University of Nebraska Press

Author Events

Pamela Carter Joern, author of The Floor of the Sky
Thursday, November 30, 2006
7:00 PM
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
3038 Hennepin Avenue
Minneapolis, MN
(612)822-4611
Appearance, book signing, and reading with Alicia Conroy, author of Lives of Mapmakers.

Joel Sartore, author of Nebraska: Under a Big Red Sky
Thursday, November 30, 2006
7:00 PM
Great Plains Art Museum
1155 Q Street
Lincoln, NE 68588
You are cordially invited to a reception celebrating the paperback Bison Books edition of Nebraska: Under a Big Red Sky. Remarks by the photographer followed by a reception and book signing.

The National Grasslands
By Francis Moul
Photography by Georg Joutras
Friday, December 1, 2006
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
University of Nebraska Bookstore
City Campus Student Union, Lower Level
Lincoln, NE 68588
(402) 472-7300
Author appearance and book signing.

Friday, December 1, 2006
2:00 – 3:00 PM
University of Nebraska Bookstore
East Campus Union
Lincoln, NE 68588
(402) 472-7300
Author appearance and book signing.

Brenda Serotte, author of The Fortune Teller's Kiss
Saturday, December 2, 2006
10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Broward Main Library
Andrews Avenue
Fort Lauderdale, FL
Appearance, workshop "The Magic of Memoir II" and book signing.

Leslie A. Duram, author of Good Growing: Why Organic Farming Works
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
3rd Annual Illinois Organic Production Conference
Interstate Center
2301 West Market Street
Bloomington, IL
Keynote speaker for the conference.

An Evening on Chuck Hagel

n October 26, 2006, the University of Nebraska Press and the Joslyn Castle Institute for Sustainable Communities hosted a discussion on the book Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward with author Charlyne Berens.  Michael R. McCarthy, co-founder and manager of the McCarthy Group in Omaha, and Geitner Simmons, editorial page editor of the Omaha World-Herald, participated as panelist at the event.

To listen to a recording of the live event, please download our podcast.

Reading Nocturnal America

here are places in this country that go unnoticed. I grew up in one of them—eastern Washington. John Keeble has lived in eastern Washington for thirty years and has written movingly about the people there and the unremitting landscape, most recently in Nocturnal America, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and just released from University of Nebraska Press. Even when the stories (which are loosely linked across time and place) venture into Saskatchewan or onto a giant oil freighter headed north toward Valdez, the settings whistle the same tune. What is it about these places that won’t let us forget even for a minute how ephemeral we are? The landscape goes on, with or without us, mostly without us.

Keeble is a beautiful writer and pulls me entirely into his stories. In "The Chasm," Jim and Diane Blood struggle to fulfill their dream of a hand-built house and farm, but the bitter elements, family obligation and guilt make everything so hard.

"What are you trying to overcome?" she asked him one day. They were working their way through the last group of logs on the ground, peeling them with bark spuds.

Jim couldn’t answer. He thought that Diane knew about the touch of the hand to things—nail, spike, bar, and wedge, the yellow pine—and about the spirits that had their roots in the material world. She was a musician, a cellist. She understood that the bow drawn across the strings activated the atoms in the air. But in another way he realized that Diane’s question went deeper, that the images of impeccability he pursued were striking a crazy, precarious balance with a chaotic thing he couldn’t name. He stuck the blade of his bark spud into a log and looked at Diane. She was staring deeply into him with her bright green eyes. The true answer to her questions seemed just out of his reach. The answer was like a word remembered for its feel on the tongue, but which he couldn’t raise to his mind.

We meet Jim Blood as a child in the cold world of "Chickens," and then in the novella "Freeing the Apes" that concludes the collection, we meet Jim and Diane again, 20 years after they’ve established their farm, through the voice of Pete. We’ve met Pete already in "Zeta’s House" and in "The Transmission," a story by turns nervous, blackly funny, and tragic, as Pete gets pulled into the vortex of the self-destructing couple next door. That dangerous husband appears in a likewise compelling role in "I Could Love You (If I Wanted)," playing spoiler/savior to single mother Lola, who must decide how to live her own unpromising life while her flawed mother withers away in the hospital. The interconnections are surprising, and strangely affirming, as though any link, good or bad, helps secure all of us a little more firmly to our ground.

Nothing is easy here—not the lives, not the story telling. And though the characters fight for their place in the landscape, they are firmly entrenched in my imagination. They have stayed with me for weeks, working away at me. What more can you ask of a book?

I'm so pleased to be reading with John at University Book Store in Seattle on Tuesday, November 28, 7:00 pm.

Kathleen Flenniken

November Featured Bookstore

ee Booksellers
Edgewood Center
5500 S. 56th Street, Suite 4
Lincoln, NE 68516

(We spoke with Linda Hillegass of Lee Booksellers, in November about bookselling and the holidays. Linda and her husband Jim McKee own the bookstore.)

1. What are some of the traditions at Lee Booksellers for the holidays, such as sales or events?

All year long we keep a pot of coffee for our customers and in November and December, we put a plate of homemade Christmas cookies alongside. Joni, a longtime staff member loves to bake and for the two months before Christmas, not even the Keebler elves are busier in the evenings. We’re pretty sure some of our customers come into the store in December just to get one of her meltingly buttery Scotch shortbread cookies.

2.  Is there anything Lee Booksellers is doing new this year?

We also do lots of store autographings and fall is our busiest season. November usually sees one or two events a week. In December we’ll be hosting a favorite suspense writer, Omahan Sean Doolittle. This year we’ll also have a free children’s concert featuring The String Beans, a local group that features its own original children’s songs for ages 3 to 8. They have a new Christmas CD, Rocking Your Christmas Stocking, and will intersperse songs from that album with outrageously goofy jokes. We’ve also started two store knitting clubs that have drawn a very enthusiastic response.

Upcoming Author Event

The National Grasslands
By Francis Moul
Photography by Georg Joutras

Saturday, November 25, 2006 at 2:00 PM
Lee Booksellers - Edgewood Center
5500 S. 56th Street
Lincoln, NE 68516
(402) 420-1919
Author appearance, reading and book signing.

Happy 385th Thanksgiving

t turns out that Thanksgiving is more of a holiday than I thought.  The Pilgrims that migrated to America practiced many days of fasting and thanksgiving in response to “internal and external threats and blessings” according to Martha L. Finch’s essay in  Eating in Eden: Food & American Utopias, edited by Etta M. Madden & Martha L. Finch.  The chapter begins with a recounting of a two month long drought in 1623 Plymouth.  The colonists called a fast for God’s mercy and broke their fast with a day of Thanksgiving when it finally rained. A Pokanoket named Hobomok, who lived with the colonists, said that the colonists’ god “‘is a good God, for he hath heard you, and sent rain.’” 

Included in this chapter is an account of the thanksgiving on which we base our Thanksgiving Holiday.  The Pilgrims were only in New England for about a year in 1621. 

Save 25% during the UNP holiday sale

Save 25% on your University of Nebraska Press book order until the end of the year!

During the checkout process, enter this discount code in the discount code field following your credit card information: XDEC6

This offer is good on all regularly priced books purchased through our Web site.* Discount expires December 31, 2006.

Browse our featured gift books here.

*excludes books published by the Buros Institute of Mental Measurements

Weekend Author Events

An American Soldier in World War I
By George Browne
Edited by David L. Snead

Sunday, November 19, 2006
3:00 PM
Bedford Book Festival
Bedford Central Library
321 North Bridge Street
Bedford, VA 24523
(540) 586-8911
Author appearance, reading and book signing.

The Fortune Teller's Kiss
By Brenda Serotte

Sunday, November 19, 2006
4:30 PM
Miami Book Fair International
Miami Dade College Fairgrounds, Room 3410
Miami, FL

The Last Street Before Cleveland
By Joe Mackall

Saturday, November 18, 2006
8:00 – 9:00 PM
Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism
Prudential Center
Sheraton Boston Hotel
39 Dalton Street
Boston, MA 02199
Author appearance and Café Session, "Ethical Implications for the Real People we Call Characters" with Dan Lehman.

Nocturnal America
By John Keeble

Friday, November 17, 2006
7:30 PM
Auntie’s Bookstore
402 West Main
Spokane, WA 99201
Author appearance, reading, and signing.

Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer
By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Friday, November 17, 2006
7:00 PM
Dahl Arts Center
713 Seventh Street
Rapid City, SD 57701
(605) 455-2244
"Celebrating Sisterhood: Exploring the roles of women in tribal culture" Author appearance, workshop and reading.

Friday, November 17, 2006
1:00 PM
Oglala Lakota College Center
490 Piya Wiconi Road
Kyle, SD 57752
(605) 455-2244
"Celebrating Sisterhood: Exploring the roles of women in tribal culture" Author appearance, workshop and reading. 

Announcing Martinez Celaya: Early Work

Since its inception in 1998, Whale and Star has been publishing meaningful books as well as commissioning graphic and sculpture editions and encouraging collaborations between artists and writers. Visit us online at www.whaleandstar.com

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s work revives and reinterprets the classic Western metaphysical tradition that relates aesthetics to ethics, the Beautiful to the Good and the True. His aesthetic project embodies his belief that being a certain kind of artist means being a certain kind of person and that it is in and through art that he gains clarity about himself and his relationship to the world.

Curator Daniel A. Siedell, who has worked with Martínez Celaya on several projects, offers a radical commentary on his work. He argues that Martínez Celaya’s ambitious and expansive project is best understood as an embodiment of a religious Weltanschauung. It is a search for that most elusive of religious virtues, hope. Art critic Thomas McEvilley, who is a philologist by training and writes about art, philosophy and religion, explores how Martínez Celaya has combined Germanic feeling with a surrealist plastic vocabulary to “present a world.” Literary critic and Paul Celan scholar John Felstiner traces, ever so lightly, the contours of an aesthetic lineage that includes Goya, Eliot, Celan and Beethoven. Former Washington Post journalist and Hollywood producer and writer Christian  Williams crafts a powerful account of Martínez Celaya’s life, a life that has become intimately entwined with his own.

With the artist’s collaboration in the compilation of images as well as his notes, which illuminate the depth of his engagement, Early Work is an intimate examination of a profound aesthetic project.

A Conversation with Joel Sartore

In celebration of the Bison Books edition of Nebraska: Under a Big Red Sky, UNP, NET, and the Center for Great Plains Studies will sponsor a conversation with Joel Sartore, followed by a reception and book signing, on Thursday, November 30, 7:00–9:00 p.m., at the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q Street, Lincoln.