Books published by publisher Univ of Minnesota Pr

In Snippy and Snappy, we are introduced to brother and sister field mice living with their mother and father in a cozy nook in a hay field. Their father enthralls them with stories about gardens in big fields, houses in big gardens, kitchen cupboards in big houses, and big yellow cheeses in big kitchen cupboards.One day Snippy and Snappy wander away from home while playing with their mother's yarn ball. Their journey takes them to a large house full of mysterious things, including cupboards full of wonderful-smelling cheese. Just as Snappy is about to nibble a piece of cheese in a mousetrap, their father jumps down to rescue them and lead them safely back home. Gag's delightfully detailed illustrations capture the coziness, wonder, and playfulness of Snippy and Snappy's adventures.

The Funny Thing is Gág's follow-up to her well-loved first book, Millions of Cats. It tells the story of a curious dragon-like "aminal" that eats children's dolls. A kindly old man named Bobo cannot stand by and allow the Funny Thing to steal dolls from children. He entices it to eat "jum-jills," a concoction he makes up from seven nut cakes, five seed puddings, two cabbage salads, and fifteen little cheeses, all rolled into little balls. A happy ending is assured when the Funny Thing discovers he loves jum-jills and is convinced that they will make his tail grow longer and his blue points grow more beautiful. He returns each day for the treats and never eats another doll.Best known for her Newbery Honor winner, Millions of Cats, Wanda Gág (1893-1946) was a pioneer in children's book writing and illustration. Her ground-breaking technique of integrating illustrations with the text is evident in all of her classic books. Born in New Ulm, Minnesota, she rose from poverty to international acclaim as a children's book author, artist, and illustrator. In recognition of her artistry, she was posthumously awarded the 1958 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Millions of Cats and the 1977 Kerlan Award for her body of work.

In its first modern translation, a novel-cum-memoir of a Frenchman’s erotic awakening in Italy by a preeminent writer of the Romantic period In 1812 Alphonse de Lamartine, a young man of means, traveled through southern Italy, where, during a sojourn in Naples, he fell in love with a young woman who worked in a cigar factory—and whose death after he returned to France would haunt him throughout his writing life. Graziella, Lamartine called this lost girl in his poetry and memoirs—and also in Graziella, a novel that closely follows the story of his own romance.“When I was eighteen,” the narrator begins, as if penning his memoir, “my family entrusted me to the care of a relative whose business affairs called her to Tuscany.” The tale that unfolds, of the young man’s amorous experiences amid the natural grandeur and subtle splendors of the Italian countryside, is one of the finest works of fiction in the French Romantic tradition, a bildungsroman that is also a melancholy portrait of the artist as a young man discovering the muse who would both inspire and elude him.Remarkable for its contemplative prose, its dreamy passions and seductive drawing of the Italian landscape, and its place in the Romantic canon, Graziella is a timeless portrait of love, chronicling the remorse and the misguided ideals of youth that find their expression, if not their amends, in art.

Breathtaking swordplay and nostalgic love, Peking opera and Chow Yun-fat's cult followers -- these are some of the elements of the vivid and diverse urban imagination that find form and expression in the thriving Hong Kong cinema. All receive their due in At Full Speed, a volume that captures the remarkable range and energy of a cinema that borrows, invents, and reinvents across the boundaries of time, culture, and conventions.At Full Speed gathers film scholars and critics from around the globe to convey the transnational, multilayered character that Hong Kong films acquire and impart as they circulate worldwide. These writers scrutinize the films they find captivating: from the lesser known works of Law Man and Yuen Woo Ping to such film festival notables as Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-wai, and from the commercial action, romance, and comedy genres of Jackie Chan, Peter Chan, Steven Chiau, Tsui Hark, John Woo, and Derek Yee to the attempted departures of Evans Chan, Ann Hui, and Clara Law.In this cinema the contributors identify an aesthetics of action, gender-flexible melodramatic excesses, objects of nostalgia, and globally projected local history and identities, as well as an active critical film community. Their work, the most incisive account ever given of one of the world's largest film industries, brings the pleasures and idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong cinema into clear close-up focus even as it enlarges on the relationships between art and the market, cultural theory and the movies.

Inspired by tales of the hero Vilmund Vidutan and his fellow knights, Sigurd Jonsson and his young friends Ivar and Helge set out to reenact these exploits on their medieval Norwegian farm. They carve swords and lances and spend hours making shields. With a little imagination, a pasture becomes a battlefield, an old boar their greatest foe, and they pass many hours jousting and dueling. But when the summer is nearly over, the three boys stumble into real trouble and must prove their courage in an adventure all their own.Written during Sigrid Undset’s time in New York, Sigurd and His Brave Companions will make medieval Norway come alive for young and old readers alike.

A pajama party at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport inadvertently helped launch R.T. Rybak’s political career (imagine a rumba line one hundred protesters long chanting, “We deserve to sleep, hey!”), but his earliest lessons in leadership occurred during his childhood. Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood, attending private school with students who had much more than he did, spending evenings at his family’s store in an area where people lived with much less, he witnessed firsthand the opportunity and injustice of the city he called home. In a memoir that is at once a political coming-of-age story and a behind-the-scenes look at the running of a great city, the three-term mayor takes readers into the highs and lows and the daily drama of a life inextricably linked with Minneapolis over the past fifty years. With refreshing candor and insight, Rybak describes his path through journalism, marketing, and community activism that led to his unlikely (to him, at least) primary election—on September 11, 2001. His personal account of the challenges and crises confronting the city over twelve years, including the tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge, the rising scourge of youth violence, and the bruising fight over a ban on gay marriage (with Rybak himself conducting the first such ceremony at City Hall on August 1, 2013), is also an illuminating, often funny depiction of learning the workings of the job, frequently on the fly, while trying to keep up with his most important constituency, his family. As bracing as the “fresh air” campaign that swept him into office, Rybak’s memoir is that rare document from a politician: one more concerned with the people he served and the issues of his time than with burnishing his own credentials. As such, it reflects what leadership truly looks like.

Beatrice Ojakangas, the oldest of ten children, came by it naturally—the cooking but also the pluck and perseverance that she's served up with her renowned Scandinavian dishes over the years. In the wake of the Moose Lake fires and famine of 1918, Ojakangas tells us in this delightful memoir-cum-cookbook, her grandfather sent for a Finnish mail-order bride—and got one who’d trained as a chef. Ojakangas’s stories, are, unsurprisingly, steeped in food lore: tales of cardamom and rye, baking salt cake at the age of five on a wood-burning stove, growing up on venison, making egg rolls for Chun King, and sending off a Pillsbury Bake Off–winning recipe without ever making it. And from here, how those early roots flourished through hard work and dedication to a successful (but never easy) career in food writing and a much wider world, from working for pizza roll king Jeno Paulucci to researching food traditions in Finland and appearing with Julia Child and Martha Stewart—all without ever leaving behind the lessons learned on the farm. As she says, “first you have to start with good ingredients and a good idea.”Chock-full of recipes, anecdotes, and a kind humor that bring to vivid life the Finnish culture of northern Minnesota as well as the wider culinary world, Homemade delivers the savory and the sweet in equal measures and casts a warm light on a rich slice of the country’s cooking heritage.

Gone Is Gone addresses an age-old question between couples-who works harder? This long-out-of-print children's book is based on a charming Bohemian tale recited to Wanda Gág when she was a child, and is now once again available to enchant audiences of all ages. The tale's sly peasant humor and conversational style combined with Gág's expressive black-and-white illustrations made the book an instant classic. In this delightful story we meet Fritzl, who lives on a farm with his wife Liesi and their baby. Fritzl works hard in the fields every day. Liesi works hard all day, too, but Fritzl somehow feels that he works harder. When he complains about how hard he works and how easy Liesi has it, doing nothing but "putter and potter about the house a bit," Liesi calls his bluff and suggests they trade places.The hilarious outcomes of Fritzl's calamitous day at home are portrayed in Gág's singular illustrations. In the end Fritzl admits that Liesi's work is "none too easy" and begs to return to his fields and not do housework another day. "Well then," says Liesi, "if that's how it is, we surely can live in peace and happiness for ever and ever."Best known for her Newbery Honor winner Millions of Cats, Wanda Gág (1893-1946) was a pioneer in children's book writing and illustration. Her groundbreaking technique of integrating illustrations with the text is evident in all of her classic books. Born in New Ulm, Minnesota, she rose to international acclaim as a children's book author, artist, and illustrator. In recognition of her artistry, she was posthumously awarded the 1958 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Millions of Cats and the 1977 Kerlan Award for her body of work.

Based on actual events from 1989 in International Falls, Minnesota, Riot tells the story of sixth-grader Bryan, whose family becomes stressed when nonunion labor “rats” are hired by the local paper mill, leaving his father, a union worker, angry and out of a job. Tension erupts into daily fights at school and nightly acts of vandalism with no solution in sight. Already torn between his parents’ opposing viewpoints on how to handle the escalating situation, Bryan’s growing feelings for the daughter of a nonunion worker only complicate matters.Bryan tries to understand the turmoil affecting his home and his town, but it is becomes harder and harder to separate his friends from his enemies. And when he witnesses a violent act that implicates his father, he must wrestle with family loyalty and telling the truth.

Dominant history would have us believe that colonialism belongs to a previous era that has long come to an end. But as Native people become mobile, reservation lands become overcrowded and the state seeks to enforce means of containment, closing its borders to incoming, often indigenous, immigrants.In Mark My Words, Mishuana Goeman traces settler colonialism as an enduring form of gendered spatial violence, demonstrating how it persists in the contemporary context of neoliberal globalization. The book argues that it is vital to refocus the efforts of Native nations beyond replicating settler models of territory, jurisdiction, and race. Through an examination of twentieth-century Native women’s poetry and prose, Goeman illuminates how these works can serve to remap settler geographies and center Native knowledges. She positions Native women as pivotal to how our nations, both tribal and nontribal, have been imagined and mapped, and how these women play an ongoing role in decolonization.In a strong and lucid voice, Goeman provides close readings of literary texts, including those of E. Pauline Johnson, Esther Belin, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Heid Erdrich. In addition, she places these works in the framework of U.S. and Canadian Indian law and policy. Her charting of women’s struggles to define themselves and their communities reveals the significant power in all of our stories.

Deaf people are usually regarded by the hearing world as having a lack, as missing a sense. Yet a definition of deaf people based on hearing loss obscures a wealth of ways in which societies have benefited from the significant contributions of deaf people. In this bold intervention into ongoing debates about disability and what it means to be human, experts from a variety of disciplines—neuroscience, linguistics, bioethics, history, cultural studies, education, public policy, art, and architecture—advance the concept of Deaf Gain and challenge assumptions about what is normal.Through their in-depth articulation of Deaf Gain, the editors and authors of this pathbreaking volume approach deafness as a distinct way of being in the world, one which opens up perceptions, perspectives, and insights that are less common to the majority of hearing persons. For example, deaf individuals tend to have unique capabilities in spatial and facial recognition, peripheral processing, and the detection of images. And users of sign language, which neuroscientists have shown to be biologically equivalent to speech, contribute toward a robust range of creative expression and understanding. By framing deafness in terms of its intellectual, creative, and cultural benefits, Deaf Gain recognizes physical and cognitive difference as a vital aspect of human diversity.Contributors: David Armstrong; Benjamin Bahan, Gallaudet U; Hansel Bauman, Gallaudet U; John D. Bonvillian, U of Virginia; Alison Bryan; Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Gallaudet U; Cindee Calton; Debra Cole; Matthew Dye, U of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; Steve Emery; Ofelia García, CUNY; Peter C. Hauser, Rochester Institute of Technology; Geo Kartheiser; Caroline Kobek Pezzarossi; Christopher Krentz, U of Virginia; Annelies Kusters; Irene W. Leigh, Gallaudet U; Elizabeth M. Lockwood, U of Arizona; Summer Loeffler; Mara Lúcia Massuti, Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil; Donna A. Morere, Gallaudet U; Kati Morton; Ronice Müller de Quadros, U Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil; Donna Jo Napoli, Swarthmore College; Jennifer Nelson, Gallaudet U; Laura-Ann Petitto, Gallaudet U; Suvi Pylvänen, Kymenlaakso U of Applied Sciences; Antti Raike, Aalto U; Päivi Rainò, U of Applied Sciences Humak; Katherine D. Rogers; Clara Sherley-Appel; Kristin Snoddon, U of Alberta; Karin Strobel, U Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil; Hilary Sutherland; Rachel Sutton-Spence, U of Bristol, England; James Tabery, U of Utah; Jennifer Grinder Witteborg; Mark Zaurov.

According to thirteen-year-old Ben Ward’s father, lumberjacks look forward to two things: mealtime and springtime. In the winter of 1898, Ben leaves school for a job as a cook’s assistant to his father at the Blackwater Logging Camp. As Ben spends long hours peeling potatoes and frying flapjacks, he dreams of working in the woods with the other men, felling trees, driving a team, and skidding timber. While enduring a long, cold winter in a camp filled with outlandish characters, as well as an orphan boy named Nevers, Ben comes to understand himself and his family’s past. Peppered throughout with heart and humor—and including a glossary and afterword with facts about logging—Blackwater Ben paints a vivid picture of the north woods of Minnesota at the end of the nineteenth century.