University of Nebraska Press

Meet prize-winning authors

The Prairie Schooner is bringing three prize-winners to the UNL campus this week!

Greg Hrbek, James Crews and Shane Book will participate in a meet and greet and Q&A today from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Dudley Bailey Library in Andrews Hall.

Tomorrow night, the three authors will also read from their books at 8 p.m. in Anderson Hall, room 15.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Greg Hrbek is the author of Destroy All Monsters, and Other Stories (2011), James Crews is the author of The Book of What Stays (2011) and Shane Book is the author of Ceiling of Sticks (2010).

Featured poem

James Crews’ poem, “The Bees Have Not Yet Left Us,” was recently featured on Verse Daily.

This poem comes from his recent book of poetry, The Book of What Stays.

Michael Simms from the Coal Hill Review said, "The Book of What Stays is one of the very best original books of poetry I've read in the past couple of years . . . . I feel that while this book may be the one that stays, there's a "part two" quickly on the way."

To read Crews’ poem on Verse Daily, click here.

Off the Shelf: Such a Life by Lee Martin

Read the beginning of "Colander" from Such a Life by Lee Martin:

"One summer morning the telephone rang in my grandmother’s house, and, because she was busy washing dishes at the sink, I ran to answer it. She kept the new dial phone on a library table by her bedroom window, a bedroom off the kitchen in the modest frame house where I’d spent the night. It was 1962, and I was seven years old. Progress had come to our sleepy, backwoods part of southern Illinois in the form of telephones you dialed instead of cranked and seven-digit numbers instead of a series of long rings and shorts. My grandmother had all this before my parents did in our farmhouse just two miles east on the County Line Road.

My grandmother’s phone was on a party line, and I loved to sneak into the bedroom when she was occupied with her soap opera—she was faithful to As the World Turns—and pick up the receiver and eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. “Well, I swan,” I heard a woman say one day, and I thought how marvelous it sounded when she said it, her voice nearly breathless with disbelief. “I swan.” More splendid than it sounded when my grandmother said it. More wonderful because it came to me over that phone line, a voice without a body, just the pure sound of it.

When the phone rang on that summer morning and I answered it, a woman’s voice on the other end of the line said to me, “Lee,tell Grandma to bring her calendar.”

It was my Aunt Anna, my mother’s sister, and I said all right, I would. I’d tell Grandma that instant. A calendar, I may very well have thought to myself. I swan.

I ran into the kitchen, and I tugged on my grandmother’s apron. “Aunt Anna’s on the phone,” I said, “and she wants you to bring your calendar. Hurry. Quick.”

Grandma whisked a calendar from the nail where it hung next to the crank phone she no longer used. She hurried into the bedroom, where I’d left the receiver lying on the library table. She picked up the receiver and held it to her ear. She said, “Anna, I’ve got the calendar. What’s wrong?”

But there was no answer on the other end of the line, and my grandmother looked at me with suspicion in her narrowed eyes, her bunched-up brow. She laid the receiver into its cradle. How I loved that sleek, black phone with its dial that whirred along so merrily when I put a finger into one of its notches and spun it.

“Lee,” my grandmother said, “it’s not nice to story.”

She thought I was fibbing, but I wasn’t. Aunt Anna was on the phone. She said, “Tell Grandma to bring her calendar.” Now suddenly she wasn’t there. Just silence, and I said to my grandmother, “Just ask her when she comes to get us.”

Aunt Anna was coming in her car, and she and I and my grandmother were going to my parents’ farmhouse, where my mother was canning tomato juice.

“Not me,” Aunt Anna said when she arrived and my grandmother asked her whether she’d called. Once again, I was suspect.

“Little boys who tell stories grow long noses,” my grandmother said, and I kept quiet, not knowing what to say in my defense."

Lee Martin is a professor of English and teaches creative writing at Ohio State University. He is the author of the novels The Bright Forever, finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and most recently, Break the Skin, as well as two other memoirs, Turning Bones and From Our House, both available from the University of Nebraska Press.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Such a Life, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Such-a-Life,674935.aspx.

Discover great new writers

Each year, the Discover Great New Writers Program from Barnes and Noble has introduced readers to up-and-coming new authors, many of whom have been from UNP.

Past UNP winners include Ted Kooser (Local Wonders), Brandon Schrand (The Enders Hotel), Daryl Farmer (Bicycling Beyond the Divide) and most recently, Jon Pineda (Sleep in Me).

Do you know an author (UNP or otherwise!) who you think should be considered for this honor?  If so, enter their works in the Facebook Sweepstakes here. You’ll be automatically in the drawing for a new NOOK Tablet.

Check out Barnes and Noble’s website or stop by a store to see the display of new writers that is updated monthly.

Contest ends Feb. 5.

A new year's resolution of reading

Inside In the United States of Africa (2009), French-speaking African writer Abdourahman A. Waberi turns the fortunes of the world upside down. On this reimagined globe a stream of sorry humanity flows from the West, from the slums of America and the squalor of Europe, to escape poverty and desperation in the prosperous United States of Africa. It is in this world that an African doctor on a humanitarian mission to France adopts a child. And this story is as deadly serious as it is wickedly satiric.

Thanks to the translators, David and Nicole Ball, this tale was made available in an English translation, which is exactly what Ann Morgan was looking for.

Morgan, a news editor and feature writer for the Guardian, has pledged this year to read a book from every country. Her choice from Djibouti was In the United States of Africa.

On her blog she wrote, “The humour is of course only the outriding breeze of a gale of indignation and righteous anger about the skewed perspective that the ‘developed’ world has on its neighbours.”

An adventurer's delight

In a remote kingdom hidden in the Himalayas, there is a trail said to be the toughest trek in the world—24 days, 216 miles, 11 mountain passes, and enough ghost stories to scare an exorcist.

Beneth Blossom Rain: Discovering Bhutan on the Toughest Trek in the World is Kevin Grange’s account of his journey across the country of Bhutan by taking on this infamous trail, the Snowman Trek.

Seattle University Magazine’s Maura Beth Pagano called it “a treat for any adventurer.” She also said that “not only does the author let readers catch a glimpse into his time on the toughest trek in the world, he inspires them to set out on their own fearless explorations.”

Grange recently created a soundtrack for his memoir on the blog, Largehearted Boy. The blog’s Book Notes series lets authors create a playlist for their book and explain why each song contributes to their story. Grange said, “To write without music is the literary equivalent of trying to paddle a boat onshore.”

Click here to read his playlist.

Be sure to also look out for an audiobook coming out later this month from Audiobook.com.

Win food from Negev Nectars

Get hungry because Zester Daily is having a “Nosh like a Pro” contest!

Enter to win a box of Israeli foods from the company Negev Nectars. Five readers will also be picked to receive a copy of Jewish American Food Culture.

Click here to enter now.

Zester Daily is an award-winning online publication produced by an international collection of experienced journalists, food writers and wine experts who want to engage food and drink enthusiasts.

Pipeline denied through Nebraska Sandhills



Today, President Obama denies the Transcanada pipeline permit through Nebraska Sandhills protecting Nebraska’s watershed. Read the full story.

UNP has two forthcoming titles you will want to check out, one that focuses on the Sandhills and one that is an exploration of America’s energy infrastructure. In David Owen’s book, Like No Other Place he focuses on the Nebraska Sandhills and the essence of its uniqueness and its people.

 

Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism by Ozzie Zehner provides insight on why we should change our energy consumption habits and why alternative energy isn't the answer to our growing energy crisis and provides solutions for the future.

Ruth wins National Jewish Book Award

Last week, Dr. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and the late Tivka Frymer-Kensky were awarded the National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies for The JPS Bible Commentary: Ruth, published by The Jewish Publication Society. The award will be presented during a ceremony in New York this coming March.

The National Jewuish Book Award is the longest-running North American awards program of its kind in the field of Jewish literature.

Ruth is the latest in the JPS Bible Commentary series. The authors provide a critical, line-by-line commentary of the biblical text, presented in its original Hebrew, complete with vocalization and cantillation marks, as well as the 1985 JPS English translation. The extensive introduction places the book within its historical, literary, and critical context, discusses contemporary interpretations of the story of Ruth, and examines its major motifs and themes.

Grace Abbott remembered

Grace Abbott (1878–1939), was a tireless and brilliant social reformer in the early twentieth century who contributed to the development of social programs that safeguarded mothers and children, protected immigrants from abuse, and rescued child laborers from the appalling conditions of the time.

Recently in the Lincoln alternative paper, Prairie Fire, Jane Renner Hood wrote a two-part series on Grace Abbott and her workings in the United States. The first article gives a brief bio of Abbott and describes her work with the Immigrants Protective League, and the second article considers her work as “…the nation’s foremost voice for children during the Progressive Era up through the early years of the New Deal with her work in the U.S. Children’s Bureau.”

If you would like to discover Abbott’s insightful words first hand, the University of Nebraska Press published The Grace Abbott Reader (2008), which is a collection of her most influential writings. It is the first collection of Abbott’s stirring words, showing that the causes she pursued with fiery conscience and fierce determination are as relevant in our day as they were in hers.