Fall 2014 Preview

This fall and winter, UT Press will publish very important works in photography, food, film and media studies, architecture, Latin American Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, including two new translations of provocative Lebanese texts by Rashid Al-Daif: Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep? and What Makes a Man?

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Not only do we have a memoir from a former Miss America, we're also publishing the first comprehensive examination of the Mr. America Contest by an acclaimed sports historian. Also this fall, a Cuban exile ponders the meaning of Mayberry, a veteran reporter for National Geographic and Newsweek provides a how-to handbook for aspiring journalists, and distinguished screenwriter and producer Bill Wittliff tells an engrossing tale of a Texas Huck Finn.

  

Below is a preview of our fall books, with videos and other goodies. Browse our full catalog here.

[ Film & Media Studies ]

The Making of Gone With The Wind

By Steve Wilson

More than 600 rarely seen items from the David O. Selznick archive—including on-set photographs, storyboards, correspondence and fan mail, production records, audition footage, restored costumes, and Selznick’s infamous memos—offer fans and film historians alike a must-have behind-the-camera view of the production of this classic movie on its seventy-fifth anniversary.

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The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez

By Frederick Luis Aldama

With insightful analysis of films ranging from El Mariachi to Spy Kids 4 and Machete Kills, as well as a lively interview in which the filmmaker discusses his career, here is the first scholarly overview of the work of Robert Rodriguez, the most successful U.S. Latino filmmaker today.

[ American Studies ]

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Being Miss America
Behind the Rhinestone Curtain

By Kate Shindle

Kate Shindle weaves an engrossing memoir of her year as Miss America 1998 with a fascinating, insightful history of the pageant to reveal why confident, ambitious young women still compete in a beauty contest that struggles to remain culturally relevant.

“Kate Shindle’s sharply observed, smart, and heartbreaking take on Miss America will be embraced by pageant super fans and should be required reading for everyone who’s thought about what it takes to be America’s ideal.”

— Jennifer Weiner, author of Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, and All Fall Down

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Becoming Belafonte
Black Artist, Public Radical

By Judith Smith

Spotlighting a vibrant episode in the evolution of African American culture and consciousness in America, this book illuminates how multitalented performer Harry Belafonte became a civil rights icon, internationalist, and proponent of black pride and power.

“I thought I knew Harry Belafonte pretty well, but Judith Smith’s book has given me deeper insights into him. A wonderful portrait of Belafonte and his times.”

—Robert DeCormier, musical director for Harry Belafonte, 1957–1961

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[ Photography ]

Aaron Siskind
Another Photographic Reality

By Aaron Siskind, Introduction by Gilles Mora

The first true retrospective of a towering figure in American photography and the only book on Aaron Siskind currently in print, this volume features important, rarely published work and an authoritative text by noted photo historian Gilles Mora.

Also forthcoming in photography, Beyond the Forest by Loli Kantor.

Houston Chronicle :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

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Bookish
A book blog with Maggie Galehouse

"Texas Titles: Lone Star reads…

Hard Ground, by Michael O’Brien and Tom Waits. A stunning book from the University of Texas Press, Hard Ground combines photographs by Michael O’Brien with poems by Tom Waits to create an arresting portrait of homelessness. This book looks at people who live “on the hard ground” and celebrates their resilience. (University of Texas Press)"

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The Guardian :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

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Hard Ground, poems by Tom Waits, photographs by Michael O'Brien
Can Tom Waits do with poetry what he does in song?  - review

review excerpt:

" ... With any sung lyric, the music's rhythmic values dictate the articulation of the words in a way that will differ from the natural rhythms of speech, which is what written poetry is primarily concerned with. And the line repetitions that are a fundamental part of song structure simply die on the page. While song may share 99% of poetry's DNA, it isn't poetry, any more than, say, a chimpanzee is a bonobo.

That said, however, this is a powerful book. O'Brien's subjects – white, black, male, female, young and old, a couple of families with small children – are all photographed against the same grey background. Some look defiant, some haunted or afraid. At the end of the book there's a series of brief quotes from each of the subjects. Some lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina, others have been dragged down by drink, drugs or mental illness. Brian Lohse, 53, has been homeless for 15 years and still can't quite make sense of his situation: "I didn't think there was any such thing as a homeless Republican, but the Lord will get your attention one way or another."

In his introduction O'Brien writes: "'Taking a photograph' is a common expression, and indeed, the subject is giving something away to the photographer. But there is reciprocity . . . and in this case, each subject received something tangible – a print that bore testament to a life." That's the key to his project – it's a concrete acknowledgment of people whom most of us would prefer to pass by in silence, an avowal that they exist, and that they can do so with full human dignity."

Read the entire article »

Austin American-Statesman :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

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Photographer puts a face on Austin's homeless
by Andrea Ball


Stephen Blair stands on the corner of North Lamar Boulevard and Fifth Street, holding a large book against his chest and tapping his own image on the cover.


"That's me," he tells passing motorists, holding out his empty Starbucks cup and silently begging for spare change.


Blair, 55, is the face of "Hard Ground," a new coffee-table book filled with photographs of Austin's homeless. The black-and-white images were taken by Austin photographer Michael O'Brien, whose work has appeared in publications including National Geographic, Texas Monthly and The New York Times Magazine. The photos are accompanied by poems by O'Brien's longtime friend, musician Tom Waits.

Blair's portrait — a tight shot highlighting his dark eyes, tousled hair and full beard — is the cover shot.

"It was timeless," O'Brien says of the photo. "There was sort of an innocence, a fragility and vulnerability."

"Hard Ground" was inspired in 2006 when O'Brien, 60, saw a lull in his freelance business. To stay busy, he volunteered to take photographs for Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a local nonprofit that bring meals to homeless people in parks and other public areas. But when the volunteer job was done, O'Brien kept taking photos.  Read More »

La Lettre de la Photographie :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien
Poems by Tom Waits

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Michael O'Brien Hard Ground

Michael O’Brien took pictures on Tuesdays at a Catholic ministry that feeds and houses the homeless. He spent two years doing it in Austin, Texas, starting in 2006. Eighty-eight of his photographs alternate with brief sections of poetry by singer-songwriter Tom Waits in O’Brien’s book Hard Ground, published March 1st by the University of Texas Press.

Other collections of lost souls (Richard Avedon’s In the American West comes to mind) are different. We meet O’Brien’s people one on one. Their “otherness” is removed. The photographs engender compassion and empathy. If that sounds simple, it is because it is simple. And, as anyone knows, being simple is very, very difficult. Hard Ground is a rare and powerful book.

“After thirty-five years working as a photographer for magazines such as Life, National Geographic, Texas Monthly and others," O’Brien points out that by 2006 “the business had changed. Newspapers were dying, magazines struggling in earnest. My career was changing; I was looking for a way to stay busy … These gentle, worn, and vulnerable souls sat quietly across from me and looked directly into the lens … I wasn’t close to living on the street. But I was uprooted by the industry’s change; I too was unsettled, floundering, often unemployed, trying to regain my balance and place. This project, and these subjects, gave me back my anchor.”

 Read more »

American Songwriter :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien
Poems by Tom Waits
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Tom Waits and Michael O’Brien: Hard Ground
By Greg Gaston

May 2nd, 2011 at 5:00 am

In a gritty but affecting collaborative book of photographs and poetry, Michael O’Brien and Tom Waits offer up a compassionate portrait of America’s homeless. Between O’Brien’s black-and-white pictures and Waits’ boho nursery rhyme verse, this collection aches for the plight of the indigent, the disenfranchised, and the ones lost among us on our country’s mean streets.

read the full review »

St. Petersburg Times :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

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Hard Ground, a coffee-table volume by a great photographer and great songwriter, reminds me of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the haunting collaboration between Walker Evans and James Agee about desperately poor sharecropping farmers in the Depression South, published in 1941.

In their new book, Michael O'Brien and Tom Waits use their considerable gifts to illuminate the Americans many of us try to ignore in the 21st century — the homeless men and women who sleep in our parks and sometimes beg for pocket change on our street corners.

Read more from tampabay.com »
Download the review in .pdf format »