Norton Shorts for College Courses

W. W. Norton & Company inaugurates a new century of visionary independent publishing with Norton Shorts. Written by leading-edge scholars, these eye-opening books deliver bold thinking and fresh perspectives in under 200 pages.  
 
A perfect fit for college courses, each Norton Shorts title features resources to help instructors enrich their course material. Browse by discipline and request your digital examination copy below. 

In the industrial age, automation came for the shoemaker and the seamstress. Today, it has come for the writer, professor, physician, programmer, and attorney. 

Chatbots are already impacting the way we read, write, and think. For better or worse, they are being used to find information, influence public opinion, diagnose illness, and shape political discussion online. How did we get to this point and what can we do to prepare? Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. Former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for the rapidly changing AI landscape and invites readers to consider how humans and smart technology might coexist in the future. This provocative reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science is essential for courses in literary theory, comparative literature, the philosophy of language, and the history of rhetoric. 

Imagination isn’t a luxury; it’s a vital resource and a powerful tool for our collective liberation.

A world without prisons? Schools that foster the genius of every child? A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin believes in the liberating power of the imagination. Deadly systems shaped by mass incarceration, ableism, digital surveillance, and eugenics emerged from the human imagination, but they have real-world impacts. To fight these systems and create a world that works for all of us, we will have to imagine things differently. As Benjamin shows, educators, artists, technologists, and others are experimenting with new ways of thinking and tackling seemingly intractable problems. Visionary and practical, Imagination: A Manifesto is an inspired selection for courses in inequality, race, technology, and sociology of education.

An award-winning historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America.

Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in nineteenth-century New England. The Indigenous women’s basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, regained a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 World’s Fair. For the girls at the center of this book, woods, prairies, rivers, ball courts, and streets provided not just escape from degrees of servitude, but also space to envision new spheres of action. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, this book evokes rich landscapes and the rebellious spirit of the girls who roamed them—a perfect fit for courses in U.S. women’s or environmental history. 

A bioethicist explodes what we think we know about disability and argues that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability. 

When bioethicist Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,” there was no returning to “normal.” Suddenly well-meaning people called her an “inspiration” while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Why do abled people frame disability as an individual problem that calls for technological solutions, rather than a social one? In a warm, spirited voice and vibrant prose, Shew argues that disabilities should be viewed not as liabilities but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world. This short, stirring book is ideal for courses in disability studies, philosophy of technology, bioethics, and philosophy or sociology of disability.