University of Minnesota Press

10/30/2024

New journal issue: Future Anterior Journal 19.2, now available on Project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/53579

10/30/2024

To celebrate 10 years of publication, Verge is sponsoring a cover art contest. As our regular readers know, the journal is known for its striking cover designs. We invite artists to submit their work and the winning image will be showcased on the cover of issue 13.1, our next open issue!
All submissions should be sent to [email protected] by Monday, February 17, 2025.

10/29/2024

What is “planetary thinking” today? Arguing that a new approach is urgently needed, Yuk Hui develops a future-oriented mode of political thought that encompasses the unprecedented global challenges we are confronting: the rise of artificial intelligence, the ecological crisis, and intensifying geopolitical conflicts.

Out today: MACHINE AND SOVEREIGNTY by Yuk Hui.

This book is available for purchase; or can be read free online on Manifold: z.umn.edu/hui-ms-m

10/22/2024

Four beautiful releases today!

-Kree: A Post-Exotic Novel by Manuela Draeger (trans. by Lia Mitchell). "A dark, mind-bending novel about what humanity is left with once they have nothing to remember or to fight for." — Reviews

-Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood by Anna Farro Henderson. "Ought to be required reading for anyone interested in a career in the sciences." —Elizabeth Rush

-Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll. Reveals the alt-right's project to claim science fiction and by extension, the future. (Open access edition available on manifold.umn.edu)

-Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life by Imre Szeman. Explores eco-stories by key players intent on shaping energy transition and their vision of a renewable society. (Open access edition available on manifold.umn.edu)

10/16/2024

😍😍😍

10/15/2024

For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects imagined the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the UN's iconic New York City headquarters, these architects experimented with room layouts, media tech, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers, to create a new type of public space: the global interior.

Assembly by Design by Olga Touloumi, which releases today, offers new information about the political and aesthetic decisions and looks back at a moment of hope, when politicians, architects, and diplomats worked together to deliver platforms for global democracy and governance.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517913335/assembly-by-design/

10/09/2024

Author Anna Farro Henderson appearing on MPR News's Climate Cast:

Climate scientist Anna Farro Henderson talks about balancing a career in politics, climate science with motherhood, a subject she explores in her new book “Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood.”

10/08/2024

🎧 New podcast episode: Adair Rounthwaite talks with Mechtild Widrich about art and public space in socialist Zagreb, and the place of the Group of Six Authors in global art history: https://share.transistor.fm/s/c846a055

10/03/2024

Galleys in the house, author in the house! We're so thrilled at the forthcoming publication of Peter Geye's A LESSER LIGHT (April 2025), set on the brooding and beautiful rocky shores of Lake Superior, a novel about industry and calamity, science vs. superstition, patriarchy's corrosive power, and the consequences of these forces colliding in the wilderness of rapid social change.

***

"Reading this book felt like watching some rare celestial event: sky-big, beautiful and strangely tender, and full of a kind of magic at the edge of things that’s impossible to describe and changes you forever to witness." —Amber Sparks

"I will never forget this achingly beautiful story with its prose that sings through the soul." —Carol Dunbar

"A great feat of literary imagination." — Charles Baxter

"Kept me gasping at the turn of every page." — Carolyn Holbrook

***

Thanks Peter Geye for stopping by!

If you are a reviewer interested in a galley, please contact [email protected].

10/03/2024

10/02/2024

I Know You Are, but What Am I? explores the cultural legacy of Pee-wee Herman, the cult television star of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

This children’s show—that was also for adults—ran on network TV from 1986 to 1990 and starred comedian Paul Reubens as Herman, a q***r man-boy whose playhouse, the set for the show, was tricked out with a profusion of animate computational toys and technologies.

In this 2024 book from University of Minnesota Press, Cait McKinney shows how three defining scenes from the show inform, and even foretell and challenge, our present moment: the playhouse as an alternative precursor to networked smart homes that foregrounds caring and ethical relationships between humans and technologies; a reparative retelling of Reubens’s career-wrecking 1991 arrest for indecent exposure inside a Florida adult film theater as part of an AIDS-phobic, antigay sting operation; and worn-out, Talking Pee-wee dolls and their broken afterlives on eBay and YouTube.

McKinney looks at how q***r people who were children in the 1980s remember and relate to Pee-wee now, showing that the moral panic about sexuality, gender, and children from the past can help us refute anti-trans and anti-q***r political movements organized today.

and explore all of this press's Forerunner series (bit.ly/4eC3S3N)
along with this particular book in it here: https://bit.ly/PeeWeeMInn

10/02/2024

"There were lots of complaints about what postcards were going to do to people's reading and writing skills, because if you could just dash off a few lines, why did you need to actually learn grammar and become a good writer?" Monica Cure (Picturing the Postcard) appearing in BBC:

In the age of social media, we're living through a communications revolution. But this isn't the first one, nor is it the first time cats have been at the centre of social change.

10/01/2024

Fiction, Medieval Studies, essays—fantastic new books dropping today!

-Mysterious Tales of Old St. Paul: Larry Millett visits the early exploits of the indefatigable St. Paul detective Shadwell Rafferty in three novellas.

"Violent, intriguing, mysterious, old St. Paul comes alive in Larry Millett’s stories as only a former street reporter could make it happen"
— John Sandford

-Instrumentality: On Technical Objects and Orientations in the Later Middle Ages by J. Allan Mitchell. Exploring attitudes toward physical gadgets, diagrams, concepts, methods, and disciplines, from medieval to modern.

"A fascinating exploration of the ornate interfaces—measuring devices, geometric diagrams, the arts and sciences—between humans and their objects."
—Matthew Boyd Goldie

-Now in Paperback: Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead. A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world.

"Thrillingly cerebral ... delivered with virtuoso aplomb."
—The New York Times

09/26/2024

Very excited about this week's release of Trans Philosophy, featuring a range of contributors, edited by Perry Zurn Andrea Pitts Talia Mae Bettcher PJ DiPietro.
🎧 Listen to all four editors in conversation on our podcast!
https://share.transistor.fm/s/d42f63ef

Establishing trans philosophy as a unique field of inquiry, offering tools for our quest toward a more just and equitable worldTrans Philosophy defines this ...

09/24/2024

09/19/2024

New release: Adam R. Rosenthal's PROSTHETIC IMMORTALITIES: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life, part of our Posthumanities series, examines the links between today’s ideas of radical life extension and age-old notions of immortality.

"Rigorous, compelling, and beautifully written, Prosthetic Immortalities is at the vanguard of the new wave in Derrida studies." —Nicole Anderson, founding editor, Derrida Today

"Puts the search for immortality into a context that's both new and timeless." — InsideHook

09/17/2024

🎧: A new podcast episode with Minnesota's first woman lieutenant governor Marlene Johnson with Lori Sturdevant and Elisabeth Griffith talking equal rights, social and political history, aging, and more: https://share.transistor.fm/s/e4b9a6d0

Marlene will be on tour for her new memoir RISE TO THE CHALLENGE in the coming weeks, with stops at Zenith Bookstore Scout & Morgan Books Fergus Falls Public Library Words to Live By Content Bookstore Washington County Historical Society Politics and Prose Bookstore Next Chapter Booksellers Fayetteville Public Library—see image here for dates and check with hosts for more details.