COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS ANNOUNCES THE Fall 2024 CATALOG

Dear Readers,

I am proud to present our Fall 2024 catalog, which features a stellar roster of important authors writing on topics both far and wide and close at hand.

Columbia University Press is deeply connected to our New York City home, and many of this season’s titles illuminate the city and its history. Jonathan Conlin’s The Met shows us a new side of the iconic museum. The letters of Joe Brainard give us a fascinating look into the art and literary scenes of the 1960s and ’70s. Robert Pigott’s Destination City uncovers the surprising stories of famous visitors we don’t typically associate with New York. And for our upstate neighbors, Mark S. Ferrara provides a working-class history of the Erie Canal in time for its bicentennial.

Leading Columbia University figures contribute major books to this catalog. Antoine Compagnon, a Proust scholar, examines the French author’s little-known Jewish ties. The anthropologist Rosalind C. Morris has written a magnum opus on South Africa’s gold industry, Unstable Ground. The great critic Phillip Lopate’s essays and reviews are collected in My Affair with Art House Cinema . Gil Anidjar rethinks the political in terms of mothers and mothering. In Search of an Open Mind presents the speeches and writings of the university’s former president, Lee C. Bollinger. Donald Keene, Columbia’s legendary scholar of Japanese literature, and the novelist Shirley Hazzard wrote each other erudite and charming letters for decades, now presented in Expatriates of No Country.

The catalog also features compelling, character-driven film histories. Joseph McBride delivers another trademark critical study, George Cukor’s People, and J. E. Smyth reveals the remarkable career of Mary C. McCall Jr., once the most powerful woman in Hollywood.

In order to publish these groundbreaking works, we rely on the Columbia University community, the broader university press community, and our readers. After a challenging semester, your help supporting our books and our mission is all the more essential.

Jennifer Crewe
Associate Provost and Director