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Are you ready to set up your reading list for the summer? To help, the University of Michigan Press has chosen to highlight some of our newest and upcoming books for you to enjoy in the break between semesters.

Don’t forget to take advantage of our spring sale by using the discount code SPRING25 at checkout! This year we’re excited to offer 50% off our entire list of titles during our sale (May 1st to May 31st). In addition, select books are available for just $10 through our spring fire sale.

Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone by Betsy Small

This personal memoir captures daily life in Sierra Leone, a life Betsy Small first encountered as a Peace Corps worker between 1984–1987, and then rediscovered when she returned decades later with her daughter. Betsy is traveling for author events, so take a look at her event schedule to see if she will be nearby!

“Betsy Small’s beautiful writing transports you straight to the sights, sounds, and smells of Tokpombu, and immediately brought me back to my years in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. Before Before is a vivid account of what we all learn intimately as volunteers: we set out to share and teach, but return as the ones truly taught.”
—Joseph P Kennedy III, Peace Corps Dominican Republic 2004–2006; former US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs

A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen by Malinda Russell

As featured by NPR's Morning Edition and Southern Living, A Domestic Cook Book is the oldest known cookbook written by an African American woman. It contains 260 recipes and household tips that draw from Malinda Russell’s twenty years of experience cooking in Southern kitchens, her boarding house, and her pastry shop, and showcase her skills as a pastry chef. Originally published in Michigan in 1866, this new edition includes a foreword by scholar Rafia Zafar as well as an introduction by the late food historian Janice Bluestein Longone that contextualize Russell’s cookbook.

“Thanks to Longone, we know Malinda Russell and her incredible cookbook, which illustrates the tenacity and contributions of Black women to a vast well of cultural and socio-economic wisdom. Russell’s book shows how African Americans have turned lemons into not just lemonade, but many life-sustaining, delectable nourishments.”
—Sakina M. Hughes, Santa Clara University

Hurt, Baby, Hurt by William Walter Scott, III

Written by the man widely recognized as the person who started the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, Hurt, Baby, Hurt is a memoir that tells Scott’s life from his birth to the immediate aftermath of the Rebellion. Now with a new foreword by Austin McCoy that considers the lasting impact of the rebellion, this book offers valuable insight into an important part of Detroit history.

“Of all the accounts I’ve read or heard about the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, I can’t think of another that is more visually or emotionally rich, or that better explains the days before and after the city exploded. . . . This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the Detroit Rebellion, or the fiery connection between inequality and discontent, especially among young people.”
—Stephen Henderson, Detroit journalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary

Up North in Michigan: A Portrait of Place in Four Seasons by Jerry Dennis

Starting in June, Up North in Michigan is available in a paperback edition that contains a new chapter. The collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars.

“No contemporary writer of nonfiction portrays as much depth of knowledge about and experience with natural Michigan as Dennis does. None establishes such a sense of place. None with such eloquence. And ardor. Careful readers will harvest as many literary fruits as they do field guide-type nuggets of factual information from Up North. It's easy to get lost in the brief, welcoming essays as the writing unspools itself with grace right before your eyes." —The Upland Almanac

Teamsters Metropolis by Ryan Patrick Murphy (Forthcoming in July)

Are you interested in the history of unions? Or maybe Jimmy Hoffa? Teamsters Metropolis tells of the unruly organizing, illicit business techniques, and dissident cultural practices that appealed to prospective members and offered an opportunity to circumvent some of the suburban regulations, helping the International Brotherhood of Teamsters become the largest U.S. union of the mid-twentieth century.

“Teamsters Metropolis is a shaken, not stirred, history of labor, queerness, suburbia, gender, federal policy, consumerism and organized crime. Murphy has taken what we thought we knew about Teamsters unionism, and revealed entirely new layers of unruly contradictions. For all who seek a fuller understanding of labor’s past and present, this is required reading.”
—Lane Windham, author of Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide

Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century By Matthew Benjamin Cole (Forthcoming in August)

Have you read dystopian fiction by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell? With detailed case studies of key thinkers from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century, Fear the Future synthesizes secondary literature and research from a range of disciplinary areas, including in political theory, intellectual history, literary studies, and utopian studies. This wide-ranging reconstruction shows that while dystopian thinking has illustrated the dangers of domination and dehumanization, it has also illuminated new possibilities for freedom.

“The growing convergence of so many of these nightmares of future and not-so-distant evils and the constant vying of the imaginary with the real for terroristic primacy makes for grim and compelling reading. We have been warned . . . so often.”
—Gregory Claeys, University of London

The Imaginary Present: Essays in Quantum Poetics by Amy Catanzano

Award-winning poet and professor Amy Catanzano explores cutting-edge scientific fields such as particle physics and astrophysics, and branches of physics such as quantum theory and relativity, through a poetic vision equally loyal to the imagination and rationality. In searching for the groundbreaking ways that artists and scientists can collaborate, The Imaginary Present offers readers a fascinating adventure through poetry and science.

“Amy Catanzano brings the seemingly disparate worlds of poetry and quantum physics together in a uniquely creative way by fully embracing and exploring the core principles of both realms. She challenges the ways we think about and implement each one, providing a deeper appreciation for both and for how connected they are.” —Mark Kruse, Department of Physics, Duke University

Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture by Jason Schneiderman

Do you wonder how the age of the internet has changed your attention span or creative writing? Nothingism grapples with the way that digital culture has begun to reshape America’s poetry landscape, examining this profound shift in the way that poetry is written, read, and taught.

“Beginning with a playful manifesto and ending with a meditation on friendship, Jason Schneiderman’s Nothingism is no ordinary collection of essays ‘about poetry.’ What I love most about this book is how frequently Schneiderman brings forward a personal perspective, moments from the author’s life, imbuing the writing’s rigor and insight with a distinct and human presence. These are wonderful essays: charming, rigorous, and alive.”
—Matthew S. Olzmann, author of Constellation Route

Radical Poetics: Essays on Literature & Culture by Khadijah Queen

In the tradition of Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and many other Black writers and theorists, poet and professor Khadijah Queen observes questions of life and literature, human feeling and behavior, and explores language-based solutions to common cultural conflicts that are often rooted in harmful assumptions. Radical Poetics makes a case for the practical value of understanding poetics beyond artistic and academic spaces and into everyday life.

"This piquant treatise from poet Queen (Anodyne) makes the case for adopting a method of literary analysis she calls 'radical poetics,' which 'urges the mind toward truth via feeling.'. . . English students and scholars will find plenty of food for thought."
—Publishers Weekly

Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized by Shiri Noy

“I wish I had this book earlier in my own career” and “this is the book I have been looking for the past twenty years I have been doing research,” wrote Professors Kristin Luker and Elaine Howard Ecklund. Get this step-by-step guide to choosing tools and developing a personalized system to help you manage and organize your research! Adaptable for those working alone, with others, or as team managers, Project Management for Researchers will guide readers between various research stages–from planning, to execution, to adjustment of research projects big and small.