Books published by University Press of Mississippi

This collection of interviews captures the conversation of one of the most prominent prose writers in the Unites States. These interviews reveal her uncompromising and frequently contradictory attitudes toward the luxuries and necessities of gastronomy, the idea that sensual appreciation, in all aspects of life, is or should be necessary.

Literary journalist, "lowly social historian", "chronicler of his times", and "champion of realism" are among the many epithets heaped upon Tom Wolfe. In this collection of interviews spanning his richly productive career, Wolfe is seen as a writer imitating no one and riding the crest of each latest wave in contemporary America.

Here are more than two hundred oral tales from some of Louisiana's finest storytellers. In this comprehensive volume of great range are transcriptions of narratives in many genres, from diverse voices, and from all regions of the state.

Focuses on Choctaw history prior to 1830, when the tribe forfeited territorial claims and was removed from native lands in Mississippi. The editors have included essays emphasizing Choctaw anthropology, Choctaw beliefs, and the Choctaw experience with the US government prior to the tribe's removal to Oklahoma.

The Communist Party was the only political movement on the left in the late 1920s and 1930s to place racial justice and equality at the top of its agenda and to seek, and win, sympathy among African Americans. This historic effort to fuse red and black offers a rich vein of experience and constitutes the theme of The Cry Was Unity.

This collection of interviews reveals the intellectual and creative life of one of America's contemporary masters of fiction writing. In spanning his richly productive career, these conversations reveal a savvy, thoughtful man who shows great intelligence, confidence, and wit, as well as an admirable sense of humility and tact.

Bernard Malamud gave his first interview in 1958, his last in 1986. During the intervening twenty-eight years he was formally interviewed at least forty times. This book collects twenty-eight of the best interviews, ranging from brief conversations with journalists to more extended and leisurely conversations with academics and writers.

Here is the inimitable Henry Miller (1891-1980) speaking candidly about himself and his robust fiction. In this enticing collection he argues convincingly for the things that have mattered in his full and exhilarating life.

Readers cannot help coming away from this book with a new appreciation of the nature and richness of African American folklore. For those with little or no previous knowledge of this heterogeneous and spellbinding lore Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel will be an eye-opening encounter.

What are super-devoted fans of comic books really like? What draws them together and energizes them? What do the denizens of this pop-culture world have in common? This book provides answers as it scrutinizes the fans whose profiles can be traced at their conventions, in pages of fanzines, on websites, and before the racks in comic-book stores.

Arthur Miller clearly enjoys militantly civil conversation. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Miller in interview is his willingness to answer question after question with grace and substance, with a sense of social commitment and metaphysical curiosity.

Cajun food has become a popular "ethnic" food throughout America during the last decade. This fascinating book explores the significance of Cajun cookery on its home turf in south Louisiana, a region marked by startling juxtapositions of the new and the old, the nationally standard and the locally unique.

Explores the cultural and political exchanges between African Americans, Asian Americans, and Asians over the last four decades. To do so, Crystal S. Anderson examines such cultural productions as novels, films and Japanese animation, all of which feature cross-cultural conversations.

Offers a close examination and interpretation of Absalom, Absalom!. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.

Records reflections on the fieldwork conducted in French Louisiana by a group of anthropologists and folklorists from Louisiana, the United States, Canada, and France between the 1970s and 2000. Contributors cast a critical look at the core anthropological concepts of field informants, and knowledge.

The Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans between the South and the North that began in the early 1940s and tapered off in the late 1960s, transformed America. Over seven years, Lisa Krissoff Boehm gathered oral histories with women migrants and their children. In extended excerpts from the oral histories, this book offers a unique window into African American women's history.

This collection of interviews with James Baldwin covers the period 1961 to 1987, from the year of the publication of Nobody Knows My Names, his fourth book, to just a few weeks before his death. It includes the last formal conversation with him.

Throughout his long and productive life, whether he was talking with Virginia Woolf, Peter Quenell, Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Sillitoe, Edwin Newman, or Gina Lollobrigida, the voice of Robert Graves remained clear and distinct - attracting and repelling a variety of interviewers with its surety.

California teacher Clarice T. Campbell wrote detailed letters to family and friends about her "small adventure" while studying at the universities of Alabama and Mississippi and teaching at black Mississippi and South Carolina colleges until 1965.cParticipant and observer, she challenged segregated bus stations, restaurants, churches, and mindsets.

Reflects the fascinating diversity of regional and grassroots music in the United States. The book covers the diverse strains of American folk music - Latin, Native American, African, French-Canadian, British, and Cajun - and offers a chronology of the development of folk music in the United States.

Although he did not start publishing until middle age, Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) had over sixty published books to his credit by the time of his death. Conversations with Anthony Burgess captures, through in-depth interviews, a writer of tremendous energy, inventiveness, and self-discipline. The collection brings together interviews from 1971 to 1989.

Few Hollywood directors had a higher profile in the 1930s than Frank Capra (1897-1991). The interviews collected in this volume portray the Capra legend vividly and demonstrate why the warm relations between Capra and his audiences continue to inspire acclaim and admiration.

This edited collection challenges a long sacrosanct paradigm. Since the establishment of Caribbean literary studies, scholars have exalted an elite cohort of emigre novelists based in postwar London, a group often referred to as -the Windrush writers- in tribute to the SS Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated large-scale Caribbean migration to London. In critical accounts this group is typically reduced to the canonical troika of V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and Sam Selvon, effectively treating these three authors as the tradition's founding fathers. These -founders- have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anticolonial, nationalist literature. However, their canonization has obscured the great diversity of postwar Caribbean writers, producing an enduring but narrow definition of West Indian literature.Beyond Windrush stands out as the first book to reexamine and redefine the writing of this crucial era. Its fourteen original essays make clear that in the 1950s there was already a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women--Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, and white-creole--who were writing, publishing, and even painting. Many lived in the Caribbean and North America, rather than London. Moreover, these writers addressed subjects overlooked in the more conventionally conceived canon, including topics such as queer sexuality and the environment. This collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); and commonly ignored genres (memoir, short stories, and journalism).

Explores the Mississippi as a waterway of change, unnaturally confined by ever-larger levees and control structures. Since 1973, the US Army Corps of Engineers Control Complex at Old River has kept the Mississippi from jumping out of its historic channel and plunging through the Atchafalaya Basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond Control traces the history of this phenomenon.