The king despairs of his idle sons, so he hires a learned brahmin who promises to make their lessons in statecraft unmissable. The lessons are disguised as short stories, featuring mainly animal protagonists. Many of these narratives have traveled across the world, and are known in the West as Aesop’s fables. Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Naráyana’s best-seller gives its reader much more than “Friendly Advice.” In one handy collection—closely related to the world-famous Pañcatantra or Five Discourses on Worldly Wisdom —numerous animal fables are interwoven with human stories, all designed to instruct wayward princes. Tales of canny procuresses compete with those of cunning crows and tigers. An intrusive ass is simply thrashed by his master, but the meddlesome monkey ends up with his testicles crushed. One prince manages to enjoy himself with a merchant’s wife with her husband’s consent, while another is kicked out of paradise by a painted image. This volume also contains the compact version of King Víkrama’s Adventures, thirty-two popular tales about a generous emperor, told by thirty-two statuettes adorning his lion-throne. Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org

This book explores past expressions of the Jewish interest in Hinduism in order to learn what Hinduism has meant to Jews living mainly in the 12th through the 19th centuries. India and Hinduism, though never at the center of Jewish thought, claim a place in its history, in the picture Jews held of the wider world, of other religions and other human beings. Each chapter focuses on a specific author or text and examines the literary context as well as the cultural context, within and outside Jewish society, that provided images and ideas about India and its religions. Overall the volume constructs a history of ideas that changed over time with different writers in different settings. It will be especially relevant to scholars interested in Jewish thought, comparative religion, interreligious dialogue, and intellectual history.

Holm’s book is an innovative approach to the biblical Book of Daniel. It places Daniel against the background of story-collections, an ancient genre that began in Egypt in the mid-second millennium B.C.E. This work focuses on Daniel 6–4 and provides detailed comparisons with specific bodies of story-collections and other related material from the Ancient Near East. In this regard, special attention is given to Egyptian court tales, a large corpus mostly neglected by previous biblical scholars. Thus, this book brings new evidence and fresh insights to the field of Daniel studies, which in recent years has generated constant interest, especially as it pertains to textual issues and literary matters. Setting Daniel against an explicit definition of the story-collection genre redefines a vast array of questions concerning textual criticism, compositional history, and the overall nature of the book. For instance, the divergent texts of the narrative parts of Daniel (the Masoretic text and the Greek editions in Theodotion and the Septuagint) now need to be described in part as variant editions, or tellings, of a common core material, rather than as translations of older written texts with clearly traceable genealogies. When Daniel is studied in the context of story-collections and kindred compositions from the Ancient Near Eastern and neighboring literatures, new light is shed on the literary traditions and processes from which the Daniel stories arose. There are a greater number of court tales and cycles than previously recognized, as in the case of Qumran but also the Egypt Demotic corpus. The detailed discussion of all these materials allows us to appreciate the Book of Daniel in a much wider literary milieu and it furthers our understanding of the history of its composition and early transmission.

The Dasam Granth is a 1,428-page anthology of diverse compositions attributed to the tenth Guru of Sikhism, Guru Gobind Singh, and a topic of great controversy among Sikhs. The controversy stems from two major issues: a substantial portion of the Dasam Granth relates tales from Hindu mythology, suggesting a disconnect from normative Sikh theology; and a long composition entitled Charitropakhian tells several hundred rather graphic stories about illicit liaisons between men and women. Sikhs have debated whether the text deserves status as a "scripture" or should be read instead as "literature." Sikh scholars have also long debated whether Guru Gobind Singh in fact authored the entire Dasam Granth. Much of the secondary literature on the Dasam Granth focuses on this authorship issue, and despite an ever-growing body of articles, essays, and books (mainly in Punjabi), the debate has not moved forward. The available manuscript and other historical evidence do not provide conclusive answers regarding authorship. The debate has been so acrimonious at times that in 2000, Sikh leader Joginder Singh Vedanti issued a directive that Sikh scholars not comment on the Dasam Granth publicly at all pending a committee inquiry into the matter. Debating the Dasam Granth is the first English language, book-length critical study of this controversial Sikh text in many years. Based on research on the original text in the Brajbhasha and Punjabi languages, a critical reading of the secondary literature in Punjabi, Hindi, and English, and interviews with scholars and Sikh leaders in India, it offers a thorough introduction to the Dasam Granth, its history, debates about its authenticity, and an in-depth analysis of its most important compositions.

During the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, Kashmir--a Muslim-majority area ruled by a Hindu maharaja--became a hotly disputed territory. Divided between India and Pakistan, the region has been the focus of international wars and the theater of political and military struggles for self-determination. The result has been great human suffering within the state, with political implications extending globally. Imagining Kashmir examines cinematic and literary imaginings of the Kashmir region's conflicts and diverse citizenship, analyzing a wide range of narratives from writers and directors such as Salman Rushdie, Bharat Wakhlu, Mani Ratnam, and Mirza Waheed in conjunction with research in psychology, cognitive science, and social neuroscience. In this innovative study, Patrick Colm Hogan's historical and cultural analysis of Kashmir advances theories of narrative, colonialism, and their corresponding ideologies in relation to the cognitive and affective operations of identity. Hogan considers how narrative organizes people's understanding of, and emotions about, real political situations and the ways in which such situations in turn influence cultural narratives, not only in Kashmir but around the world.

This textbook for master programs in economics offers a comprehensive overview of microeconomics. It employs a carefully graded approach where basic game theory concepts are already explained within the simpler decision framework. The unavoidable mathematical content is supplied when needed, not in an appendix. The book covers a lot of ground, from decision theory to game theory, from bargaining to auction theory, from household theory to oligopoly theory, and from the theory of general equilibrium to regulation theory. Additionally, cooperative game theory is introduced. This textbook has been recommended and developed for university courses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

This volume brings together sixteen articles on the religions, literatures and histories of South and Central Asia in tribute to Patrick Olivelle, one of North America’s leading Sanskritists and historians of early India. Over the last four decades, the focus of his scholarship has been on the ascetic and legal traditions of India, but his work as both a researcher and a teacher extends beyond early Indian religion and literature. ‘Religion and Identity and South Asia and Beyond’ is a testament to that influence. The contributions in this volume, many by former students of Olivelle, are committed to linguistic and historical rigor, combined with sensitivity to how the study of Asia has been changing over the last several decades.

Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the pre-modern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these pre-modern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining-The Novel: An Alternative History is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.