July 25th, 2010

The Sixteenth Edition will be available in book form and as a subscription website.  The same content from The Chicago Manual of Style will be in both versions.

While digital technologies have revolutionized the publishing world in the twenty-first century, one thing still remains true: The Chicago Manual of Style is the authoritative, trusted source that writers, editors, and publishers turn to for guidance on style and process. For the sixteenth edition, every aspect of coverage has been reconsidered to reflect how publishing professionals work today. Though processes may change, the Manual continues to offer the clear, well-considered style and usage advice it has for more than a century.

The sixteenth edition offers expanded information on producing electronic publications, including web-based content and e-books. An updated appendix on production and digital technology demystifies the process of electronic workflow and offers a primer on the use of XML markup, and a revised glossary includes a host of terms associated with electronic as well as print publishing. The Chicago system of documentation has been streamlined and adapted for a variety of online and digital sources. Figures and tables are updated throughout the book—including a return to the Manual’s popular hyphenation table and new, comprehensive listings of Unicode numbers for special characters.

With the wisdom of a hundred years of editorial practice and a wealth of industry expertise from both Chicago’s staff and an advisory board of publishing professionals, The Chicago Manual of Style, sixteenth edition, is an invaluable resource in this rapidly changing world. If you work with words—no matter what the delivery medium—this is the one reference you simply must have.

Praised as "suave, soulful, ebullient" (Tom Waits) and "a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer, and a committed contrarian" (New York Times Book Review), Elijah Wald is one of the leading popular music critics of his generation. In The Blues, Wald surveys a genre at the heart of American culture.
It is not an easy thing to pin down. As Howlin' Wolf once described it, "When you ain't got no money and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food, you've damn sure got the blues." It has been defined by lyrical structure, or as a progression of chords, or as a set of practices reflecting West African "tonal and rhythmic approaches," using a five-note "blues scale." Wald sees blues less as a style than as a broad musical tradition within a constantly evolving pop culture. He traces its roots in work and praise songs, and shows how it was transformed by such professional performers as W. C. Handy, who first popularized the blues a century ago. He follows its evolution from Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith through Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix; identifies the impact of rural field recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and others; explores the role of blues in the development of both country music and jazz; and looks at the popular rhythm and blues trends of the 1940s and 1950s, from the uptown West Coast style of T-Bone Walker to the "down home" Chicago sound of Muddy Waters. Wald brings the story up to the present, touching on the effects of blues on American poetry, and its connection to modern styles such as rap.
As with all of Oxford's Very Short Introductions, The Blues tells you--with insight, clarity, and wit--everything you need to know to understand this quintessentially American musical genre.

This book is about the making of the writer William Faulkner. It is the first to inquire into the three most important women in his life—his black and white mothers, Caroline Barr and Maud Falkner, and the childhood friend who became his wife, Estelle Oldham. In this new exploration of Faulkner’s creative process, Judith L. Sensibar discovers that these women’s relationships with Faulkner were not simply close; they gave life to his imagination. Sensibar brings to the foreground—as Faulkner did—this “female world,” an approach unprecedented in Faulkner biography.

Through extensive research in untapped biographical sources—archival materials and interviews with these women's families and other members of the communities in which they lived—Sensibar transcends existing scholarship and reconnects Faulkner’s biography to his work. She demonstrates how the themes of race, tormented love, and addiction that permeated his fiction had their origins in his three defining relationships with women. Sensibar alters and enriches our understanding not only of Faulkner, his art, and the complex world of the American South that came to life in his brilliant fiction but also of darknesses, fears, and unspokens that Faulkner unveiled in the American psyche.

This book makes available for the first time in English—and for the first time in its entirety in any language—an important yet little-known interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography Hubertus von Amelunxen and the German literary and media theorist Michael Wetzel. Their conversation addresses, among other things, questions of presence and its manufacture, the technicity of presentation, the volatility of the authorial subject, and the concept of memory. Derrida offers a penetrating intervention with regard to the distinctive nature of photography vis-à-vis related technologies such as cinema, television, and video. Questioning the all-too-facile divides between so-called old and new media, original and reproduction, analog and digital modes of recording and presenting, he provides stimulating insights into the ways in which we think and speak about the photographic image today. Along the way, the discussion fruitfully interrogates the question of photography in relation to such key concepts as copy, archive, and signature. Gerhard Richter introduces the volume with a critical meditation on the relationship between deconstruction and photography by way of the concepts of translation and invention. Copy, Archive, Signature will be of compelling interest to readers in the fields of contemporary European critical thought, photography, aesthetic theory, media studies, and French Studies, as well as those following the singular intellectual trajectory of one the most influential thinkers of our time.

When Ahlème’s mother was killed in a village massacre, she left Algeria for France with her father and brother and never returned. Now, more than a decade later, she is practically French, yet in many ways she remains an outsider. Her dreams for a better life have been displaced by the harsh realities she faces every day. Her father is unable to work after an accident at his construction site. Her brother boils over with adolescent energy and teeters dangerously close to choosing a life of crime. And as a temporary resident, Ahlème could at any moment be sent back to a village and a life that are now more foreign than Paris.
In Some Dream for Fools, Faïza Guène explores the disparity between the expectations and limitations of immigrant life in the West and tells a remarkable story of one woman’s courage to dream.

Leading sociologist proposes a new framework for a socialist alternative. Rising inequality of income and power, along with the recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet there has been a global retreat by the Left: on the assumption that liberal capitalism is the only game in town, political theorists tend to dismiss as utopian any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations. As Fredric Jameson first argued, it is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism.

Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. Building on a lifetime’s work analyzing the class system in the developed world, as well as exploring the problem of the transition to a socialist alternative, Wright has now completed a systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors. Envisioning Real Utopias aims to put the social back into socialism, laying the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.

In this startlingly original and persuasive book, Raymond Tallis shows that it is easy to underestimate the influence of small things in determining what manner of creatures humans are. He argues that the independent movement of the human index finger is one such easily overlooked factor. Indeed, not for nothing is the index finger called the “forefinger.” It is the finger we most naturally deploy when we want to pry objects out of small spaces, but it plays a far more significant role in an action unique to us among primates: pointing.

Tallis argues that it is through pointing that the index finger made a significant contribution to the development of humans and to the creation of a human world separate from the rest of the natural world. Observing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the hugely familiar and awkward encounter between Michelangelo’s God and Man through their index fingers, Tallis identifies the artist’s intuitive awareness of the central role of the index finger in making us unique. Just as the reaching index fingers of God and Man are here made central to the creation of our kind, so Tallis believes that the seemingly simple act of pointing, which is used in a wide variety of ways, is central to our extraordinary evolution.

A staggering achievement, Telling Times reflects the true spirit of the writer as a literary beacon, moral activist, and political visionary. Few writers have been so much at the center of historic events as Nadine Gordimer. Telling Times, the first comprehensive collection of her nonfiction, bears insightful witness to the forces that have shaped the last half-century. It includes reports from Soweto during the 1976 uprising, Zimbabwe at the dawn of independence, and Africa at the start of the AIDS pandemic, as well as illuminating portraits of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and many others. Committed first and foremost to art, Gordimer appraises the legacies of hallowed writers like Tolstoy, Proust, and Conrad, and engages vigorously with contemporaries like Achebe, Said, and Soyinka. No other writer has so consistently evoked the feel of Africa—its landscapes, cities, and people—through a remarkable range of travel writing, from Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire to Egypt and along the Congo River. With nearly one hundred pieces from six decades of work, Telling Times is an extraordinary summation from a writer whose enduring courage and commitment to human freedom has made her a moral compass of our time.

"Breaking Ranks" brings a new and deeply personal perspective to the war in Iraq by looking into the lives of six veterans who turned against the war they helped to fight. Based on extensive interviews with each of the six, the book relates why they enlisted, their experiences in training and in early missions, their tours of combat, and what has happened to them since returning home. The compelling stories of this diverse cross section of the military recount how each journey to Iraq began with the sincere desire to do good. Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Anne Lutz show how each individual's experiences led to new moral and political understandings and ultimately to opposing the war.

Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium) covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author's death in 1956. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a German script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card. Selected from the six-volume German transcriptions from the original microscripts, these 25 short pieces are gathered in this gorgeously illustrated co-publication with the Christine Burgin Gallery. Each microscript is reproduced in full color in its original form: the detached cover of a trashy crime novel, a disappointing letter, a receipt of payment. Sometimes Walser used the pages of small tear-off calendars (but only after cutting them lengthwise and filling up each half with text). Schnapps, rotten husbands, small town life, the radio, pigs (and how none of us can deny being one), jealousy, Van Gogh and marriage proposals are some of Walser's subjects. These texts take strength from Walser's motto: "To be small and to stay small."

In Self-Portrait Abroad, our narrator—a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself—travels the globe, finding the mundane blended everywhere with the exotic: With his usual poker face, he keeps up on Corsican gossip in Tokyo and has a battle of nerves in a butcher shop in Berlin; he wins a boules tournament in Cap Corse, takes in a strip club in Japan's historic Nara, gets pulled through Hanoi on a cycle rickshaw, and has a chance encounter on the road from Tunis to Sfax. Tales of a cosmopolitan at home in a strangely familiar world, Self-Portrait Abroad casts the entire globe in a cool but playful light, reminding us that, wherever we go,we take our own eyes with us...

A compelling analysis of how capitalism has given birth to the new sculpted, engineered and pleasure-seeking body. In this startling new work, Hervé Juvin argues that the demographic transformation of the West, with the spectacular extension of life expectancy over the twentieth century, has given birth to a new body—a machine for pleasure that is an end to itself, conquering need, suffering and time. But Juvin’s central message turns on a sinister paradox: what communism set out to do, and disastrously failed to achieve, capitalism is in the process of realizing—and democracy will offer no protection. The wildest of all the utopian dreams of past revolutions is now taking shape before our eyes: the discredited messianic notion that humanity can be recreated in a new form is finally being realized.

The dominant accounts of the current financial crisis-focussing on the lack of regulation, out-of-control markets and irresponsible speculation-have not offered us much beyond the kind of information that we can glean from newspaper headlines. This book, drawing on some of the most prominent radical analysts of the system, from Walden Bello to Barbara Ehrenreich, digs deeper, foregrounding the key questions that are still waiting to be asked. Viewing the crisis as a product of the social order that was built during the era of neoliberal capitalism, it presents a more complete and convincing account of its origins, development and consequences. The contributors assess current events and political responses, critically examining official rhetoric and hegemonic narratives to point the way to an understanding of the crisis beyond the subprime headlines. Contributors: Walden Bello - Dick Bryan - Gary Dymski - Barbara Ehrenreich - Sam Gindin - Peter Gowan - Michael Hudson - James Livingston - Scott MacWilliam - Johnna Montgomerie - Anastasia Nesvetailova - Ronen Palan - Leo Panitch - Nomi Prins - Mike Rafferty - Susanne Soederberg - Henry Veltmeyer

Zizek analyzes the end of the world at the hands of the “four riders of the apocalypse.” There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Zizek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But, he asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Slavok Zizek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal.

After passing through this zero-point, we can begin to perceive the crisis as a chance for a new beginning. Or, as Mao Zedong put it, “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” Slavoj Zizek shows the cultural and political forms of these stages of ideological avoidance and political protest, from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Concluding with a compelling argument for the return of a Marxian critique of political economy, Zizek also divines the wellsprings of a potentially communist culture—from literary utopias like Kafka’s community of mice to the collective of freak outcasts in the TV series Heroes.

The emergence of the book was an event of world historical importance, and heralded the dawning of modernity. In this much praised history of that momentous process, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin mesh together economic and technological history, sociology and anthropology, with the study of modes of consciousness to root the development of printing in the changing social relations and ideological struggles of Western Europe.