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Today on the Story Prize blog, Greg Hrbek discusses his inspiration for his short story collection, Destroy All Monsters, which is a nominee for this year's prize.
Hrbek explained how he “never thought he would write ‘fantastic stuff.’ I read The Canon in college and pretty much nothing else. The book that changed how I wanted to write was a novel by Scott Bradfield called The History of Luminous Motion.”
To read the full interview, click here.
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Save 25 percent when you order online from UNP!
Click here for some gift books, including the following:
In Search of Powder: A Story of America's Disappearing Ski Bum, by Jeremy Evans, is Evans' account of how he became immersed in ski bum culture—a carefree lifestyle whose mantra was simply: “Ski as much as possible.” At age twenty-six, Evans suffered a stroke, which caused him to reexamine his priorities, quit his job, move back to Tahoe, and throw himself into snowboarding.
Idaho Wine Country, by Alan Minskoff with photography by Paul Hosefros, is the first full-length exploration of the state's emerging wine industry, chronicles an enterprise on the verge of discovery.
Click here for the promotion code.
This offer is good on all regular priced books purchased through our Web site.
Expires December 16, 2011.
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New in a paperback edition, read from Homer Hickam's foreword of Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story by David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin:
"The book that follows is a riveting, insightful account of the Skylab missions flown by the United States in 1973 and 1974. It is also simply a great yarn. Skylab began as an underdog, was nearly knocked out several times, staggered back to its feet, and fought on against overwhelming odds until it became a champion. In a lot of ways, it was the Rocky of space, and just like the story in that great film, it is an inspiration for all who know it. The difference is the remarkable saga of Skylab is all true.
Continue reading "Off the Shelf: Homesteading Space by David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin" »
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Today we honor those American veterans who have served our country, putting their lives on the line for our freedom.
According to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, an act approved on May 13, 1938 made November in each year a legal holiday – day a to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be known as “Armistice Day.” It was mainly set aside veterans of World War I, but after World War II had required the greatest mobilization of soldiers, sailors, Marines and air men in the nation's history, the 83rd Congress amended the act by striking out the word "Armistice" and inserting in its place the word "Veterans." With the approval of this legistlation on June 1, 1954, November 11th became a day to honor American veterans of all wars.
Click here to learn more.
UNP offers many books that tell the stories of those who we celebrate today, and always.
When We Walked About the Clouds: A Memoir of Vietnam by H. Lee Barnes shows what it was like to be a Green Beret, first in the Dominican Republic during the civil war of 1965, and then at A-107, Tra Bong, Vietnam.
An American Soldier in World War I by George Browne is the story of George “Brownie” Browne who was a twenty-three-year-old civil engineer in Waterbury, Connecticut, when the United States entered the Great War in 1917. This book is an edited collection of more than one hundred letters that Browne wrote to his fiancée, Martha “Marty” Johnson, describing his experiences during World War I as part of the famed 42nd, or Rainbow, Division.
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A Grammar of Creek (Muskogee) by Jack B. Martin, has been selected to receive the Linguistic Society of America’s prestigious Leonard Bloomfield Book Award!
The Bloomfield Award was established to recognize the volume which makes the most outstanding contribution to the development of our understanding of language and linguistics.
Creek (or Muskogee) is a Muskogean language spoken by several thousand members of the Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations of Oklahoma and by several hundred members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. This volume is the first modern grammar of Creek, compiled by a leading authority on the languages of the southern United States.
Martin will be presented with the award at a ceremony preceding the Presidential Address on Saturday, January 7, 2011 at the LSA’s next Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon.
Congrats to Jack!
And this Sunday, if you are in Omaha, go to the Bookworm to meet UNP author Joel Sartore. His book signing begins at 1 p.m.
Sartore has spent twenty years taking pictures for National Geographic magazine and has been a contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning since 2005.
Click here for more information.
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This past week, two UNP books were reviewed by Necessary Fiction and the Omaha World-Herald.
In Necessary Fiction, Steve Himmer reviewed Bohemian Girl by Terese Svoboda. He said that “…self-invention and renewal it offered is at the heart of Bohemian Girl.”
Click here to read the full review.
And in the Omaha World-Herald, David Hendee called Atlas of the Great Plains by Stephen J. Lavin, Fred M. Shelley, and J. Clark Archer a tool that could “…help save your life.”
The Atlas of the Great Plains has more than three hundred original full-color maps, accompanied by extended explanatory text and it chronicles the history of the Great Plains, including political and social developments.
As Hendee said, “it could help keep your car from being stolen, if you choose places in the Great Plains with low rates of vehicle theft. It could even help win a bet on whether Nebraska or Texas has more natives per capita in the National Football League.”
Read the full story here.
And later this week on Thursday, journalist and author Catherine Robbins will be discussing her book, All Indians Do Not Live in Teepees (or Casinos) on the radio show, Native American Calling at 11:00 a.m. MST.
Click here to stream the discussion live.
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Read the beginning of "Going, Going, Gone" from The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life by Floyd Skloot:
"I was standing in the bedroom of our Brooklyn apartment with my ear pressed to the radio. It was dark outside, a spring evening in the mid-1950s, and through the open window I could hear people talking in the courtyard four stories below. I was eight or nine years old, and my brother Philip, a teenager, was sitting at his desk bent over homework. That explains why the radio’s volume was turned so low. Philip couldn’t hear it over the courtyard chatter or else he’d have told me to turn it down.
Continue reading "Off the Shelf: The Wink of the Zenith by Floyd Skloot" »
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The Least Cricket of Evening by Robert Vivian is written about Midwestern towns and Europeans cities, and tries to find the spiritual significance of circumstances and places and those who inhabit them.
Vivian’s collection was reviewed yesterday in Shelf Awareness, in the From My Shelf section.
Bruce Jacobs said “With a poet's eye and ear, Vivian elevates the everyday to the universal in a contemplative voice.”
Click here to read the full review.
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Take advantage of this cold rainy weather to stay inside and do some extra reading! Especially reading that may inspire your taste buds to help cope with the chilled temperatures.
Right now you can save 25 percent of wine and food books, like Corkscrewed and Masters of American Cookery.
Corkscrewed by Robert V. Camuto recounts his journey through France’s myriad regions—and how the journey profoundly changed everything he believed about wine.
Masters of American Cookery: M. F. K. Fisher, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Julia Child by Betty Fussell demonstrates vividly how each of these chefs has made a unique and invaluable contribution to the American way of cooking and eating.
Click here for the list of all sale books and the discount code.
Sale ends Nov. 30, 2011.
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Educated Tastes is a collection of new essays, edited by Jeremy Strong, that examine how taste is learned, developed, and represented. From the highs (and lows) of connoisseurship to the frustrations and rewards of a mother encouraging her child to eat, the essays in this volume explore the complex and infinitely varied ways in which food matters to all of us.
Strong has given UNP an insight as to how this book began and where the idea came from. Below is an explanation from the author himself:
The background to Educated Tastes starts with an article I published in Gastronomica back in 2006. I’d noticed that offal dishes were appearing on more restaurant menus and that more of my friends were serving them at dinner parties. Since I adore kidneys, pig’s trotters, liver etc. this was a welcome development. Equally, I also thought the trend merited some critical enquiry.
In Britain and North America a conventional wisdom dictated that offal was generally a food of the poor. In this respect it occupied a different place in a register of value compared to southern Europe, the Arab world and parts of Asia, where it has been more highly prized. And yet, I noticed, many offal dishes appeared to be in the process of relocation in the register. Foodstuffs that had regarded as ‘peasant’ fare, the province of the less-well-off, the by-products attendant upon the production of more valuable joints and cuts, were now emerging as trendy restaurant offerings. In tandem with this process it seemed that the actual poor – now of course, mostly urban in the Western world – had lost the skills and tastes to prepare and enjoy these foods themselves. Decades of food education that failed to engage with raw ingredients, coupled with a supermarket culture that adds ‘value’ by doing in factories that which previously had been done in domestic kitchens, had robbed folk of part of their cultural patrimony.
The result of these musings, mixed with some Pierre Bourdieu and reflections on Jamie Oliver, was my article ‘The Modern Offal Eaters’ in the Spring 2006 issue of Gastronomica. To my surprise I got more responses to this than for anything else I’d ever written. People e-mailed me with questions, it got discussed in blogs, occasionally plagiarised by students (which is both irritating and flattering), cited in other papers, and – to my great surprise – quoted in an in-flight magazine. It is worth pointing out at this stage that I’m neither a food historian nor a sociologist, though I’ve always had an interest in food and cooking. My academic background is in literature and film. At the time I was thinking about offal I was actually meant to be researching for two other papers – one on screen versions of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, the other on a film genre or formula that I christened the ‘team film’ including such pictures as The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and Ocean’s Eleven. Trying to assemble my materials and thoughts for these three unconnected endeavours was a haphazard process. For a few months my waking hours, and at times my dreams, were filled with heist movies and sweetbreads, Wessex landscapes and chitterlings. More through luck than judgment I managed to complete the three articles which were all published that year. I was particularly pleased when David Howes, the eminent Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, gave an exceptionally generous and helpful review of my submission to Gastronomica.
That could have been the end of my dalliance with writing on food culture. At the time I was Head of the Media Department at Thames Valley University in West London, working with theorists, film-makers, photographers and journalists. There was certainly no professional imperative to continue with research in this area. The problem was I’d enjoyed working on this just as much as I enjoy my long-standing preoccupation with the novel-to-film process – an interest that began as an undergraduate in English Literature at Exeter University, continued as a graduate student at NYU, and formed the topic of my PhD at the University of Stirling. So in the summer of 2006, I started thinking about the project that would become Educated Tastes. I knew that I wanted to put together a book that would make a real contribution to a rapidly-growing field. I was particularly concerned with that slippery word – ‘taste’ – and the importance of food, food choices, and food knowledge in culture and identity.
I had previously co-edited another book, Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism, so I had an idea of the advantages and frustrations that attend a project involving many contributors. Of course, the former far outweigh the latter. There’s a wealth of material in Educated Tastes that I could never have thought of or researched on my own. Equally, if you’re ever thinking of editing a book yourself, bear this in mind… it’s still much easier to collaborate (even in the age of e-mail) with colleagues who work on the same corridor than it is when they’re spread across multiple continents with different holidays etc.
I was very keen that Educated Tastes draw on a wide field of disciplines while remaining accessible to a general readership with an interest in food. In this regard I am enormously proud of the contributors who have all succeeded in drawing upon their respective fields without recourse to specialist jargon. There are essays here from writers eminent in such fields as music, philosophy, broadcasting, and landscape architecture but their contributions do not presuppose knowledge of any technical idiom. Over a few months I contacted a number of potential contributors, some of whom I knew personally, others only through their work and reputation. Their responses were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Shortly I was able to put together a book proposal which I sent to UNP.
At the same time as the groundwork for Educated Tastes was taking shape I also changed jobs, moving to a role that brought me much closer to issues of food production. In April 2007 I became Head of Higher Education at Writtle College. Writtle is a Land-based College offering undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees in such disciplines as Agriculture, Horticulture, Animal Science and Conservation. It also has a small but well-regarded Design School. Most of my colleagues here are scientists yet it’s clear that much of their research and teaching coincides with matters relevant to my interest in food studies. Sustainability, terroir and the taste of place, the balance between commercial and environmental imperatives, packaging and supermarket culture, and farm-to-fork are frequent topics of discussion. Writtle also provided another contributor; landscape architect and former chef Tim Waterman with whom I’ve passed many a happy hour discussing food and wine.
I hope readers enjoy Educated Tastes, and I’ll welcome their feedback.
Jeremy.
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