All Announcements

Consider shopping local this holiday season!

by jgagne • November 19, 2015

We reached out to our local independent booksellers to find out what fun events they have planned for Small Business Saturday, Cyber (or CIDER) Monday, and the rest of the holiday season. If you shop for the holidays, please consider ordering or purchasing gifts from local retailers. You might also consider giving a book from a small press or university press. Wesleyan has number of books that would make great gifts, some are included here.

November 28th SMALL BUSINESS SATURDAY

Bank Square Books
53 W. Main St
Mystic, CT 06355
Day-long celebration with local authors: James R. Benn, L.M. Browning, Sarah MacLean, Ruth Crocker, Ann Haywood Leal, Susan Kietzman, David K. Leff, Adam Shaughnessy, and Robert Steele.

Breakwater Books
81 Whitfield St
Guilford, CT 06437
Book signing with Mary Sharnick, Orla’s Canvas, 12–2PM

Hickory Stick Bookshop
2 Green Hill Rd.
Washington, CT 06794
Book signing with Marilyn Singer, Tallulah’s Tap Shoes, 2PM

Mystic Seaport Museum Store
75 Greenmanville Ave
Mystic, CT 06355
Book signing with Roger C. Taylor, L. Francis Herreshoff: Yacht Designer, 3pm

November 30th CIDER MONDAY

Breakwater Books
81 Whitfield St
Guilford, CT 06437
Join us on “Cider Monday” (our version Cyber Monday) & enjoy warm cider and snacks as you do your holiday shopping. Leave your computer and shop in a local bookstore where real people can help you with your selections. Enjoy an old fashioned shopping experience! (View more events here.)

Hickory Stick Bookshop
2 Green Hill Rd.
Washington, CT 06794
Enjoy a cup of cider and a snack as you have an old-fashioned holiday shopping experience in a real bookstore with real people to help you. We promise our “servers” won’t crash, but instead will offer recommendations that will help you with your selections. We’ll even wrap your gifts!

Additional Events

Bank Square Books
53 W. Main St
Mystic, CT 06355
December 1 – Mystic Stroll, businesses in Mystic stay open late for holiday shoppers! That night, we will host cookbook author Ellen Stimson for a cookie contest and cookie swap. More info here.

Breakwater Books
81 Whitfield St
Guilford, CT 06437
December 3 – E-List’s annual Girls Night Out Guilford, 5PM. Meet at Whitfields, to start with a 1/2 price glass of wine! More info here.

Broad Street Books
45 Broad St
Middletown, CT 06457
December 19 – Scooby Doo books and read by Santa
Broad Street Books is also a one of the sponsors of Middletown’s Holiday on Main Street.

Burgundy Books
1285 Boston Post Rd
Westbrook, CT 06498
November 21 – Luncheon with Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, 12PM
December 15 – Book signing with Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, 12:30PM

Harbor Books
146 Main St
Old Saybrook, CT 06475
December 4 – Old Saybrook’s Winter Stroll, stop by at our table for a free novelty bookmark!

Hickory Stick Bookshop
2 Green Hill Rd.
Washington, CT 06794
December 5 – Donna Marie Merritt, We Walk Together, 2PM
December 6 – Jack Chaucer, Nikki Blue: Source of Trouble

Mystic Seaport Museum Store
75 Greenmanville Ave
Mystic, CT 06355
December 5 – Book signing with Carlo DeVito, Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex: The Complete Illustrated Edition, 1PM
December 6 – Book signing with Paul S. Krantz, Riding the Wild Ocean, 2pm

R.J. Julia Booksellers
768 Boston Post Rd
Madison, CT 06443
December 2 – Book signing with Ellen Stimpson, An Old Fashioned Christmas, 7PM
December 3 – Teens Talk Books Holiday Party, 6PM
December 6 – Santa Letter Writing Workshop, 12PM–1:30PM
December 18 – Voices In The Bookstore, local authors read their work, 6PM
December 20 – The Grinch Story Time, 10:30AM

Gift Ideas from Wesleyan University Press

Honoring Veterans of Connecticut and Beyond

by selliott • November 11, 2015

Connecticut Veterans

The Battle of Antietam, pictured here, claimed over 22,000 casualties in one day. Years later, a soldier remembered: “for the six months following everything I ate drank or smelled had an odor of dead men in it and the memory of the scene and the place and the four trees that stood in the field to mark the place of burial will never be effaced.” (Manuscript of William Relyea, pp. 54–55, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford.) From Heroes for All Time.

Nurse Harriet Ward Foote Hawley, who hailed from Connecticut wrote of her charge: “I can’t let them die—if they do a piece of my life dies too.” From Heroes for All Time.

Connie Nappier, Jr., Tuskegee Airman and native of Connecticut, c. 1944–1945. Courtesy of Connie Nappier and The Veterans Oral History Project at Central Connecticut State University (40-1, p308) From African American Connecticut Explored.

Wesleyan poets who served in WWII and the Vietnam War

Left: The late Harvey Shapiro earned a Distinguished Flying Cross serving as a B-17 tail gunner during WWII.
Right: Yusef Komunyakaa earned a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, working as a specialist for the military paper Southern Cross.

Announcing “Reality by Other Means” from James Morrow

by jgagne • November 3, 2015

Seventeen stories from the award-winning author of the Godhead Trilogy

Join the Abominable Snowman as, determined to transcend his cannibalistic past, he studies Tibetan Buddhism under the Dalai Lama. Pace the walls of Ilium with fair Helen as she tries to convince both sides to abandon their absurd Trojan War. Visit the nursery of Zenobia Garber, born to a Pennsylvania farm couple that accept her for the uncanny little biosphere she is. Scramble aboard the raft built by the passengers and crew of the sinking Titanic—and don’t be surprised when the vessel transmutes into a world even more astonishing than the original Ship of Dreams. Reality by Other Means offers readers the most celebrated results from James Morrow’s thirty-five-year career designing fictive thought experiments. Anchored by seven previously uncollected stories, this omnibus ranges from social satire to theological hijinks, steampunk escapades to philosophical antics.

JAMES MORROW has written ten critically acclaimed novels of satire and speculation, including Towing Jehovah, The Last Witchfinder, and Galápagos Regained. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania.

“No matter where—or when—he sets his stories, Morrow’s a clean stylist with an accurate grip on the diction, the character, and the metabolic rate of the narrator. Intelligent and funny, this is the best kind of mind candy.”

—Kit Reed, author of The Story Until Now

“In these angrily compassionate tales, Morrow ventriloquizes Dante and Swift in writing as cutting as freshly strung barbed wire. Each posits an astonishing otherness that debunks a menacing human folly while also eliciting gasps or guffaws of outraged delight.”

—Michael Bishop, author of A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

“Here’s undeniable proof that James Morrow is our Jonathan Swift—a funnier, more fantastical Swift. Morrow can be brainy and absurd, hilarious and profound, scatological and philosophical—all on the same page. After you stop laughing, you keep thinking, and that’s when you realize you’re in the hands of a master. No one else sounds like him, and no one else has sharper satirical knives.”

—Daryl Gregory, author of Afterparty

“James Morrow, a master of the reductio ad absurdum, is a thoughtful satirist whose sharp but never gratuitous wit takes aim at serious issues in beautifully crafted prose that is always a pleasure to read.”

—Pamela Sargent, author of The Shore of Women

“Even as Reality by Other Means points out what is wrong with society, James Morrow never lets us forget that society is made up of individuals who matter, be they a soldier on the battlefield, a hitchhiker on the Ark, or our daughter the Earth. No one has ever used the devices of satire and science fiction to give us literature this smart, this elegant, this compassionate. I hope that Morrow, who understands that the only way out is for us to reason together, will forgive me for saying that I admire his work beyond all reason.”

—F. Brett Cox, coeditor of Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic

“James Morrow is an amusing and important writer. Collecting all his serious work, Reality by Other Means adds to his reputation by virtue of its completeness”

–Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War

November 2015
360 pp., 6 x 9-1/2”
Jacketed Cloth, $30.00
978-0-8195-7594-4

eBook, $23.99 Y
978-0-8195-7575-3

Announcing “Radicalism and Music” from Jonathan Pieslak

by jgagne • November 3, 2015

A comparative study of the music cultures of four radical groups

Radicalism and Music offers a convincing argument for music’s transformational impact on the radicalization, reinforcement, and motivational techniques of violent political activists. It makes a case for the careful examination of music’s roles in radical cultures, roles that have serious impacts, as evidenced by the actions of the Frankfurt Airport shooter Arid Uka, Sikh Temple murderer Wade Page, white supremacist Matthew Hale, and animal-rights activist Walter Bond, among others. Such cases bring up difficult questions about how those involved in radical groups can be stirred to feel or act under the influence of music.

Radicalism and Music is based on interviews, email correspondence, concerts, and videos. As a “sound strategy,” music is exploited to its fullest potential as a tool for recruiting and retaining members by members of al-Qa’ida, the Hammerskin Nation, Christian Identity, Kids in Ministry International, Earth First!, and Vegan Straight Edge. But, as the book points out, the coercive use of music is not isolated to radical cultures, but in political propaganda, sporting events, and popular music as well. Ultimately, Radicalism and Music shows how music affects us through our emotions, and how it triggers violence and enables hateful ideology.

JONATHAN PIESLAK is an associate professor at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War.

Listen to interviews with the author here:
To the Best of Our Knowledge
WAMC’s The Academic Minute
The Mike Huckabee Show

“Radicalism and Music is a compelling read, rigorously researched and accessible to the interested reader. Pieslak is to be commended for his neutral approach: he comes across as intellectually intimate with his subjects without being committed to their respective agenda or passing judgment.”
—Nelly Lahoud, author of The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction

“Radicalism and Music is a well-argued foil to the notion that music is a universal language that brings people together. The subtheme of music and its relationship to the Internet provides important groundwork for thinking of music as a particular ‘information technology’ without divorcing it from its ritual function.”
—Benjamin J. Harbert, coeditor of The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

“Pieslak’s work reveals uses of music that are questionable and discomforting and thus rarely studied. By skillfully comparing music’s role in a range of extremist cultures, Pieslak remaps the bounds of human musicality, showing how music’s social and emotional power can inspire violence as much as community, cultivate hatred as much as beauty.”
–Daniel Cavicchi, author of Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum

November
320 pp., 8 illus., 6 x 9”
Unjacketed Cloth, $85 x
978-0-8195-7583-8
Paper, $27.95
978-0-8195-7584-5
eBook, $21.99 Y
978-0-8195-7585-2

#tbt: Joy Harjo, “Desire”

by sgerton • October 22, 2015

Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is “Desire,” from Joy Harjo’s Mad Love and War (1990). The collection won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1991, and Harjo was the 1990 recipient of the Before Columbus American Book Award.

Desire

Say I chew desire and water is an explosion
of sugar wings in my mouth.

Say it tastes of you.

Say I could drown because you left
for the time it takes a blackbird to understand
a pine tree.

Say we enter the pine woods at dawn.

We never slept and the only opium we smoked
was what became of our mingled breath.

Say the stars have never learned
to say good-bye. (One is a jewel
of blue magic in your perfect ear.)

Say all of this is true and more

than there are blackbirds
in a heaven of blackbirds.

JOY HARJO is a multitalented artist of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is an internationally known poet, performer, writer, and musician. She is the author of many acclaimed books, including Soul Talk, Song Language, She Had Some Horses, In Mad Love and War, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and a memoir, Crazy Brave. She has produced five award-winning albums of music and poetry, including Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century, Winding through the Milky Way, and Red Dreams: A Trail Beyond Tears. Her newest book of poetry is Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.

#tbt: “The Hidden Musicians” revisited

by jgagne • October 8, 2015

January 11th–12th, 2016, Open University in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom will hold a conference surrounding The Hidden Musicians by Ruth Finnegan, who is a music professor at the university. More information about this event can be found at here.

The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, was originally published in 1989, but was reprinted by the Wesleyan University Press in 2007. The book is comprised of various studies by Professor Finnegan who studied the practices of amateur musicians and music ensembles in the small English town of Milton Keynes. She studied the differences and distinctions between what makes a band ‘professional’ or ‘amateur’, seen through the lens of professional and candid photographs taken at rehearsals and musical events, as seen below.

_{above: The eighty-year-old Wolverton Town and British Rail Band. The current members in their band uniform.}

_{Above: An informal photograph of the Woburn Sands Band shortly after competing in the National Brass Band Finals, showing the age range typical of many music groups (here 11 to 70).}

The book also explores the different genres of music made in the town, comparing the different rock bands, musical theatre ensembles, and variations of marching bands and community bands in the town. Through this, Finnegan creates a new methodology of studying music and how music is made and performed as seen throughout the book’s illustrations and its resonance within the musical academia of Open University.

Outside of Milton Keynes, amateur bands and musicians like those of the small English town, have continued to flourish throughout the years upon the same premises of being communal, casual, and organized by camaraderie. In the Wesleyan University Press office, our director, Suzanna Tamminen, below, spends her lunch hour practicing her tuba for her community band.

Announcing “Riverview Hospital for Children and Youth”

by jgagne • October 6, 2015

“No child will be considered too sick emotionally, or too disturbed,
or too unmanageable to be deprived of an opportunity to learn.”
—William Glasser, Schools Without Failure

Prior to 1972, visitors to Connecticut state mental hospitals might have noticed a six-year-old chronically depressed girl crouching in the corner of a chaotic cafeteria, or a seven-year-old autistic boy sleeping on a cot next to a seventy-year-old schizophrenic man. Riverview Hospital for Children and Youth tells the story of one of the first milieu based therapeutic hospitals specializing in children’s care, located in Middletown, Connecticut. Richard J. Wiseman, its first superintendent, offers his own story and treatment philosophy alongside the voices of the many people who worked tirelessly to free children from an adult mental health facility, and to treat children as children. This important book provides access to decades of experiences, useful tools, and knowledge regarding the treatment of children requiring mental health care. Weaving first-person narrative and interviews with staff, administrators, and patients, Riverview Hospital for Children and Youth testifies to the passion and determination it took to spring children from an adult mental health ward and bring them into a place of their own. A companion ebook comprising three original staff manuals is also available.

RICHARD J. WISEMAN is one of the pioneers of modern mental health treatment for children, and was the first in Connecticut to argue that autism was a developmental, not a psychiatric, disorder. His work was an important factor in the State of Connecticut’s decision to shift childcare, for children with autism, to the newly named Department of Developmental Disabilities. Wiseman lives in Cromwell, Connecticut.

Also newly available: Riverview Hospital Staff Manuals
These archival materials provide detail that illuminates the treatment philosophy and methods employed by the Riverview staff during the hospital’s formative years. Materials includes the ABCD Program, BLEU Handbook, and Sunburst Handbook.

“Riverview Hospital offers readers an inside view of this leading psychiatric hospital for children. As someone with four decades of experience in the private sector, I gained a fresh perspective on how complex and political the public sector is, and new respect for the challenges faced. An excellent resource for students as well as anyone with an interest in the history of children’s services.”
—David Tompkins, vice president of program services, Klingberg Family Centers

“A fascinating and profound look at the early development of a ‘continuum of care’ model for children’s mental health. Dick Wiseman provides an engaging voice for the staff, administrators, and officials working with the children at Riverview. His understanding and quest for a healthy therapeutic milieu is captured nicely for us through his insight that ‘challenges lead to growth, and growth leads to higher developmental levels, which leads to change.’ The stories and documentation are recommended learning opportunities for students and professionals in the field of children’s services. I so enjoyed the journey.”
—Gregory Horne, professor emeritus of Psychology and Human Services,
Middlesex Community College

Riverview Hospital for Children & Youth
304 pp., 8-1/2 x 11”
$29.95 Jacketed Cloth, 978-0-8195-7589-0
$23.99 Ebook, 978-0-8195-7590-6
Publication Date: November 10, 2015

Riverview Staff Manuals
eBook only, $3.99 Y
978-0-8195-7598-2
Publication Date: November 10, 2015

The Driftless Connecticut Series is funded by
the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund
at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving

Announcing “She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks” from NourbeSe Phillip

by jgagne • October 6, 2015

New edition

The groundbreaking seminal collection by the author of Zong!

Brilliant, lyrical, and passionate, this collection from the acclaimed poet M. NourbeSe Philip is an extended jazz riff running along the themes of language, racism, colonialism, and exile. In this groundbreaking collection, Philip defiantly challenges and resoundingly overthrows the silencing of black women through appropriation of language, offering no less than superb poetry resonant with beauty and strength. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks was originally published in 1989 and won the Casa de Las Americas Prize. This new Wesleyan edition includes a foreword by Evie Shockley. An online reader’s companion is available at http://nourbesephilip.site.wesleyan.edu.

NOURBESE PHILLIP is a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright who was born in Tobago, in the twin island state of Trinidad and Tobago, and now lives in Toronto. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Zong!, a novel, and three collections of essays. EVIE SHOCKLEY is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, and author of the new black, winner of the Black Caucus of American Library Association’s Literary Award for Poetry.

“Philip’s tragic transport—as a curate of the impure word, the degeneration and regeneration of grammar—bears the black history of romance. No sojourn in contemporary poetry is more necessary or more beautiful than hers.”

—Fred Moten, author of The Feel Trio

“Since the original publication of She Tries Her Tongue, the critical community has been catching up with NourbeSe Philip’s seismic poetic voice and her radical philological project—continued in Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence and Zong! This collection should be required reading for all students of Caribbean art and literature.”

—Emily Greenwood, author of Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

“She Tries Her Tongue richly touches upon the difficult intertwining of race, gender, sexuality, history, and language. No other work brings these concerns so centrally to readers.”

—Samantha Pinto, author of Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic

“She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks“

All Things are alter’d, nothing is destroyed

Ovid, The Metamorphoses (tr. Dryden).

the me and mine of parents

the we and us of brother and sister

the tribe of belongings small and separate,

when gone. . .

on these exact places of exacted grief

i placed mint-fresh grief coins

sealed the eyes with certain and final;

in such an equation of loss tears became

a quantity of minus.

with the fate of a slingshot stone

loosed from the catapult pronged double with history

and time on a trajectory of hurl and fling

to a state active with without and unknown

i came upon a future biblical with anticipation

August

100 pp., 6 x 9” or 5-1/2 x 8-1/2”

Paper, $15.95

978-0-8195-7567-8

eBook, $12.99 Y

978-0-8195-7568-5

Announcing “Maple Sugaring” from David K. Leff

by jgagne • October 6, 2015

The art and science of maple syrup, and stories from the people who make it

Maple Sugaring gives readers an intimate look at the art and science of America’s favorite sweet. These stories, told by real-life sugarmakers, reveal how this ancient industry has continued into the twenty-first century. Thanks to the newest technology, and patience, New England sugarmakers are still keeping it real. A former maple sugarmaker and board member of the Connecticut Maple Syrup Producer’s Association, David Leff takes us on a journey into the very heart of New England’s character. Along the way he talks with the sugar gurus, who share their expertise, insights, and anecdotes about their experiences in the business. What makes maple sugaring such a beloved tradition? Is it marketing savvy, family tradition, or something deeper—and harder to tap? This book is for anyone with a sweet tooth who is curious about the science, or who simply enjoys a good story. Maple Sugaring is full of wisdom, quirky characters, and recipes.

DAVID K. LEFF is a former deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. He is the author of Hidden in Plain Sight: A Deep Traveler Explores Connecticut and other books. His essays have appeared in the Hartford Courant, Appalachia, Yankee, Canoe & Kayak, and The Encyclopedia of New England. He lives in Collinsville, Connecticut.

“From heartwarming family history to the latest trends in sugaring technology, from traditional recipes to new culinary trends, from reminding the reader of the healthy and natural significance of maple syrup to the sugarmaker’s passion for this labor of love, Maple Sugaring cleverly captures what’s best of this time-honored New England tradition. Clearly, David Leff shares our passion.”

—Mike Girard, Girard’s Sugarhouse, Heath, Massachusetts

“David Leff dives into a vat of maple syrup and comes out with a brilliant book on sugaring. His practical know-how and reverence for the practice are matched only by his skill at depicting the kaleidoscopic interaction of character, place, science, and passion that has created the New England culture we know and love. Tree by tree, shack by shack, he builds a world and illustrates it from every angle. Like John McPhee before him, Leff has turned cultural investigation into an art.”

—Eric D. Lehman, author of A History of Connecticut Food

“David Leff provides an excellent account of the maple industry and the incredible sugarmakers that bring us this all-natural sweetener every year. Anyone who loves pure maple syrup and the rural lifestyle of the northeast will greatly enjoy this book.”

—Michael Farrell, author of The Sugarmaker’s Companion: An Integrated Approach to Producing Syrup from Maple, Birch, and Walnut Trees

October

220 pp., 13 illus., 6 x 9”

Cloth, $24.95

978-0-8195-7569-2

eBook, $19.99 Y

978-0-8195-7570-8

NourbeSe Philip & Gina Ulysse team up!

by selliott • October 5, 2015

Atlantic Reasonings Between Caribbean Sisters
Performances by M. NourbeSe Philip and Gina Athena Ulysse
October 15th, 7:30PM in Wesleyan’s Memorial Chapel.

Two Wesleyan Press authors, M. NourbeSe Phlip and Gina Athena Ulysse are teaming up for an evening of powerhouse performances sponsored in large part by Wesleyan’s own Center for the Americas, with a additional support from our English Department’s Concentration in Creative Writing. Other funders include the Andrew W. Melon Fund for Lectures in Ethics; Center for the Arts; Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; the English Department’s Concentration in Creative Writing; Office of Equity & Inclusion; and Romance Languages & Literatures.

Please, also join us on October 14th, 4:15 PM, in Russell House, for a conversation between M. NourbeSe Philip and Indira Karamcheti–who will discuss Caribbean diasporas, the arts, race and self-care, followed by an open Q&A with audience members.

About the artists:

Gina Athena Ulysse is a performance artist, anthropologist, and author of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, Downtown Ladies, and Haiti, me & THE WORLD.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, lawyer, and author of She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and Zong!. Her essay collections include A Genealogy of Resistance and Showing Grit.

Respond to the Facebook invite here.