New Books In Language

This textbook offers a fresh approach to learning Sanskrit, the ancient language at the heart of South Asia’s vast religious, philosophical, and literary heritage. Designed for independent learners and classrooms alike, it provides a uniquely in-depth and immersive introduction to the language, exploring a rich selection of Sanskrit texts from the Buddhist tradition. Reading Sanskrit: A Complete Step-By-Step Introduction with Texts from the Buddhist Tradition (Columbia UP, 2025)draws from the Buddhist tradition’s vast Sanskrit corpus to present a thematically coherent collection of texts covering a wide range of literary genres, including narrative, philosophical, and poetic writings. This unique choice of source material provides an engaging approach to language learning, immersing the student in one of the major strands of South Asian spirituality and culture while highlighting Buddhism’s connection to other religious and literary traditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did three words come to carry the weight of America's abortion debates? In Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025), Dr. Emily Winderman examines how this phrase shaped American reproductive politics and health care standards across generations. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book traces the unexpected origins of this rhetoric in urban reform movements, showing how early associations of alleys with sanitation, morality, and criminality created lasting impressions that would later influence abortion discourse. Dr. Winderman demonstrates how "back-alley abortion" was always more than just descriptive language—it has shaped perceptions of medical legitimacy and clinical spaces. The book reveals how this phrase emerged from racialized and gendered intersections of urban planning, public health, and social reform movements before becoming a rhetoric that anticipated pre–Roe v. Wade criminalized medical encounters. After Roe, back-alley abortion molded public memory through high

The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) by Henry H. Sapoznik explores a century of Yiddish popular culture in New York City. Sapoznik--the author of Klezmer! Jewish Music fro0m Old World to Our World and a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR's Yiddish Radio Project--tells his story through chapters on eating, architecture, music and theater. Within each chapter are shorter entries on topics as varied as knishes, cafeterias, prominent buildings, Jews and jazz, Black cantors, women cantors, and Yiddish theater. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles, the book offers fresh insights into the profound influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. The guide also contains fifty images, many of which have never before been published. The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City is vivid, deeply researched, and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnet

From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near East In 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the story of the Amarna Letters and the dramatic world of the Bronze Age they revealed. Blending scholarly expertise with painstaking detective work, Eric Cline describes the spectacular discovery, the fierce competition among dealers and museums to acquire the tablets, and the race by British and German scholars to translate them. Dating to the middle of th

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Zoe Avery, a Worimi woman and a Research Officer at the Centre for Australian Languages within the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Zoe and her teammates are preparing the upcoming 4th National Indigenous Languages Survey. This time around, the AIATSIS team have made some really important changes to the survey design through a co-design process which we will discuss. The survey will be conducted in late 2025 to 2026 and reported upon in 2026. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism? A thoughtful, vital new intervention from the award-winning historian. For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe’s political Right, the province of blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. Such threats culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The landscape is very different now, as Mark Mazower argues in On Antisemitism: A Word in History (Penguin Press, 2025). More than four-fifths of the world’s Jews now live in Israel and the United States, with the former’s military dominance of its region guaranteed by the latter while the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left not the Right. Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here, seeking to illuminate rather than blame. Very few words have the punch of ‘antisemitism’ and yet no term is more liable to be misunderstoo

One of the constants of Jewish history is that Jews have learned from the cultures around them. But this exchange of information was not an easy endeavor. Not only did Jews speak a different language, but their cultural touchpoints were different. If they were to learn from the people around them, their translations had to be deliberate, sometimes taking creative license of create buy in among the Jewish community. Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe (U Penn Press, 2024) by Iris Idelson-Shein explores how translations of non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages impacted Jewish culture, literature, and history from the sixteenth century into modern times. Offering a comprehensive view of early modern Jewish translation, Iris Idelson-Shein charts major paths of textual migration from non-Jewish to Jewish literatures, analyzes translators’ motives, and identifies the translational norms distinctive to Jewish translation. Through an analysis of translations hosted in t

Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound (University of California Press, 2024) explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. This buried genealogy of laughter re-emerges with explosive force thanks to the binding of laughter to sound reproduction technology in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing case studies ranging from the early global market for phonographic laughing songs to the McCarthy-era rise of prerecorded laugh tracks, Casadei convincingly demonstrates how laughter was central to the twentieth century’s development of the very category of sound as not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive, reproducible, and contagious. A fr

Ways of Knowing: Oral Histories on the Worlds Words Create (Litwin Books, 2025) sits at the heart of the library project, shaping how materials are described and organized and how they can be retrieved. The field has long understood that normative systems like Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress do this inadequately and worse, deploying language and categories that are rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, and U.S. imperialism. In Ways of Knowing, Emily Drabinski and Amanda Belantara present unique and timely oral histories of alternative thesauri created in response to the inadequacies and biases embedded within widely adopted standards in libraries. The oral histories tell the stories behind the thesauri through the narratives of the people who created them, revealing aspects of thesauri work that ordinarily are overlooked or uncovered. The set of oral histories included in the volume document the Chicano Thesaurus, A Women’s Thesaurus, and Homosaurus. Drabinski and Belantara recorded hour-long oral his

The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail (Heresy Press, 2025) constitutes a bulwark against the persistent censorial efforts from both the political left and right. At a time when conformist pressures threaten viewpoint diversity, and when political attacks on free expression are mounting, this book is a valuable resource for all who seek to understand and defend the right that is central to both individual liberty and our democratic self-government. This concise volume is organized around 10 claims that proponents of speech restrictions regularly assert, such as: “words are violence,” “free speech is right-wing,” and “hate speech isn’t free speech.” In lively, clear, and persuasive prose, the authors examine the flaws in these pro-censorship assertions. The book also includes an insightful introduction by Jacob Mchangama, shedding additional light on the topic from historical and international perspectives. Greg Lukianoff is an attorney, New York Times best-selling author, and th

Bitch is a bitch of a word. It used to be a straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations and efforts to reject or reclaim the word – it's not always entirely clear what it means. Bitch is a chameleon. There are good bitches and bad bitches; sexy bitches and psycho bitches; boss bitches and even perfect bitches. Bitch: The Journey of a Word (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Karen Stollznow presents an eye-opening deep-dive account that takes us on a journey spanning a millennium, from its humble beginnings as a word for a female dog through to its myriad meanings today, proving that sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks. It traces the colorful history and ever-changing meaning of this powerful and controversial word, and its relevance within broader issues of feminism, gender, race, and sexuality. Despite centuries of censorship and attempts to ban it, bitch has stood the test of time. You may wonder: is the word going away anytime soon? Bitch, please. This interview was condu

The American-born folklorist and musician Margaret Fay Shaw’s passion for the Hebrides led her to the island of South Uist in 1929 and then to Canna in 1935 as the wife of the eminent folklorist John Lorne Campbell. Her extraordinary work in documenting and preserving traditional Gaelic songs and customs remains a vital resource for understanding Hebridean music, and the Campbells’ house on Canna is a unique collection of priceless material celebrating the Hebridean world. This vast archive also includes Margaret's collection of still and film photography, which capture the essence of island life at a time when old traditions were vanishing. The Cadence of a Song: The Life of Margaret Fay Shaw (Birlinn, 2025) by Fiona J. Mackenzie celebrates the legacy and life of a remarkable woman, who herself wrote with such wit and flair of her travels and adventures and which took her from turn of-the-century Pennsylvania to 1920s New York, Paris, Nova Scotia and the Hebrides, where she lived until her death in 2004.

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks writer, illustrator, filmmaker and Academy Award winner Shaun Tan. Shaun is best known for illustrated books that deal with social and historical subjects through dream-like imagery. His books have been widely translated throughout the world and enjoyed by readers of all ages. In the episode, Brynn and Shaun discuss his award-winning 2006 book The Arrival, which is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images. In the book, a man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoke

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Sari Pietikainen about her new book Cold Rush (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double developments of two unfinished forces – rapidly progressing climate change and global economic investment - working simultaneously in tension and synergy. Neither process is linear or complete, but both are contradictory and open-ended. This book traces the multiplicity of Cold Rush in the Finnish Arctic, a high-stakes ecological, economic, and political hotspot. It is a heterogeneous space, understood as indigenous land within local indigenous Sámi people politics, the last frontier from a colonial perspective, and a periphery under the modernist nation-state regime. It is now transforming into an economic hub under global capitalism, intensifying climate change and

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh speaks with Dr Vaughan Rapatahana about sexual predation in the English language teaching industry. The conversation addresses his new book Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation (Brill, 2024), which explores how teaching English overseas intersects with and enables widespread sexual exploitation. Trigger warning: this show discusses sexual exploitation and related content that listeners may find distressing. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature: Inciting Difference (Routledge, 2024) examines contemporary debates on such concepts as national literature, world literature, and the relationship each of these to translation, from the perspective of modern Japanese fiction. By reading between the gaps and revealing tensions and blind spots in the image that Japanese literature presents to the world, the author brings together a series of essays and works of fiction that are normally kept separate in distinct subgenres, such as Okinawan literature, zainichi literature written by ethnic Koreans, and other "trans-border" works. The act of translation is reimagined in figurative, expanded, and even disruptive ways with a focus on marginal spaces and trans-border movements. The result decentres the common image of Japanese literature while creating connections to wider questions of multilingualism, decolonisation, historical revisionism, and trauma that are so central to contemporary literary stu

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Loy Lising speaks with Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller about the 3rd edition of her best-selling textbook Intercultural Communication (Edinburgh UP, 2025). A comprehensive and critical overview of the field of intercultural communication Key concepts and discussions illuminated with international case studies of intercultural communication in real life Includes learning objectives, key points, exercises and suggestions for further reading in each chapter A new chapter devoted to intercultural crisis communication; expanded coverage of language in migration; and new studies and examples of virtual, online and computer-mediated communication throughout. Combining perspectives from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, the third edition of this popular textbook provides students with an up-to-date overview of the field of intercultural communication. Ingrid Piller explains communication in context using two main approaches. The first t

Why is political rhetoric broken – and how can it be fixed? Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions (Cambridge University Press, 2022) returns to the origins of rhetoric to recover the central place of eloquence in political thought. Eloquence, for the orators of classical antiquity, emerged from rhetorical relationships that exposed both speaker and audience to risk. Through close readings of Cicero – and his predecessors, rivals, and successors – political theorist and former speechwriter Rob Goodman tracks the development of this ideal, in which speech is both spontaneous and stylized, and in which the pursuit of eloquence mitigates political inequalities. He goes on to trace the fierce disputes over Ciceronian speech in the modern world through the work of such figures as Burke, Macaulay, Tocqueville, and Schmitt, explaining how rhetorical risk-sharing has broken down. Words on Fire offers a powerful critique of today's political language – and shows how the struggle over the meaning of eloquence has

Sanskritist and seasoned teacher Dr. Antonia Ruppel shares her views on the merits and pitfalls of academic enterprise, the brave new world of self-employed scholarship and the teaching of ancient languages.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Jinhyun Cho. Dr. Cho has guested on this show previously, and she is a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. Her research cuts across translation and interpreting and sociolinguistics, with a focus on language ideologies, language policies and intercultural communication. In this episode, Brynn and Dr. Cho discuss Dr. Cho’s new book, Multilingual Practices and Monolingual Mindsets: Critical Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Health Care Interpreting. With a novel approach, which sees interpreting as social activities infused with power, Dr. Cho’s research and this book have captured the dynamics of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic power relations in diverse sociolinguistic contexts. For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital, Life in a New Language, Linguistic Inclusion in Public Health Communications and Interpreting s