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CHICAGO FALL BOOKS C FALL B 2016 H OO KS INTERNATIONAL 2016 EDITION I INTERNATIONAL C AGO PRESS C A AGO, ILLINOIS 60637 C HI ED C ITION STREET TH G UNIVERSITY OF CHI 60 EAST 1427 O Recently Published Fall 2016 Contents General Interest 1 Special Interest 43 Paperbacks 109 America’s Snake Run, Spot, Run Distributed Books 126 The Rise and Fall of the The Ethics of Keeping Pets Timber Rattlesnake Jessica Pierce Ted Levin ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20989-0 Author Index 216 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04064-6 Cloth $26.00/£18.00 Cloth $35.00/£24.50 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20992-0 Title Index 218 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04078-3 Subject Index 220 Ordering Inside Information back cover The Dancing Bees Wattana Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of An Orangutan in Paris the Honeybee Language Chris Herzfeld Tania Munz ISBN-13: 978-0-226-16859-3 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02086-0 Cloth $26.00/£18.00 Cloth $30.00/£21.00 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-16862-3 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02105-8 Edge of Irony But Can I Start a Modernism in the Shadow of the Sentence with “But”? Cover design by Mary Shanahan Habsburg Empire Advice from the Chicago Style Q&A Catalog design by Brian Beerman and Mary Shanahan Marjorie Perloff University of Chicago Press ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05442-1 Editorial Staff Cloth $30.00/£21.00 With a Foreword by Carol Fisher Saller E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-32849-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37064-4 Cloth $15.00/£10.50 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37078-1 SIMON GOLDHILL A Very Queer Family Indeed Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain “We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual kind.” o begins A Very Queer Family Indeed, which introduces us to the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Benson became SArchbishop of Canterbury at the height of Queen Victoria’s reign, while his wife, Mary, was renowned for her wit and charm—the “This bold, erudite, and highly original prime minister once wondered whether she was “the cleverest woman book takes as its principal subject the in England or in Europe.” The couple’s six precocious children includ- vast literary output of an extraordinary ed E. F. Benson, celebrated creator of the Mapp and Lucia novels, and Victorian family—that of Archbishop Margaret Benson, the first published female Egyptologist. Edward W. Benson and his wife and What interests Simon Goldhill most, however, is what went on children, almost all of whom published behind the scenes, which was even more unusual than anyone could extensively. Goldhill makes a series of imagine. Inveterate writers, the Benson family spun out novels, essays, brilliant forays into Victorian discussions and thousands of letters that open stunning new perspectives—includ- of sex and sexuality, of religious belief ing what it might mean for an adult to kiss and propose marriage to a and doubt, and of topics as engaging and twelve-year-old girl, how religion in a family could support or destroy complexly shaded as ‘discretion’ and ‘in- relationships, or how the death of a child could be celebrated. No discretion.’ A Very Queer Family Indeed is, other family has left such detailed records about their most intimate all told, a remarkable achievement—one moments, and in these remarkable accounts, we see how family life that is both beautifully written and com- and a family’s understanding of itself took shape during a time when pulsively readable.” —Christopher Lane, psychoanalysis, scientific and historical challenges to religion, and new author of The Age of Doubt: Tracing the ways of thinking about society were developing. This is the story of the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty Bensons, but it is also more than that—it is the story of how society transitioned from the high Victorian period into modernity. OCTOBER 344 p., 8 halftones 6 x 9 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39378-0 Cloth $35.00/£24.50 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39381-0 Simon Goldhill is professor of Greek and the director of the Centre for BIOGRAPHY HISTORY Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cam- bridge. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of many books, including Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave; How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today; and Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives, all also published by the University of Chicago Press. general interest 1 ALICE KAPLAN Looking for The Outsider Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic he Outsider is a rite of passage for readers around the world. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus’s novel has T been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It’s the rare novel that’s as likely to be found in a teen’s backpack as in a graduate philosophy seminar. If the twentieth century produced a novel that could be called ubiquitous, The Outsider is it. “Thoroughly enjoyable, and filled with How did a young man in his twenties who had never written a fascinating thoughts and insights. A novel turn out a masterpiece that still grips readers more than seventy wonderfully elegant investigative jour- years later? With Looking for “The Outsider,” Alice Kaplan tells that story. ney, leading us from the first spark to the In the process, she reveals Camus’s achievement to have been even afterlife of Camus’s novel.” —Sarah Bakewell, more impressive—and more unlikely—than even his most devoted author of At the Existentialist Cafe readers knew. Born in poverty in colonial Algeria, Camus started out as a jour- SEPTEMBER 288 p., 3 maps 6 x 9 nalist covering the criminal courts. The murder trials he attended, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-44015-6 Cloth $26.00/£18.00 Kaplan shows, would be a major influence on the development and E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-44029-3 themes of The Outsider. She follows Camus to France, and, making deft LITERATURE BIOGRAPHY use of his diaries and letters, re-creates his lonely struggle with the novel in Montmartre, where he finally hit upon the unforgettable first-person voice that enabled him to break through and complete The Outsider. Even then, the book’s publication was far from certain. France was straining under German occupation, Camus’s closest mentor was unsure of the book’s merit, and Camus himself was suffering from near-fatal tuberculosis. Yet the book did appear, thanks in part to a resourceful publisher, Gaston Gallimard, who was undeterred by paper shortages and Nazi censorship. 2 general interest Few books inspire as much devotion as The Outsider. Camus’s novel couldn’t have a better biographer than Alice Kaplan, whose books about twentieth-century France have won her legions of fans. No reader of Camus will want to miss this brilliant exploration. The initial critical reception of The Outsider was mixed, and it “It might seem that there’s nothing left wasn’t until after liberation that the book began its meteoric rise. As to say about The Outsider. But Kaplan’s France and the rest of the world began to move out of the shadow Looking for “The Outsider” reveals a of war, Kaplan shows, Camus’s book—with the help of an aggressive seductively manipulated story, every marketing campaign by Knopf for their 1946 publication of the first scintilla of its plot derived from real life English translation—became a critical and commercial success, and or from prior literature: James Cain’s Camus found himself one of the most famous writers in the world. The Postman Always Rings Twice, Camus Suddenly, his seemingly modest tale of alienation was being seen for claimed, was the strongest influence on what it really was: a powerful parable of the absurd, an existentialist his novel, which is based on the absurd, masterpiece. not on existentialism after all. Like most fiction, The Outsider was built upon nar- rative truths, and, for the first time, the Alice Kaplan is the author identity of the foreigner shot by Meur- of numerous books, in- sault is revealed, no longer condemned cluding Dreaming in French, The Interpreter, French to be the nameless Arab. Graceful yet Lessons, and The Collabora- demanding, Looking for “The Outsider” tor, the last of which was shows how thoroughly Camus made art a finalist for the National Book Award and the out of his life.” National Book Critics —Laura Claridge, Circle Award. author of The Lady with the Borzoi PHOTO BY CATHERINE HÉLIE © EDITIONS GALLIMARD Also by Alice Kaplan Dreaming in The French French Collaborator Lessons The Paris Years of The Trial and A Memoir Jacqueline Bouvier Execution of ISBN-13: Kennedy, Susan Robert Brasillach 978-0-226-42419-4 Paper $15.00 Sontag, and ISBN-13: /£10.50 Angela Davis 978-0-226-42415-6 Paper $23.00 ISBN-13: /£16.00 978-0-226-05487-2 Paper $15.00/£10.50 general interest 3 LEONARD BARKAN Berlin for Jews A Twenty-First-Century Companion hat is it like to travel to Berlin today, particularly as a Jew, and bring with you the baggage of history? And what hap- W pens when an American Jew, raised by a secular family, falls in love with Berlin not in spite of his being a Jew but because of it? The answer is Berlin for Jews.