We here at the University of Nebraska Press celebrated the upcoming holiday with pie. Our first ever Pie-A-Palooza was today, and about a dozen UNP employees entered their most beautiful, best tasting and most creative creations. Here’s a pic of the lovely, lovely pies, with more to come on Monday.
Have a safe and happy July 4! Our office will be closed tomorrow for the holiday, but we’ll be back on Monday.
Louise Pound’s birthday party was yesterday, as was the launch party for a new biography about her titled Louise Pound: Scholar, Athlete, Feminist Pioneer.
The University of Nebraska Press attended, and this party was notable for several reasons. Among them:
Hostess Paige Namuth actually met Louise Pound. Her parents were friends of Pound and her siblings, Roscoe and Olivia, and sometimes visited them at their Victorian home in downtown Lincoln (which, sadly, has been torn down). One visit, Louise Pound, who by then was in her 80s, took an interest in Paige, who was then about 10 years old. They spent the afternoon playing outside, and at the end of the visit, Louise gave the girl her ice skates, roller skates and golf clubs. Paige still has them, and they were on display at the party last night. (Paige also gave one golf club to a teenage girl – a promising athlete. She thought Louise would approve).
The party was held at the Antlers Center, a substance abuse recovery center that Namuth helps run, which is housed in an old mansion at the corner of South Street and Sheridan Boulevard. Lucky party attendees got a tour of home, which lore has it, was once owned by a man whose brother lived a block away, so they built an underground tunnel connecting the two homes.
Above is a photograph of Louise Pound’s golf clubs (more pics are on our Facebook page), and follow this link to a story in the Lincoln Journal Star about the event.
You know that summer has truly arrived once every major media outlet (and a whole bunch of minor media outlets, too) has published its summer reading list. I’ve already taken a stab at creating a summer reading list out of University of Nebraska Press titles, and today I thought I’d offer UNP blog readers a roundup of summer reading lists featuring titles published by presses other than ours.
I begin with none other than Oprah. Oprah’s list includes 25 titles that are a mix of mystery, literature, poetry and memoir. Some titles are brand new; others are classics. It is one of the more well-rounded summer reading lists I have seen.
Salon.com visited with a variety of authors at BEA and asked them what they intend to read this summer. The authors answers are on video.
ABC’s Charlie Gibson shared his 2009 summer reading suggestions, also via video.
Kenneth C. Davis of the Huffington Post put together a summer reading list made up entirely of his favorite history titles.
NPR has a whole page on its Web site devoted to summer reading lists, including this one, by famous librarian Nancy Pearl, and this one, with titles recommended by independent booksellers.
And, last on my list, Bookslut.com offers a girls-only summer reading list.
These should give you plenty of reading ideas for this summer. One last note: I’m enjoying some of the UNP’s French translation at the moment. Here’s a good book to start with.
Today is the first day of a short but busy week here at the University of Nebraska Press. Tomorrow (Tuesday) evening is a launch party for our book Louise Pound: Scholar, Athlete, Feminist Pioneer, which is (as the title implies) a biography of linguist and notable Nebraskan Louise Pound. The book launch party, which happens to coincide with Louise Pound’s birthday, is at the Antlers Center, at the corner of Sheridan Boulevard and South Street here in Lincoln, from 5 to 7 p.m. Bonus: Some of Pound’s athletic equipment – including skates, golf clubs and tennis racquets – will be on display at the party, which is free and open to the public.
Thursday is the UNP’s inaugural pie-baking contest. This is something I’m looking forward to, as the employees of the UNP are a talented bunch in the departments of both creativity and culinary skills. Look for photographs and recipes on the blog late this week or early next.
And Friday is a holiday – sort of. It’s the day we state employees have off, since July 4 is on a Saturday this year. Bit o' Nebraska trivia: It’s also the day the City of Lincoln is putting on its fireworks display (so as not to interfere with Larry the Cable Guy’s appearance at Memorial Stadium on July 4).
In other news, the Inkwell Bookstore blog has posted images of numerous books featuring Michael Jackson on the cover. Some are pretty cool-looking in terms of cover design, some a pretty cool-looking in terms of content, and some are just plain strange. Also, today’s PW morning report mentions a Jackson bio that was already in the works is set to go to press tomorrow. Wow.
Read from "Coming, Aphrodite!" in the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of Youth and the Bright Medusa:
"Don hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him. He occupied one big room with no outside exposure excepton the north, where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners were always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window, was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog’s bed, and often a bone or two for his comfort.
Continue reading "Off the Shelf: Youth and the Bright Medusa by Willa Cather" »
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned on this blog that Ted Kooser – Pulitzer Prize winner, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and all around writer extraordinaire – has a new book coming out in September. But I don’t know that I’ve mentioned any details of this book, and now is as good a time as any.
When Ted Kooser was a little boy, he spent lots of time with his grandparents – his mother’s parents – in the small Iowa town where they lived. His grandfather owned a gas station, and other aunts and uncles lived simple lives on small farms outside of town. Young Ted spent days fishing with an uncle, playing in his grandparents’ yard, visiting elderly relatives in tiny, immaculate houses with sagging beds and luxurious vegetable gardens, admiring his grandmother’s irises.
Kooser said he spent years putting off writing about his mother’s family because he wanted the story to be perfect. Finally, in 1997, when his mother was ill, he began to write. The result is a slim book – about 75 pages – of prose that he completed not long before his mother died in 1998. He showed it to her before she died, and she approved of his work.
We’re publishing that book this fall. It’s called Lights on a Ground of Darkness. The beauty of this book is that it tells not just Kooser’s family story , but the story of many, many immigrant families on the Great Plains during the 1950s – of hard work, of potential (both realized and unrealized) of families in which English was only spoken outside of the home, and of a way of life that died with a generation. It’s the type of book that every writer descended from immigrants would like to write. But I think Ted does it best.
Have a great weekend.
I learned via today’s PW Morning Report that Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s new mystery book will be promoted with a series of online puzzles. This Web site says the puzzles are “bound to intrigue us as much as any of his mystery novels.” We shall see.
In University of Nebraska Press news, former Boston Celtics star and basketball legend Bill Russell was on the Daily Show the evening before last, promoting his new book. The UNP is not the publisher of Russell’s book, but it is the publisher of The Dandy Dons, which tells the story of Russell and his ragamuffin University of San Francisco team that shocked everyone by being really awesome. And it was fun to see one of the main characters of The Dandy Dons chatting with Jon Stewart.
In other news, former astronaut Alan Bean was featured in the New York Times today. Bean kept a diary while stationed on the space station Skylab, portions of which were published in the recent UNP book Homesteading Space. In 1981, Bean retired from NASA to paint full-time, and the astronauts, spacescapes and other subjects he observed during his Skylab days provide the fodder for much of his work. Bean has been painting since the 1960s, but it wasn’t until he was well into his career as an astronaut that he began painting the moon and other spacescapes, he says in the NYT story:
“My astronaut friends began to say to me, ‘Bean, why do you keep painting the earth?’ ” he recalled. “ ‘You’re the only artist that’s ever been anywhere else but this earth, and you keep painting the earth.’”
That is hands-down my favorite quote in the story.
In today's round of Twitter news, two teenagers have sold a book titled Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less. Here’s a link to the Media Bistro story on the book.
In honor of this book, here's are four (even shorter!) descriptions of UNP titles, presented in haiku form:
A Lantern in her Hand
Pioneer dreams big
Marries, has children, lives life
Children live her dreams
The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas
Gather in Vegas
Watch sports, place bets, eat, drink, sleep
Return home poorer
Little Pancho: The Story of Tennis Legend Pancho Segura
Poor kid plays tennis
Almost becomes huge star
Later, coaches stars.
Searching for Tamsen Donner
Two journeys decades
apart. One leads to better
grasp of the other
This story on PW Online, contains the quote “everyone pretty much agrees that publishing is broken but we keep doing the same things over and over."
Among the possible fixes for the broken publishing industry, the article continues, is Twitter.
Twitter, as everyone knows, is a quick way to get the word out about events, reviews, interviews and, of course, books themselves. But it’s also a way to, for instance, share a chapter of Ulysses with the masses, as a Boston Tech professor has done. We here at the University of Nebraska Press haven’t jumped on the Twitter bandwagon just yet, though it’s coming, and likely soon. I like the idea of posting entire stories on Twitter, such as those in Microfictions – a collection of short short stories by Ana Maria Shua.
Speaking of short stories, this is the time of year for summer reading lists. I was thinking of my own summer reading selections, and realized that I am drawn, summer after summer, to short story collections. Some good ones from the UNP:
-- Our Lady of the Artichokes, a beautifully written collection of stories by Katherine Vas, which explores topics of religion, youth, death, poverty, among many others. Bonus: It has a really beautiful cover.
-- Bad Jews and Other Stories, by Gerald Shapiro. I first read this collection while I was still in college, shortly after I took one of my very favorite college classes of all time (which happened to be taught by the author.) Protagonists featured in this collection are often cranky, funny (either intentionally or unintentionally), mishap-prone and yet supremely sympathetic.
-- The aforementioned Microfictions by Ana Maria Shua. I’ve written about this book before, but it’s one that merits a second mention. This is a collection of extremely short stories – many are just a few lines long – that despite their brevity are still funny, thought-provoking, heart-breaking and, almost always, suspenseful and unexpected. This is a book that could be read in half an hour. However, I recommend reading each story slowly and savoring every well-chosen word.
Read from Chapter 1, "Science Nabs Sorority Sneak", from The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession by Ken Alder:
"The case had all the signs of an inside job. One of the ninety young women in College Hall was a sneak thief. For several months, someone had been filching personal possessions from the rooms of her dorm sisters: silk underthings, registered letters, fancy jewelry, cash. It was the springtime of the Jazz Age in 1921, and young women were returning to the boardinghouse on the campus at Berkeley to find their evening gowns spread out on their beds, as if someone had been sizing them up. A sophomore from Bakersfield had been robbed of $45 she had hidden inside a textbook; a freshman from Lodi lost money and jewelry valued at $100; and Margaret Taylor, a freshman from San Diego, could not find her diamond ring worth $400—though she wondered whether she had simply misplaced it.
Continue reading "Off the Shelf: The Lie Detectors by Ken Alder" »
