Looking to indulge your literary side this weekend? Join the University of Chicago Press at the 2010 Printer’s Row Lit Fest this Saturday and Sunday, June 12-13. Not only will the Press be on site selling our fabulous wares, plenty of Press authors will be on hand reading from and discussing their books. Here’s a lowdown of what’s happening at the Fest.

All weekend long, the Press will be selling our books at our booth (located in Tent O, which will be closer to Polk than Harrison. This is a new location for us, as our usual spot will be occupied by construction equipment. Use this map to find us). We’ll have our newest releases, as well as many of our most popular Chicago titles and stunning picture books (all of which make great gifts for Dad!). We’ll also be bringing back our popular $5 table: everything on it will cost you just one portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Among the books you’ll find on the discount table will be Roger Ebert’s Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, Normal Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, and Mike Royko’s One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko. Supplies of these . . .

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Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age explores literary culture at the turn of the nineteenth century to show how, alongside the period’s innovations in mass printing, romantic writing and writers themselves played crucial roles in creating the age’s “bookish culture.”

And in keeping with the theme of his book, Piper will appear at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival on Saturday, April 24, at 1 p.m to participate in a panel discussion titled: “Reading the World: The Future of the Book” as part of the five-day long festivities, which begin Wednesday. An article on the festival in the Saturday edition of the Montreal Gazette cites Piper on the “bookish culture” of today:

When McGill professor Andrew Piper was a child, punishment meant being sent to his room to read.

Today, if the father of two metes out punishment to either his 5-year-old son or 3-year-old daughter, it means taking away a bedtime story, be it Scaredy Squirrel’s latest adventure or a Frog and Toad tale.

Piper grew into his love of books and became an expert on the relationship between the book and literature in the 18th and 19th . . .

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During the Progressive Era, social activists in New York employed private investigators to seek out behavior they viewed as sexually promiscuous, politically undesirable, or downright criminal. The goal was to uncover the roots of society’s problems, and the information collected eventually empowered government regulators in the Progressive era and beyond, strengthening a federal state that grew increasingly repressive in the interest of pursuing a national security agenda.

Jennifer Fronc’s history of this urban movement, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era, follows these investigators—often journalists or social workers with no training in surveillance—on their information-gathering visits to gambling parlors, brothels, and meetings of criminal gangs and radical political organizations. Drawing on the hundreds of detailed reports that resulted from these missions, Fronc reconstructs the process by which organizations like the National Civic Federation and the Committee of Fourteen generated the knowledge they needed to change urban conditions. Revealing the central role of undercover investigation in both social change and the constitution of political authority, New York Undercover narrates previously untold chapters in the history of vice and the emergence of the modern surveillance state.

Fronc recently discussed her book as part of a series at New York . . .

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Bloggingheads.tv has posted an interesting interview with Eric A. Posner, author of The Perils of Global Legalism. In the interview Posner and host Henry Farrell discuss a variety of issues related to the topic of Posner’s new book which offers a provocative argument against the establishment of an international rule of law. Watch the complete interview below or navigate to Bloggingheads.tv.

With The Perils of Global Legalism, Eric A. Posner contends that advocates of global legalism demonstrate a dangerously naive belief that law can be effective even in the absence of legitimate institutions of governance. After tracing the historical roots of the concept, Posner carefully lays out the many illusions—such as universalism, sovereign equality, and the possibility of disinterested judgment by politically unaccountable officials—on which the legalistic view is founded. Drawing on such examples as NATO’s invasion of Serbia, attempts to ban the use of land mines, and the free-trade provisions of the WTO, Posner demonstrates throughout that the weaknesses of international law confound legalist ambitions—and that whatever their professed commitments, all nations stand ready to dispense with international agreements when it suits their short- or long-term interests.

To find out more read an excerpt from the book.

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Photographer Jed Fielding, whose collection Look at me was published by the University of Chicago Press in March, has a show opening tonight at the Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York City . Writing about the gallery opening, The New Yorker raves:

Fielding’s photographs of the blind children he met at schools in Mexico City are not in the tradition of photojournalistic muckraking. Like his terrific earlier series from the streets of Naples, these images are vivacious, audacious, and in your face. His subjects are not pitiable victims; they’re rambunctious, apparently happy kids at play, responding to Fielding’s attention with curiosity and delight. They may be cut off from the visual world, but they relish physical contact, both with one another and with the patient photographer. The best of the work was made at close range, where that connection was most tangible, and young faces fill the frames with fragile, vivid life.

For those not fortunate enough to be in Manhattan during the show’s run (it’s up through October 17), Fielding’s photographs are available in convenient book form. An in-depth pictorial study of blind schoolchildren in Mexico, Look at me contains more than sixty arresting images from which . . .

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