Harvard University Press Blog

Cecil Brown

One of the coolest things about working in publishing is when you realize that an author you've known only via one or two books they've done for you has led a totally rad and interesting life unbeknownst to you and your fickle eye. Such is the case with one-shot HUP author Cecil Brown, profiled in the Berkeley Daily Planet. Brown's reminiscences read like a who's-who of 20th-century black America -- Jesse Jackson, Amiri Baraka (who was still LeRoi Jones when Brown met him), Huey Newton, and Richard Pryor all figure into the life story of a guy who seems to have been everywhere. Brown's novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, orginally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1969, is sort of a forgotten classic -- Gerald Early, for one, remembers it as one of the "three books that everybody just had to read" during his high school years.

Brown's contribution to the HUP list (Stagolee Shot Billy, out in paperback) tracks the origin and development of the Stagolee legend, chronicled in countless songs from the ragtime era right up until the present day. Delving into a subculture of St. Louis known as "Deep Morgan," Cecil Brown emerges with the facts behind the legend to unfold the mystery of Stack Lee and the incident that led to his murder of "Billy" in 1895. The book was one of Esquire's "Best of 2003" and was praised everywhere from the New York and LA Times Book Reviews to Playboy.

Libraries embrace street lit; finger waggers wag, but readers keep reading

Today's New York Times informs us that urban libraries like the one headed by Shonda Miller in Far Rockaway, Queens, have begun to embrace what's variously known as  "urban fiction," "street lit" or "gangsta lit," a genre that sprang up during the 1990s and which chronicles the (glamorized) trials and tribulations of urban black life in America's cities. Pimps, hustlers, dealers, and madams populate the pages of these fast-moving novels -- take, for example, Angel, protagonist of the wildly popular eponymous novel set in this blogger's own hometown, is according to the Times "a Versace-clad seductress who shoots her boyfriend in the head during sex, stuffs money from his safe into her Vuitton bags and, as she fondles the cash, experiences a sexual frisson narrated in terms too graphic to reproduce here." Toni Morrison it's not, but is that the point?

The point, librarians say, is that people are reading. People who have never seen the inside of a library in their lives, they report, come in asking for Teri Woods, Kwame Teague, and other street lit luminaries, whose tales of lurid urban doings speak to phenomena with which many patrons are sadly familiar in their daily lives. Some librarians see the genre as a sort of gateway drug into further reading; Vanessa Morris, a professor at Drexel who started a book club in North Philadelphia, has seen her teenage pupils branch out from street lit into more "credible" genres like straightforward biography. At Far Rockaway, once the librarians have got their hooks into kids weaned on the drugs-and-guns glamor of street lit, they use it as an opportunity to push the hard stuff on them -- "If you want sex, dirt and murder, read Shakespeare!" says Sharon Anderson, the head librarian there.

All hail Biblioburro

This story is awesome, especially if you are a book lover. Luis Soriano has for ten or so years been running what he calls the "Biblioburro," his unique take on the time-honored Bookmobile. The Biblioburro is just about what it sounds like -- it's a donkey (two, actually -- "Alpha" and "Beto") that carries around books. In Soriano's corner of Colombia (think One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Garcia Márquez is in fact a native son of the region), torn as it is by warfare between competing guerrilla groups, it's the best way to get books to a lit-hungry populace that otherwise stands no chance of fufilling its desire to read. Soriano started the Biblioburro "out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia," says the reporter who interviewed him. We rather agree, and thus will raise a glass tonight (or this afternoon, you never know) to Luis Soriano, Alpha, Beta, and the whole idea of working hard to help people improve their lives, even in the direst of situations.

Not just a history of France, but a history of the French

An evocative turn of phrase from the Christian Science Monitor's Gail Russell Chaddock in her review of Robert Gildea’s Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914:

There’s a sea of books on the French Revolution and its fallout. There’s another sea of books on French cultural history –  its edgy Parisian salons, its sun-drenched villages in Provence. It’s rare to try to fuse both, rarer still to do it well. He does.

No higher praise, we figure! The Monitor has also instituted an engaging component to their reviews in the form of an audio interview with the author -- Gildea's, available on the same page as the review, shows the author to be both charming and articulate. The interview really adds something, so don't miss it.

Insular? Really?

Needless to say, Horace Engdahl's surprise outburst on the alleged parochialism of American literature took a lot of us by surprise. Though head of a jury ostensibly bound to Alfred Nobel's dictum that his eponymous prizes be awarded with no consideration given to a recipient's particular nationality, Engdahl appeared to effectively seal off the notion that the prize could be awarded to an American until the country shapes up its literary act.

"There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States," Engdahl told the Associated Press. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature ...That ignorance is restraining."

Engdahl's unsubtle tirade naturally drew equally sharp reponses, like this one from The New Yorker's David Remnick: "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures." Ouch. But in our tradition of taking a step back from the sound bites, we thought we'd ask someone who knows the score to evaluate Engdahl's statement on the merits. And thus we turned to Werner Sollors.

Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies here at Harvard and a much-respected scholar of American literature, particularly in its role as a conduit through which African American, European immigrant, and other minority writers took part in the developments that transformed the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, lending the nation an increasingly multicultural sense of self-awareness. Sollors' treatise on Ethnic Modernism, about to be released for the first time in book form, "does more than reconnect modernism with ethnicity; it recasts modernism entirely," says the novelist Gish Jen, perhaps herself a couterweight to Engdahl's rash thesis. "This is vintage Sollors: out-of-the-box, profound, and brimming with brio." Sollors is furthermore the co-editor, with Greil Marcus, of our soon-to-come New Literary History of America, which we daresay is likely to further broaden our conception of both "American" and "literature." Below is what Professor Sollors, himself born in Germany, had to say in reponse to the accusation that American literature is somehow too parochial for sophisticated Europeans to bother with.

Now let us praise Open Access

Bet you didn't even know that today is Open Access Day, where we all come together to recommit ourselves to broadening awareness of Open Access. What is Open Access, you ask? Well, the Open Access Day website defines it thus:

Open Access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society.

Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it.

Bet you also didn't know that HUP plans to wade into the pool ourselves with the launch this fall of the Journal of Legal Analysis, "a peer-reviewed open access journal sponsored by the Harvard Law School," which will publish, free of charge, superior scholarship in legal analysis from all disciplines. Articles will be faculty-edited and refereed by our fine friends at the Law School, so if you think you've got the goods check out the journal's website for a list of already-accepted articles and contact info for the editorial team. We'll be publishing using the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems, which will allow us to make the content freely available while preserving all the bits and pieces of the traditional publishing process, including indexing and all that thrilling stuff.

BONUS POINTS: The credo of the Open Access movement crystallized at a 2002 session in Budapest, resulting in the Soros-sponsored Budapest Open Access Initiative -- read it to get a primer of sorts on what the whole thing is about.

"Not usually known for sexing up"

From a Guardian article on books that gain a new title on their transatlantic voyage:

...Perhaps the most striking UK-to-US change is to Mary Beard's Pompeii - The Life of a Roman Town. Though not usually known for sexing up, Harvard University Press clearly disliked the plain English packaging of a potentially hot book. Profile's British cover has been replaced, there's what looks like a different author photo, and the title becomes The Fires of Vesuvius. An epic HBO adaptation must be on the cards.

While it's true that the US market tends to present a slightly different set of demands when it comes to packaging, it's also true that the classics often don't need "sexing up" at all, as many of our beloved ancients were plenty raunchy to begin with. Try Catullus, for example (the truly shameless will want to skip directly to poem #16, which we won't translate here), or see Jeffrey Henderson's recently-completed Loeb revision of Aristophanes, which restores the raunch to the somewhat bowdlerized versions produced during the early 20th century. Beard, too, is no stranger to the corporeal elements of Roman life -- The Fires of Vesuvius contains a chapter entitled "The Pleasures of the Body: Food, Wine, Sex and Baths."

Glowing green

... not with envy, but with GFP, or green fluorescent protein, discovered in the early 1960s by three scientists studying jellyfish off the west coast of North America. Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien have now been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of and subsequent research into the remarkable sustance known as GFP, which turned out to have all kinds of uses beyond making jellyfish light up (did you know, however, that the last German submarine destroyed during World War I had its position betrayed by bioluminescent plankton?). Once harnessed, GFP turned out to be one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the twentieth century -- after figuring out how to attach it to a protein, researchers could then follow the glow of the GFP to determine when that protein was made and where it traveled. It's fair to say that GFP revolutionized our understanding of molecular biology, transforming our study of everything from the AIDS virus to the workings of the brain.

The story of this remarkable discovery and of the scientists who produced it is told with aplomb in Vincent Pieribone and David F. Gruber's Aglow in the Dark: The Revolutionary Science of Biofluorescence, out in paperback from HUP. Aglow in the Dark is popular science at its best, traversing the continents and the decades to explain the the sheer wonder of bioluminescence and its near-miraculous applications in the life sciences.

More facts about GREEN (from the Sensational Color website, chock full of color facts):

• Green occupies more space in the spectrum visible to the human eye than most colors.
• Green is second only to blue as a favorite color.
• In several religions, green is the color associated with resurrection and regeneration.
• Green was the favorite color of George Washington, the first President of the United States.

GREEN quote of the day:

• "Absolute green is the most restful color, lacking any undertone of joy, grief, or passion. On exhausted men this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it becomes tedious." -- Wassily Kandinsky

||| Learn more about Aglow in the Dark.

Nerve fibers from neurons that contain the gene for yellow fluorescent protein.

The Birds

No need to run shrieking in terror from the New York Times' fabulous slide show of images from Audubon: Early Drawings and Egg & Nest, our dual (but not dueling, we hope) bird books out this season. Previous coverage of Audubon on the blog here, and don't miss Rosamond Purcell, author/photographer of Egg & Nest, TONIGHT at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (6pm, directions). Purcell should be on your radar; check out these bona fides from none other than Jonathan Safran Foer: "What kind of genius is Rosamond Purcell? Is she an artist? A scholar? A documentarian? A living cabinet of wonders? Her originality defies category, as does her newest triumph, Egg & Nest. Crack its shell."

Image: Tippi Hedren & Co. make a run for it in a still from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). 

Ten books to survive the meltdown

Once you're done crying into your beer over the nation's increasingly worsening financial prospects, take a moment to pick up one of our 10 Books to Survive the Meltdown, which range from the literal (Surviving Large Losses: Financial Crises, the Middle Class, and the Development of Capital Markets) to the utopian (Hardt and Negri's Empire--more coverage of Negri on the blog here and here, BTW), to the contemplative (sparkling new edition of Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy--never hurts to take the long view, I mean at least you're not awaiting execution in a dank prison cell in Padua on largely spurious charges...). So whatever your cast of mind, we've got something for you, reader. And when you're done, put it somewhere safe, like the mattress.