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Ever want to work for a busy and industrious publishing house? One of the largest American university presses? Learn all about where books come from? Here's your chance to learn more and apply for YUP's Summer Publishing Internships. 

Please note that the application deadline is Friday, March 11, 2011.

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After a hiatus, the Yale Press Podcast series is back—at least, for a limited time. Your interest will determine its future, so please let us know what you think by commenting at www.facebook.com/yalepress; rating us on iTunes; or e-mail us at [email protected]. All of our interviews are free and available for download.

For the new episode, listen as host Chris Gondek speaks with Michael Takiff about his new, oral biography, A Complicated Man: The Life of Bill Clinton as Told by Those Who Know Him. The podcast is a true in-depth look at Takiff's reflections on writing the book, composed from  over 150 interviews, the legacy of Bill Clinton, and the complex relationships he has managed under international attention. 

You might recognize the artist of the podcast logo, Ivan Brunetti, and his use of our Emeritus logo, designed by Paul Rand. You'll find an extended interview with him in Episode 1, and later this month, we'll have the trailer for his new book Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice.

Listen and go!

We at YUP would like to wish a hearty congratulations to Clare Cavanagh for becoming a finalist for a 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in the Criticism category. Her “rigorously thoughtful” book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West, covers the intersection of poetry, national life, and national identity in Poland and Russia, from 1917 to the present, including discussions of Blok, Mi­łosz, Frost, Yeats, Whitman, Akhmatova, among others.

Cavanagh writes that “[t]he book is firstly an overview of twentieth-century Eastern European poetry in its Russian and Polish incarnations. It is also a comparative study of modern poetry on both the Eastern and Western side of the great political divide that came to be known mid-century as the ‘Iron Curtain.’ Finally, it is a polemic with Western postmodern literary and philosophical theories from French poststructuralism and deconstructionism to American cultural criticism and New Historicism.”

For fans of comparative studies in poetry, this is the one to beat. Read the full list of finalists at “Critical Mass.”

It’s the return of YUP’s Follow Friday!

@bencarp is hanging out with YUP staff at our AHA booth, with tea, coffee, and cookies.

@3PennyMovies gets into the quirky lunar folklore of Bernd Bruner’s Moon.

@ChrisMacDen is anxiously awaiting his copy of The Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade after reading Michelle Alexander’s new book The New Jim Crow.

@mcnallyjackson hosted David Swanson with Mark Crispin Miller, editor of our Icons of America series, for a conversation on Swanson’s War Is a Lie; Michael Takiff to talk about A Complicated Man; and the editors of the Paris Review.

As reported by the Yale Daily News earlier this month, the new Henry Roe Cloud series on American Indians and Modernity was announced by Ned Blackhawk, a Yale professor of History and American Studies, and Christopher Rogers, Editorial Director of Yale University Press. Cloud was the first known Native American graduate from Yale College. According to Professor Blackhawk, the new series has grown out of the “pressing concern” that private universities, despite having “vast resources […] have not treated the studies of Native Americans as seriously” as have public universities. In an effort to increase Native American scholarship the Henry Roe Cloud series will publish one new title a year in this underrepresented field. Here is the Henry Roe Cloud series press release.

Brian DeLay’s War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War is a shining example of this sorely needed Native American scholarship.  Focusing on the period before and during the U.S.-Mexican War, War of a Thousand Deserts, tells the largely unrecorded and overlooked story of the influential activities of Native Americans living in the northern Mexican territory that would become much of Texas and the American Southwest. In doing so, the book actually reenvisions the better part of 19^th and 20^th century American History. As Professor Blackhawk says in his July 2009 review for the Journal of Military History:

This book successfully conjoins the history of U.S. expansion with the history of northern Mexico and links the following three fields into a singular whole: southern plains Indian history, the early Mexican republic, and Anglo-American expansion.

In the past, these three elements had been largely treated as three distinct areas; DeLay, by contrast, successfully combines the three into one indivisible whole. In this new, untold version of the events described in the book, Indian history becomes inextricably linked with American history. This binding of key elements becomes essential to the book’s scholarship and importance. According to DeLay, “the interplay of [American, Mexican, and Indian] endeavors is a central goal of [the] book.”

In writing this history, DeLay does not merely attempt to assert the “incidental significance” of Indian History to the period surrounding the U.S.-Mexican War. Instead, he writes to “demonstrate that Mexican, American, and indigenous politics came together in a forgotten nexus that reshaped North American boundaries for all of its peoples.”

In describing this nexus, DeLay argues that Indian raids of the mid-19^th century not only “shattered northern Mexico’s economy, depopulat[ed] its countryside and opened up great wounds in Mexico’s body politic,” but also that they had equally influential, if less tangible, effects on the U.S. side of the conflict.  These raids “indirectly facilitated the conquest and occupation of the Mexican North in 1846 and 1847” by leading the Americans to “