New Books in Language and Translation

For the Love of Tamil celebrates the life and work of E. Annamalai (born 1938), the most prominent Tamil linguist of his generation. Spanning six decades and multiple continents, his scholarship ranges from formal analyses of Tamil syntax and semantics to studies of diglossia, pedagogy, language politics and Tamil poetics and literature. This volume collects contributions from leading scholars in various disciplines related to Tamil studies. Together, they reflect the intellectual breadth and disciplinary range of Annamalai’s work, covering classical and modern Tamil literature, grammatical traditions, linguistic analysis, sociolinguistics, and cultural history. They also highlight the lasting importance of Annamalai’s scholarship and demonstrate how his rigorous yet comprehensive approach to Tamil has influenced the study of language, literature, and society.
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For the Love of Tamil celebrates the life and work of E. Annamalai (born 1938), the most prominent Tamil linguist of his generation. Spanning six decades and multiple continents, his scholarship ranges from formal analyses of Tamil syntax and semantics to studies of diglossia, pedagogy, language politics and Tamil poetics and literature. This volume collects contributions from leading scholars in various disciplines related to Tamil studies. Together, they reflect the intellectual breadth and disciplinary range of Annamalai’s work, covering classical and modern Tamil literature, grammatical traditions, linguistic analysis, sociolinguistics, and cultural history. They also highlight the lasting importance of Annamalai’s scholarship and demonstrate how his rigorous yet comprehensive approach to Tamil has influenced the study of language, literature, and society.
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The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) offers a new look at over a century of Yiddish culture in New York City. Author Henry H. Sapoznik focuses on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black-Jewish cultural interactions, restaurants, real estate, and journalism to tell the history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the influence of Yiddish culture on New York City and showcases the culture’s persistent

Join YIVO for a discussion with Sapoznik about this new book, led by Eddy Portnoy.

This discussion originally took place on October 23, 2025.
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A transdisciplinary array of authors offering a new frame of reference for autotheory and its genre-bending synthesis of autobiography and critical theory.

Autotheories (MIT Press, 2025) tells the story of a field in formation. Building on traditions that have long fused life writing, philosophical encounter, embodied theorizing, and cultural critique, autotheory constructs new practices of critical theory. Transgressing generic boundaries and bridging stylistic registers, it crafts language that is intimate, analytic, playful, and insurgent. Editors Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan underscore autotheory's multiple genealogies and genre-bending forms while situating it within the contemporary political field. In this collection, autotheory emerges as a strut (of style), a straddle (of disciplines), a proliferation (of selves), an axis (of identifications), an index (of attachments), and an archive (of loves).An assemblage and an experience, Autotheories surveys the field's iterations and permutations without settling for classification or bowing to ossification.Contributors:Alex Brostoff, Jessica Bush, Judith Butler, Vilashini Cooppan, Carla Freccero, rl Goldberg, Jan Grue, Emma Lieber, Megan Moodie, Lili Owen Rowlands, John Patterson, Paul B. Preciado, Erica Richardson, Migueltzinta C. Solís, Jamieson Webster, Damon Ross Young, Stacey Young, Arianne ZwartjesMatthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas.
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The Philosophy of Translation (Yale UP, 2024) is a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what translation really is and what translators actually do. As the translator of sixty books from multiple languages, Damion Searls has spent decades grappling with words on the most granular level: nouns and verbs, accents on people’s names, rhymes, rhythm, “untranslatable” cultural nuances. In this book, he connects a wealth of specific examples to larger philosophical issues of reading and perception. Translation, he argues, is fundamentally a way of reading—but reading is much more than taking in information, and translating is far from a mechanical process of converting one word to another. This sharp and inviting exploration of the theory and practice of translation is for anyone who has ever marveled at the beauty, force, and movement of language.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Damion Searls to discuss The Philosophy of Translation, exploring what it truly means to read as a translator, how grammar shapes worldview, and where creativity lives in the space between languages.

Damion Searls studied philosophy at Harvard and is a prominent translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, including books by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Proust, Kielland, Jelinek, Schwitters, Mann, Modiano, and Fosse. His own books include the novel Analog Days, the poetry volume The Mariner’s Mirror, and The Inkblots, a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator.

Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.
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