Suitably Modern

Suitably Modern traces the growth of a new middle class in Kathmandu as urban Nepalis harness the modern cultural resources of mass media and consumer goods to build modern identities and pioneer a new sociocultural space in one of the world's "least developed countries." Since Nepal's "opening" in the 1950s, a new urban population of bureaucrats, service personnel, small business owners, and others have worked to make a space between Kathmandu's old (and still privileged) elites and its large (and growing) urban poor. Mark Liechty looks at the cultural practices of this new middle class, examining such phenomena as cinema and video viewing, popular music, film magazines, local fashion systems, and advertising. He explores three interactive and mutually constitutive ethnographic terrains: a burgeoning local consumer culture, a growing mass-mediated popular imagination, and a recently emerging youth culture. He shows how an array of local cultural narratives--stories of honor, value, prestige, and piety--flow in and around global narratives of "progress," modernity, and consumer fulfillment. Urban Nepalis simultaneously adopt and critique these narrative strands, braiding them into local middle-class cultural life. Building on both Marxian and Weberian understandings of class, this study moves beyond them to describe the lived experience of "middle classness"--how class is actually produced and reproduced in everyday practice. It considers how people speak and act themselves into cultural existence, carving out real and conceptual spaces in which to produce class culture.

Chaudhuri's extravagant and discerning collection unfurls the full diversity of Indian writing from the 1850s to the present in English, and in elegant new translations from Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu. Among the 38 authors represented are contemporary superstars such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Pankaj Mishra.

"The inadequate acknowledgement of women short story writers in standard anthologies is a cause for wonder or affront. How else, indeed, can you view it, given the riches overlooked?" So states editor Patricia Craig in her introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories, a rich, wide-ranging collection that, at last, redresses this historical imbalance by bringing together forty examples of the very best women's stories--from established authors such as Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Mansfield, to such modern masters as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Bharati Mukherjee, and Amy Tan. Here readers will find humor, passion, eccentricity, forcefulness, elan, intellectual vigor, subversion--indeed every shading of tone and mood, from ironic detachment to full-blooded engagement. Each writer has her own, perfectly realized angle of vision, whether it's the zestfulness of Angela Carter, the breathtaking evocations of Willa Cather, the quirkiness of Grace Paley, or the pungency of Flannery O'Connor. Breaking with tradition, editor Patricia Craig offers few stories about traditional "women's" topics. Instead, the entries in this collection range from an unforgettable tale of racism in South Africa to explorations of adultery, immigration, the importance of cultural identity, and the rootlessness of American cities. Craig also includes some provocative offerings from outside the mainstream of twentieth century fiction--a ghost story by Edith Wharton, a delightful fairy tale, and several engaging historical pieces. Eloquent and captivating, The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories offers a dazzling assortment of classic stories and overlooked gems that will amuse, intrigue, and challenge every lover of fine fiction.

"Iconic works of art such as Jackson Pollock's One and Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night draw around 3 million viewers to New York's Museum of Modern Art annually. However, between the museum's permanent collection and its temporary exhibits on display, only just a fraction of MoMA's vast collection and the infrastructures that support it are visible to the public. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio dives deep into the institutions, technologies, and histories that have made MoMA a cultural powerhouse. Domínguez Rubio seeks to uncover the considerable forces that support and sustain this growth. He shows us the veritable army of conservators, art movers, and curators who try to fend off the slow and inevitable deterioration of the works in MoMA's prestigious collection, as well as the enormous and idiosyncratic technologies they rely on, ranging from air conditioning units to specially designed storage containers. And indeed, the vast majority of MoMA's immense collection is in storage. Of the museum's 1,221 works by Picasso, only 24 are regularly on display. These works are thus not only subject to the elements, but to trends in the art world. The prestige of a museum, then, is ultimately as fragile as the works it contains: not only do works of art decay over time, their perceived importance is constantly in flux"--

This book charts the evolution of metaphysics since Descartes and provides a compelling case for why metaphysics matters.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST and REAL SIMPLE A profound and enchanting new novel from Booker Prize-longlisted author Niall Williams about the loves of our lives and the joys of reminiscing. You don't see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you've been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed. The rain is stopping. Nobody in the small, forgotten village of Faha remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. Now--just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricity--it is stopping. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is standing outside his grandparents' house shortly after the rain has stopped when he encounters Christy for the first time. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. This is the story of all that was to follow: Christy's long-lost love and why he had come to Faha, Noel's own experiences falling in and out of love, and the endlessly postponed arrival of electricity--a development that, once complete, would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries. Niall Williams' latest novel is an intricately observed portrait of a community, its idiosyncrasies and its traditions, its paradoxes and its inanities, its failures and its triumphs. Luminous and otherworldly, and yet anchored with deep-running roots into the earthy and the everyday, This Is Happiness is about stories as the very stuff of life: the ways they make the texture and matter of our world, and the ways they write and rewrite us.

New and classical results in computational complexity, including interactive proofs, PCP, derandomization, and quantum computation. Ideal for graduate students.

A beloved and internationally bestselling author’s contemporary retelling of Jane Austen’s classic novel of love, money and two very different sisters. When their father unexpectedly dies, the three Dashwood girls—Elinor, Marianne and Margaret—must face the harsh reality of a life where they no longer have the home or the financial security that they have always taken for granted. As they come to terms with life without the comforts of either their country house or an inheritance, Elinor, a sensible architecture student, and Marianne, a passionate, musical free spirit, are also confronted by a world where their choices are abruptly limited by their new and alarming circumstances. With her trademark insight and wit, Joanna Trollope has brought Austen’s characters and their story into the 21st century. In the timeless spirit of their creator, she casts a clever, gently satirical eye on Elinor and Marianne as they are forced to navigate the modern world and the search for love. The results are both heartbreaking and hilarious, but always, in the hands of consummate storyteller Trollope, hugely entertaining and achingly true to life. Reimagining Sense and Sensibility in a fresh and contemporary light, Trollope recasts this beloved coming-of-age story as a perfect tale for our times.

The Tamil Brahmans were a traditional, mainly rural, high-caste elite who have been transformed into a modern, urban, middle-class community since the late nineteenth century. Many Tamil Brahmans today are in professional and managerial occupations, such as engineering and information technology; most of them live in Chennai and other Tamilnadu towns, but others have migrated to the rest of India and overseas. This book, which is mainly based on the authors ethnographic research, describes and analyses this transformation. It is also a study of how and why the Tamil Brahmans privileged status within a hierarchical society has been perpetuated in the face of both a strong anti-Brahman movement in Tamilnadu, and a series of wider social, cultural, economic, political, and ideological changes that might have been expected to undermine their position completely. The major topics discussed include Brahman rural society, urban migration and urban ways of life, education and employment, the position of women, and religion and culture. The Tamil Brahmans class position, including the internal division into the upper- and lower-middle classes, and the process of class reproduction, are examined closely to analyze the congruence between Tamil Brahmanhood and middle classness, which as comparison with other Brahman and non-Brahman groups shows is highly unusual in contemporary India."