|
|
 On Friday, May 4, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture received the Best Publication Award at the James Beard Foundation Awards in New York, NY. The award was accepted by Darra Goldstein, Gastronomica’s founding editor and the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Russian at Williams College.
The Beard Awards is widely recognized within the food industry as the highest possible honor for culinary professionals and publishers in the United States. Dorothy Kalins, founding editor of Saveur, presented Gastronomica with the honor, stating:
“Since 2001, Gastronomica has proven that food can be the catalyst for meaningful and serious discussions about culture, history, literature, art, and politics.
Founding Editor Darra Goldstein has turned her enthusiasm for food into a substantive and intelligent publication that influences us all. In addition to editing Gastronomica, Darra is a Professor of Russian at Williams College. She is a quintessential example of the diverse and unexpected personalities you’ll find talking about food Gastronomica, where poets, artists, professors, opinion makers, and pundits bring a stimulating breadth of perspectives to the table.
In our digital age of fleet tweets, trendy headlines, and the battle to grab readers’ attention, Gastronomica reminds us that curiosity, hard thought, and great writing are award-worthy values.”
The honor was shared with Food52.com, a web-based publication and food community started by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs.
While this is the first such honor for Gastronomica, UC Press has had a long history of recognition at the Beard Awards, with past Beard winners including Food Politics by Marion Nestle, The Wines of Bordeaux by Clive Coates, My Bombay Kitchen by Niloufer Ichaporia King, and Encyclopedia of Pasta by Oretta De Vita Zanini, among other finalists.
 Kate Marshall, Acquisitions Editor for Food and Agriculture, spoke with Darra Goldstein following the event.
KM: So, Darra, what’s it like to be honored by the Oscars of the food world?
DG: It’s wonderful that a niche publication like Gastronomica was recognized among all the big players in the field, and sharing the stage with so many talented food writers and chefs was thrilling. So I enjoyed the glamour of the evening, not to mention the champagne!
KM: Did you meet any food celebrities or influential folks at the JBFA gala?
DG: I drive my students crazy when I tell them we don’t have cable TV at home, so I never watch any of the food shows and don’t really follow celebrity. But I did talk to Andrew Zimmern — we’re both Vassar grads — and I was thrilled to see Daniel Humm from Eleven Madison (Gastronomica’s featuring him in the May issue). On the food writing side, it was great to spend time with personal icons like Claudia Roden and Betty Fussell.
KM: Gastronomica is one of our highest profile publications. Why do you think readers respond so strongly to the journal?
DG: For one thing, it’s gorgeous. Readers adore the covers, as well as the edgy artwork and photography inside. People also like Gastronomica’s wide-ranging content. As one friend said to me, each issue is idiosyncratic, unexpected, and intellectual — the material never gets stale. People really do want to think deeply about food these days, and Gastronomica offers some serious stuff without ever forgetting the pleasures of food.
KM: What other food publications do you admire and enjoy reading?
DG: All my favorite publications seem to have gone by the wayside. First Cuisine, then the original Eating Well, more recently Gourmet. There is some excellent food writing on Gilt Taste these days.
KM: Apart from the James Beard Award, what do you think are your biggest Gastronomica achievements over the past 12 years? Who are you most proud to have published?
DG: Gastronomica has received some wonderful recognition, including the Prix d’Or at the Gourmet Voice World  Media Festival (2004), the UTNE Independent Press Award for Social/Cultural Coverage (2007), and the AAP/PSP PROSE award for Best Design in Print (2009). Last year it was named Best Food Magazine in the World at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Paris. But apart from these very public awards, I think Gastronomica’s greatest achievement has been to bridge the divide between academics and the food world, on the one hand bringing serious writing to the general public and on the other bringing a sense of aesthetics to the world of academic writing. The journal has also given the burgeoning field of food studies a distinctive voice and helped it gain legitimacy.
It’s hard to say what I’m most proud of because there have been so many terrific contributions over the years. I collected some of my favorites from the journal’s first decade in The Gastronomica Reader that UC Press published in 2011. I’m proud to have published poets like Louise Glück and Eamon Grennan, photographer-artists like Pinar Yolacan and Hans Gissinger, and writers like Paul Russell and Paul Greenberg. I’m especially happy to have launched the writing careers of many young people by giving them their first publication in Gastronomica.
If you’re anything like me, you spend too many lunches at your desk catching up with the world while you finish that turkey wrap you picked up from People’s Cafe. But even if you’re having something other than turkey wrap for lunch, just because you’re sitting at your desk doesn’t mean that you’re stuck there. For instance, you could take a trip this lunchtime to the world of Mark Twain.
www.thisismarktwain.com brings to life the Autobiography of Mark Twain in video slideshows, images, interviews with the editors and other Mark Twain scholars, and audio clips of excerpts from the book. The site takes readers behind the scenes to view materials only available at the Mark Twain Papers of The Bancroft Library. The reader can interact with the content in chronological order or follow the same non-linear method that Mark Twain used to tell the story of his life in his Autobiography.
We’ve added a section highlighting the brand new Readers Edition, which has an exclusive excerpt from the highly anticipated Volume Two of the autobiography.
 We are very proud to announce that our journal Gastronomica is the co-winner of the James Beard Foundation’s “Publication of the Year.” In the announcement, Gastronomica was cited for its editorial excellence over the last eleven years and for the ways in which the journal has generally deepened our understanding of food.
As one Facebook commenter said so very well: “Darra Goldstein’s vision, dedication and insight in creating Gastronomica expanded awareness of the cultural significance of food and ensured the academic legitimacy of food studies. Bravo!”
We couldn’t have said it any better ourselves.
 Darra Goldstein, Gastronomica's illustrious founder and Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Russian at Williams College, receiving the well-deserved honor.
 A note from the person who maintains this blog: Almost exactly a year ago, a dear of friend of mine walked out on to the Golden Gate Bridge, sent a text asking that her dog be cared for and jumped. If the publication of The Final Leap deters a single troubled person from making the same decision, it will be most important book we’ve published all year. On with the post.
The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most beautiful and most photographed structures in the world. It’s also the most deadly. Since it opened in 1937, more than 1,500 people have died jumping off the bridge, making it the top suicide site on earth. It’s also the only international landmark without a suicide barrier. Weaving drama, tragedy, and politics against the backdrop of a world-famous city, The Final Leap is the first book ever written about Golden Gate Bridge suicides. John Bateson leads us on a fascinating journey that uncovers the reasons for the design decision that led to so many deaths, provides insight into the phenomenon of suicide, and examines arguments for and against a suicide barrier. He tells the stories of those who have died, the few who have survived, and those who have been affected—from loving families to the Coast Guard, from the coroner to suicide prevention advocates.
On the newest UC Press podcast, Chris Gondek talks to John Bateson about the experiences that lead him to write The Final Leap.
And for additional context, here’s a short review from the San Jose Mercury News.
 Congratulations to Mary Power and Dan Simberloff who, along with 82 other distinguished scientists (4, including Power, from UC Berkeley), were elected to the National Academy of Sciences this week.
Mary Power is a freshwater ecologist and has done groundbreaking work on the Eel River. Mary also serves on the editorial board of our own Freshwater Ecology series, is a contributor to a forthcoming UC Press book on the ecosystems of California, and is President of the Ecological Society of America.
Dan Simberloff is from the University of Tennessee and the lead editor of the third volume in the Encyclopedias of the Natural World series. His volume is the Encyclopedia of Biological Invasion, which he co-edited with Marcel Rejmanek from UC Davis. Dan has contributed several blurbs for UC Press books including Laws, Theories and Patterns in Ecology and the brand new Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology, which he describes as a “… great service …”
That makes two posts in the same week where I got to open with the word “Congratulations.” Not bad.
 Congratulations are certainly in order for our Journals Division as they celebrate having Boom: A Journal of California named one of the Best Magazines of 2011 by none other than Library Journal.
To quote directly from the article announcing the win: “One in eight Americans lives in California, a state with an economy larger than Canada’s. Boom presents an engaging and visually attractive forum for scholars and artists to describe some of California’s remarkable stories. It brings history and social sciences to life with readable scholarship that will not only please scholars and entertain general readers but also interest patrons well beyond California’s borders.”
We’ve made it pretty easy for you to see what so impressed Library Journal through Boom’s companion site, BoomCalifornia. There you can find blog entries from Boom‘s contributors, a calendar of community events throughout California, photo galleries curated by the journal, and more. It’s also a great place to learn more about new and forthcoming California titles published by our books division.
Congratulations again to the entire Boom team!
 There are three major myths of human nature: humans are divided into biological races; humans are naturally aggressive; men and women are truly different in behavior, desires, and wiring. In an engaging and wide-ranging narrative Agustín Fuentes counters these pervasive and pernicious myths about human behavior. Tackling misconceptions about what race, aggression, and sex really mean for humans, Fuentes incorporates an accessible understanding of culture, genetics, and evolution requiring us to dispose of notions of “nature or nurture.” Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields, including anthropology, biology, and psychology, Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy and differences between the sexes. A final chapter plus an appendix provide a set of take-home points on how readers can myth-bust on their own. Accessible, compelling, and original, this book is a rich and nuanced account of how nature, culture, experience, and choice interact to influence human behavior.
Here’s our own Chris Gondek interviewing Race, Monogramy, and Other Lies They Told You author Agustín Fuentes:
And for additional context, Agustin Fuentes wrote an author blog for Psychology Today and gave this interview to Good Morning (New Zealand)
 In the newest Acquiring Eye feature, Humanities Publisher Mary Francis gives us her take on the music and cinema titles and journals coming out this spring.
Starting with one of the flagship publications from our  Journals Division, Film Quarterly is always a treat to find in the mailbox. Never an issue goes by when I don’t learn something new (even after years of working in cinema and media studies), or discover a terrific new writer, or am compelled to go find a local screening of one of the films discussed–or all of the above!
What could be better? Film Quarterly online, of course. Editor Rob White supplements FQs regular feast of articles, columns, and reviews with a range of in-depth web exclusives, including more reviews of films, dialogs between writers and filmmakers, festival reports, and much more. My favorites are the dialogs around recent films and TV shows. White and Nina Powers on Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” (a kind of continuation of their thoughtful response to von Trier’s controversial “Antichrist”) challenged me to revisit a film that confounded me on first viewing. And the excellent discussion of Todd Haynes’s version of “Mildred Pierce” was a treat for fans of both Haynes’s interpretation and the classic 1945 version.
 Ellington Century by David Schiff — Was Duke Ellington the greatest composer of the twentieth century? It would be easy to say that he was the greatest jazz composer. But David Schiff’s new book challenges readers to break down the false barriers between jazz, classical, and pop music to appreciate Ellington’s amazing music in the broadest possible context. Schiff’s elegant, evocative prose opens our ears to the way that Ellington’s music is as vital to musical modernism as anything by Stravinsky, more influential than anything by Schoenberg, and has had a lasting impact on jazz and pop that reaches from Gershwin to contemporary R&B.
 Weill’s Musical Theater by Stephen Hinton — Speaking of composers whose work crossed all barriers, Stephen Hinton’s new book is the first truly comprehensive treatment of Kurt Weill’s music. Hinton’s elegant prose and mastery of the history of twentieth century music finally give Weill his due as one of the century’s great masters. Weill wrote some of the world’s most fantastic songs (try to get “Mack the Knife” out of your head after reading this), and a huge variety of works for the stage, such as the Threepenny Opera, that are still performed today. ‘’Variety” is the key: Weill’s output ranged across conventional operas, Broadway musicals, experimental forms, works for children, and more. He was a self-conscious innovator (like his most famous collaborator, Brecht), and Hinton pays close attention to Weill as a ‘reformer’ with an important role in the history of opera and music theater.
 Frontier Figures by Beth Levy — Composers have been as invested as anyone in the myths of the American West, and Beth Levy’s prize-winning first book looks at how American composers seized upon the American West as a creative cornerstone on which to build a uniquely American identity. Composers such as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Cadman, and Arthur Farwell were all city born and bred, educated in Europe, with little personal experience of life on the range, yet deeply invested in exploring how music could embody the sounds of the west. Levy investigates what these composers knew (or thought they knew) about Indian music, the real life of farmers and cowboys, and the history of western expansion. She ranges from Mexican music at Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, Dvorak composing symphonies in Iowa, Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, and the music played at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows to Hollywood westerns, Agnes DeMille’s ‘cowboy ballets,’ and what the American west did (and does) still mean to composers living more than a century after the close of the frontier.
 Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth Century Music by Susan McClary — We often think of so-called early music as poised and quaint, distanced from our contemporary expectations of music’s emotional power. But the music of the 17th century is quite charged: harmonically tense, virtuosic, lushly orchestrated, in a word, intense. What were the social and historical reasons that music of the period, sacred or secular, prized emotional intensity so highly? And how was this linked to the many technical innovations of the period? McClary’s clear, evocative prose brings the heady emotional quality of this music alive, showing how this music retains its powerful immediacy for listeners.
 The Anatomy of Harpo Marx by Wayne Koestenbaum — Wayne Koestenbaum is a unique critical voice. He is deeply engaged with the ways in which all the arts are in some way performing arts, whether one is the artist or the audience. All his writings grapple with the personal, lyrical dimensions of performing, listening, watching, remembering, and learning via poetry, prose, making music, watching films, gazing on artworks. Kosetenbaum’s playful and astute approach makes him perfectly suited to write a critical love letter to the sublime performance style of Harpo Marx, whose mute physical comedy brought the style and affect of the silent era into the otherwise wildly noisy, anarchic world of the Marx Brothers films. He blends close readings of the visual style of the films with more personal reflections on the Marx Brothers as vaudevillians, as modern movie stars, as Jews, as brothers, as both exemplifying and breaking all the rules of comedy.
 Black Hole of the Camera by JJ Murphy — There are many books on the artworks of Andy Warhol, but there has never been a comprehensive book on Warhol’s films until now. Given that there are hundreds of films (if you count the short, compelling Screen Tests), many of them challengingly long (Empire), rebarbative, subversive, or simply, arrestingly strange, the challenge of trying to see this vast and influential body of work on its own terms is great. JJ Murphy, himself an award-winning filmmaker, does an amazing job of looking all the entire corpus of Warhol’s film and video work, and brings his own artist’s eye to these challenging, much-misunderstood works.
 Poetics of Slumberland by Scott Bukatman — Why are comics and animation particularly suited to visualizing the fantastic, the impossible, the crazy and comic? From the start, animation, comics, and early cinema were about delight in seeing a fantastic creature (Gertie the Dinosaur, her contemporaries, Muybridge’s galloping horses, or the inhabitants of Little Nemo’s dreams) come to life. Bukatman looks a how animation and cinema were new technological realms for familiar aesthetic pleasures that go back to Frankenstein, Pinocchio, and Pygmalion. (Bukatman’s discussion of why My Fair Lady absolutely had to become a movie musical is quite amazing.) Part of the pleasure is ambivalent: the newly animated creature usually moves quickly beyond the control of the creator to comic, fantastic or scary effect (sometimes all three). Bukatman carries his argument through related genres and phenomenon, from superheroes whose actions destroy the frames of comic books to CGI monsters in contemporary summer blockbusters and digital enhancements of live performers on stage.
This year, as in years past, UC Press is a proud sponsor of National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world. We thought this would be a good time to reflect a bit on a special Fall 2011 success, take a close look at our Spring 2012 titles, and finally give you a bit of a preview of what we have in store for you for Fall 2012.
Fall 2011
 Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Selections surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique “poem of place” in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories, and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s.
The fine folks at Chicago Review in devoted much of their 56:4 issue to his work.
Spring 2012
 In the Bee Latitudes, Annah Sobelman’s second book, traverses and choreographs the places of passion where visible and invisible touch. With extraordinary ability to imagine her way far into an experience, making new moves in the English language at each and every point, Sobelman enlists many voices, questions, and bodies (mostly in Taos and Florence) that press toward Emersonian nature. In vibrant, malleable, and layered syntax, these poems break conventions of lineation and punctuation, each utterance at the frontier of the articulate, yet necessarily pitched toward the insistently visceral.
 The Banjo Clock — For Karen Garthe, poetry is a Molotov cocktail. A master of radical invention, Garthe combines brio of conception with linguistic virtuosity, bringing language to new life from the inside at breakneck speed. The Banjo Clock, her second collection, cultivates a luxuriant sensibility even as it interrupts poetic continuity with cuts, ironies, sharp wit, and wild recklessness. In poems that consider poetry itself, Garthe writes about preparing the medium, the ink, “the motion of new utility.” She then turns to America’s psychic maladies and the need to rehabilitate our democracy, now floundering in the glare of TV’s blue depressive light.
 Gravesend, which takes its name from the English town at the mouth of the Thames, revisits the genre of the ghost story and, through fragmentation, juxtaposition, and allusion, powerfully summons the uncanny, the spectral presence. Cole Swensen delves into ancient fables, the Bible, medieval records, Victorian ghost stories, contemporary interviews, and more to explore the effects of the ghostly on our daily lives, at times returning to the notion of “gravesend,” implicitly asking if all ends in the grave or if death itself has an end. Swensen’s focus on language shapes these visitations—glimpses of the supernatural or intuitions of the afterlife in all its mystery—allowing readers to ponder such eternal questions further or simply to experience the frisson that accompanies the perception of a ghost or the reading of a poem.
 Robert Duncan — This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan (1919–1988), one of America’s great postwar poets. Lisa Jarnot takes us from Duncan’s birth in Oakland, California, through his childhood in an eccentrically Theosophist household, to his life in San Francisco as an openly gay man who became an inspirational figure for the many poets and painters who gathered around him. Weaving together quotations from Duncan’s notebooks and interviews with those who knew him, Jarnot vividly describes his life on the West Coast and in New York City and his encounters with luminaries such as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.
Fall 2012
 Robert Duncan: The Collected Early Poems and Plays — (October 2012) A landmark in the publication of twentieth-century American poetry, this first volume of the long-awaited collected poetry, non-critical prose, and plays of Robert Duncan gathers all of Duncan’s books and magazine publications up to and including Letters: Poems 1953–1956. Deftly edited, it thoroughly documents the first phase of Duncan’s distinguished life in writing, making it possible to trace the poet’s development as he approaches the brilliant work of his middle period.
Poems for the Millennium, Vol 4, The University of California Book of North African Literature — (November 2012) In this fourth volume of the landmark Poems for the Millennium series, Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour present a comprehensive anthology of the written and oral literatures of the Maghreb, the region of North Africa that spans the modern nation states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania, and including a section on the influential Arabo-Berber and Jewish literary culture of Al-Andalus, which flourished in Spain between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. Beginning with the earliest pictograms and rock drawings and ending with the work of the current generation of post-independence and diasporic writers, this volume takes in a range of cultures and voices, including Berber, Phoenician, Jewish, Roman, Vandal, Arab, Ottoman, and French. Though concentrating on oral and written poetry and narratives, the book also draws on historical and geographical treatises, philosophical and esoteric traditions, song lyrics, and current prose experiments. These selections are arranged in five chronological “diwans” or chapters, which are interrupted by a series of “books” that supply extra detail, giving context or covering specific cultural areas in concentrated fashion. The selections are contextualized by a general introduction that situates the importance of this little-known culture area and individual commentaries for nearly each author.
 Over the next few months, we’ll be introducing you to some of the authors and books that make our Fall 2012 list so promising.
First up, we have this remarkable article from The Chronicle of Higher Education exploring a new generation of Black Studies Ph.D.s. In the article, Martha Biondi, the director of graduate studies and an associate professor of African-American studies and history at Northwestern, was quoted at length about how contemporary graduate students “have forged a path of integrating top-notch scholarship with social and political relevance.”
Martha Biondi is also the author of the upcoming book, The Black Revolution on Campus, due out from UC Press this August. The Black Revolution on Campus is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Black students demanded that public universities serve their communities; that private universities rethink the mission of elite education; and that black colleges embrace self-determination and resist the threat of integration. Most crucially, black students demanded a role in the definition of scholarly knowledge.
Associate Professor Biondi masterfully combines impressive research with a wealth of interviews from participants to tell the story of how students turned the slogan “black power” into a social movement. Vividly demonstrating the critical linkage between the student movement and changes in university culture, Biondi illustrates how victories in establishing Black Studies ultimately produced important intellectual innovations that have had a lasting impact on academic research and university curricula over the past 40 years. This book makes a major contribution to the current debate on Ethnic Studies, access to higher education, and opportunity for all.
|
