Books published by University of Nebraska Press

Whether pulled from the folds of memory, channeled through the icons of Greek mythology and Roman Catholicism, or filtered through the lens of pop culture, Sonja Livingston''s Queen of the Fall considers the lives of women. Exploring the legacies of those she has crossed paths with in life and in the larger culture, Livingston weaves together strands of memory with richly imagined vignettes to explore becoming a woman in late 1980s and early 1990s America.Along the way, the award-winning memoirist brings us face-to-face with herself as an inner-city girl-trying to imagine a horizon beyond poverty, fearful of her fertility and the limiting arc of teenage pregnancy. Livingston looks at the lives of those she''s known: friends who''ve gotten themselves into "trouble" and disappeared never to be heard from again, girls who tell their school counselor small lies out of necessity and pain, and a mother whose fruitfulness seems, at times, biblical. Livingston interacts with figures such as Susan B. Anthony, the Virgin Mary, and Ally McBeal to mine the terrain of her own femininity, fertility, and longing.Queen of the Fall is a dazzling meditation on loss, possibility, and, ultimately, what it means to be human.Sonja Livingston is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis. Her first book, Ghostbread, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Book Prize for nonfiction.

"An extensive study of the emergence of ethnology and ethnography, and how theories in Europe and Russia during the eighteenth century experienced a paradigm shift with the work of Franz Boas starting in 1886"--

Explores, with textual specificity and historical alertness, the question of how the cultures of the nineteenth century - the cultures that shaped Willa Cather's childhood, animated her education, supplied her artistic models, generated her inordinate ambitions, and gave embodiment to many of her deeply held values - are addressed in her fiction.

Just down the highway from Connecticut's Gold Coast is the state's rusty underbelly, the wretched, used-up sort of place where you might find Xhenet Aliu's Domesticated Wild Things: the reluctant mothers, delinquent dads, and not-quite-feral children, yet dreamers all.

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this collection of tales returns readers to the American Northwest so deftly observed and powerfully evoked in John Keeble's previous works. Nocturnal America occupies a terrain at once familiar and strange, where homecoming and dislocation can coincide, and families can break apart or hone themselves on the hard edges of daily life.

After the US-Filipino remnants surrendered to a far stronger force, they unwittingly placed themselves at the mercy of a foe who considered itself unimpaired by the Geneva Convention. The already ill and hungry survivors, including many wounded, were forced to march at gunpoint many miles to a harsh and oppressive POW camp.

From sensual pleasures and perils, moments and memories of darkness and light, the poems in Orlando Ricardo Menes's new collection sew together stories of dislocation and loss, of survival and hope, of a world patched together by a family over five generations of diaspora.