UT Press at the San Antonio Book Festival

On Saturday, April 2, the University of Texas Press and four of our authors will enjoy the 4th annual San Antonio Book Festival at the Central Library and environs in downtown San Antonio. We'll have a booth in the Exhibitor Tent with tons of titles for sale at a great discount. There are a lot of great authors in attendance (Jamie Brickhouse! Nathalie Dupree! Sonia Manzano!), so we’ve distilled our authors' appearances into a single UT Press schedule.

Get The SABF App For Your Smart Phone. Just go the App Store on your device, download "Eventbase Free" and click on the San Antonio Book Festival tab.

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11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande
Location: Auditorium, 1st floor of Library
Author: George T. Díaz

George T. Díaz is an assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University. His award-winning book, Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande, was published with the University of Texas Press. Recently he served as the Visiting Scholar at the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston where he designed and taught a course on smuggling in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Díaz's research is informed by investigations in Mexican and U.S. archives as well as a lifetime of living on the border.

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12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing

Location: Café Commerce, 1st floor of Library

Author: Clark Davis

Clark Davis is a Professor of English at the University of Denver. He is the author of It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing, Hawthorne’s Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement, and After the Whale: Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick.

Click here for more info about Clark Davis.

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1:15 PM - 2:00 PM

Variations on a Rectangle: Thirty Years of Graphic Design from Texas Monthly to Pentagram

Location: The Studio, SW School of Art, McAllister Building

Author: DJ Stout

DJ Stout was the art director of Texas Monthly between 1987 and 1999, and he has been a partner in Pentagram’s Austin office since 2000. He is the author and designer of The Amazing Tale of Mr. Herbert and His Fabulous Alpine Cowboys Baseball Club: An Illustrated History of the Best Little Semipro Baseball Team in Texas. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
A Love Letter to Texas Women
Location: West Terrace, 3rd floor of Library

Author: Sarah Bird

Sarah Bird is the author of ten novels, including Above the East China Sea and The Yokota Officers Club. She has been a colum­nist for Texas Monthly, a storyteller for NPR’s Moth Radio Hour, and a writer for the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, Salon, and the Daily Beast, among others. A former Dobie-Paisano Fellow, a 2015 Meryl Streep Screenwriting Lab winner, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers pick, she is the 2016 recipient of the Texas Institute of Letters Lifetime Achievement Award.

Click here for more info about Sarah Bird.

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Year End Round Up of Best Books

End of year best-of lists are everywhere this month. We've had a great year and are very proud of the lists our books have landed on thus far. Help us celebrate another great year in publishing!

Holiday shopping note: Order by next Thursday, December 17, to guarantee domestic delivery by December 25.

End of Year Round Up

“Best Of” or “Gifts” Lists

New York Times Sunday Book Review Holiday issue

The Jemima Code
Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks
By Toni Tipton-Martin

"The Jemima Code is no ordinary book. It’s a heaping helping, a long overdue acknowledgment of African-Americans who have toiled in this field since the country’s beginnings. With eloquence and urgency, Tipton-Martin makes the case that without the people of the African diaspora not only would America’s food be different, so would its culinary conversation." 

—The New York Times Book Review

Variations on a Rectangle
Thirty Years of Graphic Design from Texas Monthly to Pentagram
By DJ Stout

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The best photography books of 2015

Frame
A Retrospective
By Mark Cohen 

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NPR, Best Books 2015

The Jemima Code
Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks
By Toni Tipton-Martin

"[The Jemima Code is] that rare coffee table book that serves up important history and compelling imagery in digestible, bite-size chunks that still stick to your ribs." 

—Michel Martin, NPR's Best Books of 2015

Don’t Suck Don’t Die
Giving Up Vic Chesnutt
By Kristin Hersh

"Don't Suck, Don't Die is not only one of the best books of the year, it's one of the most beautiful rock memoirs ever written. Hersh is as stunningly talented an author as she is a musician, and her portrayal of Chesnutt is perfectly done." 

—NPR's Best Books of 2015

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Wall Street Journal, Best Books for Photography Lovers 2015

Frame
A Retrospective
By Mark Cohen 

"Mr. Cohen’s pictures are remarkable." 

—The Wall Street Journal

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American Photo, Best Books 2015

Frame
A Retrospective
By Mark Cohen

Political Abstraction
By Ralph Gibson

What are the Best Gift Books for Academics?

Inside Higher Ed is running a contest on Twitter and Facebook where readers can decide the top University Press Books of 2015 that would make ideal holiday gifts. Sure, we'd be thrilled to feel the love and see all of you post our books as nominations, but this is also a great opportunity to support all our fellow university presses.

If you are looking for your next great read or trying to find the perfect gift, be sure to check out the contest hashtag, #IHEreaderschoice, to see and vote on entries. Whether you are a book lover, an author, part of a press, anyone in higher education, or someone who wants to gift a great book, this is your chance to see the best of scholarly publishing.

Nominating a Book

Anyone may nominate a book that has been published by a university press in 2015. Entries should include the #IHEreaderschoice hashtag and one or more of the following: book title, image of the book cover or link to the book¹s page on the press website or another site. The nomination period is November 30 through December 6.

Voting for a Book

To vote for a particular book, simply heart the tweet or like the Facebook post containing the nomination. You can vote for as many books as you like. The voting period is December 7-13. On December 14, Inside Higher Ed will tabulate the number of votes each book received and announce the top five titles. The book with the most votes will be the official winner.

Prizes

All who voted for the winning book will be entered into a random drawing, and five lucky voters will receive a copy of the book. The publishing press of the winning book will enjoy special Inside Higher Ed 2015 Readers¹ Choice Winner recognition in an advertising campaign and their banner ad will appear in the Daily News Update just in time for holiday gifting. The winning book will also be displayed at the Inside Higher Ed booth at the Modern Language Association annual convention January 7-10, 2016, in Austin, TX.

It Starts with Trouble

William Goyen and the Life of Writing

By Clark Davis

Selected as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015

"Ultimately, what makes It Starts with Trouble an essential read for anyone interested in literature and art is Davis’s painstaking research combined with the passion and intelligence he brings to his subject, bolstering a compelling case to reclaim Goyen’s place in American letters . . . . Like Goyen, Davis understands what writing is for. He reminds us of the stakes of art, of being an artist." 

—Los Angeles Review of Books

Nominate on Twitter! | Nominate on Facebook!

William Goyen’s Six Women

It's been said that behind every great man is a great woman. For William Goyen, a Texas writer of startling originality whose work attracted the praise of Joyce Carol Oates, there were six women who deeply impacted his life of writing. In honor of Women's History Month, we asked author Clark Davis (It Starts With Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing, May

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2015) to reflect on the strong women who influenced Goyen's life and work.

William Goyen’s Six Women
By Clark Davis, author of the forthcoming It Starts With Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing

In the mid-1970s, at what was arguably the lowest point of his life, William Goyen began writing a letter to his old friend and fellow Texan, Margo Jones. Goyen and Jones had met in 1937 when he was a graduate student at Rice and Jones was assembling the group that would become the Houston Community Players. Their friendship continued through the 1940s and early 1950s when Jones made her reputation as an innovative Broadway director, most notably of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Summer and Smoke. By all accounts, they were very close—two East Texans (she from Livingston, he from Trinity), each with a high artistic drive and fervid personality.

There was nothing unusual, in other words, about Goyen writing to an old friend, particularly when he was in distress . . . except for the fact that Jones had died in 1955. Alcohol played a role in her early death, though the direct cause was carbon tetrachloride poisoning: she had fallen asleep on a newly cleaned carpet in her hotel in Dallas. (Goyen had been with her a few nights before and felt helpless and guilty in the face of her depression and drinking.) In the twenty years since, he himself had become an alcoholic and not long before writing Margo had attempted suicide in a hotel in Newport Beach, California. Now, as he remembered her “Texas-girl sweetness and . . . full-faced smile” he saw their lives as parallel: she was his “sister—demonic, rapturous insane in booze and in reverie and golden dream,” and writing to her was his chance “to speak amends of love.”

This letter to Margo Jones became part of Goyen’s never-completed autobiography, an interwoven collection of imagined correspondence addressed to several older women who had been vital presences in his life. “They were women of style and fashion, art, theatre, Letters,” he explained to one potential publisher; “all seemed . . . to be searching for, enjoying, or fleeing, an image of life that was counter to the conventional one of woman as Serving Wife, Listener Only, Mother.” The list included Frieda Lawrence, whom Goyen had come to know in Taos, New Mexico in 1946. A legendary and sometimes scandalous figure, she had left her husband and three children in 1912 for D. H. Lawrence, the author of The White Peacock, eventually moving to the US and settling with him at Kiowa Ranch, high on Lobo Mountain in Taos County. Some years after Lawrence's death in 1930 she began to spend most of her time at her house in El Prado, just a few miles from Taos Plaza.

Dorothy Brett, Frieda Lawrence, and Goyen in Taos.
Source: Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

It was during this period that she met the thirty-one-year-old Navy veteran who was waiting tables at the Sagebrush Inn. In the winter of 1946 Goyen and Walter Berns, his fellow officer from the carrier USS Casablanca, planned to drive from Texas to California where they would live and write in the San Francisco area. They were captivated, however, by snow-covered Taos and decided to stay, attracted more by the landscape, as Goyen later admitted, than the literary community. When the manager of the restaurant introduced him as an aspiring writer to the table that included Frieda, Mabel Dodge Luhan, the printer Spud Johnson, and Tennessee Williams, Goyen was both embarrassed and captivated. A short time later Frieda invited him and Berns to dinner, letting them look through some of Lawrence’s manuscripts, and giving them advice that Goyen seems never to have forgotten. He described the scene in a letter to an old friend in Houston, explaining that Frieda was “a grand old woman, like a peasant Queen, a marvelous smiling face and deep husky Germanic voice, and she answers every question with a lusty and throaty, ‘Ya!’” She “was really inspired several times; and once, as a kind of valedictory, she leaned her head back, looked up toward the ceiling and said, ‘And now . . . I am old and you are young. I say to you that you must fight and refuse to compromise, refuse absolutely to compromise. I lived with a fighter and I know what it is to fight. . . .’”

Spring 2015 Preview

This spring and summer, UT Press will publish significant works in photography, film and media studies, architecture, Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Latina/o Studies, including a compelling chronicle of the dangers, fears, shared histories and aspirations that bind Mexicans and Americans despite the U.S./Mexico border walls.

  

Below is a preview of our spring books, with videos and interior images. Browse our full catalog here or below:

[ Nature and Environment ]

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Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change

By Seamus McGraw

"This title deserves a wide and varied readership; it has the power to change minds.”

—Booklist starred review

“Seamus McGraw takes on an immense and cacophonous subject—climate change—and does so in a way that avoids the usual polarities of denial versus panic. He does an excellent job of seeking out interested American parties who don’t typically have a voice in the debate and makes a case that leadership on the issue probably won’t come from the conventional class of ‘leaders’ (namely, Congress). . . . His pragmatism and his refusal to live in a world of ideals make this a worthy project. . . . It deserves an audience of good readers.”

—Tom Zoellner, author of Train: Riding the Rails that Created the Modern World and The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire

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[ Music ]

John Prine: In Spite of Himself

By Eddie Huffman

“Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs.”
—Bob Dylan, Huffington Post

“The unlikely success of the reluctant performer makes for fascinating reading.”

—Kirkus Reviews

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