Books

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for ashort fiction, John Wideman has compiled an anthology featuring stories from each of the past winners.

Shara McCallum is on of the most compelling voices in American poetry. In her second collection Song of Thieves she artfully draws from the language and imagery of her Caribbean background to play a haunting and soulful tune.

Spring Training is a look back at the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 1988 spring training season in Bradenton, Florida that reveals how the fundamentals of baseball are taught and learned. The author has added a new introduction and postscript, which includes a lengthy interview with manager Jim Leyland about the lessons that can be learned from losing.

A unique sequence of narrative poems focusing on Galileo’s life, relationships, and work. George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written.

A fully bilingual anthology featuring the work of eleven women poets not yet fully established—by choice or because of youth—within Mexican literary hierarchies.

Awarded the 2004 Eugene M. Kayden National Translation Award from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Curative Powers combines post-colonial theory with ethnographic research to reconstruct how the Soviet government used medicine and public health policy to transform the society, politics, and culture of its outlying regions, specifically Kazakhstan.

Winner of the 2003 Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

Charles McCormick’s extensively researched work describes the formative period of federal domestic spying in the Pittsburgh region. He utilizes case files from various federal intelligence agencies to add to our understanding of the security state, cold war ideology, labor and immigration history, and the rise of the authoritarian American Left, as well as the career paths of figures as diverse as J. Edgar Hoover and William Z. Foster.

Samuel Rosenberg was an influential Pittsburgh-based painter and art instructor. In this biography Barbara Jones tells the story of his life, accompanied by almost ninety reproductions of the artist’s work.

A powerful collection that doesn’t shirk from showing pain that includes thirteen new poems along with selections from her four previous volumes of poetry.

Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry

“To Hell with Paradise” illustrates the problems of founding a tourist industry for a European or U.S. clientele in a society where the mass of the population is poor, black, and with a historical experience of slavery and colonialism. It combines political and cultural history to reveal how Jamaica transformed itself in the nineteenth century from a pestilence-ridden “white man’s graveyard” to a sun-drenched tourist paradise.

Mariolina Salvatori presents an anthology of documents that examine the evolution of American education in the nineteenth century and meaning of the word pedagogy.

Past winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, this long-time author from Black Sparrow Press is known for her fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.

Winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Rick Moody, this collection contains vignettes about people struggling with the cascading effects of seemingly inconsequential mistakes.

An impressive account of the 1755 battle between British forces led by General Edward Braddock and the victorious French and Indian fighters stationed at Fort Duquesne.

Whether cataloging her flower garden or worrying about her son, admiring a trio of aged aunts or recovering from an argument with her husband, the narrator in these beautifully lyric poems deftly explores imagination, relationships, and the unlived possibilities in our own lives. Like the currents of time that pull us inexorably into the future, Sandra Kohler leads us through The Ceremonies of Longing, illuminating the magic that inhabits daily life and ordinary dreams.