Cryptonym: Presses Distributed by Chicago
The University of Chicago Press maintains a distinctive and diverse list of distributed publishers from around the world. We're your one stop source for everything from the Magna Carta to the Marquis de Sade.
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This year Belfast turns 400 years old, and to mark the occasion Liverpool University Press has brought forth this comprehensive volume surveying Belfast’s complex history over these past four centuries and beyond. Liverpool has just launched the book in the UK, and we’ll have books for readers stateside very shortly. In the meantime, have a look at all the news surrounding the book:
Belfast Times: http://www.belfasttimes.co.uk/belfast-400/?cb=05991868083365262
Ulster TV: http://www.u.tv/utvplayer/video.aspx?vidid=150008&chapid=123176
Slugger O’Toole: http://sluggerotoole.com/2013/01/24/book-launches-everyday-life-after-the-irish-conflict-and-belfast-400/
The Irish Times Review and the London Review of Books have also published reviews.
“In format and content it is high-brow-meets-coffee-table and the illustrations and maps are quite stunning.” Irish Times
The Belfast City Council also has some nice words for the book: http://www.belfastcity.gov.uk/news/news.asp?id=3324
Happy Birthday Belfast!
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Surely the talk of sweeping changes in the American demographic have had a lot to do with race, especially the surge in Latino and African-American voters. Obama as the first “black president” is symbolic of such change, but the discussions regarding his race and its significance often wrongly assume one crucial fact: Obama isn’t exactly African-American, but biracial, a grossly overlooked fact that indicates even more sophisticated demographic change.
Andrew Jolivette offers his opinions on Obama and biraciality in this Daily Beast article by David Kaufman. To read more on the topic, have a look at Jolivette’s recent book out with the Policy Press, Obama and the Biracial Factor.
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If you’re planning to celebrate Scotland’s national bard tomorrow eve, then you’ll have to do it without traditional haggis—sheep’s lung has been banned in the US since 1971. The BBC has some ideas of what Americans can do instead, but apparently none of these create the same texture (“‘It lacks the lightness the lungs help create.’”).
Even without the USDA ban, a lot of Americans probably aren’t used to eating lungs, which fall under the catch-all umbrella of offal—an animal’s glands, essential organs, skin, muscle, guts, and every unmentionable in between. Yum, right? But as Nina Edward explains in the upcoming Offal: A Global History, many of these dishes are given pretty names to veil their origins (nice try, “sweetbreads”). And offal seems to be becoming more and more trendy at American restaurants.
If you want to know more about this offal subject, snag a copy Edward’s book!
You didn’t think we’d leave you without a picture of haggis, did you? Feast your eyes on Haggis, Neeps and Tatties!
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Hey kids, it’s National Pie Day! (Not to be confused with National Pi Day, which is March 14). Can we celebrate the fact that we live in a world with not one, but TWO days dedicated to the consumption of pie?
And if you haven’t yet, you should take some time out today to dive into Janet Clarkson’s Pie: A Global History. Learn some things, kiddies. It’s good for the soul. As is pie.
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Liverpool University Press has just picked up a hefty amount of the past from the University of Exeter Press this week, acquiring Exeter’s lists in medieval studies, classics, history, archaeology, and landscape studies. It’s a large acquisition that will no doubt bolster Liverpool’s current lists, and it enables Exeter to focus attention on its esteemed series in film history, performance studies, and local history. The full press release is below:
Liverpool University Press acquires Medieval, Classics and History lists from University of Exeter Press
Liverpool UK/Exeter UK – 14.01.2013
Liverpool University Press, the UK’s third oldest university press, has finalized an agreement with the University of Exeter Press to acquire its Medieval Studies, Classics and Ancient History, History, Archaeology and Landscape Studies lists, with immediate effect.
The acquisition includes the following book series: Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies, Exeter Studies in Medieval Europe, Exeter Studies in History, Exeter Maritime Studies and titles under the Bristol Phoenix Press imprint. UEP will continue to publish in Film and Performance Studies, and in South-West Studies, and to act as UK distributor for some North American academic presses.
“This is an important strategic move for Liverpool University Press, giving it world-class Medieval Studies and Classics lists to sit either side of the acclaimed Translated Texts for Historians series, a stronger presence in Maritime Studies, and some outstanding Modern History titles. We look forward to building on the foundations established by University of Exeter Press over several decades, in particular by Simon Baker and the present team, and to making much of the Exeter list available digitally for the first time,” said Anthony Cond, Managing Director of Liverpool University Press.
“In streamlining our subject range at Exeter, we are looking forward to expanding our prize-winning series, Exeter Performance Studies and Exeter Studies in Film History. UEP will also continue to publish academic local history, and to nurture and develop the substantial backlist in other areas of the humanities. The transferring lists will be in safe hands at Liverpool, with whom we have had close associations over many years; and with whom we have a shared and continuing commitment to academic publishing.” said Simon Baker, Publisher and Managing Director at University of Exeter Press.
Liverpool University Press assumes publishing responsibilities for the acquired titles with immediate effect. All stock will be available via its distribution channels - Turpin Distribution (UK, Europe and ROW) and The University of Chicago Press (North America). Turpin Distribution will be handling all UK trade returns for the acquired titles, previously distributed by NBN International. For further information or any customer queries please contact Jenny Howard (jhoward2@liverpool.ac.uk).
About Liverpool University Press
Founded in 1899, Liverpool University Press is the UK’s third oldest university press, with a distinguished history of publishing exceptional research, including the work of Nobel prize winners. Shortlisted for the IPG Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year 2012, LUP has rapidly expanded in recent years, specialising in literature, modern languages, history and visual culture. www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk
About University of Exeter Press
UEP is internationally recognised for its excellence in humanities publishing. Over fifty years dedicated to scholarly book publishing has provided it with a wealth of experience from which to continue to expand and develop its activities. www.exeterpress.co.uk
Source: Liverpool University Press/University of Exeter Press
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“On October 11, the Chinese writer Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and two months later his new novel, Pow!, demonstrates for Americans why he deserved to win. It’s a vibrant, visceral novel that is both personal and political, realistic and surrealistic, funny and shocking. The explosive title cries out —Pow!— but it is also a subtle display of narrative wizardry… . Mo Yan’s Pow! is a pyrotechnic display of how to blow up one’s personal life to mythic proportions.” Steven Moore | Washington Post“Mo’s work is shot through with politics and history, and Pow! is no exception. Translated by the masterful Howard Goldblatt, Pow! adds to the growing list of Mo Yan’s rollicking and ribald novels available in English—all translated by Goldblatt, who has championed Mo Yan’s work for decades and continues to do the author great justice in his earthy and vivid translations.” Andrea Lingenfelter | Quarterly Conversation“Mo Yan is a writer who, defiantly in the face of those who wish his work were less cartoonish and more straightforward in its political meanings, continues to sing his own peculiar and alluring song.” Dwight Garner | New York Times“Mo the public figure is careful with words. But Mo the novelist slips past the censors by dressing up his cutting realism in absurd and fantastic clothing. In doing so, he’s embracing a long tradition that stretches from Cervantes to the German novelist Günter Grass… . Mo’s skill makes Pow! a wild, unpredictable ride—a work of demented and subversive genius.” Hector Tobar | Los Angeles Times
“Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose work Mo Yan has claimed as an inspiration, sometimes the images in Pow! overflow, and the very point of his writing is that abundance. Unlike the magical realists, however, there is a lucid clarity to Mo Yan’s best writing. In this country he is akin to William T. Vollmann, whose books are long and dense with harrowing and acute images.” John Freeman | Boston Globe“The brilliance of this novel—and the reason it deserves comparisons to so many great authors—is the way in which this tragic story is filtered through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy… . As a result, the story gets pulled and twisted out of shape, and what is ‘real’ becomes a lot less certain—especially when Xiaotong keeps insisting on his story’s veracity.” Chad Post | Three Percent“Pow! is a frenzied stew of stinging satire and theatre of the absurd. Readers are free to interpret it as they wish; the truth is in there somewhere.”
“There is little doubt that Mo Yan’s novel Pow!—with its Rabelaisian carnivalesque language and surrealist narration—rightly belongs among the best of world literature… . Mo’s novel in the English version, rendered beautifully and ingeniously by Howard Goldblatt, has acquired a poetic, or rather, onomatopoetic title … [and] readers of Pow! are bombarded page after page by the blaring force of a story of carnivorous excess that bares China’s soiled bottom.”
Yunte Huang | Chicago Tribune
“Mo, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, was much criticized in the days following the award for his perceived cozy relationship with the Chinese government and reluctance to stand up for freedom of expression. Such judgments, however, are challenged by his bold, outlandish and far from apolitical new novel. Like his earlier works, Pow! defies easy definition. It is national and personal in its concerns, surreal and real, and as comic as it is serious.” Krys Lee | Financial Times
“In the face of homogenizing Chinese nationalism and global capitalism, he manages to capture, with the most exacting granularity, the folkways of a tiny, very particular place. In the face of an authoritarian government that monopolizes all history, Mo Yan’s work preserves the paths of memory that individuals have cut through a traumatic and terrible past.” Dylan Suher | Asymptote“Mo Yan spares the reader nothing. He recounts matters disgusting, ugly, raunchy, repulsive, sexually graphic, ineffably sad, occasionally joy-filled—all of which combine to make a novel larger than life.” Valerie Ryan | Seattle Times“Pow! is a Rorschach inkblot of a book, and all the better for not telling the reader
what to think. Within the book, meat is everywhere and everything. What that means could be anything.” Economist“Recently enshrined Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s latest novel is a rip-roarin’, gut-bustin’, greasy meal of a book… . Pow! is a hilariously slapstick affair, salted with subtle critique of a corrupt government and well-seasoned with sly satire. It’s a resounding confirmation of Mo Yan’s place among the best writers of our time.” Stephen Sparks | Green Apple Books
“This novel by Mo Yan—2012’s Nobel laureate for literature—is a savage satire of the meatpacking industry, greed, rivalry and revenge, as told by a young Chinese boy who becomes a Meat God.” Nick DiMartino | Shelf Awareness -
Photograph: Sarah Angelina Acland, Aloe arborescens, circa 1909.
A New York Times piece on early color photography includes a mention of Sarah Angelina Acland: First Lady of Colour Photography, published in the US in November by the Bodleian Library.
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The Tradescants arguably did more to change the botanical and gastronomic landscape in England in the seventeenth century than anyone else. Both Tradescants spent their lives collecting new plants—through their own travels and by commissioning others to send or bring back specimens from abroad—and then growing or propagating those plants for their own use and for distribution.
From “The Natural World: The Tradescants’ Culinary Treasures” by Amy L. Tigner, in Gastronomic, Winter 2012
The Bodleian Library will publish The Tradescants’ Orchard, a collection of sixty-six watercolors by the Tradescants, in June 2013.
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You only have two more weeks to order your sets of the Edible and Animal series at a 25% discount! Don’t miss out on this great offer from Reaktion Books!
And you still have time to get your Edible six-pack for that special cocktail-and-wine lover in your life! You can get Champagne, Gin, Rum, Whiskey, Vodka, and Cocktails at 25% off until 12/31. These short, colorful histories will make the perfect holiday gift!
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“Mo the public figure is careful with words. But Mo the novelist slips past the censors by dressing up his cutting realism in absurd and fantastic clothing. In doing so, he’s embracing a long tradition that stretches from Cervantes to the German novelist Günter Grass. I’m going to allow Mo the wiggle room he clearly needs because in the end his skill makes Pow! a wild, unpredictable ride—a work of demented and subversive genius.”—Hector Tobar, LA Times
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17 Pieces of Dating Advice from the 1930s
Don’t imagine that any nice-minded girl is going to say “yes” to such a proposition as: “Well, what about a spot of double harness, old thing?”
Aren’t you glad you saw this before the weekend? For more vintage dating advice drawn from the Bodleian Library’s How to Be a Good Lover, check out the slideshow at the Huffington Post.
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This Friday, the 92Y Tribeca in New York will host Helio San Miguel, editor of World Film Locations: Mumbai, published in the US this month by Intellect.
“The home of Bollywood, Mumbai is the epicenter of India’s film industry and its foremost film location, making it one of the most filmed cities in the world. Explore the sheer complexity of this incomparable city through the lens of Mumbai’s manifold cinematic representations”
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“Certain works make an apparently disproportionate mark; they fall into your life like meteors,” begins the PN Review essay on The Arrière-pays by Yves Bonnefoy, translated by Stephen Romer. “Barely articulated feelings are revealed in that otherworldly glow as central… Their imagery can dictate the aspirations of a lifetime. To them one returns like a pilgrim. One such work is Bonnefoy’s L’Arrière-Pays.”
“Seagull Books has accomplished what no other English publisher has dared,” lauded Beverley Bie Brahic. Seagull has produced “a book that generously weds text to image… The cover of this richly illustrated book,” she wrote in the Guardian, “is a detail from Piero della Francesca; its text is interspersed with images of paintings and places, each identified with a scrap of text.”Paul Whiteman offers some more background in the Hudson Review: “Forty years ago, Yves Bonnefoy published a somewhat unclassifiable book entitled L’Arrière-pays… . Now at last it has been fluently, indeed brilliantly, translated into English by Stephen Romer… . Bonnefoy’s beautiful prose, lovingly rendered for the most part by Romer, eschews technical language and is shot through with the kind of reverie and music that belong to the province of poetry and not philosophy… . The Arrière-pays is a poet’s book above all.”
But what’s a poet think? “In this unique book,” writes the poet Paul Stubbs, “Bonnefoy is telling us that the great artists, the most courageous of them ‘forge their works out of, and despite the awareness of, non-being’” while Ron Slate explains things a bit more concretely at On the Seawall : “the narrative tracks a traveler who in turn is hunting for the presence of le arrière-pays while planning a text called An Unknown Feeling. Bounding between exaltation and constraint, he ultimately seems to settle for a recognition of presence in the world itself, not in the dream.”
Nicole Zdeb elaborates in the Quarterly Conversation: “Yves Bonnefoy has modeled how to conduct enquiry into an aspect of the mind, a purely subjective and intimate endeavor, bringing in the signs, symbols, and imagery that this aspect has used as vehicle. The result is an extraordinary contribution to art criticism, fresh evidence that Bonnefoy has earned his lionized reputation. The Arrière-pays is a visible manifestation of intellectual and spiritual engagement. It is a thing of surpassing beauty.”
“Paul Auster has said that Yves Bonnefoy ‘is one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime,’ recalls The Coffin Factory in their review. “Jonathan Galassi says that Yves Bonnefoy ‘is the last figure standing in a monumental tradition that has shaped modern European literature.’” Books like this one are “exactly what book lovers should be drooling over.”
And of course the Times Literary Supplement agrees, though you won’t know without a subscription: “Seagull Books has produced a handsome book, interspersed with images of the paintings and places the text visits in its quest for what lies ‘over there,’ out of sight,” a contributor wrote before including The Arrière-pays on their “Books of the Year” notice and concluding that “it is a gift to literature.”
Click here to learn more.
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Photo postcard of a Victorian couple sitting in a studio mock-up of a hot-air balloon. Photo by J. E. Ballantyne, from Fantasy Travel: Vintage People on Photo Postcards by Tom Phillips.
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On October 12th, Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though coverage of the win appeared nearly everywhere—in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, and the BBC, to name a few, and in the literary blogs at Three Percent, Conversational Reading, and Bookslut—there’s a great deal more excitement—and political controversy—to come.
Seagull Books is proud to present Pow!, Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Mo Yan’s newest novel. After a glimpse behind the scenes at this never-before-published masterpiece with Seagull’s assistant editor Bishan Samaddar in First Post, Pow! was featured by The New Yorker in their November 26 issue and in an interview with Mo’s translator Howard Goldblatt online. And that’s just for starters.The first reviews of Pow! are just starting to appear, as Mo makes his way to Sweden for the ceremony. In the Quarterly Conversation’s 30th Issue, Andrea Lingenfelter put to rest lingering questions about Mo’s politics:
If this book isn’t a social and political critique, I don’t know what is. The narrator is a child in a man’s body, sexually frustrated, powerless, and poor. Who’s on top in this society? Corrupt village heads and Party officials with their Audi A6s and Remy Martin cognac. The peasants get rich feeding the unseemly appetites of China’s new urban bourgeoisie with bogus and sometimes toxic products, while the countryside itself turns into an abattoir. This is the Reform Era and these are the Party bosses who have guided it.
You can read more of Lingenfelter’s review here: http://quarterlyconversation.com/pow-by-mo-yan
And there’s much more to come.
