas about authenticity, performance, and nationalism”—Petr Janeček, editor of Folklore of the Atomic Age
All of these books will surely give us unique glimpse about various histories and cultures. To read these books will be a pleasure to me and will help me to write more captivating novels.