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To catch the wave of year-end lists and Best of the Best citations, we thought to extend our reach beyond the books we publish here at the Press, and ask some of our scholarly tastemakers the works they’d endorse as most praiseworthy in 2012. Not every pick is new and you’ll see some selections here that may not flit across the landscape of other favorites lists—but we’ll be posting the books that made our radar blink all week long, with salutations to the authors, ideas, and publishers (large and small) that keep us coming back for more.

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Today, we’re off and running with picks from Carol Fisher Saller, our assistant managing editor of manuscript editing at the Press, author of The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (Or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself), and editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online’s Q & A + Rodney Powell, our assistant editor acquiring in film and cinema studies and all-around movie guru:

What the Zhang Boys Know, by Clifford Garstang (Press 53, 2012), is a tender look at the residents of the Nanking Mansions condos in the unevenly gentrifying Chinatown of Washington, DC. The boys are the small children of a recent widower, Zhang Feng-qi, and what they don’t know is equally to the point, as the novel’s interwoven short stories take us behind the condo doors of Feng-qi, a gay couple and their little dogs, a sculptor, a desperate and penniless young woman, and others, both to see what the other residents can’t and to view developments through yet another individual’s eyes. Garstang’s forte is the short story—most of these first appeared in literary journals—and this is his second novel in stories. His first, In an Uncharted Country (Press 53, 2009), is every bit as affecting. —Carol Fisher Saller

I like to circle around subjects over an extended period of time, so it’s not surprising that my favorite book of 2012, Kazan on Directing, was first published in 2009 (the centenary of Kazan’s birth). It includes excerpts from his notebooks, personal journals, and correspondence, as well as other texts, both published and unpublished—a fascinating combination of detailed comments about individual projects and general ruminations about the art of directing for both stage and screen. Go to the chapter on Death of a Salesman (Kazan’s favorite among all the plays he directed) and be engrossed by his analysis of that great work, taken from a notebook entry and script notes. Then go on to a letter he wrote to the four principal actors several months into the run after he attended a performance and found them coasting. I think you’ll be hooked, and ready to investigate the fascinating relationship with Tennessee Williams on four plays and two films—and I haven’t even mentioned the memorable collaborations with Marlon Brando from A Streetcar Named Desire to On the Waterfront. Elia Kazan, whatever his failings, was a major American artist, and Kazan on Directing helps us understand why that is so. —Rodney Powell

Cheers to holiday reading—stay tuned for more!

Adrian Johns is having a pretty good series of weeks. Earlier this month, the intellectual property specialist was named a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow. The chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science and the Allan Grant Maclear Professor in History at the University of Chicago, Johns plans to use his Guggenheim funding to study the intellectual property defense industry.

Johns is no stranger to prizes. His earlier work The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association, the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the SHARP Prize for the best work on the history of authorship, reading and publishing. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, his most recent volume, won the American Society for Information Science and Technology’s Book of the Year Award and was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

Just yesterday, Johns was feted in a ceremony bestowing yet another honor on his work with Piracy, the Gordon J. Laing Prize for best faculty author, editor or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the University of Chicago Press the greatest distinction.

A review published in the London Review of Books finesses Johns’ redress of the vitally linked histories of piracy and printed matter:

In Adrian Johns’s account, intellectual property rights have always been precarious. According to him, the concepts of intellectual property and intellectual piracy arose as delayed responses to the advent of printing and the development of a commercial book trade, around the year 1660, in London. ‘To find the origins of intellectual piracy,’ he writes,

stand at the main door of St Paul’s Cathedral. Facing west, walk away from the Cathedral, heading down Ludgate and toward Fleet Street. After about a hundred yards you come upon a narrow alley … Entering the alley, the din of the traffic quickly fades, and you find yourself in a small courtyard. A doorway at the far corner leads into a building of indeterminate age with a stone façade. You pass along a brief, twisting entranceway and into an elegant antechamber. But then the passage suddenly and dramatically opens out, leading into a vast, formal hall. It is richly decorated with 17th-century panelling and arrayed flags, all illuminated by stained-glass windows portraying Caxton, Shakespeare, Cranmer and Tyndale. You are in Stationers’ Hall, the centre of London’s old book trade. And here, beyond all the elegant joinery and ceremonial paraphernalia, lies the key to the emergence of piracy. It sits quietly in a modest muniments room. It is a book.

Piracy posits the phenomenon at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and much of Johns’ work seeks to understand this as part of the nature of print culture.

Something tells us he must be on to something. Or maybe we’re just looking for innovative intellectuals whose smiles light up a room:

This past Friday, the University of Chicago community mourned the loss of one of its brightest stars, when Miriam Bratu Hansen lost her decade-long battle with cancer. The Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities; professor in the Departments of Cinema & Media Studies and English, and at the College; founder of the Film Studies Center; and a faculty board member of the University of Chicago Press (1991-96), Hansen shifted the confines of cinema studies to account for modernism's more vernacular forms in line with the writings of Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and others from the Frankfurt school, as Hansen's colleague Tom Gunning describes in his moving tribute:

Coming to the United States, she worked at the Whitney Humanity Center at Yale and taught at Rutgers University before coming to Chicago in 1990. Her research moved to the history of early American cinema and to the work of the Frankfurt school and its satellites on cinema. Both of these areas were evident in her book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Cinema published in 1991, a work which gave shape to the research that had been emerging in the eighties on early American cinema, seeing it through the lens of Negt and Kluge's concept of the public sphere, and providing a magisterial analysis of D. W. Griffith's 1916 film Intolerance through the criticism of Walter Benjamin, and new work on gender.

Hansen was able to work out an intersection between film history, film analysis and film theory few have ever matched. Her boundless curiosity marked her teaching and writing in the next decade, as she evolved the concept of the "vernacular modernism" through probing the influence of Hollywood on early Asian (especially Chinese) cinema, working with her student Zhen Zhang, and especially extending her research into the Frankfurt school and cinema, producing a series of crucial essays and finishing shortly before her death a large manuscript on cinema and the Frankfurt school.

Tributes to Hansen online can be found at Film Studies for Free (including a compendium of her work available on the web), Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, Cintetrix, and 3 Quarks Daily. Many will remember her for her vitality, patience, and uncompromising intellect. I'm one of them.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Miriam Hansen Fellowship Fund at the University of Chicago, 5801 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, IL 60637.

Miriam Hansen on Post-Medial Culture from Film Studies Center on Vimeo.

The University of Chicago Press, along with the publishing world, has lost a lion in the death, at the age of eighty-five, of Morris Philipson, who served as Director of the Press from 1967 to 2000. During his tenure—the longest of any director in the Press's 119-year history—he raised the bar in academic publishing to unprecedented heights, promoting the intellectual revolutions in culture, scholarship, and the arts that characterized this dramatic period.

His remarkable judgment and taste earned him a reputation for making bold choices that resulted in pioneering works that defined their fields. This vision was exemplified by such monumental projects as The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, The Lisle Letters, and Yves Bonnefoy's Mythologies. Other outstanding publications included John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, a 1980 American Book Award winner that broke new ground in gender studies; several editions of the Chicago Manual of Style, the definitive reference for any writer; and Norman Maclean's best-selling A River Runs Through It. Philipson was also an innovator in paperback publishing, expanding the Press's commitment to reissuing classic works by provocative writers including André Malraux, Isak Dinesen, Anthony Powell, and Paul Scott.

Philipson took great pride in establishing the Press as one of America's leading publishers of translations, forging fruitful partnerships with French and German publishers in particular. Philipson and his editors introduced to an American audience works by Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Thomas Bernhard, among others. A translation of essays and letters by the German publisher Kurt Wolff, who as an émigré founded Pantheon Books, was for Philipson "an occasion to make conscious the fact that the character of a press is determined by the publisher making selections on the basis of his conceptions of art and serious thought," he told Publishers Weekly in 1991.

In recognition of his extraordinary contributions, in 1984, the French government awarded Philipson the Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his service to French letters, and in 1982 he became the first director of a scholarly press to win PEN American Center's Publisher Citation. Shortly before retiring in 2000 Philipson also received the Association of American Publishers' Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing.

Philipson was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and received his BA (1949) and MA (1952) from the University of Chicago. Abroad, he pursued studies at the Sorbonne and as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Munich. He received a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University where, under the mentorship of Jacques Barzun, he concentrated on aesthetics. As an advocate for the pursuit of "the best that has been said and thought in the world," he inspired the next generation by teaching courses in philosophy, cultural history, and literature at the Julliard School of Music, Hunter College, and the University of Chicago. Before returning to his alma mater to assume the directorship, he established his distinctive editorial style at Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, and Basic Books during the golden age of New York publishing.

His passion for publishing was reflected not only in recognizing the potential in other authors, but in realizing his own literary aspirations. He was the author of five acclaimed novels—Bourgeois Anonymous (Vanguard, 1965), The Wallpaper Fox (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), A Man in Charge (Simon & Schuster, 1979), Secret Understandings (Simon & Schuster, 1983), and Somebody Else's Life (Harper & Row, 1987)—as well as short stories and works of nonfiction. Cynthia Ozick praised his work as comprising "lucid and engagi

  The 2012 class of Guggenheim Fellows was announced this week by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, inciting some exuberant responses on the part of several winners (check out Terry Teachout’s Twitter feed). The Guggenheim has long been hailed as the “mid-career award,” honoring scholars, scientists, poets, artists, and writers, who have likely published a book or three, professed a fair amount of research, and are actively engaged in projects of significant scope. The fellowship possesses some tortured origins—(John) Simon Guggenheim, who served as president of the American Smelting and Refining Company and Republican senator from Colorado, seeded the award (1925) following the death of this son John (1922) from mastoiditis (Guggenheim’s second son George later committed suicide, and more infamously his older brother Benjamin went down with the Titanic). Among this year’s crop (we dare say more forward-leaning than previous years?) is a roster of standout “professionals who have demonstrated exceptional ability by publishing a significant body of work in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the creative arts,” affiliated with the University of Chicago Press: Creative Arts Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and author of three poetry collections, coeditor of The Open Door: [...]

For the second year in a row, a former Phoenix Poet has taken home the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—and, for W. S. Di Piero, the legacy is a long, tall glass of water. He joins the company of twenty-six fellow poets who have soldered the experience of working class lives into indomitable verse, like Philip Levine; those who, like C. K. Williams and Adrienne Rich, have championed social issues and countered injustice; and those, like John Ashbery, who also deal in the criticism of the visual arts.

What makes Di Piero unique, in a body of work conjures the presence of divinity in everyday life, redresses the grievances of a working-class South Philadelphia upbringing, and moves with effortless comfort from plain-style speech to bold translations from Euripides and Giacomo Leopardi, is exactly what doesn’t. He tells the truth, and I think it’s fair to say, it’s not slant. Di Piero questions poets and the quotidian equally, and what he arrives at is often something close to a sense of permission.

As Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine stated the Foundation’s official announcement:

“R. P. Blackmur once said that great poetry ‘adds to the stock of available reality,’ and that’s certainly true of W. S. Di Piero’s work. He wakes up the language, and in doing so wakes up his readers, whose lives are suddenly sharper and larger than they were before. He’s a great poet whose work is just beginning to get the wide audience it deserves.”

In 1992, we published Di Piero’s fifth collection The Restorers, as part of the Phoenix Poets series.  In one of the book’s opening poems, “The Early Part of the Day,” Di Piero evokes the persons who inhabit a morning, with his trademark plain speak:

“They take their daily exercise walking the street/down from the rehab center, past my house,/unrighteous, ignoring the sluice of cars/schoolkids on bikes/buses heaving people/from the cinderblock slum two blocks beyond the center/to gardens, pools, and kitchens one suburb away.”

Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, W. S. Piero has authored ten books of poetry, including, most recently in 2011, Nitro Nights, as well as five essay collections. Professor Emeritus of English at Stanford University, Di Piero writes a regular column on the visual arts for the independent newsweekly the San Diego Reader and contributes regularly to The Threepenny Review. His poetry and translations have been published widely, including in The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and Agni, and his essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, the American Scholar, Commonweal, Bookforum, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he won the California Book Award in Poetry for Chinese Apples: New and Select