An Interview with Carlos Rojas and Edith Grossman on The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

Follow @WRLBooks Following last night’s book launch event at the Cervantes Institute, New York, the Margellos World Republic of Letters and Yale University Press are pleased to announce today’s publication in English of Carlos Rojas‘ novel, The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell, masterfully translated by Edith Grossman. Here we present a conversation […]

The Rise and Fall of Urbanism: Douglas W. Rae’s City

Settled by Puritans in 1638, New Haven, Connecticut was the first planned city in America. A few weeks ago in New Haven, a group of citizens met in the basement of a middle school to discuss the well-being of their town. Issues like “food deserts,” street crime, and health problems came to the forefront as dozens […]

Eminent Biography: André Vauchez on Francis of Assisi

Last month, as it became clear that Cardinal Bergoglio would likely be elected Pope, his friend Brazilian Cardinal Claudio hugged him and gave him a message. “He said don’t forget about the poor,” Pope Francis explained at a Vatican press conference. “And that’s how in my heart came the name Francis of Assisi.” Francis of […]

Eminent Biography: Tim Jeal on Dr. Livingstone

Read an excerpt from Livingstone on the London Yale Books Blog Read a piece by Tim Jeal for The Daily Beast Born March 19, 1813, David Livingstone became a living myth and national hero of Victorian Britain long before his death in present-day Zambia, having lost contact with the rest of the world for most of his last […]

The Courage to Be

Few thinkers, let alone theologians, have managed to inspire the popular imagination as Paul Tillich did in the mid-twentieth century. As a public intellectual, he has been compared to Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writings also gained mass appeal and whose lectures attracted large audiences in the 19th century. One of Tillich’s landmark works, The Courage […]

The American Crisis: A Serial Drama

It would hardly be an understatement to say that environmental advocate Gus Speth has seen it all. An “ultimate insider,” according to TIME, he’s worked for two presidential administrations and the United Nations, founded two environmental organizations, served as an academic dean at an Ivy League institution, and currently teaches environmental law. But what he’s […]

Leila Ahmed and Women’s Voices in Islam

What does it mean for a Muslim woman to wear a veil? What is the role of women in Islam? What is the relationship between culture and faith? Leila Ahmed, an author and professor at Harvard Divinity School, investigates these topics most recently in A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to […]

To London, with Love: This is a Woman’s World

Ivan Lett— Typically I reserve this space for books acquired through our London office, but my subject here is largely still about England, all the same. In fact, much of the literature discussed in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, focuses on English […]

Proust, Revisited: 100 Years after Swann’s Way

Read the In Search of Lost Time centennial press announcement from Yale University Press!  William C. Carter is obsessed with Marcel Proust. He has published two biographies of the man, Marcel Proust: A Life and Proust in Love, and has been called “Proust’s definitive biographer,” by Yale’s own Harold Bloom. He’s co-produced a Proust documentary: “Marcel […]

Yale University Press Director John Donatich on the Margellos World Republic of Letters

Continuing the English-language publishing success of Greek poet Kiki Dimoula’s new volume of poetry, The Brazen Plagiarist, Yale University Press Director John Donatich comments on the mission of the literature in translation series, the Margellos World Republic of Letters. The video below aired at the Athens Concert Hall on Tuesday, January 29, where crowds of […]