For a few weeks now, I’ve been meaning to write about Gabrielle Burton and something she and her family did that I think is pretty cool. First, some background: Gabrielle is the author of Searching for Tamsen Donner, which the University of Nebraska Press published earlier this year, and which I’ve written about before. For Gabrielle, writing a book about the wife of the leader of the ill-fated and famous Donner Party was as much a labor of love as it was a labor of scholarship. Gabrielle became obsessed with Tamsen Donner more than 30 years ago, when she was … Continue reading Two seven-mile treks, 150 years apart

Last week, I started reading Peggy Shumaker’s memoir, Just Breathe Normally. This is a book the University of Nebraska Press published as a hardcover a few years back, before I had begun working here. This fall, the press is releasing it as a paperback. Drawn by its beautiful cover (a swimmer gliding through cool blue-green water), I picked it up as soon as it came arrived in stock. I’m glad I did.  Just Breath Normally jumps back and forth between two difficult times in Shumaker’s life: her childhood, in which she was the oldest of four children of poor, alcoholic, unpredictable … Continue reading This just in: Just Breathe Normally by Peggy Shumaker

Yesterday’s New York Times featured this article, which explains that recent changes in the genre of chick lit mirror recent changes in the U.S. economy. No longer are heroines hunting for rich men whilst climbing their own corporate ladders in lovely, designer shoes. No, they’re doing more practical things, like clipping coupons after their white-collar-criminal husbands go to jail. Or getting divorced. Or generally living simple lives fraught with everyday problems, the kind to which readers can relate. The journeys these women face, the NYT article continues, are emotional journeys, rather than economical ones in which readers see the ambitious … Continue reading An alternative to chick lit

On this day in history, Cecil B. DeMille was born in Ashfield, Mass., in 1881. DeMille produced and directed 70 films, and is perhaps best-known for his over-the-top productions of Cleopatra, The Crusades, and The Ten Commandments (which was a remake of a silent version of the film he produced and directed in the 1920s). Pulp writer Harold Lamb was a technical adviser to DeMille, and the University of Nebraska Press has published several collections of Lamb’s short stories, including Swords from the Desert and Swords from the West, which are new this fall. Many of Lamb’s stories, like many … Continue reading This Day In History

Julie and Julia, a movie based on a memoir based on a blog about a woman who attempts to cook every single recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, opens tomorrow. I read the book when it was published a few years ago, and loved a lot of things about it, including that if Julie, on her sort of broken stove in her tiny apartment kitchen in a city where grocery shopping is inconvenient and time-consuming, could cook every single recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, then I was probably capable of making one or … Continue reading Julie & Julia (and two University of Nebraska cookbooks)

The fourth-floor offices of the University of Nebraska Press offer a clear view of the Memorial Stadium Jumbotron, which the past few weeks has been on at all times – a clear signal that football season is nearly upon us. Nebraskans – and a lot of non-Nebraskans, too – know that football season is a big, big, big deal here. And like most of the rest of the state, the University of Nebraska Press participates in the football madness. We publish a number of football titles, and, in honor of football season, many of those titles are on sale. Sale … Continue reading Football titles on sale and two American history titles in the news

Remember the Skin Project in which writer Shelley Jackson asked volunteers to each have one word of a short story tattooed onto their bodies? Perhaps the participants in that project will have another shot at literary/tattoo fame. A call for submissions of literary tattoos has been all over the book blogosphere of late, most recently on The Millions (those of you who follow the link, note the montage of Where the Wild Things Are tattoos). Authors Justin Taylor and Eva Talmadge are seeking to compile the images into the book, complete with name and location of the bearer of each tattoo, … Continue reading On Tattoos

  Chad W. Post, translation guru and the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Open Letter Press at the University of Rochester, has written this editorial (which is circulating today on various publishing blogs) on the dwindling number of new works of translation published by both mainstream and independent publishing houses. Fans of University of Nebraska Press translation titles, don’t fear. We have two translation titles coming out this fall: My Men, a memoir by Algerian author Malika Mokeddem, and Dream of Reason, an epic, fantastical novel by famous Spanish author Rosa Chacel. And next year, we’ll publish another short story collection by … Continue reading Translations

Last week, I posted about some of our Fall/Winter titles. Today, I’m going to offer a preview of a few more.  In Rooms of Memory, by Hilary Masters: A collection of beautiful and carefully crafted essays by a man who has lived a very full life, connected to a lot of other very full lives. Masters is the son of the poet Edgar Lee Masters. He was close friends with writer and photographer (and Nebraska native) Wright Morris. In this collection, he steps back and forth through time – in one essay, he’s a college student and budding writer living … Continue reading Another fall sneak peek