Tag Archives: books

The Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse receives documents every month from all Nebraska state agencies, including the University of Nebraska Press (UNP).  UNP books, as well as all Nebraska state documents, are available for checkout by libraries and librarians for their patrons.

Here are the UNP books the Clearinghouse received in November and December, 2025:

Bakandamiya: an Elegy, by Saddiq Dzukogi. Series: African Poetry Book.

Covering more than five hundred years of cultural transformation, Bakandamiya: An Elegy is a book-length epic poem set in northern Nigeria. The poem moves from passages of mythic power to elegant lyricism with remarkable skill, subverting the legend of Bayajidda, a prince from Baghdad whose arrival reshaped the outlook of the Hausas, a Native ethnic group in West Africa. Told in part from a Bori spirit’s point of view and in part through personal lyrics, part prayer and part praise song, Bakandamiya decries the loss of culture and spirituality due to colonization from both the West and the East. Even as it subverts myths and popular beliefs and addresses some of the events that led to the Nigerian civil war, it tackles the lingering question of nationhood.

In this work of lyric and poetic ambition, Saddiq Dzukogi blends the personal with the mythical, expanding the griot tradition of Bakandamiya, a poetic form from northern Nigeria popularized by Mamman Shata. Here the form travels from orature to contemporary poetics for the first time, taking its place at the vanguard of contemporary poetry.

Born to Explore: John Casani’s Grand Tour of the Solar System, by Jay Gallentine. Series: Outward Odyssey : A People’s History of Spaceflight.

Once, there were giants in the heavens: billion-dollar machines of wonder and science that flew to the outermost planets and told us what secrets had been lying in wait. In charge of the people and processes behind these missions was a humble father of five who did the job not for money or prestige but simply because it represented a challenge like no other. That man was John Casani. The full story of his unparalleled life and career is told here for the first time.

Young Casani was obsessed with the mechanical world yet lacked direction in life. After restarting college for an engineering degree, he then whimsically road-tripped to California in the late 1950s and was hired, almost by accident, at Pasadena’s secretive Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Beginning as a workaday technician, Casani rose through JPL’s ranks to senior management—while battling politics, funding, physics, and occasionally colleagues. With inborn skill and uncommon methods he kept his troops focused on success. Casani ran nine-figure space missions off the index cards in his shirt pocket, once employed a live goat to press people into action, and even sent messages to aliens in space.

Born to Explore examines a transitional period of space history, when planetary exploration faced threats from an adversarial space shuttle program that consumed the lion’s share of NASA funding. Recounted by Jay Gallentine, Casani’s life story unfolds in conjunction with the tribulations of the Galileo mission to Jupiter—a twisting case study of what can go wrong even with the best intentions and the best minds in the world at work.

The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1888-1891, volume 2, edited by Michael Anesko, Greg W. Zacharias, and Katie Sommer. Series: The Complete Letters of Henry James.

The second volume in The Complete Letters of Henry James: 1888–1891 contains 131 letters, of which 80 are published for the first time, written from April 23, 1890, to January 3, 1891. These letters continue to mark Henry James’s ongoing efforts to care for his chronically ill sister, develop his work, strengthen his professional status, and build friendships. They also trace James’s efforts to write for the theater up to the afternoon before the first performance of The American.

Conflict and Correspondence : Belonging and Urban Community in Guadalajara, Mexico, 1939-1947, by Jason H. Dormady. Series: Confluencias.

In the decades following the 1910 Mexican Revolution, Guadalajara faced immense demographic and economic transformation, stunning both longtime residents and new arrivals. The city’s population nearly tripled from 1920 to 1950, and the resultant population boom strained government resources and challenged living standards for all.

In Conflict and Correspondence Jason H. Dormady examines the critical transition period when Guadalajara lost control of urban growth after 1939 and when the newly empowered state and federal governments began to exercise immense control over the development of the city in 1947. As the city changed around them, residents used petitions and letters to municipal officials to help address their feelings of alienation, isolation, and separation from the community around them. Petitions took the form of sensate, moral, recreational, spiritual, and gendered arguments about creating livable communities and avoiding the disorientation experienced by urban transformation. In the context of infrastructure failures, tight housing markets, and a dramatic aesthetic transition, petitions on these topics reinforced to residents—and, they hoped, city officials—their belonging to the community. Resident petitions reveal how everyday people lived the consequences of the 1910 revolution as they advocated for shaping space and building place in midcentury Guadalajara.

Guns, Furs, & Gold : an American West History of Indigenous People’s and Explorers, by Larry E. Morris. Series: Bison Books.

IGuns, Furs, and Gold offers a riveting narrative of the American West by exploring the interactions of the Arikaras, Crows, Cheyennes, and Arapahos with each other and with Euro-American traders, explorers, and settlers from 1804, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark embarked on their voyage of discovery, to 1864, when the U.S. Army attacked both Confederate forces in the South and Native nations in the West.

Larry E. Morris recounts the nineteenth-century experience of these four tribes by detailing their interactions with four legendary survivors of a fight with the Arikaras in 1823. These renowned figures include the remarkable trailblazer blazer Jedediah Smith, the unparalleled interpreter Edward Rose, the premier guide and Indian agent Thomas Fitzpatrick, and the grizzly-bear-mauling survivor Hugh Glass. Their careers illuminate the fate of four Indian nations, revealing how—despite the best efforts of several explorers to treat the Indigenous peoples respectfully—the guns, furs, disease, and gold rushes of the interlopers put the Indians’ way of life, their lands, and their very lives at grave risk. The sixty-year period comes to a close when more than 150 Plains Indians, most of them women, children, and elderly, were ambushed and slaughtered by Colonel John Chivington’s Third Colorado Cavalry on the banks of Sand Creek.

The Naming, by Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Series: African Poetry Book.

The Naming explores the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to ancestry. The poems in this collection examine the various ways one remains tied to their ancestors by reimagining memories, history, homesteads, migration, and the intersections of the past, present, and possible futures. Through this exploration, the collection seeks to rebuild a world that doesn’t merely replicate realities but reinvents, enshrines, and restories them.

Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s poems offer a vital contribution to African cultural studies through their focus on Igbo heritage and ancestry.

Playing to the End : Elder Black Men, Placemaking, and Dominoes in Denver by Steve Bialostok. Series: Anthropology of Contemporary North America.

In Playing to the End, Steve Bialostok immerses readers in the vibrant world of the card room at Denver’s Hiawatha Davis Jr. Recreation Center, where a group of older Black men gather to play dominoes, exchange playful banter known as “talking shit,” and cultivate a space of belonging. More than just a game, their gatherings are acts of Black placemaking—resisting cultural erasure, gentrification, and societal marginalization while fostering joy, resilience, and community.

Through five years of ethnographic study, Bialostok reveals how these men transform the card room into a sanctuary of identity and defiance, where humor and camaraderie become tools of self-determination. As they navigate the pressures of a changing neighborhood, their interactions affirm the power of play, talk, and collective memory in sustaining Black spaces. Playing to the End is a compelling testament to the significance of these gatherings and the ongoing struggle for autonomy, cultural affirmation, and social connection in an inequitable world.

Pleasure, Play, and Politics: a History of Humor in U.S. Feminism, by Kirsten Leng. Series: Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Pleasure, Play, and Politics is the first book to examine the roles humor played in U.S. feminism during the late twentieth century. Based on extensive archival research, it brings to light the stunning, moving, and frankly hilarious ways feminists have used satire, irony, and spectacle as they worked to build a better world. The story it tells includes activism and music, political mobilization and cartooning, stand-up comedy and demands for change.

Kirsten Leng explores the ways culture and politics feed one another and shows how humor contributed to movement-building by changing hearts and minds, creating and maintaining a sense of community beyond a single issue, and sustaining activists over the long haul. The fascinating individuals, groups, and objects examined here—including the sex workers’ rights group COYOTE, the Guerrilla Girls, Florynce Kennedy, and the Lesbian Avengers—don’t just provide entertaining anecdotes or unsettle lazy assumptions that feminists are perennially dour and censorious: they offer a lesson or two for contemporary feminists and social justice activists. Taken together, they remind us that laughter can move us, that humor and anger can coexist, and that play and pleasure have a place in struggle.

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place, edited by Arnab Dutta Roy, Paul Ugor, and Simone Maria Puleo. Series: Frontiers of Narrative.

In recent decades authors from across the world have adopted and adapted the bildungsroman literary genre to reflect on coming of age in postcolonial spaces and places. The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place emphasizes matters of space, place, and environment—concepts intrinsically linked to the bildungsroman’s processes of meaning-making and critique.

From Latin America to South Asia to Africa, the contributors focus on three distinct but interrelated themes: ecology, cultural geography, and mediascapes. They consider aesthetic formations that address the themes of spatiality, youth, individual and collective experiences of social stagnation or growth, the unique challenges faced by certain global subjects on account of the places they inhabit, and whether or not futurity is guaranteed for them. This unique collection delves into myriad features of the postcolonial bildungsroman, enlarging our theoretical understanding of the genre as well as of media and literature in the postcolonial world.

Winged Witnesses, by Chisom Okafor. Series: African Poetry Book.

The voices in these poems have witnessed the microhistories of the atypical body, the unusual body, the enjambed body, the chronically ill body trying to navigate space and time, love and displacement. The poems are a force field for questions that are at once intense and gripping: When we embody life through disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent body-minds, how do we grapple with love, time, and consciousness? How does the chronically ill body navigate the monstrosities of trauma and displacement? The poems not only play around with the idea of body-minds but also center on embodiment as touchstones of description. They are alive to history and the way poetry’s memorial practices animate the raw intimacy between the seen and unseen.

The people who populate Chisom Okafor’s Winged Witnesses are broken by numerous afflictions and darknesses, but there is a common companionship that binds them, as in a loop. Their voices call out in the wild and their jaded feet drag through lonely pathways, where wild birds dust-bathe by the wayside. There is trauma in these poems, but also light and salvation, and everything that comes between.

**Pictures and Synopses courtesy of University of Nebraska Press.

The Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse receives documents every month from all Nebraska state agencies, including the University of Nebraska Press (UNP).  UNP books, as well as all Nebraska state documents, are available for checkout by libraries and librarians for their patrons.

Here are the UNP books the Clearinghouse received in September and October, 2025:

Daddy Issues: Stories, by Eric C. Wat. Series: Zero Street Fiction.

Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction.

Daddy Issues is a collection of moving and complex—yet simply and directly told—stories of queer Asian American experiences in Los Angeles. In many of these stories, the protagonists are artists and writers and other creative thinkers living on the fringe of survival, attempting to align a life of the imagination with the practical considerations of career, income, and family: a gay father who hasn’t come out to his young son; a social worker, numbed by the destitution of his clients, who finds himself lost in self-destruction; a trans man who returns home to a father with dementia to help his family pack as they are pushed out by gentrification; a husband who can only stand aside as his wife heals from a miscarriage; and a broke writer who learns to love his stories again.

The stories in Daddy Issues offer different contemplations on solitude—the good and the bad of it. Ultimately, this collection by Eric C. Wat is full of hope, and it shows how we can find the connections we need once we allow ourselves to become vulnerable.

Death Does Not End at the Sea, by Gbenga Adesina. Series: The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

In Gbenga Adesina’s groundbreaking debut book of poems, a defiant and wise exploration of exile, voyages, and spiritual odysseys, we encounter figures embarking on journeys haunted by history—a son keeps dreaming he carried his dead father across the sea; a young Black father, tired of fear and breathlessness, travels with his son in search of the ghost of James Baldwin—to Paris, the south of France, Turkey, and Senegal to investigate his ancestral roots; and finally, a group of immigrants on small boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea sing in order not to drown, in a stunning sequence that invokes the middle passage. In a lyrical voice at once new and surprisingly ancient, Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea explores the complexity of elusive citizenship, an immigrant’s brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead.

Dreams of a Young Republic, by John J. Harney. Series: Studies in Pacific Worlds.

The Congregation of the Mission, a Catholic order known as the Vincentians after their founder Saint Vincent de Paul, began missionary work in China in 1699. First run by French priests and nuns, a large vicariate in the south of China was taken over by American priests in 1921. French envoys of nineteenth-century imperialism had given way to American priests who ascribed to an idealized vision of a modern democratic China. For the Americans, China was a dream: a place liberated from centuries of imperial orthodoxy, a nascent democracy, a country that would forever be free and democratic—and thus one that would inevitably be capitalist and more friendly to Catholicism.

In Dreams of a Young Republic John J. Harney examines the perceptions and expectations of this group of American Catholic missionaries between the 1911 revolution that created the Republic of China and the communist revolution of 1949 that led to the collapse of that republic on the Chinese mainland. The Vincentians experienced warlordism, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek’s partial unification of the country, Japanese invasion during World War II, and communist revolution. Through all this they clung to a vision of a free, democratic China friendly to the West. As Harney contextualizes the Vincentians’ observations and desires, he provides insight into the China that came to be and offers a history of a Sino-American relationship with much deeper roots than the antagonisms of the Cold War and the decades that have followed.

Our People Believe in Education: the Unlikely Alliance of the Miami Tribe and Miami University, by Cameron M. Shriver with Bobbe Burke. Series: Indigenous Education.

Across the United States, many institutions are striving to acknowledge and repair oppressive pasts and unequal presents, even as Indigenous communities are struggling to reclaim and revitalize the philosophies and knowledges of their elders. Our People Believe in Education explores the stories of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami University to show how two organizations with almost nothing in common, aside from the name Miami, have collaborated to support Indigenous language and cultural revitalization. Founded in 1809, Miami University is a midsize public university in Oxford, Ohio, on land that once belonged to the Miami Tribe. The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma was, like many tribal nations, forcibly removed from its homelands and is now headquartered in northeast Oklahoma.

Cameron M. Shriver and Bobbe Burke provide a reflective examination of why a relationship developed between the two entities despite significant geographical and ideological hurdles, and how that partnership has evolved since 1972, when Myaamia chief Forest Olds first visited Miami’s university campus in his nation’s homeland. This intimate history of a tribe and a university struggling to reconcile colonial education with Indigenous survival offers a jumping-off point for new conversations in, and between, these two spheres.

Raising the Redwood Curtain: Labor Landscapes and Community Violence in a Pacific Littoral, by Michael T. Karp. Series: Studies in Pacific Worlds.

Raising the Redwood Curtain explores how shifting land use practices and exploitative labor patterns spurred by the colonial settlement of the Pacific world influenced the genocide of California’s Native people, anti-Asian campaigns, and the oppression of eastern European immigrant workers. By carefully examining these local developments, it explores how global capitalism fundamentally reordered labor patterns and social relations.

By analyzing the history of three episodes of labor and racial violence in Humboldt County, California, Michael T. Karp spans nearly a century in a detailed examination of the causes and interconnections between the Indian Island massacre of 1860, the expulsion of Chinese and Japanese people from the county between 1885 and 1906, and the killing and persecution of eastern Europeans during the Great Lumber Strike of 1935.

Regional labor and land use patterns shaped these events, but so did global economic developments and environmental change, connecting disparate acts of racial violence across time. By bringing together new scholarship on the American West, environmental history, and the Pacific world, Michael T. Karp illustrates the importance of considering communities on the periphery to better understand the violence that defined the colonial settlement of North America.

Twinless Twin: a Novel, by Dean Marshall Tuck. Series: The James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel.

The James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel, AWP Award Series Winner.

Twinless Twin finds a family maimed by a troubled, enigmatic son, whose unspeakable actions leave the family reeling, torn between moving on and searching for answers. A twin who survives their sibling twin may sometimes be plagued with lifelong feelings of loss, guilt, and even a strange sense of urgency—a need to live two lives in one. In this story, the tragedy of the lost child reverberates through the surviving sibling and ripples through the rest of the family and beyond.

Set largely in twentieth-century America in the foothills of an unnamed mountain, this insular landscape breeds rumor, legend, desperation, daydreams, and a mystery that runs deeper than the family who inhabits its woods. Raising questions regarding culpability in the face of tragedy and the responsibilities of those who remain after a family has been splintered, Twinless Twin ultimately asks: What must be done to salvage the family, their reputation, and their homeplace?

Wolves in Shells, by Kimberly Ann Priest. Series: The Backwaters Prize in Poetry.

Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry.

Wolves in Shells is a modern monomyth telling the story of a woman navigating homelessness, trauma, and memories as she attempts to leave a violent partner. Reflecting on her familial heritage, this survivor grapples with the way she, the women of her history, and her daughter have been conditioned to accommodate the demands of the male ego and predation. Reflective, clear-eyed, and incisive, the poems of Wolves in Shells feature O-Six, a wolf born into the rewilding territory of Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s who serves as a metaphor for women who must cope with violence and survive on their own. Drawing from Gaston Bachelard’s quote “wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones,” the narrative considers how survival requires a balance of protectiveness, risk, trust, and escape.

**Pictures and Synopses courtesy of University of Nebraska Press.