Broadview Press Blog

An Excerpt from The Grasshopper, Third Edition, by Bernard Suits In this passage, the Grasshopper explores the possibility of playing a game without any rules. Ivan and Abdul [I began] had been officers of general rank before each was retired and ‘elevated’ to the post of ambassador in the backwater capital of Rien-à-faire. Both had…

Broadview is proud to support and recognize outstanding student writing. We are happy to announce that Kiera Keglowitsch, a first-year student at the university of Alberta, has won the Broadview Junior Award for an Essay in Prose. Please click here to read Kiera`s essay on love in Pride and Prejudice. The essay was selected by a panel of…

ARGUING WITH PEOPLE In the following interview, Michael Gilbert talks arguments with Stephen Latta, Broadview’s Philosophy Editor. Gilbert’s new book draws together insights from Argumentation Theory and our experience of everyday arguing to challenge and deepen how we approach critical thinking. SL: What is Argumentation Theory? MG: Argumentation Theory is an area of study that draws…

“Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value—it’s a widget.” – Dennis Johnson George Packer presented an interesting, in-depth look at books in the era of Amazon in the February 17th installment of The New Yorker, urging readers to consider this important question: Amazon may be good for…

Broadview Press/Freehand Books is pleased to announce a shift in management roles for the new year. Effective this week, Leslie Dema assumes the position of President, taking over from Don LePan. Leslie, who has been the company’s Vice President since 2011, holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Guelph; she held the position…

I’m writing this time about poetry. To my mind, one of the most unfortunate trends of recent years is the decline in poetry sales for university and college courses. (Yes, I do have Broadview’s interests at heart here, but it’s more than that—really!) Increasingly, instructors have turned away from assigning anthologies of poetry or individual…

In 1999, the development of the Open eBook (OeB) format—which would later become the EPUB format—was the first step in moving publishing into a digital age. Early e-readers such as the Rocket Ebook and the Softbook were issued, and publishers began implementing systems of digital production. In 2000, Stephen King became the first author to…

The invention of the typewriter in the 1860s spurred a fervent interest in speed, legibility, and precision among writers and publishers alike. As individual writers experienced the various advantages of typescript over a handwritten manuscript, printing houses began looking for ways to replicate the efficiency of the keyboard in large-scale printing practices. An increasingly mechanical…

Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie was a landmark publication of the 18th century, both in terms of its scope and its distribution. Although the encyclopedia had existed as a genre for centuries prior (one of the most notable contributions being Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in 77 CE), the scale of the Encyclopédie…

Garamond. Caslon. Baskerville. Bodoni. These names have survived as widely known font types, but their origins go back as early as the 16th century when the expansion of printing and readership called for the development and evolution of type design. Claude Garamond was the first to combine popular roman and italic fonts that were established…

We know it now as a popular program for learning languages like French, Spanish, or Italian, but the original Rosetta Stone was the key to unlocking the meaning of early hieroglyphic inscriptions. In 1799, after centuries of misinterpreting the Egyptian writing system, French soldiers came across a stone located in the Egyptian city of Rosetta;…

One of Broadview’s Digital Assistants proofing an EPUB file. Several years ago now, we at Broadview decided it was time to begin offering ebooks; as reading preferences became more and more diverse, it became increasingly important that our content be available electronically to meet the changing needs of our readership. Because our books are primarily…

The Broadview edition of Robinson Crusoe, edited by Evan R. Davis, was recently reviewed by Benjamin F. Pauley (Eastern Connecticut State University) in Digital Defoe. Read the full review here and look for more information on this edition on the Broadview website.

Greetings from the distribution office at Broadview Press! As our busy season comes to a close, we would like to give you a glimpse behind the doors of our warehouse and a brief description of what went into fulfilling orders, both small and large. We’ll let you know about some of the tools we use…

Brian Orend’s The Morality of War is one of the most widely-read and influential books ever written on the topic. Earlier this year, Orend was a guest on the Smart People Podcast where he discussed the second edition of The Morality of War (now available!), as well as the larger ethical issues surrounding war, peace,…

In this excerpt from the introduction to our newly published anthology, The Broadview Introduction to Literature, general editor Neta Gordon addresses the age-old question: Does delving deeper into the structure, meaning, and purpose of a literary work only serve to destroy the value of that work?

In anticipation of the publication of Globalization and International Development, we spoke with co-editor (along with Denise Dimon) H.E. Baber to get her thoughts on the ethical and economic issues surrounding globalization and the ways in which this new anthology brings those issues to light.

“I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose, words in their best order; poetry, the best words in the best order.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge Writing about Literature 2/e was written because literature and writing instructors were asking for a chapter on poetry to complement…

A lovely review of Roderick McGillis and John Pennington’s edition of George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind recently appeared in VII: An Anglo-American Literary Review. Daniel Gabelman writes: “In addition to the text of At the Back of the North Wind and the seventy-six original illustrations by Arthur Hughes, the Broadview edition…

Stephen Donovan and Matthew Rubery’s unique anthology of Victorian investigative journalism, Secret Commissions, was recently reviewed by Ann M. Hale (University of St. Thomas) in the Spring 2013 issue of the Victorian Periodicals Review. Hale writes: “A key strength of Secret Commissions is that the content resonates with a range of disciplines, from media studies…

The newly published third edition of The Broadview Anthology of Short Fiction is a unique collection of 45 stories, with more works from the past 20 years and a greater representation of American authors than previous editions. In her Preface to the anthology, editor Sara Levine—herself a celebrated fiction writer—comments on the ways in which…

Co-editors Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter (University of Iowa, MFA Program in Nonfiction) recently sat down with Gemma de Choisy of The Lit Show to discuss their recently published anthology, Understanding the Essay. Give it a listen!

Recently the following letter was sent to the heads of major Canadian universities. It outlines our concerns about how recent changes to the Canadian Copyright Act are being interpreted by institutions of higher education.

Mark S. Schwartz, Associate Professor of Law, Governance, and Ethics at York University, sat down for an interview with the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies to discuss his research in business ethics and the publication of Corporate Social Responsibility: An Ethical Approach (Broadview Press, 2011).