Books Division

University of Minnesota Press publishes a wide variety of trade, regional, and scholarly books in various subject areas. Browse our special theme, search books by series, explore our new releases, or check out our upcoming events, and subject catalogs.

Series lander

Learning tools and syllabus suggestions 

 

NEW NONFICTION

  • Raising Ollie
  • We Are Meant to Rise
  • How the “bad feelings” of trans experience inform trans survival and flourishing
  • Opioid Reckoning
  • An intensely moving and revelatory memoir of enduring and emerging from exceptional grief

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

  • How Black women’s reproduction became integral to white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy—and remains key to their dismantling
  • This surprising examination uncovers the eugenic impulse in a nation’s desire for “founding mothers”
  • Native women and women of color poignantly share their pain, revelations, and hope after experiencing the traumas of miscarriage and infant loss
  • How the politics of “medical necessity” complicates American health care
  • Describing and assessing feminist inroads into the state

PRIDE MONTH READS

  • Forty-four years after two men married in a legal ceremony in Minnesota, the Supreme Court has decided the question first raised by these gay pioneers
  • The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man—available for the first time in the United States
  • A groundbreaking new history of urban cruising through the lenses of urban poets
  • Delves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive
  • An updated edition of this measured, practical, and timely guide to LGBT rights and issues for educators and school officials

TRANS STORIES

  • How the “bad feelings” of trans experience inform trans survival and flourishing
  • A radical and necessary rethinking of trans care
  • A groundbreaking twentieth-century history of transgender children
  • Uncovering the overlapping histories of blackness and trans identity from the nineteenth century to the present day
  • Daring new theories of masculinity, built from a large and geographically diverse interview study of transgender men

RECENT AWARD WINNERS

  • A sixty-year history of Afro–South Asian musical collaborations
  • The preoccupation with “depth” and its relevance to cinema and media studies
  • An in-depth look at Black food and the challenges it faces today
  • Award-winning author Kao Kalia Yang delivers an inspiring tale of resourceful children confronting adversaries in a refugee camp
  • An in-depth account of the life and career of Minnesota’s first modern architect

 

LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

  • A masterpiece of nineteenth-century literature in a fresh translation that fully captures the language, psychology, and social reach of Stendhal’s original
  • Lost Illusions
  • A philosopher and former racing cyclist examines how competitive riders lose their sense of self as they pursue perfect motion and mastery over pain
  • The second volume in the Nobel Prize–winning writer’s epic of medieval Norway, finely capturing Undset’s fluid, natural style in a new English translation, the first in nearly a century
  • A harrowing early novel by one of France’s most unusual contemporary writers

 

FORTHCOMING NONFICTION

  • A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world
  • Uncovering the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppression
  • The son of a Black mother and white father overcomes family trauma to find the courage of compassion in veterinary practice
  • An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations
  • An extraordinary illustrated biography of a Métis man and Anishinaabe woman navigating great changes in their homeland along the U.S.–Canada border in the early twentieth century

NONFICTION SUMMER RELEASES

  • One woman’s enlightening trek through the natural histories, cultural stories, and present perils of thirteen national monuments, from Maine to Hawaii
  • The story of starting and running an organic farm—told by the woman who owned one of the first Community Supported Agriculture operations in the Upper Midwest
  • Part memoir, part cultural history, these memories of seven aunts holding home and family together tell a crucial, often overlooked story of women of the twentieth century
  • The complex and dramatic history of an illegal teachers’ strike that forever altered labor relations and Minnesota politics
  • A walking journey through France’s vast interior becomes a meditation on both personal recovery and the role of history in the present—more than 425,000 copies sold in France

 

COOKBOOKS

  • The Perennial Kitchen
  • The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen
  • The Soup and Bread Cookbook
  • The Steger Homestead Kitchen
  • 500 casseroles for every occasion—sweet and savory, hearty and light, homey and festive—from beloved James Beard Cookbook Hall of Famer Beatrice Ojakangas

 

INDIGENOUS STORIES, CULTURE, THEORY

  • Noopiming (cover)
  • More than two dozen essays of Indigenous resistance to the privatization and allotment of Indigenous lands
  • The vital role of dance in enacting the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples
  • A cultural history of Sápmi and the Nordic countries as told through objects and artifacts
  • A collective memoir in poetry of an Ojibwe family and tribal community, from creation myth to this day, updated with new poems

 

ENVIRONMENT

  • A methodological follow-up to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
  • An urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological era
  • How afforestation reveals the often-concealed politics between humans and plants
  • An unparalleled how-to guide to citizen-sensing practices that monitor air pollution
  • How contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles

 

EDUCATION

  • The complex and dramatic history of an illegal teachers’ strike that forever altered labor relations and Minnesota politics
  • A critique of what lies behind the use of data in contemporary education policy
  • What kind of university is possible when digital tools are not taken for granted, but hacked for a more experimental future?
  • How special education used disability labels to marginalize Black students in public schools
  • Considers colonial school–prison systems in relation to the self-determination of Native communities, nations, and peoples

 

MINNESOTA FICTION

  • A writer and former ski jumper facing a terminal diagnosis takes one more leap—into a past of soaring flights and broken family bonds
  • Radically personal and quintessentially American, an intimate drama at the heart of an apocalyptic vision
  • Two lost sisters find family, and themselves, among the voices of an Ojibwe reservation
  • From the best-selling author of These Granite Islands, a novel of stories intersecting at a broken-down fishing resort in the north woods of Minnesota
  • A riveting family saga immersed in the gritty, dark side of Swedish immigrant life in America in the early twentieth century

 

DISABILITY STUDIES

  • A philosophical challenge to the ableist conflation of disability and pain
  • Championing the liberatory potential of silence to address the fraught disability politics of queerness
  • Revealing inequalities and sensory hierarchies embedded in the latest medical technologies and global biotechnical markets
  • Modeling a disability culture perspective on performance practice toward socially just futures
  • A radical critique of architecture that places disability at the heart of the built environment

 

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

  • Thinking through object-oriented ontology—and the work of architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid—to explore new concepts of the relationship between form and function
  • The first comprehensive study of the artist Robert Heinecken and his critical views on the culture of mass media
  • An examination of Japanese contemporary art through the lens of ecocriticism and environmental history
  • Examines how images of accumulation help open up the climate to political mobilization
  • Explores how Soviet architects reimagined the built environment through the principles of the human sciences

 

ARCHIVES

  • Delves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive
  • How digital networks and services bring the issues of archives out of the realm of institutions and into the lives of everyday users
  • A groundbreaking synthesis of food studies, archival theory, and early American literature
  • Explores how media infrastructure, not content, shapes contemporary digital culture
  • Expanding the insights of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families into policing, public order, (in)justice, and daily life

 

HENRI LEFEBVRE

  • A collection of previously untranslated writings by Henri Lefebvre on rural sociology, situating his research in relation to wider Marxist work
  • Leading intellectual Henri Lefebvre on political and state theory
  • The relationship between bodily pleasure, space, and architecture—from one of the twentieth century’s most important urban theorists
  • The first English translation of Lefebvre’s groundbreaking work on the urban experience
  • For the first time in English, Lefebvre’s essential work on how Marx and Engels conceptualized the development of the city

 

NOW IN PAPERBACK

  • The new novel from the author of As We Have Always Done, a poetic world-building journey into the power of Anishinaabe life and traditions amid colonialism
  • From the young Black teenager who built a bass guitar in woodshop to the musician building a solo career with Motown Records—Prince’s bassist BrownMark on growing up in Minneapolis, joining Prince and The Revolution, and his life in the purple kingdom
  • Travel with Olympic gold medalist Jessie Diggins on her compelling journey from America’s heartland to international sports history, navigating challenges and triumphs with rugged grit and a splash of glitter
  • The remarkable eighty-five-day journey of the first two women to canoe the 2,000-mile route from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay
  • An irresistible read-aloud picture book, in which a little odd-duck-out discovers her unique strengths

 

DEATH AND GRIEF

  • After Effects
  • Our Grateful Dead
  • What God Is Honored Here?
  • Jack and the Ghost
  • We Know How This Ends

 

HOGNANDER MINNESOTA HISTORY AWARDS

  • Revealing the enduring link between settler colonization and the making of modern Minneapolis
  • How white advocates of emancipation abandoned African American causes in the dark days of Reconstruction, told through the stories of four Minnesotans
  • A working-class history of a 1916 miners’ strike in northern Minnesota, one of the most important events in organized labor of the early twentieth century
  • The true story, and the black citizens, behind the evolution of racial equality in Minnesota
  • The untold history of how the land of the Dakota and Ojibwe became the State of Minnesota

 

URBAN STUDIES

  • A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world
  • An alternative history of capitalist urbanization through the lens of the commons
  • A fascinating deep dive into one city’s urban policy—and the anxiety over immigrants that informs it
  • A pathbreaking look at how progressive policy change for economic justice has swept U.S. cities
  • A timely ethnography of how Indonesia’s coastal dwellers inhabit the “chronic present” of a slow-motion natural disaster

 

LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY

  • Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matter
  • A vital reckoning with how we understand the basic categories of cultural expression in the digital era
  • Why Captain Ahab is worthy of our fear—and our compassion
  • A pathbreaking new genealogy of statelessness
  • Before the idea of the Anthropocene, there was the angry planet

 

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

  • Isherwood’s lectures on writing and writers, now all available for the first time
  • New perspectives on Christopher Isherwood as a searching and transnational writer
  • Shines a critical spotlight on the American life of the famed author
  • How Christopher Isherwood reinvented himself as an American writer through gay print culture of the postwar United States
  • Isherwood’s previously unpublished letters to his mother cast his early years as a writer in a new light

 

ON GOVERNANCE AND POWER

  • Has society ceded its self-governance to technogovernance?
  • From broken-window policing in Detroit to prison-building in Appalachia, exploring the expansion of the carceral state and its oppressive social relations into everyday life
  • A groundbreaking collection of writings by Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group documenting their efforts to expose France’s inhumane treatment of prisoners
  • A field guide to a nonfascist life at the end of the world as we know it
  • Tracing the rise of digital computing in policing and punishment and its harmful impact on criminalized communities of color

 

ON CITIZENSHIP

  • A searing critique of the “freedom” that America offers to the victims of its imperialist machinations of war and occupation
  • Why are immigrants from Mexico and Latin America such an affectively charged population for political conservatives?
  • Connects global migration with urban marginalization, exploring how “race” maps onto place across the globe, state, and street
  • A monumental account of one migrant community’s everyday lives, struggles, and aspirations
  • Investigating the global system of detention centers that imprison asylum seekers and conceal persistent human rights violations

 

LIFE

  • A paradigm-shifting genealogy of biological life as metaphysical concept rather than a scientific category
  • A vital contribution to environmental humanities that explores artistic responses to the plastic age
  • Understanding biopolitics anew, through life and not death, in the aftermath of mass violence
  • How global capitalism has turned human beings into a new form of biocapital
  • A genealogy of logistics, tracing the link between markets and militaries, territory and government

 

OUT OF ...

  • Explores the intrinsic relation of life to air, and breathing, through contemporary art
  • A groundbreaking collection of fiction from Iceland’s best contemporary authors
  • A new temporal aesthetic in films such as Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2046, and The Hangover
  • Rediscover the astute and passionate music writings of the pioneering rock critic for the New Yorker
  • A revealing inquiry into how global culture is lived locally.

 

WATER

  • A personal health crisis, stories from environmental refugees, and our climate in danger prompt a meditation on intimate connections between the health of the body and the health of the ecosystem
  • Trinity Baird’s hope for independence is tenuous, especially when her family has the final say—and the power to lock her away
  • Personal essays exploring the link between natural history and memory, landscape and identity, place and meaning
  • A memoir of family, mining pioneers and unscrupulous magnates, and the fight for Minnesota’s natural resources
  • The author of Old Turtle and a longtime wilderness guide charts a journey through the wilds of nature and the twists and turns of daily life

 

FIRE

  • The first English publication of Sami folktales from Scandinavia collected and illustrated in the early twentieth century
  • Restoring the literature of Pele and Hi‘iaka to its rightful place in Native culture and identity
  • An outsider American recounts two decades of radical lesbian life in this urgent, ferociously funny memoir
  • A deeply personal meditation on history and memory, place and displacement by a major writer
  • Asserts the strength and diversity of Cherokee identity through its rich literary tradition

 

EARTH

  • An urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological era
  • Rethinking our relationship with Earth in a time of environmental emergency
  • How sensors are changing our environmental relationships
  • Analyzing the ethical stance of the earth art movement from the 1960s to the present
  • Re-envisions the earth in innovative painterly, sculptural, and architectural forms