front cover of All about Skin
All about Skin
Short Fiction by Women of Color
Edited by Jina Ortiz and Rochelle Spencer, Foreword by Helena María Viramontes
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
All about Skin features twenty-seven stories by women writers of color whose short fiction has earned them a range of honors, including John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Flannery O'Connor Award, and inclusion in the Best American Short Stories and O. Henry anthologies. The prose in this multicultural anthology addresses such themes as racial prejudice, media portrayal of beauty, and family relationships and spans genres from the comic and the surreal to startling realism. It demonstrates the power and range of some of the most exciting women writing short fiction today.
            The stories are by American writers Aracelis González Asendorf, Jacqueline Bishop, Glendaliz Camacho, Learkana Chong, Jennine Capó Crucet, Ramola D., Patricia Engel, Amina Gautier, Manjula Menon, ZZ Packer, Princess Joy L. Perry, Toni Margarita Plummer, Emily Raboteau, Ivelisse Rodriguez, Metta Sáma, Joshunda Sanders, Renee Simms, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Hope Wabuke, and Ashley Young; Nigerian writers Unoma Azuah and Chinelo Okparanta; and Chinese writer Xu Xi.

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers  
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Angelitos
A Graphic Novel
Ilan Stavans and Santiago Cohen
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
From internationally renowned Ilan Stavans, in collaboration with award-winning illustrator Santiago Cohen, comes Angelitos: A Graphic Novelan explosive new graphic novel about a college student and his interactions with Padre Chinchachoma, a charismatic Catholic priest who devotes himself to rescuing homeless children in Mexico. Though his work gives hope to the desperate masses of children on the streets of Mexico City, his efforts interfere with and infuriate the police—with dire consequences. Set in a deeply classist society and against the backdrop of the tragic destruction of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, the core of the story also revolves around the student’s fear that Padre Chincha might be sexually abusing the children he rescues, at a time and place when such actions went unchecked by the Catholic Church.
 
Though Angelitos: A Graphic Novel is a fictional retelling of a desperate time, it draws on autobiographical elements to tell the real-life story of Alejandro García Durán de Lara, popularly known as Padre Chinchachoma, a complicated figure revered by some and reviled by others. 
 
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Arabic Sociolinguistics
Topics in Diglossia, Gender, Identity, and Politics
Reem Bassiouney
Georgetown University Press, 2009

This introduction to major topics in the field of Arabic sociolinguistics examines key issues in diglossia, code-switching, gendered discourse, language variation and change, and language policies. It introduces and evaluates various theoretical approaches and models, and it illustrates the usefulness and limitations of these approaches to Arabic with empirical data. Reem Bassiouney explores how current sociolinguistic theories can be applied to Arabic and, conversely, what the study of Arabic can contribute to our understanding of the function of language in society.

Graduate students of Arabic language and linguistics as well as students of sociolinguistics with no knowledge of Arabic will find this volume to be an indispensable resource.

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As She Was Discovering Tigony
Olympe Bhêly-Quenum
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Dorcas Keurléonan-Moricet is a brilliant white geophysicist posted on assignment in Africa. She falls in love with a young African man, Ségué n’Di, and enters into an extramarital affair with him. In her professional work, she discovers deposits of minerals of inestimable worth. Reading the current age of globalization and neoliberalism as one in which the riches of Africa are again being cynically exploited by multinational companies—including her own—Keurléonan-Moricet’s views and her life gradually change. As the popular resistance against the dictatorial regime in power grows, she comes to play a key role in the unfolding political drama.
 
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Beirut '75
Ghadah Samman
University of Arkansas Press, 1995

Ghada Samman’s first full-length novel, originally published in Arabic in 1974, is a creative and daring work prophetically depicting the social and political causes of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. The story opens in a taxi in which we meet the five central characters, each seeking something to give life meaning: security, fame, wealth, dignity, recognition, freedom from fear and from tradition-sanctioned, dehumanizing practices. Once they reach the capital city of Beirut, on which they’ve pinned their hopes, they all discover, man and woman alike, that they are victims of forces either partially or completely beyond their control, such as political corruption, class discrimination, economic and sexual exploitation, destruction of the natural environment, and blind allegiance to tradition.

Beirut ’75 addresses struggles of Arab society, particularly the Lebanese, but the message is one of the universal human condition. Thus, in addition to this superb English-language presentation, Samman’s novel has already appeared in German (two editions), French, and Italian versions.

Winner of The University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation.

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Benefit Street
A Novel
Adria Bernardi
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Winner of FC2’s Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize
 
A universal story of exile, of the refugee and emigrant, and of all those displaced who can reconstruct a sense of home only by weaving a new fabric of the imagination
 
For nearly two decades, Şiva has met after work on Tuesdays with four friends at a teahouse called the Kafiye. In interrupted conversations, the women explore what it is to live engaged lives inside and outside the home. Amidst joking and complaints, while drinking too much tea and eating too many sweets, they tell of their days: a son’s ninth birthday, the bruise on the arm of an aging parent, soldiers stationed outside the school, the funeral of an opposition political leader killed in a mysterious car accident.
 
Set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country, Benefit Street tells of a wide circle of friends—teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans—in a time of gathering and dispersal. It tells the story of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, and neighbors, as war to the East threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime.
 
The ideals of youth, freedom, and coexistence are severely tested with the shocking revelation that the charismatic leader of their group has sexually abused the women under his care. The limits of reconciliation are tested as Şiva makes an arduous journey into the mountains to meet an estranged mother with a genius for weaving complex rugs.
 
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Black Diamond
Zakes Mda
Seagull Books, 2014
In this novel by celebrated South African writer Zakes Mda, Kristin Uys, a tough magistrate who lives alone with her cat in the Roodepoort district of Johannesburg, goes on a one-woman crusade to wipe out prostitution in her town. Her reasons are personal, and her zeal is fierce. Her main targets are the Visagie Brothers, Stevo and Shortie, who run a brothel, and although she fails to take down the entire establishment, she manages to nail Stevo for contempt of court, serving him a six-month sentence. From Diepkloof Prison, the outraged Stevo orchestrates his revenge against the magistrate, aided and abetted by the rather inept Shortie and his former nanny, Aunt Magda.

Kristin receives menacing phone calls and her home is invaded and vandalized—even her cat isn’t spared the threats—and the chief magistrate has no choice but to assign a bodyguard to protect her. To Kristin’s consternation, security guard Don Mateza moves into her home and trails her everywhere. This new arrangement doesn’t suit Don’s longtime girlfriend Tumi, a former model and successful businesswoman, who is intent on turning Don into a Black Diamond—a member of the wealthy new black South African middle class. And Don soon finds that his new assignment has unexpected complications that Tumi simply does not understand.

In Black Diamond, Mda tackles every conceivable South African stereotype, skillfully turning them upside down and exposing their ironies—often hilariously. This is a clever, quirky novel, in which Mda captures the essence of contemporary life in a fast-changing urban world.
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Blood Kin
A Novel
Mark Powell
University of Tennessee Press, 2006
Set in the South Carolina foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the late summer of 1970, Blood Kin tells the story of the Burden family and the community of outcasts that surrounds them. James Burden is the eldest son in the Burden family. A Korean War veteran and former prisoner-of-war, he struggles with inner demons and drug addiction. He has returned home after almost two decades of absence to find his family members consumed with struggles all their own. His former wife is haunted by her thoughts of an unborn child. His brothers, both Vietnam veterans, are troubled by their experiences there. Roy Burden returned a hero, while Enis Burden saw no combat at all. The younger brothers are also dealing with troubles with love and the hopes of starting their own families. James’s father is himself disturbed by his memories of his own father’s dark deeds and death. And James’s mother is plagued by worry for her husband and sons. The Burdens face their struggles within a community of misfits, including a reluctant sheriff, a runaway thief, a forgotten fire-talker, a religious con man and his actress girlfriend, a local apple baron, and a failed prophet. All of them are living on the fringes of a rural South racing toward a middle-class modernity that has little use for any of them. Blood Kin was awarded the 2005 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, an award named for one of the South’s most celebrated writers. The annual prize, co-sponsored by the Knoxville Writers’ Guild and the University of Tennessee Press, endeavors to bring to light novels of high literary quality, thereby honoring Peter Taylor’s own practice of assisting writers who care about the craft of fiction.
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Camp Nine
A Novel
Vivienne Schiffer
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. military to ban anyone from certain areas of the country, with primary focus on the West Coast. Eventually the order was used to imprison 120,000 people of Japanese descent in incarceration camps such as the Rohwer Relocation Center in remote Desha County, Arkansas. This time of fear and prejudice (the U.S. government formally apologized for the relocations in 1982) and the Arkansas Delta are the setting for Camp Nine. The novel's narrator, Chess Morton, lives in tiny Rook Arkansas. Her days are quiet and secluded until the appearance of a "relocation" center built for what was, in effect, the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese Americans. Chess's life becomes intertwined with those of two young internees and an American soldier mysteriously connected to her mother's past. As Chess watches the struggles and triumphs of these strangers and sees her mother seek justice for the people who briefly and involuntarily came to call the Arkansas Delta their home, she discovers surprising and disturbing truths about her family's painful past.
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Carry You
Glori Simmons
Autumn House Press, 2018
Glori Simmons’s new book, Carry You, is a timely collection of linked short stories that examines how war shapes and distorts our understanding of family, friends, country, and self. Simmons draws out the humanity of her characters, their flaws and failings, their hopes and desires, and their dreams for the future. These stories show that the human capacity for violence, compassion, and love are not bound by time or place.
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Conflict and Cultural Heritage
A Moral Analysis of the Challenges of Heritage Protection
Helen Frowe
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2019
In the third issue of the J. Paul Getty Trust Occasional Papers in Cultural Heritage Policy series, authors Helen Frowe and Derek Matravers pivot from the earlier tone of the series in discussing the appropriate response to attacks on cultural heritage with their paper, “Conflict and Cultural Heritage: A Moral Analysis of the Challenges of Heritage Protection.” While Frowe and Matravers acknowledge the importance of cultural heritage, they assert that we must more carefully consider the complex moral dimensions—the inevitable serious consequences to human beings—before formulating policy to forcefully protect it.

A number of writers and thinkers working on the problem of preserving the world’s most treasured monuments, sites, and objects today cite what Frowe and Matravers call extrinsic and intrinsic justifications for the protection of cultural heritage. These are arguments that maintain that protecting heritage will be a key means to achieve other important goals, like the prevention of genocide, or arguments that heritage deserves to be forcefully protected for its own sake. Frowe and Matravers deconstruct both types of justifications, demonstrating a lack of clear evidence for a causal relationship between the destruction of cultural heritage and atrocities like genocide and arguing that the defense of heritage must not be treated with the same weight or urgency, or according to the same international policies, as the defense of human lives.

By calling for expanded theory and empirical data and the consideration of morality in the crafting of international policy vis-à-vis cultural heritage protection, Frowe and Matravers present a thoughtful critique that enriches this important series and adds to the ongoing dialogue in the field.
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Conservation of Natural and Cultural Heritage in Kenya
Edited by Anne-Marie Deisser and Mugwima Njuguna
University College London, 2016
n Kenya, cultural and natural heritage has a particular value. Its pre-historic heritage not only tells the story of man's origin and evolution but has also contributed to the understanding of the earth's history: fossils and artefacts spanning over 27 million years have been discovered and conserved by the National Museums of Kenya (NMK). Alongside this, the steady rise in the market value of African art has also affected Kenya. Demand for African tribal art has surpassed that for antiquities of Roman, Byzantine, and Egyptian origin, and in African countries currently experiencing conflicts, this activity invariably attracts looters, traffickers and criminal networks. This book brings together essays by heritage experts from different backgrounds, including conservation, heritage management, museum studies, archaeology, environment and social sciences, architecture and landscape, geography, philosophy and economics to explore three key themes: the underlying ethics, practices and legal issues of heritage conservation; the exploration of architectural and urban heritage of Nairobi; and the natural heritage, landscapes and sacred sites in relation to local Kenyan communities and tourism. It thus provides an overview of conservation practices in Kenya from 2000 to 2015 and highlights the role of natural and cultural heritage as a key factor of social-economic development, and as a potential instrument for conflict resolution
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Cosella Wayne
Or, Will and Destiny
Cora Wilburn, edited and introduced by Jonathan D. Sarna
University of Alabama Press, 2019
The first novel written and published in English by an American Jewish woman
 
Published serially in the spiritualist journal Banner of Light in 1860, Cosella Wayne: Or, Will and Destiny is the first coming-of-age novel, written and published in English by an American Jewish woman, to depict Jews in the United States and transforms what we know about the history of early American Jewish literature. The novel never appeared in book form, went unmentioned in Jewish newspapers of the day, and studies of nineteenth-century American Jewish literature ignore it com­pletely. Yet the novel anticipates many central themes of American Jewish writing: intermar­riage, generational tension, family dysfunction, Jewish-Christian relations, immigration, poverty, the place of women in Jewish life, the nature of romantic love, and the tension between destiny and free will.
 
The narrative recounts a relationship be­tween an abusive Jewish father and the re­bellious daughter he molested as well as that daughter’s struggle to find a place in the com­plex social fabric of nineteenth-century Amer­ica. It is also unique in portraying such themes as an unmarried Jewish woman’s descent into poverty, her forlorn years as a starving or­phaned seamstress, her apostasy and return to Judaism, and her quest to be both Jewish and a spiritualist at one and the same time.
 
Jonathan Sarna, who introduces the volume, discovered Cosella Wayne while pursuing research at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. This edition is supplemented with selections from Cora Wilburn’s recently rediscovered diary, which are reprinted in the appendix. Together, these materials help to situate Cosella Wayne within the life and times of one of nineteenth-century American Jewry’s least known and yet most prolific female authors.
 
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front cover of Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities
Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities
James Cuno
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
A pathbreaking call to halt the intertwined crises of cultural heritage attacks and mass atrocities and mobilize international efforts to protect people and cultures.
 
Intentional destruction of cultural heritage has a long history. Contemporary examples include the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, mosques in Xinjiang, mausoleums in Timbuktu, and Greco-Roman remains in Syria. Cultural heritage destruction invariably accompanies assaults on civilians, making heritage attacks impossible to disentangle from the mass atrocities of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Both seek to eliminate people and the heritage with which they identify.
 
Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities assembles essays by thirty-eight experts from the heritage, social science, humanitarian, legal, and military communities. Focusing on immovable cultural heritage vulnerable to attack, the volume's guiding framework is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a United Nations resolution adopted unanimously in 2005 to permit international intervention against crimes of war or genocide. Based on the three pillars of prevent, react, and rebuild, R2P offers today's policymakers a set of existing laws and international norms that can and—as this book argues—must be extended to the protection of cultural heritage. Contributions consider the global value of cultural heritage and document recent attacks on people and sites in China, Guatemala, Iraq, Mali, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. Comprehensive sections on vulnerable populations as well as the role of international law and the military offer readers critical insights and point toward research, policy, and action agendas to protect both people and cultural heritage. A concise abstract of each chapter is offered online in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish to facilitate robust, global dissemination of the strategies and tactics offered in this pathbreaking call to action.
 
The free online edition of this publication is available at getty.edu/publications/cultural-heritage-mass-atrocities. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.
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front cover of Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community
Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community
Academic Libraries and Museums in Collaboration
Alexia Hudson-Ward
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2022
Academic libraries and museums foster many outstanding collaborations supporting teaching, learning, and research within their respective institutions. These collaborations, like other progressive activities, require significant invisible labor, caretaking, and resources that have not always been documented.
 
Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community collects examples of successful academic library-museum collaborations and serves as critical knowledge for the cultural heritage sector. Authors from libraries and museums across the United States demonstrate how to develop and execute partnerships and bring forth new dimensions of transdisciplinary objects-based pedagogy, research, and learning centered on inclusive educational practices. Chapters explore visual thinking strategies and the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education in the undergraduate classroom; restoring Indigenous heritage through tribal partnerships; using object-based teaching to motivate student research; and much more.
 
The collaborative approaches highlighted here demonstrate the power of possibility when two collections-centric entities unite to enrich our collective understanding of materiality, instructional approaches, and the importance of provenance. Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community also illustrates why interrogating past practices and value assignments within academic library and museum collections is essential to advancing culturally relevant approaches to knowledge sharing in physical and digital spaces.
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front cover of Cultural Heritage in Mali in the Neoliberal Era
Cultural Heritage in Mali in the Neoliberal Era
Rosa De Jorio
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Up to 2012, Mali was a poster child of African democracy, despite multiple signs of growing dissatisfaction with the democratic experiment. Then disaster struck, bringing many of the nation's unresolved contradictions to international attention. A military coup carved off the country's south. A revolt by a coalition of Tuareg and extremist Islamist forces shook the north. The events, so violent and unexpected, forced experts to reassess Mali's democratic institutions and the neoliberal economic reforms enacted in conjunction with the move toward democracy. Rosa De Jorio's detailed study of cultural heritage and its transformations provides a key to understanding the impasse that confronts Malian democracy. As she shows, postcolonial Mali privileged its cultural heritage to display itself on the regional and international scene. The neoliberal reforms both intensified and altered this trend. Profiling heritage sites ranging from statues of colonial leaders to women's museums to historic Timbuktu, De Jorio portrays how various actors have deployed and contested notions of heritage. These actors include not just Malian administrators and politicians but UNESCO, and non-state NGOs. She also delves into the intricacies of heritage politics from the perspective of Malian actors and groups, as producers and receivers--but always highly informed and critically engaged--of international, national and local cultural initiatives.
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front cover of Double Toil and Trouble
Double Toil and Trouble
A New Novel and Short Stories by Donald Harington
Donald Harington
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
Double Toil and Trouble is the first new volume of fiction in more than a decade by beloved Arkansas writer Donald Harington (1935–2009). Featuring the long-lost suspense novel of the title and four previously unpublished or uncollected stories, this volume adds several new chapters to the saga of Stay More, the fictional Ozarks village that serves as the setting for more than a dozen other Harington novels.

Edited by longtime Harington scholar Brian Walter, Double Toil and Trouble also includes an appendix featuring the author’s spirited correspondence with the editor who originally inspired the title novel, providing an insider’s look at the American literary scene and Harington’s own early assessment of his work. Spanning several decades of the author’s career, this volume gives readers a Harington who is at once familiar and fresh as he experiments with new formal possibilities, only to once again endear the vagaries of love, life, and folk language to us.
 
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Faith and Fat Chances
A Novel
Carla Trujillo
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Finalist, 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction 

Carla Trujillo brings to life another side of the fabled city of Santa Fe in this rollicking novel set in Dogtown, a dilapidated neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Home to a hardscrabble community of working people struggling to make a living on meager means, Dogtown is worlds apart from the tourists, artists, and upscale eateries just a stone’s throw away. The close-knit neighborhood thrives in its own way, until an entrepreneur arrives with a plan to cast out its occupants and construct a winery in its place.

Led by Dogtown’s unofficial mayor, Pepa Romero—an irreverent healer with old-world wisdom and new-age knowledge—the citizens of Dogtown revolt. Using everything at their disposal, including spying, supernatural powers, the law, and individual cunning, they set in motion a thrilling and at times hilarious chain of events that culminates in a storm of epic proportions. With an unforgettable cast of characters, Faith and Fat Chances illuminates the ingenuity and resilience of people fighting to preserve their way of life.

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front cover of Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory
Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory
A Novel
By Emma Pérez
University of Texas Press, 2009

Runner-up, Best Historical Fiction in English, Latino Book Awards Competition, 2010

This literary adventure takes place in nineteenth-century Texas and follows the story of a Tejana lesbian cowgirl after the fall of the Alamo. Micaela Campos, the central character, witnesses the violence against Mexicans, African Americans, and indigenous peoples after the infamous battles of the Alamo and of San Jacinto, both in 1836. Resisting an easy opposition between good versus evil and brown versus white characters, the novel also features Micaela's Mexican-Anglo cousin who assists and hinders her progress. Micaela's travels give us a new portrayal of the American West, populated by people of mixed races who are vexed by the collision of cultures and politics. Ultimately, Micaela's journey and her romance with a black/American Indian woman teach her that there are no easy solutions to the injustices that birthed the Texas Republic.

This novel is an intervention in queer history and fiction with its love story between two women of color in mid-nineteenth-century Texas. Pérez also shows how a colonial past still haunts our nation's imagination. The battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto offered freedom and liberty to Texans, but what is often erased from the story is that common people who were Mexican, Indian, and Black did not necessarily benefit from the influx of so many Anglo immigrants to Texas. The social themes and identity issues that Pérez explores—political climate, debates over immigration, and historical revision of the American West—are current today.

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Friedrichsburg
A Novel
By Friedrich Armand Strubberg
University of Texas Press, 2012

Summerfield G. Roberts Award for a Work of Creative Writing, Sons of the Texas Republic, 2013

First published in Germany in 1867, this fascinating autobiographical novel of German immigrants on the antebellum Texas frontier provides a trove of revelations about the myriad communities that once called the Hill Country home.

Founded in 1846, Fredericksburg, Texas, was established by German noblemen who enticed thousands of their compatriots to flee their overcrowded homeland with the prospect of free land in a place that was portrayed as a new Garden of Eden. Few of the settlers, however, were prepared for the harsh realities of the Texas frontier or for confrontation with the Comanche. In his 1867 novel Friedrichsburg, Friedrich Armand Strubberg, a.k.a. Dr. Schubbert, interwove his personal story with a fictional romance to capture the flavor of Fredericksburg, Texas, during its founding years when he served as the first colonial director.

Now available in a contemporary translation, Friedrichsburg brings to life the little-known aspects of life among these determined but often ill-equipped settlers who sought to make the transition to a new home and community on the Texas frontier. Opening just as a peace treaty is being negotiated between the German newcomers and the Comanches, the novel describes the unlikely survival of these fledgling homesteads and provides evidence that support from the Delaware Indians, as well as the nearby Mormon community of Zodiac, was key to the Germans’ success. Along the way, Strubberg also depicts the laying of the cornerstone to the Vereinskirche, the blazing of an important new road to Austin, exciting hunting scenes, and an admirable spirit of cultural cohesion and determined resilience. In so doing, he resurrects a fascinating lost world.

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front cover of From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions
From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions
Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama
Carla Guerrón Montero
University of Alabama Press, 2020
A new reading of Panama’s nation-building process, interpreted through a lens of transnational tourism

Based on long-term ethnographic and archival research, From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama considers the intersection of tourism, multiculturalism, and nation building. Carla Guerrón Montero analyzes the ways in which tourism becomes a vehicle for the development of specific kinds of institutional multiculturalism and nation-building projects in a country that prides itself on being multiethnic and racially democratic.

The narrative centers on Panamanian Afro-Antilleans who arrived in Panama in the nineteenth century from the Greater and Leeward Antilles as a labor force for infrastructural projects and settled in Panama City, Colón, and the Bocas del Toro Archipelago. The volume discusses how Afro-Antilleans, particularly in Bocas del Toro, have struggled since their arrival to become part of Panama’s narrative of nationhood and traces their evolution from plantation workers for the United Fruit Company to tourism workers. Guerrón Montero notes that in the current climate of official tolerance, they have seized the moment to improve their status within Panamanian society, while also continuing to identify with their Caribbean heritage in ways that conflict with their national identity.
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The Golden Land
Elizabeth Shick
New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2022
Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, this debut novel digs deep into the complexities of family history and relationships. 

When Etta's grandmother dies, she is compelled to travel to Myanmar to explore complicated adolescent memories of her grandmother's family and the violence she witnessed there. Full of rich detail and complex relationships, The Golden Land explores those personal narratives that might lie beneath the surface of historical accounts.
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The Good Oak
Martin Etchart
University of Nevada Press, 2005
Thirteen-year-old Matt Echbar is angry at the world. His widowed father is too busy for him, and his grandfather is an embarrassment, an unschooled Basque shepherd whose language and customs are completely alien to Matt’s all-American lifestyle. Things get worse when the grandfather steals a flock of sheep and dragoons Matt into helping him drive them to a secret camp in the Arizona mountains. The ensuing adventure is one of the most compelling and delightful coming-of-age novels in recent fiction. As Matt and his aitatxi, accompanied by their two faithful sheepdogs, drive the flock across the burgeoning suburbs of Phoenix and into the remote mountains, the boy learns the ancient skills of the sheepherder and discovers the unexpected wisdom that has given his Old Country grandfather the strength and patience of a sturdy oak. By the time the journey reaches its fateful conclusion, Matt has developed a new bond with the old man and has learned that true manhood includes accepting one’s heritage. 
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Great American Desert
Stories
Terese Svoboda
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Water, its use and abuse, trickles through Great American Desert, a story collection by Terese Svoboda that spans the misadventures of the prehistoric Clovis people to the wanderings of a forlorn couple around a pink pyramid in a sci-fi prairie. In “Dutch Joe,” the eponymous hero sees the future from the bottom of a well in the Sandhills, while a woman tries to drag her sister back from insanity in “Dirty Thirties.” In “Bomb Jockey,” a local Romeo disposes of leaky bombs at South Dakota’s army depot, while a family quarrels in “Ogallala Aquifer” as a thousand trucks dump chemical waste from a munitions depot next to their land. Bugs and drugs are devoured in “Alfalfa,” a disc jockey talks her way out of a knifing in “Sally Rides,” and an updated Pied Piper begs parents to reconsider in “The Mountain.” The consequences of the land’s mistreatment is epitomized in the final story by a discovery inside a pink pyramid.
 
In her arresting and inimitable style, Svoboda’s delicate handling of the complex dynamics of family and self seeps into every sentence of these first-rate short stories about what we do to the world around us—and what it can do to us.
 
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front cover of The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County
The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County
A Novel
Jerry Apps
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
When the Alstage Mining Company proposes a frac sand mine in the small Ames County village of Link Lake, events quickly escalate to a crisis. Business leader Marilyn Jones of the Link Lake Economic Development Council heads the pro-mine forces, citing needed jobs and income for the county. Octogenarian Emily Higgins and other Link Lake Historical Society members are aghast at the proposed mine location in the community park, where a huge and ancient bur oak—the historic Trail Marker Oak—has stood since it pointed the way along an old Menominee trail. Reluctantly caught in the middle of the fray is Ambrose Adler, a reclusive, retired farmer with a secret.
            Soon the fracas over frac sand attracts some national attention, including that of Stony Field, the pen name of a nationally syndicated columnist. Will the village board vote to solve their budget problems with a cut of the mining profits? Will the mine create real jobs for local folks? Will Stony Field come to the village to lead protests against the mine? And will defenders of the Trail Marker Oak literally draw a battle line in the sand?
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front cover of Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage
Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage
Nicholas Price
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 1996
The first comprehensive collection of texts on the conservation of art and architecture to be published in the English language. The book consists of forty-six texts, some never before in English and many originally published only in obscure or foreign journals.

The thirty major art historians and scholars represented raise questions such as when to restore, what to preserve, and how to maintain aesthetic character. Excerpts have been selected from the following books and essays: John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture; Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts; Clive Bell, The Aesthetic Hypothesis; Cesare Brandi, Theory of Restoration; Kenneth Clark, Looking at Pictures; Erwin Panofsky, The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline; E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion; Marie Cl. Berducou, The Conservation of Archaeology; and Paul Philippot, Restoration from the Perspective of the Social Sciences. The fully illustrated book also contains an anannotated bibliography and an index.
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Hope Leslie
Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts
Sedgwick, Catherine M
Rutgers University Press, 1987

Hope Leslie (1827), set in the seventeenth-century New England, is a novel that forced readers to confront the consequences of the Puritans’ subjugation and displacement of the indigenous Indian population at a time when contemporaries were demanding still more land from the Cherokees, the Chickasaws, and the Choctaws.

"This handsome reprint ... makes available after many decades the New Englander's tale of seventeeth-century Puritans, and their relations with the indigenous Indian population." -- Nineteeth-Century Literature

" A splendidly conceived edition of Sedwick's historical romance. Highly recommended." --Choice

"Develop(s) the connections between patriarchal authority within the Puritan state and its policy of dispossessing and exterminating Indians. The different heritage it envisions explicitly link white women and Indians and elaborates a communal concept of liberty at odds with the individualistic concept which predominated in American culture." -- Legacy

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The Last Shepherd
Martin Etchart
University of Nevada Press, 2012
Mathieu Etchiberri wants nothing more than to leave his family’s Arizona sheep ranch and go to college, but his father insists that he take over the ranch instead. Then his father is killed in an accident, and Matt discovers that he is not the heir to the ranch. So he travels to the French Pyrenees from which his father and grandparents came to settle the questions about his legacy. Instead, he discovers a vast Basque family and a mystery that drove his father to America and still festers in the mountain village. As Matt resolves the mystery of his family, he also discovers his Basque roots and learns the nature of love of family, responsibility, and the tension between individual desires and the needs of a community.

Matt’s journey to manhood takes place in a vividly depicted landscape populated by lively, memorable characters. This is the powerful story of a young man’s search for an identity that encompasses two cultures and one complex, scattered family.
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The Neorealist in Winter
Stories
Salvatore Pane
Autumn House Press, 2023
Eleven short stories following Italian characters exploring life in an era of media oversaturation.
 
Salvatore Pane’s The Neorealist in Winter is a collection of eleven short stories that explore what it means to be human in an age of media oversaturation. Utilizing methods of speculative, historical, and postmodern storytelling, Pane grapples with legacies of immigration, poverty, toxic masculinity, and moral failures, while focusing on working-class issues, family drama, and PTSD. Following eleven Italian narrators, Pane builds a cast of cinematic characters across disparate times and places—a struggling director attends a house party in the la dolce vita of 1960s Rome, gangsters chase a low-level lottery runner in coal valley Scranton, a woman contemplates experimental surgery to purge memories of her childhood trauma in Minnesota, and a pro wrestling promoter descends into self-denial through his autobiography.

The Neorealist in Winter was selected by Venita Blackburn as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Fiction Prize.
 
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Sacred Wilderness
Susan Power
Michigan State University Press, 2014
A Clan Mother story for the twenty-first century, Sacred Wilderness explores the lives of four women of different eras and backgrounds who come together to restore foundation to a mixed-up, mixed-blood woman—a woman who had been living the American dream, and found it a great maw of emptiness. These Clan Mothers may be wisdom-keepers, but they are anything but stern and aloof—they are women of joy and grief, risking their hearts and sometimes their lives for those they love. The novel swirls through time, from present-day Minnesota to the Mohawk territory of the 1620s, to the ancient biblical world, brought to life by an indigenous woman who would come to be known as the Virgin Mary. The Clan Mothers reveal secrets, the insights of prophecy, and stories that are by turns comic, so painful they can break your heart, and perhaps even powerful enough to save the world. In lyrical, lushly imagined prose, Sacred Wilderness is a novel of unprecedented necessity.
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Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories
Yamamoto, Hisaye
Rutgers University Press, 2001
Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories brings together nineteen stories that span Hisaye Yamamoto's forty-year career. It was her first book to be published in the United States. Yamamoto's themes include the cultural conflicts between the first generation, the Issei, and their children, the Nisei; coping with prejudice; and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.

In addition to the contents of the original volume, this edition brings back into print the following works:
- Death Rides the Rails to Poston
- Eucalyptus
- A Fire in Fontana
- Florentine Gardens
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Smiling in the Darkness
Adelaide Freitas, Translated by Katharine F. Baker, with Bobby J. Chamberlain, Reinaldo F. Silva, and Emanuel Melo
Tagus Press, 2020
Many people of Portuguese descent take pride in claiming that the word "saudade" is untranslatable. In reality, we come close with a melding of bittersweet nostalgia, bone-­deep longing, and an endless yearning for what one can never have again—or indeed may never have had. Adelaide Freitas dipped her pen in saudade to tell of family separation and bonds that never loosen. In her authentic Azorean voice, she recounts the immigrant experience and centrifugal impulses that force people apart in spite of their desperation to cling to one another. In their sensitive rendering, the translators have captured the nuances of Freitas's novel Smiling in the Darkness, with special care for those who have her native language in their heritage and heartfelt saudade for its loss.
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Spirit Wind
Jon L. Gibson
University of Alabama Press, 2009
A coming-of-age story set in the isolated, murky swamps of Louisiana
 
When the mighty wind blows through the swamps of southern Louisiana, it changes not only the land, but the inhabitants as well. Just such a wind brought a lone infant into the care of the Chitimacha Indians deep in the Atchafalaya swamp. Raised by the tribal holy man, Storm Rider grows to adolescence as a respected tribal member, steeped in the wisdom and traditions of his adopted people. Their clan competitions, life-cycle rituals, social interactions, and subsistence labors are well explained in this historical novel.
 
When captured by an enemy raiding party, Storm Rider and his nemesis, the village bully, forge a bond that delivers them from danger and charts their futures. Love, hate, friendship, and loyalty ride the dark bayou waters and converge at the sacred Rain Tree. Swamps, hurricanes, cannibals, and unforgettable characters are interwoven as tightly as one of old Cane Basket's watertight baskets in this anthropologically accurate story of American Indian cultures in conflict.
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Stories for a Lost Child
Carter Meland
Michigan State University Press, 2017
The summer before going into high school, Fiona receives a mysterious box in the mail, one that she hopes will answer her questions about her Anishinaabe Indian heritage. It contains stories written by the grandfather she never knew, an Anishinaabe man her mother refuses to talk about. As she reads his stories about blackbirds and bigfoot, as well as tales about Indians in space and homeless Native men camping by the river in Minneapolis, Fiona finds other questions arising—questions about her grandfather and the experiences that shaped his stories, questions about her mother’s silence regarding the grandfather she never knew. Fiona’s desire to know more and her mother’s reluctance to share stir up bitter feelings of anger and disappointment that slowly transform as she reads the stories into a warmer understanding of the difficulties of family, love, and the weight of the past.
 
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Tales from la Vida
A Latinx Comics Anthology
Frederick L Aldama
The Ohio State University Press, 2018

In the Latinx comics community, there is much to celebrate today, with more Latinx comic book artists than ever before. The resplendent visual-verbal storyworlds of these artists reach into and radically transform so many visual and storytelling genres. Tales from la Vida celebrates this space by bringing together more than eighty contributions by extraordinary Latinx creators. Their short visual-verbal narratives spring from autobiographical experience as situated within the language, culture, and history that inform Latinx identity and life. Tales from la Vida showcases the huge variety of styles and worldviews of today’s Latinx comic book and visual creators. 

Whether it’s detailing the complexities of growing up—mono- or multilingual, bicultural, straight, queer, or feminist Latinx—or focusing on aspects of pop culture, these graphic vignettes demonstrate the expansive complexity of Latinx identities. Taken individually and together, these creators—including such legendary artists as Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Roberta Gregory, and Kat Fajardo, to name a few—and their works show the world that when it comes to Latinx comics, there are no limits to matters of content and form. As we travel from one story to the next and experience the unique ways that each creator chooses to craft his or her story, our hearts and minds wake to the complex ways that Latinxs live within and actively transform the world.

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That Guy Wolf Dancing
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Michigan State University Press, 2014
From one of the writers of the twentieth-century Native American Literary Renaissance comes a remarkable tale about how to acknowledge the past and take a chance on the future. Rooted in tribal-world consciousness, That Guy Wolf Dancing is the story of a young tribal wolf-man becoming a part of his not-sonatural world of non-tribal people. Twenty-something Philip Big Pipe disappears from an unsettled life he can hardly tolerate and ends up in an off-reservation town. When he leaves, he doesn’t tell anyone where he is going or what his plans, if he has any, might be. Having never taken himself too seriously, he now faces a world that feels very foreign to him. As he struggles to adapt to the modern universe, Philip, ever a “wolf dancer,” must improvise, this time to a sound others provide for him. Like the wolf, Philip sometimes feels hunted, outrun, verging on extinction. Only by moving rhythmically in a dissident, dangerous, and iconic world can Philip Big Pipe let go of the past and craft a new future.
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Waddenland Outstanding
History, Landscape and Cultural Heritage of the Wadden Sea Region
Edited by Linde Egberts and Meindert Schroor
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
The Wadden Sea Region is comprised of the embanked coastal marshes and islands in the Wadden Sea near Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. This area retains an exceptional common history in all its aspects: archaeologically, economically, socially, and culturally. Its settlement history of more than two thousand years is unrivalled and still mirrored in the landscape. Even though it has never constituted a political unity, it still shares a landscape and cultural heritage. For example, the approaches to water management and associated societal organization developed in the region during the last millennium have set significant world standards. This book offers an overview of current research on history, landscape and cultural heritage of the Wadden Sea region.
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White Dove, Tell Me
A Novel
Martin Etchart
University of Nevada Press, 2024
In the town of Urepel, Arizona, Xabier Etxea, a young Basque-American sheep rancher, and his wife grapple with the rituals, mores, and spirituality of their heritage and the realities of living in the new American West. Their tenuous balance of the past and the present is disrupted when Xabier’s father is unexpectedly killed.

In the wake of this tragedy, Xabier learns that not only is the family ranch in jeopardy of foreclosure but his father’s death may not have been the accident it first appeared to be. Now, he must find a way to save his family’s ranch while unraveling the mysteries leading to his father’s death. Along the way, Xabier strives to adhere to his father’s memory and words—the invitation to stay true to who he is without losing his arima (soul).

In lyrical language that evokes the mythologies that have shaped the Etxeas’s worldview, White Dove, Tell Me speaks to the divided self that seeks to honor the family’s Basque heritage, while they strive for understanding in a new land.         
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You Shall See the Beautiful Things
A Novel & A Nocturne
Steve Amick
Acre Books, 2023
Envisioned as a “nocturne,” Steve Amick’s playful, multilayered novel expansively retells Eugene Field’s famed verse “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”

In the fishing village of Scheveningen in 1889, three men build and secretly launch an unorthodox fishing vessel, departing from the long tradition of netting herring using massive boats and large crews. Collaborating in this venture are Wyn van Winkel, a cavalier joker and opium addict currently AWOL from the Aceh War in Sumatra; Ned Nodder, a seasoned fisherman trying to support his family while plagued by narcolepsy and prophetic dreams; and Luuk Blenkin, a scattered young troubadour failing at love and searching for his place in the world.

As formally innovative as the “picarooner” this mismatched trio construct, the narrative lifts off into the fantastical, flitting between reality and irreality. Sparked by lines of the “Dutch lullaby,” the inexplicable adventure unfolds—and along the way, we learn of Wyn’s romantic recklessness, his broken relationship with his father, and the tragedies of war that scarred and changed him. We witness Ned’s unconventional path toward matrimony, as well as the painful loss that made his marriage a true union. We follow Luuk’s fumblings for purpose and fulfillment beyond the disgrace that befell his family and marred both his outlook and his prospects.

In the spirit of a nocturne, Steve Amick envelops his characters in the world of night and dreams. Lyrical, historical, surprising, magical, heartwarming, and heartbreaking, You Shall See the Beautiful Things will make readers look at the stars—and herring—in a new light.
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