Distributed Presses

Kasia Boddy's Boxing: A Cultural History continues its successful start with a short but laudatory review in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The reviewer praises Boddy's work, saying:

"Boddy intelligently takes up—via art, literature, film, and the media—the many issues that have historically veined the sport: 'nationality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and different versions of masculinity,' plus dialectics like 'brawn versus brains, boastfulness versus modesty, youth versus experience.' Her reach is considerable, but so is her grasp. The result is a sweeping critical history and a perfect power-to-weight ratio."

Read the full Atlantic Monthly review
Learn more about Boxing: A Cultural History

Posted by HG at 02:40 PM | Permalink
Posted to History | Reaktion | Reviews

Kasia Boddy's newly published Boxing: A Cultural History has hit the ground running with a review by none other than Joyce Carol Oates in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. In her relatively positive review, Oates notes:

At nearly five hundred densely packed pages, Boddy's investigation into 'the intricate conceptual and iconographic constructions' that surround boxing has the heft of a work twice its length—the equivalent, in book form, of the old-style championship boxing matches that ran as long as thirty rounds, often in the broiling sun. . . . . Boxing: A Cultural History would seem to include everything that has ever been written, depicted, or in any way recorded about boxing no matter how obscure, whimsical, or trivial; a treasure trove for boxing historians and aficionados that might evoke vertigo in less committed readers. . . .

What is most valuable about Boxing: A Cultural History isn't its ideas so much as its wonderfully heterogeneous gathering of specifics. To read Boddy's book is to confront dozens—hundreds?—of inspired mini-essays.

Read Joyce Carol Oates' entire New York of Review of Books review
Learn more about Boxing: A Cultural History

Posted by HG at 12:09 PM | Permalink
Posted to History | Reaktion | Reviews

Donato Ndongo, author of the recently published Shadows of Your Black Memory, was interviewed by the Columbia Missourian about his work as a novelist in exile from his native Equatorial Guinea. The interview is on the Columbia Missourian website.

Read the Columbia Missourian interview of Donato Ndongo
Learn more about Donato Ndongo's Shadows of Your Black Memory

Posted by TLF at 10:27 AM | Permalink
Posted to Publicity | Swan Isle

Gwendolyn Wright, author of the recently published USA: Modern Architectures in History, was interviewed by School Library Journal about her work on PBS's History Detectives. The video of the interview can be viewed on the School Library Journal website.

Watch the School Library Journal interview of Gwendolyn Wright
Learn more about Gwendolyn Wright's USA: Modern Architectures in History

Posted by HG at 01:41 PM | Permalink
Posted to Art and Architecture | Books for the News | Reaktion

Donato Ndongo will read from his novel Shadows of your Black Memory and discuss African literature in Spanish at the Instituto Cevantes of Chicago, 31 W. Ohio St., on April 24, 2008.

Donato Ndongo (born 1950 in Neifang, Equatorial Guinea) is a novelist, essayist, journalist, and part of a movement of young Afro-descended authors who have contributed their African experience and traditions to Hispanic culture. Currently, Ndongo is a visiting scholar at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The event takes place Thursday, April 24, at 6:30 PM. A reception will follow.

Visit the Cervantes Institute of Chicago

Learn more about Shadows of your Black Memory.

Posted by TLF at 12:34 PM | Permalink
Posted to Author Events | Swan Isle

Donato Ndongo's novel Shadows of your Black Memory, recently published in English translation by Swan Isle Press, received a glowing review in the March 2nd issue of The Independent:

This accomplished novel describes the love of something mercilessly elusive: a magical and transitory space floating between the past and the future, an eternal present wherein the moon is 'round and red, stained with the blood of the sun hidden behind the mountains.' Originally written in Spanish, Donato Ndongo's remarkable and strikingly original novel appears now in a subtle and elegant translation by Michael Ugarte, which does full justice to the dreamily poetic nature of the narrative.

Read the full Independent review
Learn more about Shadows of your Black Memory, published by Swan Isle

Posted by TLF at 12:08 PM | Permalink
Posted to Fiction | Reviews | Swan Isle

Donato Ndongo's novel Shadows of your Black Memory, recently published in English translation by Swan Isle Press, was reviewed by Emmanuel Harris in the most recent issue of PALARA:

Ugarte's text brilliantly captures the tone and cadence of the original novel and renders a thoughtful, compassionate narrative that readers will undoubtedly cherish. . . . Ndongo weaves an unforgettable tale that is at once Hispanic, bildungsroman and intensely and undeniably African. . . . Shadows of Your Black Memory is a work of outstanding quality and Donato Ndongo is without question an exceptional talent.

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

Learn more about Shadows of your Black Memory

Posted by TLF at 12:00 PM | Permalink
Posted to Fiction | Reviews | Swan Isle