Publishers Weekly
11/19/2007
Wave of Terror
Theodore Odrach, trans. from the Ukranian by Erma Odrach.
Academy Chicago, $19.95 paper (350p) ISBN 978-0-89733-562-1
Odrach's delightfully sardonic novel about the Stalinist occupation of Belarus that began in 1939 is rich with history, horror and comedy. The story unfolds in Pinsk and the villages of the Pinsk Marshes, where peasants who endured czars and Polish conquerors squirm helplessly under the boot of a regime more authoritarian than any they've known. Families are sent to labor camps on trumped-up charges; hapless innocents are tortured and executed without explanation. Ivan Kulik, the headmaster of an elementary school in the Ukrainian-speaking village of Hlaby, is frustrated with farcical Soviet demands, especially that classes be taught in Belorussian (none of the students or teachers speak the language). University-educated Ivan is fluent in Russian but prefers his native tongue, which doesn't help when he becomes infatuated with the beautiful Marusia Bohdanovich, who incompetently affects Russian airs. Potentially deadly trouble looms for Ivan and Marusia after she catches the eye of a sociopathic secret police lieutenant named Sobakin. There's a surplus of tragedy, but Odrach finds amid the havoc an affecting thread of humanity. The novel has been skillfully translated into English by Odrach's daughter. (Jan. 08)
Friday, November 16, 2007
from Washington City Paper
Arts & Events -- Washington DC
The Yurting Kind
By Eve Ottenberg Posted: November 14, 2007
Notes From Nethers: Growing Up in a Sixties Commune
By Sandra Eugster
Academy Chicago Publishers, 328 pp. $18.95
The ’60s and early ’70s meant political revolution to some; to others, it was an endless wild party. But there were those for whom the time was neither liberating nor exhilarating; rather, it was frightening and even constricting. Sandra Eugster grew up on a Virginia commune in the ’60s and experienced it in all of these ways, though her new memoir, Notes From Nethers, tends to emphasize the defects. Indeed, a reader might come away thinking that one mindless fad after another reigned supreme on the communes of this period. There are a few salient reasons for Eugster’s reproaches: She was a child who had no choice in her upbringing; she naturally craved stability and reliability from the adults around her, but she got the opposite. By 1977, when she escaped what she describes as chaos by going to college, communal life had crippled her socially. She could not distinguish between teasing and seriousness, had never dated, and was astonished that most women had not burned their bras—in fact, she didn’t know where to buy them or how to gauge their proper size. (She also didn’t know how to shave her legs, though this last crisis hardly seems catastrophic.) One can sympathize with her anger at her jargon-spouting mother for not foreseeing or correcting any of this—she was too busy with the latest hippie craze, which is a reminder of how much hokum prevailed back then. To her credit, Eugster doesn’t take cheap shots at the various easy targets, as a more conservatively biased writer would do. However, her depiction of the communards chanting “Hare Krishna” while naked in a homemade sauna is particularly dispiriting, and she describes several members of the commune falling under the spell of Guru Maharaj Ji, a charlatan whose popularity in the early ’70s signaled the decline of the counterculture. Eugster unearths many such artifacts that were better left buried: As the chapter titled “Placenta Soup” disturbingly suggests, alternative health and spiritual fashions, often indistinguishable from rank idiocy, were rampant. Primal scream therapy, a bit of therapeutic fakery appropriately consigned to the compost heap of history, reappears here like an unwelcome visitor. This silliness was disheartening enough at the time, but adults could brush it off as a distraction from more consequential matters of feminism, civil rights, environmentalism, or the antiwar movement. Eugster, however, was raised on a diet of spiritual and therapeutic quackery. Nonetheless, her praise for the tolerance and other virtues she learned on the commune brings to mind the special history of such experiments in this country, going back to Brook Farm, immortalized (albeit satirically) in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, and other, more explicitly political 19th-century attempts at utopian societies. To do the subject justice, the communes of the ’60s should be seen in that context, not just as the trendy effluvia of a volcanic era.
Arts & Events -- Washington DC
The Yurting Kind
By Eve Ottenberg Posted: November 14, 2007
Notes From Nethers: Growing Up in a Sixties Commune
By Sandra Eugster
Academy Chicago Publishers, 328 pp. $18.95
The ’60s and early ’70s meant political revolution to some; to others, it was an endless wild party. But there were those for whom the time was neither liberating nor exhilarating; rather, it was frightening and even constricting. Sandra Eugster grew up on a Virginia commune in the ’60s and experienced it in all of these ways, though her new memoir, Notes From Nethers, tends to emphasize the defects. Indeed, a reader might come away thinking that one mindless fad after another reigned supreme on the communes of this period. There are a few salient reasons for Eugster’s reproaches: She was a child who had no choice in her upbringing; she naturally craved stability and reliability from the adults around her, but she got the opposite. By 1977, when she escaped what she describes as chaos by going to college, communal life had crippled her socially. She could not distinguish between teasing and seriousness, had never dated, and was astonished that most women had not burned their bras—in fact, she didn’t know where to buy them or how to gauge their proper size. (She also didn’t know how to shave her legs, though this last crisis hardly seems catastrophic.) One can sympathize with her anger at her jargon-spouting mother for not foreseeing or correcting any of this—she was too busy with the latest hippie craze, which is a reminder of how much hokum prevailed back then. To her credit, Eugster doesn’t take cheap shots at the various easy targets, as a more conservatively biased writer would do. However, her depiction of the communards chanting “Hare Krishna” while naked in a homemade sauna is particularly dispiriting, and she describes several members of the commune falling under the spell of Guru Maharaj Ji, a charlatan whose popularity in the early ’70s signaled the decline of the counterculture. Eugster unearths many such artifacts that were better left buried: As the chapter titled “Placenta Soup” disturbingly suggests, alternative health and spiritual fashions, often indistinguishable from rank idiocy, were rampant. Primal scream therapy, a bit of therapeutic fakery appropriately consigned to the compost heap of history, reappears here like an unwelcome visitor. This silliness was disheartening enough at the time, but adults could brush it off as a distraction from more consequential matters of feminism, civil rights, environmentalism, or the antiwar movement. Eugster, however, was raised on a diet of spiritual and therapeutic quackery. Nonetheless, her praise for the tolerance and other virtues she learned on the commune brings to mind the special history of such experiments in this country, going back to Brook Farm, immortalized (albeit satirically) in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, and other, more explicitly political 19th-century attempts at utopian societies. To do the subject justice, the communes of the ’60s should be seen in that context, not just as the trendy effluvia of a volcanic era.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Publishers Weekly
PW Daily Online, November 6, 2007
Wicker Park Goes Regional
By Claire Kirch -- Publishers Weekly, 11/6/2007 6:47:00 AM
Eric Miller, a commission sales rep with Miller Trade Book Marketing, is giving a new direction to Chicago-based Wicker Park Press, the small press he launched in 2002, shifting its focus from publishing primarily satire to specializing in regional titles about Chicago landmarks. Wicker Park's first regional title, Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, photographs and paintings by Larry W. Green, has just been released, and Miller has shipped 500 copies of a 3,200-copy print run.
“There's a lot of people out there, who identify with Chicago,” Miller explained about his switch in emphasis. “There's a strong market for regional books.” His next title, which doesn’t have a pub date yet, will be on Chicago's celebrated Maxwell Street Market.
While ordering only a few copies of Water Tanks of Chicago for her store, Kris Kleindienst, co-owner of St. Louis's Left Bank Books, believes that Wicker Park's offerings will find their audience. “Regional is a niche that works, no matter what the region,” Kliendienst said. “And [Miller] chooses interesting books on interesting topics.”
Along with the change in publishing direction, Miller has revamped Wicker’s distribution. He is now selling the list to his accounts and has hired Partners Book Distributing to sell to the chains. Wicker Park titles had been distributed by Academy Chicago Press, founded in 1976 by Eric Miller's parents, Jordan and Anita Miller. Academy Chicago releases are in turn distributed by the Chicago Distribution Center.
PW Daily Online, November 6, 2007
Wicker Park Goes Regional
By Claire Kirch -- Publishers Weekly, 11/6/2007 6:47:00 AM
Eric Miller, a commission sales rep with Miller Trade Book Marketing, is giving a new direction to Chicago-based Wicker Park Press, the small press he launched in 2002, shifting its focus from publishing primarily satire to specializing in regional titles about Chicago landmarks. Wicker Park's first regional title, Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy, photographs and paintings by Larry W. Green, has just been released, and Miller has shipped 500 copies of a 3,200-copy print run.
“There's a lot of people out there, who identify with Chicago,” Miller explained about his switch in emphasis. “There's a strong market for regional books.” His next title, which doesn’t have a pub date yet, will be on Chicago's celebrated Maxwell Street Market.
While ordering only a few copies of Water Tanks of Chicago for her store, Kris Kleindienst, co-owner of St. Louis's Left Bank Books, believes that Wicker Park's offerings will find their audience. “Regional is a niche that works, no matter what the region,” Kliendienst said. “And [Miller] chooses interesting books on interesting topics.”
Along with the change in publishing direction, Miller has revamped Wicker’s distribution. He is now selling the list to his accounts and has hired Partners Book Distributing to sell to the chains. Wicker Park titles had been distributed by Academy Chicago Press, founded in 1976 by Eric Miller's parents, Jordan and Anita Miller. Academy Chicago releases are in turn distributed by the Chicago Distribution Center.
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