Category Archives: Literature

A conversation with Dan Chirot about his new book ‘You Say You Want a Revolution,’ exploring radical idealism

Those who wish for revolution should be wary, a new book by Dan Chirot warns; they might come to regret that wish should revolution become a violent reality.

Chirot is a professor in the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies and of sociology. His latest book, “You Say You Want a Revolution: Radical Idealism and its Tragic Consequences” was published in March by Princeton University Press. He is the author or co-author of many articles and several books, most recently “The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World” (with Jackson School colleague Scott Montgomery, 2015). (more…)

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Why we’re so emotionally invested in the semicolon

In new book, alum Cecelia Watson examines history of punctuation’s polarizing mark

The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class and education are concentrated, so that in this small mark big ideas are distilled down to a few winking drops of ink,” writes Cecelia Watson, AM’05, PhD’11. (more…)

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Author Charles Johnson — with new story collection ‘Night Hawks’ out — discusses the anatomy of a short story

Charles Johnson, University of Washington professor emeritus of English and award-winning author, has released a new book of short stories, his fourth.

The dozen stories in “Night Hawks,” published this month by Scribner, range from realism to light science fiction, myth and his own personal experiences, laced gently with humor and philosophy. Calling him a “modern master,” Kirkus Reviews wrote of the new book: “Johnson’s stories can be as morally instructive as fables, as fancifully ingenious as Twilight Zone scripts, and as elegantly inscrutable as Zen riddles.” (more…)

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New book ‘City Unsilenced’ explores protest and public space

Jeff Hou is a professor of landscape architecture and adjunct professor of urban design and planning in the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. His research, teaching and practice focus on community design, design activism, cross-cultural learning and engaging marginalized communities in planning and design. (more…)

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