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In this evocative memoir by one of America's most revered contemporary poets, Charles Simic recounts his journey from a childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia to his coming-of-age experiences as a young bohemian in New York City, then as a reluctant draftee in the United States Army. Simic’s early years in Belgrade, a city bombed first by the Nazis in 1941 and then by the Allies in 1944, recall memories of bombs, broken glass, and visits from the Gestapo. His family is jailed for trying to flee the newly Communist Yugoslavia and finally manages to emigrate in 1953. Their first stop is Paris, where the teenaged Simic, craving the forbidden, slips out for his first taste of French nightlife and nudie shows. In New York and Chicago, Simic attends high school and his intense interests in art, poetry, jazz, film — and women — ripen into fully formed passions. The memoir continues with recollections of Simic’s induction into the Army, the publication of his first poem, and family dinners with his highly opinionated but much beloved Uncle Boris. A Fly in the Soup is both the story of a young man whose travel agents were Hitler and Stalin, and an autobiography of the childhood and coming of age of one of the most respected contemporary American poets.

Winner of the NASSS Outstanding Book Award

Hockey and multiculturalism are often noted as defining features of Canadian culture; yet, rarely are we forced to question the relationship and tensions between these two social constructs. This book examines the growing significance of hockey in Canada’s South Asian communities. The Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi broadcast serves as an entry point for a broader consideration of South Asian experiences in hockey culture based on field work and interviews conducted with hockey players, parents, and coaches in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. This book seeks to inject more “color” into hockey’s historically white dominated narratives and representations by returning hockey culture to its multicultural roots. It encourages alternative and multiple narratives about hockey and cultural citizenship by asking which citizens are able to contribute to the webs of meaning that form the nation’s cultural fabric.

How feminism has failed African American women and why they must fight back.

Amid the longest-running economic boom in American history and despite the emergence of a significant black middle class, the lot of low-income black people in general-and black women in particular-seems more troubling than ever. Their plight, Sheila Radford-Hill argues in this book, is directly related to the diminution of black women’s traditional power as culture bearers and community builders. A cogent critique of feminist theory and practice, Further to Fly identifies the failure of feminism to connect with the social realities it should seek to explain, in particular the decline of black women’s empowerment.

Further to Fly searches out the causes and effects of this decline, describing the ways in which, since the 1960s, black women have been stripped of their traditional status as agents of change in the community-and how, as a result, the black community has faltered. Radford-Hill explores the shortcomings of second-wave black and white feminism, revealing how their theoretical underpinnings have had unintended (and often unacknowledged) negative consequences for black women’s lives and their communities.While acknowledging that African American women have made significant contributions to the black struggle for justice in America, Radford-Hill argues that more needs to be done. She combines social criticism and critical analysis to argue that black women must revive their legacy of activism and reclaim the tradition of nurturing in the black community, proposing specific tactics that can be used to revive the support networks that help determine the obligations of community members and guide how people interact on an everyday level. As a deft account of genesis and effects of black women’s diminishing power, and as a sobering analysis of the devastating blunders of feminist theory and practice, this work makes a compelling argument for an "authentic feminism," one that aggressively connects the realities of women’s experiences, needs, aspirations, and responsibilities.