Illinois Press Book Blog

Peter Cole, author of the recent University of Illinois Press book Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia, contributed a guest column to today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

“On Thursday, May Day, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union will declare an eight-hour strike to protest the war in Iraq. Since the ILWU controls every port along the U.S. Pacific Coast, including Seattle and Tacoma, this strike demonstrates the collective power of workers willing to use it.”

The Wisconsin State Journal catches up with local resident Bill Malone on his lifetime achievement award from the Society for American Music and new book with Hazel Dickens, Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens. 

Today’s Washington Post blurbs tomorrow’s Baltimore celebration of the release of Follow Your Heart: Moving with the Giants of Jazz, Swing, and Rhythm and Blues. Authors Joe Evans and Christopher Brooks will be signing books at An Die Musik at 2:00PM.

The May-June 2008 issue of Utne Reader includes an enthusiastic review of Stacy Bierlein’s edited collection of short stories, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection.

“This anthology of international fiction explodes with unexpected combinations of place, ethnicity, and nationality. . . . Fiction, here, is well suited to the task of telling truths: Unfettered by factual accuracy, the dreamlike and disconcerting scenarios cast cultural realities in sharp relief.”

The University of Illinois Press is distributing A Stranger Among Us for OV Books. Stacy Bierlein will be signing copies of the book at the University of Illinois Press booth at BookExpo America in Los Angeles on Saturday, May 31, at 2:00 PM.

Three new books recently landed on my desk:

-Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38 edited and with an Introduction by Suping Lu (May 19, 2008)

-Father and Son by James Farrell, with an Introduction by Charles Fanning (May 12, 2008)

-Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression by David Welky (May 12, 2008)

 The future publication dates are noted above but all will be available to order in the next few weeks.

Samuel Regalado, author of Viva Baseball!: Latin Major Leaguers and Their Special Hunger, was interviewed on PBS’s new American Experience segment, Roberto Clemente.  The Third Edition of Viva Baseball! will be published by the University of Illinois Press on April 28, 2008.

Colleen McElroy’s new poetry collection Sleeping with the Moon is featured at PoetryFoundation.org.

“She will happily give the MFAs a headache with her unfashionably clear statements and heartbroken admissions and the bold planting, in almost every poem, of the moon, which she annexes to her purposes, only sometimes romantic.”

I wrote the following message to a national Sacred Harp listserv in December of 2006, during a two-year postdoctoral appointment at the University of Alberta. This research fellowship allowed me to finish Traveling Home and get it into the publication pipeline at Illinois, but it also brought me to a part of North America where Sacred Harp singing was almost completely unknown. It was the first time since I had started singing (at the Putney School in Vermont) that I’d lived in a place with no established local Sacred Harp community. I had heard that there might be two or three occasional singers in Calgary, a four-hour drive south; singing with a larger group would require a plane flight or a few days in the car. In the fall of 2005 I initiated a tiny weekly singing in Edmonton, which continued to meet for the next two academic years. Here is what I wrote to my fellow singers about this experience:
*****

As the year comes to an end I’ve been reflecting on the experience of starting a regular Sacred Harp singing here in Edmonton (a lovely Canadian city of about a million people, an 8-hour drive north of the Montana border). During the school year we’ve been singing every week on the University of Alberta campus for about 16 months now, with the occasional summer or holiday singing held at our house. We get between five and eleven singers a week, including me and my husband James. (Three years ago James had never heard of Sacred Harp, and I count myself very lucky that he’s learned to love it and is willing to hold down the bass part on his own when necessary.) I can be certain of the attendance numbers because I only have one case of loaner tunebooks, and we have yet to run out. Three locals have been sufficiently smitten that they have bought tunebooks of their own, and I try to pick up one or two more whenever I’m at a convention in the U.S.

The curious thing about starting a singing in northwestern Canada is that virtually nobody has *any* past acquaintance with shape-note singing. I could tell them that we “sing the notes” from right to left and then reverse direction for the words and I don’t think anybody would be the wiser. I try to convey a sense of typical vocal timbre for the different parts (inasmuch as there is such a thing) by example and through the judicious use of recordings, but when you get right down to it I have one of those piercing upper-octave tenor voices and my ability to mimic Sacred Harp alto or bass sounds is very limited. (Of course I mostly just encourage singers to sing out nice and loud in “their own” voices — but those with past singing experience or formal vocal training have a number of voices to choose from, and they seek additional instruction.) (more…)

English in Print: From Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton, the companion exhibit to the new book by Valerie Hotchkiss and Fred C. Robinson, will open at The Grolier Club in New York on May 12, and run through July 26, 2008. The exhibition “examines the history of early English books, exploring how the English language came into print, with a close study of the texts, the formats, the audiences, and the functions of English books.”

Valerie Hotchkiss is the head of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Fred C. Robinson is the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor Emeritus of English and a librarian of the Elizabethan Club at Yale University.

The April 4, 2008, issue of the The Times Literary Supplement features a review of Raymond Queneau’s Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays, 1928-70. The book’s translator receives high praise.

“Jordan Stump has done anglophone readers a great service in providing this well-chosen, thoughtfully translated collection.”