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 

 

FORTHCOMING NONFICTION (2023)

  • Exploring one of the greatest potential contributors to climate change—thawing permafrost—and the anxiety of extinction on an increasingly hostile planet
  • Beyond an adrenaline ride or a chronicle of bravura heroics, this unflinching view of a Minneapolis firefighter reveals the significant toll of emergency response
  • The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community
  • A critical look at the competing motivations behind one of modern architecture’s most widely known and misunderstood movements
  • A radical proposal for how a tiny organism can transform our understanding of human relations

 

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

CHILDREN'S BOOKS, NEW AND FORTHCOMING

  • 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 Canoe Area Wilderness in winter, snowshoeing the frozen lakes and silent forest with family, encountering the wonders of northern wildlife in the cold season
  • Award-winning author Kao Kalia Yang delivers an inspiring tale of resourceful children confronting adversaries in a refugee camp
  • This delightful storybook by the incomparable d’Aulaires, based on a poem by Hans Christian Andersen, will charm a new generation of little readers
  • A grandmother’s sudden departure leaves her family with an even more puzzling, and wondrous, surprise in this enchanting story from the National Book Award–winning author—at last back in print

 

NEW LITERATURE

  • 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
  • Championing the liberatory potential of silence to address the fraught disability politics of queerness
  • A collective memoir in poetry of an Ojibwe family and tribal community, from creation myth to this day, updated with new poems
  • The mystery of how an ordinary Minnesota girl came to be, briefly, one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States

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

  • 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

  • Bringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisis
  • A bold new consideration of climate change between narratives of the Earth’s layers and policy of the present
  • Exploring one of the greatest potential contributors to climate change—thawing permafrost—and the anxiety of extinction on an increasingly hostile planet
  • Studying nature conservation in Palestine-Israel through the lens of settler colonialism
  • A timely rethinking of the archetypal story of Noah, the great flood, and who was left behind as the waters rose

 

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

 

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

 

BOOKS WITH TEACHABLE PODCAST EPISODES

  • Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matter
  • 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
  • A field guide to a nonfascist life at the end of the world as we know it
  • A vital contribution to environmental humanities that explores artistic responses to the plastic age
  • An event-by-event look at how institutionalized racism harms the health of African Americans in the twenty-first century

 

FORTHCOMING HISTORY (2023)

  • 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

 

FICTION & MYSTERY

  • A grisly death near her new homestead draws Brigid Reardon into a complicated mystery soon after her arrival in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1881
  • From “the reigning royalty of Minnesota murder mysteries” (The Rake) comes a striking new heroine: a young Irish immigrant caught up in a deadly plot in nineteenth-century Deadwood
  • The ninth and final Minnesota mystery, in which Shadwell Rafferty, with the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, may have solved his own murder
  • When one of St. Paul’s wealthiest scions loses his head—literally—it’s up to Holmes and Watson to track a cold-blooded killer
  • Trinity Baird’s hope for independence is tenuous, especially when her family has the final say—and the power to lock her away

 

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

 

PLANTS AND NATURAL HISTORY

  • The definitive field guide for understanding and identifying ferns and lycophytes in Minnesota
  • The first comprehensive, fully illustrated field guide to Minnesota’s nearly 250 species of sedges and rushes
  • The first complete resource for the practical use of plants in the Anishinaabe culture and the stories that surround them
  • An illustrated guide to the natural habitats and rich diversity of wildlife in the greater Minneapolis and St. Paul metro area
  • The definitive work on Minnesota’s natural history and ecology—updated, expanded, and copiously illustrated to account for profound changes to the state’s natural landscape over the past twenty-five years

 

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

 

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

  • A leading philosopher seeks to recover “common sense” as a meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy
  • Advances an innovative and interdisciplinary dialogue with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead
  • How computer animation technologies became vital visualization tools in the life sciences
  • An up-to-the-moment critique of a recent turn in philosophical thought
  • Explores the intimate connections between thinking and creative practice

 

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
  • Meth cooks practice late industrial alchemy—transforming base materials, like lithium batteries and camping fuel, into gold
  • 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
  • What exactly is it we want from dogs today?
  • Considers colonial school–prison systems in relation to the self-determination of Native communities, nations, and peoples
  • A collective engages and mirrors the critical need for energy justice and transformation
  • Rethinking our relationship with Earth in a time of environmental emergency