University of Nebraska Press

Off the Shelf: We Are Here by Ellen Cassedy

Read the begining of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust by Ellen Cassedy:

"A soft summer rain was falling as a white-haired woman made her way to the microphone. “Tayere talmidim!” she began. “Dear students!” Through the pattering of drops on my umbrella, I leaned forward to catch her words. The old woman’s name was Bluma, a flowery name that matched her flowered dress. She was a member of the all-but-vanished Jewish community in Vilnius, Lithuania, the city once known as the Jerusalem of the North. “How fortunate I am,” she said in a quavering voice. “I have lived long enough to see people coming back to Vilnius to study Yiddish.”

UNP author unplugged

Earlier this week on the Dzanc Books blog, The Collagist, author Matthew Gavin Frank answered interview questions in the form of excerpts.
 
Frank is the author of upcoming book, Pot Farm, which details the strange, sublime, and sometimes dangerous goings-on at Weckman Farm, a place with hidden politics and social hierarchies, populated by recovering drug addicts, alternative healers, pseudo-hippie kids, and medical marijuana users looking to give back.
 
Click here for insight into what Frank thinks about writing and why he does it in the interview titled “There is a Glossary of Terms for the Lives We are Leading Together.”

Off the Shelf: Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite by R. Mark Liebenow

Read the beginning of Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite by R. Mark Liebenow:

"In the middle of the night something pushes on my toes. Half asleep, I think a nocturnal squirrel is rooting around at the bottom of my tent. There is scuffling and the animal bumps hard against the hollows of my feet. That’s no squirrel. It’s larger, perhaps a raccoon. Then I hear a low guttural snort and National Geographic images rush into my head-grizzlies mauling their helpless prey, wolves tearing elk apart with their long savage teeth.

With my heart pounding, I lie as still as a mummy.

When I hear the creature shuffle away, I risk sitting up, making as little noise as possible, and peek out the tent’s opening. I detect a sour musky scent but the darkness is so thick that at first I don’t see anything. Then the animal moves into the slight moonlight hovering between trees a dozen feet away and I’m able to make out a back that is big, black, and shaggy.

Bears unsettle me when they are this close. They are strong enough to rip the doors off cars when hungry, can flatten a tent in one leap, and have claws that can shred the bark of trees. My shelter’s thin nylon skin wouldn’t stop a chipmunk determined to get in. It’s January and this bear is supposed to be hibernating, not roaming around.

Pulling my head back in, I zip up the tent and force myself to lie down. I listen to the sounds of the wilderness for a long time, hear the twitching of branches and the rustling of dry leaves. I do not sleep well."

Mark Liebenow has won the Chautauqua Nonfiction Prize, among other awards. His work has been published in such journals as the Colorado Review, the Spoon River Poetry Review, and the Clackamas Literary Review.

 

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Moutnains of Light, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Mountains-of-Light,674967.aspx.

Friday roundup

On the blog, Pages of Julia's, “book beginning Fridays” the first pages of books are shared and discussed. Today, Julia called River in Ruin by Ray A. March a “great beginning" and praised March for bringing an important environmental issue to light.  The full review is to come.

In Necessary Fiction, reviewer Ashley Cowger said Greg Hrbek’s short story collection, Destroy All Monsters is “definitely worth the read.”

Cowger also said, “Hrbek’s writing is crisp and often lyrical, and these stories complement each other nicely." Read the full review here.

And Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity by Fleda Brown was listed as a “don’t miss book” by the blog, Books in Northport. It also says, the book is “…more than worth the cover price--you will want to send it to someone you love and keep it yourself at the same time, I guarantee.”

Read the full review and excerpts here.

Off the Shelf: Descanso for My Father by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Read the beginning of the Prologue from Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher:

"I watch my son as thunderclouds gather outside my Denver home. He stomps his wide little feet on the hardwood floor, clamoring for a tube of eucalyptus lotion he cannot reach and cannot have. He balls his dimpled fists into hammers, tugs at the reddish wisps of hair curling around his head like flames. He is twenty-three months old, the same age I was when my father died. I look at him now and try to imagine the impressions he is forming from this time, the feelings he is filing away to retrieve later and hold to the light.

Mood shifting, he gallops away, squealing with delight into the kitchen following a bouncing red ball. And I wonder: if I died at this moment, would he remember me?

Nine years old. Rumbling down a two-lane highway on the way home from a Jemez Mountain stream, cutoffs damp, comics wrinkled, sun slanting through the side window of my mother’s ’67 Comet. I’m trying to sleep but I’m kept awake by the jolt of potholes and the rootbeer breath of my little sister, who snores on the backseat beside me. Hills the color of red chile powder slide by on the horizon, lulling me into a dream. I open my eyes to another bump and it is there—a “t” on the mesa, a cross etched black against the white August sky.

“Someone died there,” my mother says, glancing in the rearview. “Struck by lightning, probably. That’s what they did in the olden days. Put up crosses. Little piles of stones.”

I sit upright. “Someone’s buried there?”

“Oh, no,” she says, laughing. “They’re memorials. Shrines. It’s a Spanish tradition.”

She lifts a hand from the wheel and crosses herself.

Our car rounds a corner and the wooden marker fades into the granite and scrub. I close my eyes but the image remains, the person who died without warning, the spirit wandering the roadside like a hitchhiker, watching cars pass, waiting for someone to notice. I see a man, always a man."

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is a New Letters Literary Award winner, four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize, National Magazine Award, and PEN Center USA contest. He is also the editor of Shadowbox magazine.

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.

Off the Shelf: Homesteading Space by David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin

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.

Off the Shelf: The Wink of the Zenith by Floyd Skloot

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.

Off the Shelf: The Least Cricket of Evening by Robert Vivian

Read the beginning of "Ghost Hallway" from The Least Cricket of Evening by Robert Vivian:

"I live in a ghost hallway. They come and go whenever they want, like the transparent, blow-away wings of bees. Their spirits hover inside this house on Mechanic Street like a twilight hue filling a wine glass. I live more or less inside their moods, which they carry behind them in traces of light that flood the panes one window at a time and in the creaky flutes of rusty hinges. The ghosts don’t say “boo” and they don’t swing chains. They’re good ghosts as far as I can tell, calm as a cup of tea, considerate and watchful and able to pay attention to the least thing for hours.