A note to all our literary Lincoln friends: The Nebraska Book Festival is tomorrow! Michael Forsberg, Allison Hedge Coke, William Kloefkorn, Ted Kooser and Hilda Raz are among just some of the UNP authors to conduct workshops or read at the event. A full listing of tomorrow's activities is on the NBF's snazzy Web site (I love their logo this year). Have a great weekend! Continue reading Nebraska Book Festival is tomorrow!
Halloween, to me, signals the arrival of an annual event I think of as The Official Two Months of Eating Well. It begins with apple cider and popcorn balls, moves into apple cake and pumpkin bread territory, before arriving in full-fledged Thanksgivingland, then giving way to peanut brittle, fancy holiday breads with raisins, currants and nuts, and, of course, cookies. Being The Official Two Months of Eating Well are rooted in tradition, the potential for falling into a rut (albeit a savory rut) runs high. But the University of Nebraska Press is here to help. On sale through November are twelve … Continue reading In time for Thanksgiving, cooking titles on sale
Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "The Bull" from Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway's Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin byBart Paul:
"He was born Sidney Frumpkin on July 11, 1903, one of nine surviving children to Abram and Lubba Frumpkin of Minsk and Kazan, respectively. His parents, both Orthodox Jews, emigrated from Imperial Russia in 1888. After eight years in this country and the birth of his first few children, Abram joined the New York City Police Department, eventually working out of Brooklyn’s Seventy-Eighth Precinct. The borough of Brooklyn was completing the transition from a semirural community of farms, shade trees and backyard gardens to a noisy city, becoming further transformed by the new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. The city had been an independent municipality until just five years before Sidney’s birth, when it was incorporated into New York City. The Brooklyn Eagle, the paper that would eventually chronicle the rise of its hometown matador, was for a time edited in the late 1840s by Walt Whitman, another homeboy whose private life was also best kept from the public eye.
Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Double-Edged Sword by Bart Paul”
Happy Friday, UNP blog readers. Two items of note today: First of all, the University of Nebraska Press Hurt Book Sale is tonight from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Swing by our warehouse (on R Street between 8th and 9th streets, in the Lincoln Haymarket) for cheap, cheap books ($2 paperbacks and $4 hardcovers) on the following topics: history and literature of the American West, Indigenous studies, translated literature, literary fiction, classic works by Nebraska authors including Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, Ted Kooser, Bill Kloefkorn and others, sports history (particularly baseball) and much more. More information on this sale is … Continue reading Hurt Book Sale tonight and UNP author on CNN
And the winners of major literary awards just keep rolling in: Marie NDiaye is the winner of the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary Prize. NDiaye is the first black woman to win the award, which was announced on Monday. NDiaye won the award for her novel Trois femmes puissantes, which translates to Three Powerful Women. The book traces the lives of three women in Africa and France and the places their lives intersect. More details about book, award and author are in this story in The Guardian. Interesting fact about the Prix Goncourt via the L.A. Times – the prize money … Continue reading UNP author winner of France’s top literary award
Rob Fitts, author of University of Nebraska Press title Wally Yonamine, is our guest blogger today, posting about the 75th anniversary of the 1934 All-American tour of Japan. Additional posts will appear on Fitts’ personal Web site throughout the week: Seventy-five years ago yesterday, nearly 500,000 Japanese had lined the streets of Ginza to welcome Babe Ruth and the All American ballplayers to Tokyo. Rows of fans, often ten to twenty deep, crowded into the road to catch a glimpse of Ruth and his teammates. The pressing crowd reduced the broad streets to narrow paths just wide enough for the … Continue reading Guest blog from UNP author Rob Fitts
Happy halloween, blog readers! A a tidbit of supernatural (though not especially scary) trivia in honor of Halloween tomorrow…… In 1922, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), best known as the author of Sherlock Holmes stories but also a devout spiritualist, published a book called The Coming of the Fairies in which he contested that fairies are real. Doyle was convinced of this by a set of photographs apparently showing two young girls from Cottingley in Yorkshire playing with a group of tiny, translucent fairies. Doyle’s book lays out the story of the photographs, their supposed provenance, and the implications of their existence. … Continue reading Today’s treat (no tricks): A story and a link
Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "First to Fly" from Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 by Francis French and Colin Burgess with a foreword by Paul Haney:
"When venturing into the unknown, the first step taken is often the biggest and the boldest. A young Russian pilot named Yuri Gagarin took humankind’s first step into space. He died in his mid-thirties, so his image is fixed: a youthful icon symbolizing the first human journey above our planet. As President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote, “Yuri Gagarin’s courageous and pioneering flight into space opened new horizons and set a brilliant example for the spacemen of the two countries.”
Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Into That Silent Sea by Francis French and Colin Burgess”
atrick Dobson, author of Seldom Seen, which is new this fall from the University of Nebraska Press, was interviewed in the Kansas City Star earlier this week. The book, for blog readers who are unfamiliar, recounts a trip that Dobson took 15 years ago, on foot, across the Great Plains. The article, a Q&A with the author, deals with how (and why) Dobson came to quit his job at a Kansas City hotel, say goodbye to his beloved young daughter, pack a backpack and set out for Helena, Montana. That trip changed Dobson, and he said he views the Patrick … Continue reading Seldom Seen author Patrick Dobson in Kansas City Star
Read from the Foreword of The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism's Parlor Gameedited by Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger:
UNP blog 