UNP author on the radio and in stores

Today in Lincoln the weather seems to be less than dreary with high chances of rain soaking your morning newspaper. (Not that it happened to me or anything…) But it’s nothing that a good collection of poetry can’t fix. Swallowing the Soap is the newest collection by Nebraska’s poet, William Kloefkorn. It contains new and selected poems that span his forty-year career. The poems inside include limited editions and hard-to-find books along with some of his most popular poems. It is filled with the panoramic landscapes of Kansas and Nebraska, the stories of the rough and tender people who live … Continue reading UNP author on the radio and in stores

Off the Shelf: In Search of Powder by Jeremy Evans

Evans Read the beginning of the Introduction from In Search of Powder: A Story of America's Disappearing Ski Bum by Jeremy Evans, Foreword by Glen Plake:

"The idea for this book entered my mind on a rainy November day along Interstate 5 in Portland, Oregon. I was stuck in traffic. I was rarely stuck in traffic in Lake Tahoe, where I lived for three years before moving to the Pacific Northwest. Now instead of counting how many days I went snowboarding, I kept track of my daily commutes. Some afternoons it took me almost two hours to drive the 8.2 miles from my downtown apartment to work. I was on a similar pace on that rainy November day when something occurred to me.

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Author John E. Ikerd is a featured speaker at the Aronia Festival

Nebraska is known for corn, the Cornhuskers and of course, farming. With the decline of family farms and rural communities and the rise of corporate farming and the resulting environmental degradation, American agriculture is in crisis. But this crisis offers the opportunity to rethink agriculture in sustainable terms. John E. Ikerd’s Crisis and Opportunity describes what sustainable agriculture is, why it began and how it can succeed. He talks about the consequences of agriculture industrialization and offers methods that can restore social responsibility to our agriculture system. Ikerd will be at the Annual North American Aronia Berry Festival in Missouri … Continue reading Author John E. Ikerd is a featured speaker at the Aronia Festival

Bliss and Other Short Stories receives glowing reviews

Ted Gilley’s Bliss and Other Short Stories is a collection of nine stories that introduces readers to an edgy vision and a world in which certainties are tested and found wanting. The stories in Bliss all feature characters going about their business, developing relationships, living their lives, and generally aspiring toward happiness, even when faced with violence, unrequited love, deaths of loved ones, and other tragedies.  Gilley is the recent winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Bliss, which is Gilley’s first book, has received tons of praise. Kevin O’Kelly of the Boston Globe wrote, “Bliss and Other Stories is … Continue reading Bliss and Other Short Stories receives glowing reviews

Football Books on Sale!

Football season is well underway and UNP is having a sale on all football books! The Cornhuskers won their first two games and former Husker, Ndamukong Suh, has already sacked a quarterback in the NFL. Go big red! Steve Smith explores the roller coaster experience of being a fan of the Big Red in Forever Red: Confessions of a Cornhusker Football Fan. Smith takes the reader on a journey into an obsessed Nebraska fan’s soul and into the mad, mad world of Cornhusker football fandom. Even if you aren’t a Husker fan, we have many more books to feed your football appetite. … Continue reading Football Books on Sale!

Off the Shelf: Unlearning to Fly by Jennifer Brice

Unlearning to Fly cover image Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "At the Airport: A Romance" from Unlearning to Fly by Jennifer Brice:

"My father proposed to my mother in an airport. I like that sentence so much, I can hardly bear to revise it. But I must. The second time my father proposed to my mother, it was in an airport. The first time was in a car. They’d met three weeks earlier, when my father’s brother, Sam, asked my mother to be my father’s blind date for his own birthday party. He was twenty-seven and she was twenty-five. Back then, Al Brice was holding down three jobs: a mechanic for Pan Am, an afterhours fueler for a jet fuel-supply company, and a logger for his family’s fledgling land-clearing concern. Carol Heeks was a public health nurse who’d arrived in Fairbanks in July of 1961 at the wheel of a blue Plymouth Valiant. A New Yorker by birth and temperament, she was unwilling to spend the rest of her life in a frontier outpost so unprepossessing that a person could drive the length and breadth of it—as she once had—without ever realizing she’d arrived.

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UNP author visits UNL on Monday

It’s a rainy day here in Lincoln, but an excellent day to curl up on the couch with a good read. Between Panic and Desire by Dinty Moore is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture.  Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. “Insouciant” and “irreverent” are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore’s books—and, invariably, “hilarious.”  Since we enjoy Moore’s books (and we hope you do, too) … Continue reading UNP author visits UNL on Monday

Robert Camuto kicks off Palmento book tour tomorrow

The Univeristy of Nebraska Press is proud to share that one of its authors, Robert Camuto, is kicking off his national book tour tomorrow for Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey. The book is about his journey through the Etna region of Sicilily where he discovers more than just great wine. He also meets the winemakers of Italy’s largest and oldest wine region.  During his visits, he gets to know winemakers whose families have been in the business for generations; ex-pats drawn to Sicily by its remoteness, beauty and heritage of great wines; young Sicilians blending new technology and ancient production … Continue reading Robert Camuto kicks off Palmento book tour tomorrow

Off the Shelf: Swallowing the Soap by William Kloefkorn

Read the poem, "Eating Mulberries for Breakfast" from Swallowing the Soap: New and Selected Poems by William Kloefkorn, edited and with an introduction by Ted Genoways:   Eating Mulberries for Breakfast   Mostly purple, purple becoming snowdriftas sugar falls from the small mouthof the dispenser,   purple you gathered from the tree justyesterday, your little brotherabove you lost almost   in branches of purple, purple risingin the bowl as the thick milkrises, and with a silver spoon   you begin to eat what you knowyour buddy Gene will laugh atwhen you tell him, if you   tell him, snowdrift sugar … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Swallowing the Soap by William Kloefkorn

Scoreboard, Baby on NPR’s Only A Game sports show

Football season is almost upon us. Tomorrow Lincoln will be one giant tail gate with fans in red running the city with high excitement for the Huskers to play the season opener. In the spirit of college football season, the University of Nebraska Press is looking into a more scandalous side of the pigskin sport.  Scoreboard, Baby: A story of College Football, Crime and Complicity by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry is a true story about the University of Washington’s 2000 football season. It puts together interviews, articles and thousands of documentation on the season that brought them a victory … Continue reading Scoreboard, Baby on NPR’s Only A Game sports show