Comics Day at UPM

The latest issue of ImageText:Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is available online now and features reviews of four UPM titles. ImageText is published by the English Department at the University of Florida and is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of comics and related media. The journal is peer-reviewed, open access and content is available free of charge.

A wide swath of the UPM comics repository is represented in the most recent issue of the journal. Featuring is a volume from our Conversations with Comics Artists series, an edited essay collection, a title from our Great Comics Artists series, and a work appearing in English for the first time. 

The titles included are, Art Spiegelman: Conversations, Comics as Philosophy, Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, and Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books

Of Comics and Men was described by the reviewer as "an important clearinghouse of information that will be very useful for other scholars who want to use comic books to address questions of cultural history."

Art Spiegelman: Conversations is said to have an expertly written intoduction and will provide "a valuable resource for those studying (and perhaps even teaching) Maus, comics history and theory, and cultural responses to 9/11."

All of the reviews can be found in full online. And all titles are available from UPM.  

New Book and Excerpt: Buryin' Daddy

A descendant of Lebanese Catholic immigrants on her father’s side and Baptist sharecroppers on her mother’s, Teresa Nicholas endured a southern upbringing with an unusual inflection . In her memoir, Buryin’ Daddy: Putting My Lebanese, Catholic, Southern Baptist Childhood to Rest, the author recalls her charmed early childhood in the late 1950s, when she and her family live with her grandparents in a graceful old bungalow in Yazoo City, Mississippi.

But when the author is five, her eccentric father—secretive, penurious, autocratic, hoarding—moves his growing family into a condemned duplex nearby. Separated from her beloved grandmother and chafing under her father’s erratic discipline, the girl longs to flee from the awful decrepit house. When she’s a teenager, she and her father find themselves on conflicting sides of the civil rights movement and their arguments grow more painful, until a scholarship to a northeastern college provides the means of her escape. She finally leaves Mississippi when she is awarded a scholarship to Swarthmore College. 

The heart of the narrative picks up nearly two decades later where Nicholas has built a successful career in book publishing in New York. When her father suddenly dies, she returns for the funeral and spends a month in the hated duplex, ostensibly to help her mother adjust to life without a domineering husband. As she learns more about her father, though, she comes to understand that he was a far more complex figure than the rigid personality she thought she knew. Drawing closer to her mother, who is affected by stroke but full of blunt country talk, she sees that her mother is also far from the naïve, helpless creature she had imagined. 

Through a series of surprising, poignant, and obliquely humorous discoveries, the author and her mother uncover her father’s secrets, in all their complicated humanity. Graced with a palpable sense of time and place and filled with memorable characters, Buryin’ Daddy will appeal to readers who will find both the familiar and the unexpected in its vividly textured pages.

Read an excerpt from Buryin' Daddy posted by the SOL Literary Magazine.   

Buryin' Daddy is now available from UPM. For news and updates visit the author's website.

New Book: Louisiana Rambles

UPM's Louisiana travel expert-in-residence Ian McNulty is back this month with a new book. Louisiana Rambles: Exploring America's Cajun and Creole Heartland is an experiential travel narrative and guide to south Louisiana.

McNulty (A Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina) takes readers along on this quest to get to the essence of what makes south Louisiana so captivating, so unique and such a place apart from the rest of the South, from America and from anywhere else in the world.

 

After Hurricane Katrina, McNulty set out on a series of daytrips to delve into the area's diverse cultural landscapes. He explored communities staked up and down the Mississippi River, nestled into the teeming bayous, braced along the edge of the Gulf, and planted out on the golden prairie stretching to the west.

Richly evocative, this book brings readers to the Louisiana of zydeco dancehalls pulsing in the country darkness, of crawfish “boiling points” and traditional country smokehouses, of Cajun jam sessions where even wallflowers are compelled to dance and of fishing trips where anyone can bring home a whopper.

Louisiana Rambles includes an extensive, chapter-by-chapter appendix of travel tips and notes from the road (or the bayou) to help readers embark on their own rambles and get the most out of a trip around south Louisiana.

See excerpts, photos and read the Louisiana travel blog at www.LouisianaRambles.com.

March Events at UPM

Mark your calendar for UPM author events this month.

Friday, March 18, 4 - 6 p.m.

Michael B. Ballard will talk about and sign Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles at Lorelei Books in Vicksburg, MS.

Saturday, March 19, 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.

Michael B. Ballard will talk about and sign The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles at Vicksburg National Military Park.

Thursday, March 24, 7 p.m.

Araminta Stone Johnston will talk about and sign And One Was a Priest: The Life and Times of Duncan M. Gray Jr. at Park Road Books in Charlotte, NC.

 Tuesday, March 29, 5-6 p.m.

Teresa Nicholas will talk about and sign Buryin’ Daddy: Putting My Lebanese, Catholic, Southern Baptist Childhood to Rest at Lemuria Books in Jackson, MS.

Wednesday, March 30, noon

Teresa Nicholas will talk about and sign Buryin’ Daddy: Putting My Lebanese, Catholic, Southern Baptist Childhood to Rest at “History is Lunch” at the Winter Archives Building in Jackson.