front cover of Dog Years
Dog Years
Melissa Yancy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Winner of the 2016 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Winner of the 2017 California Book Awards,
first fiction category

Many of these richly layered stories juxtapose the miracles of modern medicine against the inescapable frustrations of everyday life: awkward first dates, the indignities of air travel, and overwhelming megastore cereal aisles. In “Go Forth,” an aging couple attends a kidney transplant reunion, where donors and recipients collide with unexpected results; in “Hounds,” a woman who runs a facial reconstruction program for veterans nurses her dying dog while recounting the ways she has used sex as both a weapon and a salve; and in “Consider This Case,” a lonely fetal surgeon caring for his aesthete father must reconsider sexuality and the lengths people will go to have children.
            Melissa Yancy’s personal experience in the milieus of hospitals, medicine, and family services infuse her narratives with a rare texture and gravity. Keenly observant, offering both sharp humor and humanity, these stories explore the ties that bind—both genetic and otherwise—and the fine line between the mundane and the maudlin. Whether the men or women that populate these pages are contending with illness, death, or parenthood, the real focus is on time and our inability to slow its progression, reminding us to revel in those moments we can control.
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A Coffee Frontier
Land, Society, and Politics in Duaca, Venezuela, 1830–1936
Douglas Yarrington
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998
This study views the economic transformation of Duaca, Venezuela into a major coffee export center in the late nineteenth century. Yarrington examines the rise of the peasantry to prosperity, yet they later lost their stature as the local elite allied itself with the state to restructure society and coffee production on its own terms in the twentieth-century. The book is a pioneering study on peasant studies, export-led development, the relationship of state and society, and the consolidation of nation-states in Latin America.
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Visions of Annihilation
The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945
Rory Yeomans
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013

The fascist Ustasha regime and its militias carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed an estimated half million Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and ended only with the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II.

In Visions of Annihilation, Rory Yeomans analyzes the Ustasha movement’s use of culture to appeal to radical nationalist sentiments and legitimize its genocidal policies. He shows how the movement attempted to mobilize poets, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and intellectuals as purveyors of propaganda and visionaries of a utopian society. Meanwhile, newspapers, radio, and speeches called for the expulsion, persecution, or elimination of “alien” and “enemy” populations to purify the nation. He describes how the dual concepts of annihilation and national regeneration were disseminated to the wider population and how they were interpreted at the grassroots level.

Yeomans examines the Ustasha movement in the context of other fascist movements in Europe. He cites their similar appeals to idealistic youth, the economically disenfranchised, racial purists, social radicals, and Catholic clericalists. Yeomans further demonstrates how fascism created rituals and practices that mimicked traditional religious faiths and celebrated martyrdom.

Visions of Annihilation chronicles the foundations of the Ustasha movement, its key actors and ideologies, and reveals the unique cultural, historical, and political conditions present in interwar Croatia that led to the rise of fascism and contributed to the cataclysmic events that tore across the continent.

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Echoes of Two Cultures
Arthur Milton Young
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964
The theme of Echoes of Two Cultures is the transmission of two cultures through legend, how the ideals and moralities of ancient Greece and Rome have inspired and informed successive civilizations to the present day. 

The legends of Cyrus the Great, from the early Greek world, and Lucretia, of early Rome, recount stories of transgression of rights; the first against a people, the second against an individual.  The Greeks of the time of Cyrus, in the 5th century BC, believed that history taught them about an inexorable and divinely ordained law of ethics meant to punish the overweening transgressor.  The citizens of Lucretia's Rome were motivated by a solemn respect for the sanctity of women and of the home.  In both legends, it is an individual woman's courage and determination that brings the offender to his rightful doom, although, in the process of this retribution, both women suffer great loss.

Young shows how the telling of these great legends, which have gathered strength and beauty from each retelling, echo down through the centuries and throughout the Western World, influencing and enlightening societies and individuals.
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front cover of Legend Builders of the West
Legend Builders of the West
Arthur Milton Young
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958
Classical mythology came west from Greece, bearing the thoughts, feelings, and distilled experiences of ancient peoples that have, in turn, been formed by the skilled hands of artists into tangible creations of beauty and significance. Before there were records to preserve significant events, these stories were passed down in tales and songs. Adapted and embellished by successive generations, they were later written down and used to create art from many different materials in different mediums.  Within these stories and the creations they inspired was an impulse either to recover the secrets of something that had been lost or to create something new from the old material.

Young examines nine legends-Perseus and Andromeda; Demeter and Persephone; Pyramus and Thisbe; Pygmalion and Galatea; Daedalus and Icarus; Atlanta and Hippomenes; Philemon and Baucis; Echo and Narcissus; and Pomona and Vertumnus-explaining the legends themselves and tracing their dissemination through centuries and civilizations and across various art forms. In Young's view, classical mythology, through expressing humanity's enthusiasms, visions, and talents, might well be considered the “skilled midwife” of human civilization, proof of our constant effort to possess life symbolically and express it through arts.
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front cover of Troy and Her Legend
Troy and Her Legend
Arthur Milton Young
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1948
The power of legend is that it is never simply an old tale retold.  Though the legend may be old, its meaning and influence is new in each retelling and for each new group of listeners.

Young provides here a “biography” of the greatest of the classical legends, the story of the fall of Troy.  As he states in his book, the greatness of the legend does not depend on its relation to historical reality, but “lies rather in the beauty and variety it has called out of the creative imaginations of artists, from Homer down to modern times, artists who with varied skill and in many forms have expressed their individual genius.”  Young's text is beautifully illustrated with examples of art inspired by the legend, from literature, painting, ceramics, tapestry, sculpture, and the opera, with fresh interpretations of their meaning.  The legend of Troy has survived more than 3,000 years in the art of many-from Quintus of Smyrna to Tennyson to Christopher Morley, Guérin to Baroccio to Strauss-and archaeological excavations in our own time have only enriched the imaginations of contemporary artists and scholars. 

In deepening our knowledge of classic texts and their changing interpretations over time, Young argues, we enhance our understanding both of the classics and of the successive civilizations they have influenced.
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front cover of Elegy On Toy Piano
Elegy On Toy Piano
Dean Young
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence.

Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and their simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. As in the agitated "Whirlpool Suite": "Pain / and pleasure are two signals carried / over one phoneline."

In taking up subjects as slight as the examination of a signature or a true/false test, and as pressing as the death of friends, Young's poems embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception, and the truth telling of wordplay.

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front cover of First Course In Turbulence
First Course In Turbulence
Dean Young
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999
Finalist for ForeWord Magazine 1999 Poetry Book of the Year

With rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young’s latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.
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front cover of Primitive Mentor
Primitive Mentor
Dean Young
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008
The ninth collection for this Pulitzer Prize finalist, who remains as entertaining, imaginative and inventive as ever.
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Skid
Dean Young
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002
Dean Young is one of the premier surrealist poets writing today. In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations. Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the imagination, these poems proclaim vitality and alertness, wasting nothing. From Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner’s "Meep! Meep!" to remembrances of lost loves and laments about the future, Young’s poems reveal his faith in the genius of calamity and the redemptive power of fun.
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Cultures of the City
Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America
Richard Young
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

Cultures of the City explores the cultural mediation of relationships between people and urban spaces in Latin/o America and how these mediations shape the identities of cities and their residents.


Addressing a broad spectrum of phenomena and disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this volume analyze lived urban experiences and their symbolic representation in cultural texts. Individual chapters explore Havana in popular music; Mexico City in art; Buenos Aires, Recife, and Salvador in film; and Asuncion and Buenos Aires in literature. Others focus on particular events, conditions, and practices of urban life including the Havana book fair, mass transit in Bogotá, the restaurant industry in Los Angeles, the media in Detroit, Andean festivals in Lima, and the photographic record of a visit by members of the Zapatista Liberation Army to Mexico City.


    The contributors examine identity and the sense of place and belonging that connect people to urban environments, relating these to considerations of ethnicity, social and economic class, gender, everyday life, and cultural practices. They also consider history and memory and the making of places through the iterative performance of social practices. As such, places are works in progress, a condition that is particularly evident in contemporary Latin/o American cities where the opposition between local and global influences is a prominent facet of daily life.


These core issues are theorized further in an afterword by Abril Trigo, who takes the chapters as a point of departure for a discussion of the dialectics of identity in the Latin/o American global city.

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