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 FICTION

  • The first English translations of the original novellas about the iconic kaijū Godzilla
  • A fifty-year-old mystery converges with a present-day struggle over family, land, and history
  • The fourth and final volume in the Nobel Prize–winning writer’s epic of one man’s fateful life in medieval Norway
  • Now in paperback: a writer and former ski jumper facing a terminal diagnosis takes one more leap—into a past of soaring flights and broken family bonds
  • A fresh and vivid translation of Flaubert’s influential bildungsroman

 

NEW AND FORTHCOMING NONFICTION

  • The deep and personal story—told through history, poetry, and images—of the forced displacement of the Sámi people from their homeland in northern Norway and Sweden and its reverberations today
  • An exploration of the winter wonders and entangled histories of Scandinavia’s northernmost landscapes—now back in print with a new afterword by the author
  • A witty and humble tribute to the sometimes profane, sometimes profound world of waiting tables
  • A comprehensive study of the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, related in two-year chapters by twenty-three leading writers on the Jazz Age author
  • Stories from survivors of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness’s epochal weather disaster

 

RADICAL WOMEN WRITERS

  • Recovering the bold voices and audacious lives of women who confronted capitalist society’s failures and injustices in the 1930s—a decade unnervingly similar to our own
  • An award-winning and canonical history of radical feminism, whose activist heat and intellectual audacity powered second-wave feminism—30th anniversary edition
  • The first scholarly study of Adrienne Rich’s full career examines the poet through her developing approach to the transformative potential of relationships
  • From pioneering rock music critic Ellen Willis, iconoclastic essays on politics and culture
  • Insightful, persuasive essays on feminism and identity politics

 

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
  • Reexamining feminist sexual politics since the 1970s—the rivalries and the remarkable alliances
  • Describing and assessing feminist inroads into the state

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

PHILOSOPHICAL DISPOSSESSION

  • A provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself
  • Excavating Marx’s early writings to rethink the rights of the poor and the idea of the commons in an era of unprecedented privatization
  • Why contamination and compromise might be a starting point for doing something, instead of a reason to give up
  • A radical new approach to humor, where traditional targets become its agents
  • On the complex aesthetics and ontology at work in Étienne Souriau’s unique oeuvre

 

COOKBOOKS

  • A cultural icon of Lake Superior cuisine shares its story, recipes, and techniques
  • 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

 

ILLUSTRATED PICTURE BOOKS

  • Six-year-old Sam, with his Liberian dad and African American mom, finds a way to bring everyone in his cross-cultural family together at the dinner table
  • A wordless picture-book journey through the Boundary Waters, canoeing and camping with a family as they encounter the northwoods wilderness in all its spectacular beauty
  • Award-winning author Kao Kalia Yang delivers an inspiring tale of resourceful children confronting adversaries in a refugee camp
  • Begin with a Bee and its story of the life of one queen bee, a rusty-patched bumblebee, teaches us not only about bees but also about our own responsibilities in the natural world
  • The story of a forest “lost” by a surveying error—and all the flora and fauna to be found there

INDIGENOUS STORIES, CULTURE, THEORY

  • Noopiming (cover)
  • More than two dozen essays of Indigenous resistance to the privatization and allotment of Indigenous lands
  • 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
  • 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

 

PLANTS

  • Interdisciplinary essays on Manuela Infante’s award-winning play explore the relationship between critical plant studies and performance art in the Anthropocene
  • An exploration of the explosive illegal trade in succulents and the passion that drives it
  • A radical proposal for how a tiny organism can transform our understanding of human relations
  • The first complete resource for the practical use of plants in the Anishinaabe culture and the stories that surround them
  • Exploring the idea that plants can think, feel, and communicate as a way of reconfiguring our relationship with the natural world

 

MINNESOTA FIGURES

  • How two teenage girls in Minnesota jump-started a revolution in high school athletics
  • 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 complex and dramatic history of an illegal teachers’ strike that forever altered labor relations and Minnesota politics
  • 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 remarkable eighty-five-day journey of the first two women to canoe the 2,000-mile route from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay

 

DANCE STUDIES

  • Modeling a disability culture perspective on performance practice toward socially just futures
  • The vital role of dance in enacting the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples
  • A new exploration of how digital media assert the relevance of dance in a wired world
  • A complete history of ballet in Minnesota by a professional dancer and creative force in the Twin Cities artistic community
  • The cultural significance of gesture as a human expression

 

DISABILITY STUDIES

  • A philosophical challenge to the ableist conflation of disability and pain
  • Imagining anti-ableist liberation beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion
  • Revealing inequalities and sensory hierarchies embedded in the latest medical technologies and global biotechnical markets
  • Young adults with intellectual disability tell the story of their own experience of higher education
  • A radical critique of architecture that places disability at the heart of the built environment

 

BOOKS WITH TEACHABLE PODCAST EPISODES

  • Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matter
  • An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations
  • An unparalleled how-to guide to citizen-sensing practices that monitor air pollution
  • A brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs
  • Tracing the evolution of the Italian avant-garde’s pioneering experiments with art and technology and their subversion of freedom and control

 

HISTORY

  • The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community
  • Redefining the artistic movement that helped shape American modernism
  • Shipwreck stories from along Minnesota’s north shore of Lake Superior and Isle Royale
  • An examination of the influence of German intellectuals on postwar American thought
  • A critical look at the competing motivations behind one of modern architecture’s most widely known and misunderstood movements

 

MICHEL SERRES

  • For the first time in English, the introductory volume in a major French philosopher’s groundbreaking series of poetic transdisciplinary works
  • The foundational work in the area now known as posthuman thought
  • Renowned philosopher Michel Serres finds the origins of knowledge in the movement of the body
  • Presents a philosophy that merges the humanities with all creation
  • An engaging critique of the science and metaphysics behind our understanding of the universe

 

DEATH AND GRIEF

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

 

MUSIC

  • The story of the Minneapolis musicians unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album
  • The singular Minnesota musician tells his story of making music, from folk outpost to pop paradise to stages shared with stars from Seeger to Springsteen
  • The raw material and interviews behind Anthony Scaduto’s iconic biography of Bob Dylan draw an intimate and multifaceted portrait of the singer-songwriter who defined his era
  • The first comprehensive history to trace the evolution of Minnesota 1960s rock and roll
  • 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

 

NATURE MEMOIR

  • A soul-satisfying journey through the wilderness that uncovers hope, healing, and the abiding grace of wild things
  • 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
  • Join the beloved author of Old Turtle as he embarks on journeys large and small
  • Personal essays exploring the link between natural history and memory, landscape and identity, place and meaning
  • An evocative memoir of life on a dairy farm in Minnesota’s St. Croix Valley

 

SUE LEAF

  • A personal journey through the ever-changing natural and cultural history of Lake Superior’s South Shore
  • The story of the scientist who first mapped Minnesota’s geology, set against the backdrop of early scientific inquiry in the state
  • North American waterways by canoe: a memoir of family and nature, history and culture, along the rivers
  • The father of Minnesota ornithology, whose life story opens a window on a lost world of nature and conservation in the state’s early days
  • An evocative memoir exploring the relationship between humans and nature through the liturgical calendar

 

NONFICTION STORIES

  • Meth cooks practice late industrial alchemy—transforming base materials, like lithium batteries and camping fuel, into gold
  • Examines the complexity and the humanity of the opioid epidemic
  • A vivid analysis of the history and revival of clinical psychedelic science
  • Exploring networked technologies and bioeconomy and their links to biotechnologies, pharmacology, and pharmaceuticals
  • The remarkable story of six brothers growing up in the ’50s and ’60s as their father—a highly respected Mayo Clinic surgeon—slowly goes insane

 

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

 

ETHNOGRAPHY

  • A fascinating ethnography of microbes that opens up new spaces for anthropological inquiry
  • A compelling examination of Sweden’s African and Black diaspora
  • A detailed exploration of parents’ fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy
  • Creative and diverse approaches to ethnographic knowledge production and writing
  • How Japanese coastal residents and transnational conservationists collaborated to foster relationships between humans and sea life

 

WAR

  • Tracing war’s expansion beyond the battlefield to the concept of the human being itself
  • How perceptual technologies have shaped the history of war from the Renaissance to the present
  • Applies Deleuzian theory to an impressive array of physical phenomena, scientific issues, and political events
  • Uncovering the class conflicts, geopolitical dynamics, and aggressive capitalism propelling the militarization of the internet
  • Considers how people have confronted, challenged, and resisted remote warfare

 

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
  • How afforestation reveals the often-concealed politics between humans and plants
  • 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

 

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
  • The Shakespearean era’s wet writers guide our eco-way today
  • 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
  • Exploring one of the greatest potential contributors to climate change—thawing permafrost—and the anxiety of extinction on an increasingly hostile planet

 

FORERUNNERS

  • Amid the historical decimation of species around the globe, a new way into the language of loss
  • The role of the humble school bus in transforming education in America
  • The role of American hospital expansions in health disparities and medical apartheid
  • A collective engages and mirrors the critical need for energy justice and transformation
  • Exploring how the crisis of the world ocean is produced by capitalism and imperialism