Yale Press Log

Summer comes to New Haven

You’ve got your shades, a towel, and plenty of sunscreen. Now the only thing you need to get through the summer is the perfect beach read. Look no further than the Yale Press’s new Summer Reading list . Whether you’re looking for that next vacation destination or have that favorite summer activity on your mind, we’ve got the perfect book to keep you occupied throughout the warmer months.

Gardeners will find a spray of new ideas in the luxurious illustrations of David Attenborough’s Amazing Rare Things, while fellow green thumbs can read up on Yale School of Forestry Dean Gus Speth’s plans for sustainable development in The Bridge at the Edge of the World. Sink your teeth into Josh Ozersky’s The Hamburger while manning the grill, or try to recreate a scene from one of Winslow Homer’s summertime watercolors at your favorite shoreline getaway.

And for the students out there, fear not. There will be no pop quiz when September rolls around.

Yale Press wraps up Nat'l Poetry Month with awards and readings

At their annual awards ceremony last night, The Publishing Triangle announced Janet Malcolm, author of the critically acclaimed Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, as winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. View the complete list of award winners here.

This remarkable work of literary biography and investigative journalism, turns on the mysterious survival of Stein and Toklas, as Jewish lesbians in Occupied France. Also a fascinating illumination of the world of Stein scholarship, and a stunningly perceptive work of criticism.

For those poety lovers in the New Haven area, the five most recent winners of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets competition will read from their work on Friday, May 2nd.  Free and open to the public, the event will take place at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, Room 208, at 4:00 p.m.

Awarded since 1919, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize celebrates the most prominent new American poets by bringing the work of previously unpublished artists to the attention of the larger public.  Previous winners of the prize include such talents as Adrienne Rich, John Ashberry, and Robert Hass.  It is the longest-running poetry prize in the United States. More information on the event after the jump.

Happy 444th Birthday, Will!

"When we are born we cry that we are come... to this great stage of fools," William Shakespeare once wrote. Well, 444 years ago today, Shakespeare entered this great stage of fools and made a little more sense out of it. To learn about how he did this, check out the wide array of Yale Press titles about the Bard, including Shakespeare the Thinker by A. D. Nuttall.

Nuttall’s profound and elegantly written study of Shakespeare’s thought is a literary tour de force, a marvelous inquiry into the questions that engrossed the playwright throughout his life. Nuttall investigates the dynamic nature of Shakespeare’s evolving answers and provides for twenty-first-century readers an unparalleled guide to Shakespeare’s plays.

Click here for an extended question & answer discussion with Nuttall. View the table of contents or read an excerpt.

To read Shakespeare's words as they should be read, Yale Press offers the Annotated Shakespeare series. Judith McGowan from the American Association of School Librarians says, "The volumes in this series will enrich any library that stocks editions of individual Shakespeaean plays."

Through the Annotated Shakespeare series, today’s readers have immediate access to the tools they need to help them better comprehend the plays of Shakespeare and explore their many possible interpretations. Each volume includes an informative introduction by the editor, Burton Raffel, a critical essay by Harold Bloom, and comprehensive on-page annotations that assist with vocabulary, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. Handsome and affordable, these paperback editions invite every reader to get to know—or become reacquainted with—the genius of Shakespeare.

Yale Press continues Nat'l Poetry Month celebration

Fady Joudah, author of The Earth in the Attic, was featured on Tuesday by the online anthology of contemporary poetry, Poetry Daily. The site also shared two of Joudah's poems, "Atlas" and "The Tea and Sage Poem."Those poems, both from The Earth in the Attic, can be read here. Also, you can click here to listen to Fady Joudah read "In the Calm" from his poem, "Pulse."

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American medical doctor and a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. He lives in Houston, TX. He is also the translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s recent poetry The Butterfly’s Burden.

As part of their celebration of National Poetry Month, CBC Radio's Writers & Company invited Yale Press author John Felstiner to talk on Monday about his book Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. Click here to hear that interview in RealAudio format--and to hear Celan himself read from his most famous work, Deathfuge.

This book is the first critical biography of Paul Celan, a German-speaking East European Jew who was Europe’s most compelling postwar poet. It tells the story of Celan’s life, offers new translations of his poems, and illuminates the connection between Celan’s lived experience and his poetry.

Felstiner's biography has received many accolades: nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; chosen as a best book of 1995 by Choice magazine, Village Voice, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Philadelphia Inquirer; and winner of the 1997 University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin.

Yale Press Podcast, Episode 14

Episode 14 of the Yale Press Podcast is now available.
Download Episode 14

In Episode 14, Chris Gondek speaks with (1) Steve Fraser, about how Americans have perceived Wall Street and its more well known investors throughout its history, and with (2) Jay Parini, about the importance of poetry for both individuals and for cultures.

Download it for free here, on iTunes, and everywhere else that podcasts can be found.

Comments are welcome.

In Episode 14, Chris Gondek speaks with (1) Steve Fraser, about how Americans have perceived Wall Street and its more well known investors throughout its history, and with (2) Jay Parini, about the importance of poetry for both individuals and for cultures.

Download it for free here, on iTunes, and everywhere else that podcasts can be found.

Comments are welcome.

April is...

National Poetry Month! To celebrate words and the people who love them, check out these new poetry releases from Yale Press:

Why Poetry Matters by Jay Parini

Poetry doesn’t matter to most people, observes Jay Parini at the opening of this book. But, undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end of the book, Parini has recovered a truth often obscured by our clamorous culture: without poetry, we live only partially, not fully conscious of the possibilities that life affords. Poetry indeed matters.

The Earth in the Attic by Fady Joudah; Foreword by Louise Glück

Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic is this year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his poems Joudah explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget.”

For more information on the Yale Series of Younger Poets, including a complete list of past winners, click here. Or click here for a list of all poetry books released by Yale Press. For more information about National Poetry Month, visit the Academy of American Poets' website here.

Hill's A Treatise of Civil Power is "a measured, brilliant book"

"A pinch-mouthed, grave-digger's poetry," which remains "rich and allusive," with "passages of stunning beauty." This is how poet and critic William Logan describes Geoffrey Hill's recent collection, A Treatise of Civil Power, in a front-page review for the New York Times Book Review.

Logan goes on to say, "English has rarely possessed a poet who listens so closely to its whispers, or is as willing to expose its secret etiquettes.... Hill is the most glorious poet of the English countryside since the first romantic started gushing about flowers, his verse so radioactive in its sensitivities that his landscapes have been accused of cheap nostalgia." You can read the entire review by clicking here.

Geoffrey Hill's latest collection takes its title from a pamphlet by Milton of 1659 that attacks the concept of a state church as well as corruption in church governance. As Milton figures prominently here, so too must the Lord Protector, Cromwell, addressed in a memorable sonnet sequence. Also considered by Hill are other poets to whom he nods in gratitude, not just Milton and "my god" Ben Jonson, or Robert Herrick, or William Blake, but also Robert Lowell and, perhaps most interestingly, John Berryman, whose Dream Songs haunts this present collection.

Here we again confront the poet's familiar obsessions—language, governance, war, politics, the contemporary and classical worlds, and the nature of poetry itself. John Hollander writes of Hill's poems that they immerse themselves "in the matters of stones and rock, of permanence and historical change, martyrdoms and mockeries, and above all history and the monuments and residua of its consequences in places, things, and persons." A Treatise of Civil Power is the work of a major poet at the height of his powers.

Library Journal reviews recent Yale Press titles

The February issue of Library Journal features a slew of reviews for Yale Press books. Here's an idea of what they're saying.

On Eloquence by Denis Donoghue struck Library Journal as "a well-written and engaging exploration of eloquence in literature." They recommended this book as "an enlightening read."

In this highly enjoyable reminder of why we should care about eloquence in literature and speech, Denis Donoghue insists that eloquence is not just a rhetorical tool, but an intrinsically valuable “upsurge of vitality for its own sake.” He offers many instances of eloquence in words and suggests the forms our appreciation of them should take.

Library Journal said that Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, edited by Susan Earle, "attests to the undeniable significance of Douglas's artistic achievements." They give this "well illustrated" book the "highest recommendation for any library with an interest in art or African American history."

This book is a major new study of the life and career of Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas––the “father of Black American art”––and his significant role in the evolution of American modernism.

Kazin biography is "rich," "absorbing," and "truly resonant"

Reviewers are praising Richard M. Cook for his recent Yale Press release, Alfred Kazin: A Biography. Here's just a sampling of what they have to say.

In a February 7 review, San Francisco Chronicle complimented Cook on "a fine job in recounting and interpreting his subject's life." They applaud Cook's ability "to produce a much fuller and rounded portrait" than in all three of Kazin's autobiographies. Cook is a "very sympathetic biographer," with a "sure grasp of the issues at stake" in Kazin's life. They especially admired Cook's "sensitive exploration of the touchy topic of Kazin's Jewish identity.... Cook handles this difficult subject with exemplary finesse." Read the entire review here.

The Chicago Tribune's February 2 review similarly commends Cook's biography, saying that "thanks to Cook's exhaustive research -- synthesizing scores of interviews, distilling the thousands of words from the archive of Kazin's journals -- we now have a vivid chronology of the life of a major literary figure in the 20th Century." Read the entire review here.

Bookforum in their review that Cook's work is "fine, able, and intelligent." They compliment "the way Cook lets Kazin speak and think for himself." Later, they say that "Cook's account of Kazin's mature years is rich and laden with anecdotes." Read the entire review here.

Alfred Kazin, the son of barely literate Jewish immigrants, rose from near poverty to become a dominant figure in literary criticism and one of America’s last great men of letters. This book provides the first complete portrait of Kazin, his troubled personal life, his relationships with such figures as Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt, and his prodigious contributions as a public intellectual.

Joudah wins 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition

Fady Joudah’s Earth in the Attic is winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and judge Louise Glück's fifth selection for the series.

Judge Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as "that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession. . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas." She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, "These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget."

Read an excerpt, or listen to Joudah read "In the Calm" from his poem, "Pulse."

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American medical doctor and a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. He is also the translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s recent poetry The Butterfly’s Burden. He lives in Houston, TX.

The Yale Series of Younger Poets champions the most promising new American poets. Awarded since 1919, the Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Past winners include Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, William Meredith, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, John Hollander, James Tate, and Carolyn Forché.

The New Republic salutes Kitaj and Calder books as "remarkable"

Writing for The New Republic, Jed Perl lists "half a dozen remarkable books about the visual arts published during the year." Two of his six favorites were published by Yale University Press this past year: Second Diasporist Manifesto: A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses by R. B. Kitaj, and Calder Jewelry edited by Alexander S. C. Rower and Holton Rower. "Each is a book," says Perl, "that I expect I'm going to be returning to in 2008--and in the years beyond."

Perl calls Kitaj's Second Diasporist Manifesto "a wonderfully idiosyncratic book." He goes on to say that "the book is niftily laid out, with Kitaj's drawings and paintings reproduced in a black-and-white that suggests the brevity of tabloid imagery, and shots of red ink added to underscore the vehemence of Kitaj's drumroll pronouncements."

This book, a follow up to Kitaj’s influential First Diasporist Manifesto (1989), is a personal reflection on the Jewish Question in contemporary art as it is lived and painted and imagined by one of today's most innovative and controversial artists. In 615 distinct propositions that deliberately echo the Commandments of Jewish Law, Kitaj here channels his ideas for a new Diasporist art in a daring stream of consciousness. Including 41 images of the artist’s work chosen by him to accompany the text, this beautifully crafted volume is a unique and fascinating look into an artist’s unusual life and work.

Calder Jewelry, says Perl, "adds yet another level of delightful complication to our understanding of an American artist whom too many people still take for granted." He calls the book an "opulent volume," and praises Maria Robledo's photographs, which "bring us very close to the jewelry, until we feel as if we are actually touching these miniaturized fantasies, taking them in our hands, trying them on."

Calder Jewelry features around 300 bracelets, brooches, necklaces, and rings, all of which are exquisitely reproduced in newly commissioned photographs. Also included are examples of Calder's inventory drawings; the boxes he made to store the jewelry; historic photographs of his jewelry worn by notable patrons, art collectors, and artists (for instance, Peggy Guggenheim and Georgia O’Keeffe); and a chronology. Essays by Mark Rosenthal and Jane Adlin discuss the relationship of these objects to the artist’s other endeavors and in relation to the history of jewelry.

Click here to read the rest of Perl's article.

Three YUP books make NYT's Notable list

Yale University Press is proud to announce that three of our books have been chosen by the New York Times for their list of 100 Notable Books of 2007. Those books are Hugh Brogan's Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life, Janet Malcolm's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, and Tim Jeal's Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer.

For their annual Holiday Books edition, the New York Times Sunday Book Review selects 100 "outstanding works from the last year." These three YUP books were selected from all of the books reviewed by the NYT since last year's list was printed on December 3, 2006. A print version of the list will run in the December 2, 2007 edition of the Book Review.

Read the NYT reviews for Alexis de Tocqueville, Two Lives, and Stanley. See the entire list here. Hear the Yale Press Podcast of Hugh Brogan discussing his book here.

In last year's 100 Notable Books of 2006, NYT chose Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. You can read their review for that book here.

Panel at Yale in honor of Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker

Shakespeare's inner thought process will be the subject of a panel discussion held at Yale tomorrow, October 30. "Shakespeare the Thinker" will be at 4:30 p.m., in the Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall, 1080 Chapel Street. The panel is free and open to the public.

Among the notable panelists are literary critic Harold Bloom and Connecticut Poet Laureate John Hollander. The event is hosted by Yale University Press, the Yale Center for British Art and the Whitney Humanities Center.

According to the Yale University Office of Public Affairs, the event was organized in honor of the late A. D. Nuttall and the recent publication of his book, Shakespeare the Thinker.

A. D. Nuttall’s study of Shakespeare’s intellectual preoccupations is a literary tour de force and comes to crown the distinguished career of a Shakespeare scholar. Certain questions engross Shakespeare from his early plays to the late romances: the nature of motive, cause, personal identity and relation, the proper status of imagination, ethics and subjectivity, language and its capacity to occlude and to communicate. Yet Shakespeare’s thought, Nuttall demonstrates, is anything but static. The plays keep returning to, modifying, and complicating his creative preoccupations. Nuttall allows us to hear and appreciate the emergent cathedral choir of play speaking to play. By the later stages of Nuttall’s book this choir is nearly overwhelming in its power and dimensions. The author does not limit discussion to moments of crucial intellection but gives himself ample space in which to get at the distinctive essence of each work.

Read an excerpt, or view the table of contents.

For more information about the panel discussion, click here or contact Manana Sikic at 203 432-0673.

R.B. Kitaj remembered

Artist R. B. Kitaj, who The New York Times says "became the first American artist since John Singer Sargent to be elected to the Royal Academy," passed away at his home in Los Angeles on Sunday, October 21, 2007. Martha Schwendener of The New York Times writes that Kitaj "became influential in Britain with figurative and Pop Art paintings that ran against the grain of 1960s and '70s abstraction."

"He draws better than almost anyone else alive," wrote art critic Robert Hughes. Kitaj also wrote books about his connection with Judaism, one of which, The Second Diasporist Manifesto, was published recently by Yale University Press.

This book, a follow up to Kitaj’s influential First Diasporist Manifesto (1989), is a personal reflection on the Jewish Question in contemporary art as it is lived and painted and imagined by one of today's most innovative and controversial artists. In 615 distinct propositions that deliberately echo the Commandments of Jewish Law, Kitaj here channels his ideas for a new Diasporist art in a daring stream of consciousness. Including 41 images of the artist’s work chosen by him to accompany the text, this beautifully crafted volume is a unique and fascinating look into an artist’s unusual life and work.

Read the entire article.

Yale University presents 24-hr Shakespeare Marathon

A 24-hr Shakespeare marathon, the first of its kind at Yale Unversity, will be held this weekend at the Old Campus. According to the Yale Daily News, a full reading of all of his 39 plays, 5 narrative poems and 154 sonnets will be performed and read on campus. A similar marathon was peformed at Wellesley College in 2004 and several Yale students who attended the even decided to bring the project to New Haven. Taking place in four classrooms on Old Campus, the event is open to the public and participation is encouraged.

Released last week by Yale University Press, A.D. Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker is hot on the heels of this one-of-a-kind event.  A. D. Nuttall's profound and elegantly written study of Shakespeare's thought is a literary tour de force, a marvelous inquiry into the questions that engrossed the playwright throughout his life. Nuttall investigates the dynamic nature of Shakespeare's evolving answers and provides for twenty-first-century readers an unparalleled guide to Shakespeare's plays.

For full text of the Yale Daily News article, written by contributing reporter Rebecca Arzoian, click here.

Auden at 100

Today is the birthday centenary of W.H. Auden, one of the most famed poets of the twentieth century.

Arthur Kirsch's Auden and Christianity, published by Yale University Press, is the first book to explore in depth how the poet turned to faith for guidance in his art and his life, despite his early disinterest in religion and his homosexuality.

Booklist wrote of Kirsch's work,

Critics have largely neglected the effects of Auden's mature commitment to Christianity.  Kirsch remedies that neglect with this much-needed study of how Auden's religious beliefs shaped his artistic vision. . . . A fascinating blending of aesthetics and theology.

Crush Wins Triangle Award

The 18th annual Publishing Triangle Awards, honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction, non-fiction, and poetry published in 2005, were presented last week in New York City. The Thomas Gunn Award for Gay Poetry went to Richard Siken's Crush.

This is only the latest in the string of accolades Richard Siken has collected for the book, which was named the winner of the 2004 Yale Younger Poets prize, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and one among the Spring 2006 Book Sense Picks Poetry Top Ten, based on the nominations of independent booksellers nationwide.

"'Crush' is a study of passion, and its effect is a seizure," says a recent review of the book. "[T]he reading experience is all assault: love, desire, loss, the body, death and the incessant self. Nothing tames the fury of running to and from this story."

Read two poems (in pdf format) from the book.

Green Squall

“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot once wrote, and for the last ten years, since its inception in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, has also been National Poetry Month. As part of this month-long national celebration of poetry, and in order to mitigate April’s cruelty, Yale Press is pleased to present Jay Hopler’s Green Squall, winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

“[T]here is a solitude in this art as deep as any in American poetry since Stevens,” Louise Glück observes in the book’s foreword.

Green Squall is a book filled with tardy recognitions and insights. Always we sense, beneath the surface of even the most raucous poems, impending crisis: the terrifying onset of that life long held at a distance. Always bravura is connected to melancholy, fastidious distinctions to wild exuberance, largesse to connoisseurship, self-contempt to uncontrollably erupting hopefulness. Hopler’s dreamy obscurities and rapturous effusions share with his more direct speech a refusal to be groomed into uncommunicative cool: they are encoded, not unintelligible. He writes like someone haunted or stalked; he wants, simultaneously, to hide and to end the anxiety of hiding, to reveal himself (in every sense of the word), to give himself away.

Read a poem (in pdf format) from the book.

Further Accolades for Crush

Richard Siken can add yet another trophy to his mantelpiece. It was announced last week that his book Crush, winner of the 2004 Yale Younger Poets prize and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, has been included among the Spring 2006 Book Sense Picks Poetry Top Ten, based on the nominations of independent booksellers nationwide.

"'Crush' is a study of passion, and its effect is a seizure," says a recent review of the book. "[T]he reading experience is all assault: love, desire, loss, the body, death and the incessant self. Nothing tames the fury of running to and from this story."

Read two poems (in pdf format) from the book.

Crush Named National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

Richard Siken’s Crush, winner of the 2004 Yale Younger Poets prize, was named this Saturday as a finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. In her introduction to the book, Yale Series of Younger Poets competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.”

Read what Bookslut has to say about it.

And read two poems (in pdf format) from the book.