Showing 101-120 of 126 items.

Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon

The University of Arizona Press

Perhaps you know them for their deer dances or for their rich Easter ceremonies, or perhaps only from the writings of anthropologists or of Carlos Castaneda. But now you can come to know the Yaqui Indians in a whole new way.

Anita Endrezze, born in California of a Yaqui father and a European mother, has written a multilayered work that interweaves personal, mythical, and historical views of the Yaqui people. Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon is a blend of ancient myths, poetry, journal extracts, short stories, and essays that tell her people's story from the early 1500s to the present, and her family's story over the past five generations. Reproductions of Endrezze's paintings add an additional dimension to her story and illuminate it with striking visual imagery.

Endrezze has combed history and legend to gather stories of her immediate family and her mythical ancient family, the two converging in the spirit of storytelling. She tells Aztec and Yaqui creation stories, tales of witches and seductresses, with recurring motifs from both Yaqui and Chicano culture. She shows how Christianity has deeply infused Yaqui beliefs, sharing poems about the Flood and stories of a Yaqui Jesus. She re-creates the coming of the Spaniards through the works of such historical personages as Andrés Pérez de Ribas. And finally she tells of those individuals who carry the Yaqui spirit into the present day. People like the Esperanza sisters, her grandmothers, and others balance characters like Coyote Woman and the Virgin of Guadalupe to show that Yaqui women are especially important as carriers of their culture.

Greater than the sum of its parts, Endrezze's work is a new kind of family history that features a startling use of language to invoke a people and their past--a time capsule with a female soul. Written to enable her to understand more about her ancestors and to pass this understanding on to her own children, Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon helps us gain insight not only into Yaqui culture but into ourselves as well.

  • Copyright year: 2000
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Turtle Pictures

The University of Arizona Press

The rhythm of vision, the rhythm of dream, the rhythm of voices saturating the hot southwestern landscape. These are the rhythms of Ray Gonzalez, the haunting incantations of Turtle Pictures.

Gonzalez has forged a new Chicano manifesto, a cultural memoir that traces both his personal journey and the communal journey that ...

  • Copyright year: 2000
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The Last Tortilla

The University of Arizona Press

"She asked me if I liked them. And what could I say? They were wonderful." From the very beginning of Sergio Troncoso's celebrated story "Angie Luna," we know we are in the hands of a gifted storyteller.

Born of Mexican immigrants, raised in El Paso, and now living in New York City, Troncoso has a rare knack for celebrating life. Writing in a straightforward, light-handed style reminiscent of Grace Paley and Raymond Carver, he spins charming tales that reflect his experiences in two worlds.

Troncoso's El Paso is a normal town where common people who happen to be Mexican eat, sleep, fall in love, and undergo epiphanies just like everyone else. His tales are coming-of-age stories from the Mexican-American border, stories of the working class, stories of those coping with the trials of growing old in a rapidly changing society. He also explores New York with vignettes of life in the big city, capturing its loneliness and danger.

Beginning with Troncoso's widely acclaimed story "Angie Luna," the tale of a feverish love affair in which a young man rediscovers his Mexican heritage and learns how much love can hurt, these stories delve into the many dimensions of the human condition. We watch boys playing a game that begins innocently but takes a dangerous turn. We see an old Anglo woman befriending her Mexican gardener because both are lonely. We witness a man terrorized in his New York apartment, taking solace in memories of lost love.

Two new stories will be welcomed by Troncoso's readers. "My Life in the City" relates a transplanted Texan's yearning for companionship in New York, while "The Last Tortilla" returns to the Southwest to explore family strains after a mother's death--and the secret behind that death. Each reflects an insight about the human heart that has already established the author's work in literary circles.

Troncoso sets aside the polemics about social discomfort sometimes found in contemporary Chicano writing and focuses instead on the moral and intellectual lives of his characters. The twelve stories gathered here form a richly textured tapestry that adds to our understanding of what it is to be human.

  • Copyright year: 1999
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The Mountain Is Moving

Japanese Women's Lives

UBC Press

The Mountain Is Moving describes postwar Japanese society and the roles that women are expected to play within it.

  • Copyright year: 1999
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Nobody's Son

The University of Arizona Press

Here's a story about a family that comes from Tijuana and settles into the 'hood, hoping for the American Dream.

. . . I'm not saying it's our story. I'm not saying it isn't. It might be yours. "How do you tell a story that cannot be told?" writes Luis Alberto Urrea in this potent memoir of a childhood divided. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining.

Urrea endured violence and fear in the black and Mexican barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son's ethnicity. "You are not a Mexican!" his mother once screamed at him. "Why can't you be called Louis instead of Luis?" He suffers disease and abuse and he learns brutal lessons about machismo. But there are gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck; witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love.

"I am nobody's son. I am everybody's brother," writes Urrea. His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of other Americans who have waged war—both in the political arena and in their own homes—to claim their own personal and cultural identity. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us. Brutally honest and deeply moving, Nobody's Son is a testament to the borders that divide us all.

  • Copyright year: 1998
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The Lillooet Language

Phonology, Morphology, Syntax

UBC Press

This timely book is the first complete descriptive grammar of Lillooet, an indigenous Canadian language spoken in British Columbia, now threatened with extinction.

  • Copyright year: 1997
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Hungarian Rhapsodies

Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and Culture

UBC Press

From an examination of photographer Andre Kertesz to a visit to a Hungarian-American church in Cleveland, Richard Teleky reconciles contemporary identity with a heritage from another country.

  • Copyright year: 1997
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Breathing Between the Lines

The University of Arizona Press

Demetria Martínez has entered the public consciousness by way of the heart. In 1994, she captured a Western States Book Award with her first novel, Mother Tongue, which went on to win widespread national attention. Now, in Breathing between the Lines, the writer returns to poetry, her first love.

Many of the poems in this book touch on the themes from Mother Tongue, about an American activist who falls in love with a Salvadoran political refugee. Weaving together threads of love and family, social conviction and activism, loss and renewal, Breathing between the Lines carries the reader deep inside the head and heart of a talented Chicana writer.

Page by page, the journey is an exhilarating one. What we find at the end is up to us.

  • Copyright year: 1997
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Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar

UBC Press

A comprehensive introduction to the syntactical analysis of classical Chinese.

  • Copyright year: 1995
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Women Singing in the Snow

The University of Arizona Press

This first book-length analysis of the Chicana literary tradition traces the development of Chicana literature from 1848 to the present. Rebolledo discusses major writers' works, important myths and archetypes, and key theoretical issues; she then shows the ways in which Chicana writers explore subjectivity and identity in their writing, the struggle Chicana writers have faced in finding their voices and developing a strong and ethnically tagged language, and the ways they have broken taboos by transgressing into traditionally male spaces.

  • Copyright year: 1995
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Women Singing in the Snow

The University of Arizona Press

This first book-length analysis of the Chicana literary tradition traces the development of Chicana literature from 1848 to the present. Rebolledo discusses major writers' works, important myths and archetypes, and key theoretical issues; she then shows the ways in which Chicana writers explore subjectivity and identity in their writing, the struggle Chicana writers have faced in finding their voices and developing a strong and ethnically tagged language, and the ways they have broken taboos by transgressing into traditionally male spaces.

  • Copyright year: 1995
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Ocean Power

The University of Arizona Press

The annual seasons and rhythms of the desert are a dance of clouds, wind, rain, and flood—water in it roles from bringer of food to destroyer of life. The critical importance of weather and climate to native desert peoples is reflected with grace and power in this personal collection of poems, the first written creative work by an individual in O'odham and a landmark in Native American literature.

Poet Ofelia Zepeda centers these poems on her own experiences growing up in a Tohono O'odham family, where desert climate profoundly influenced daily life, and on her perceptions as a contemporary Tohono O'odham woman. One section of poems deals with contemporary life, personal history, and the meeting of old and new ways. Another section deals with winter and human responses to light and air. The final group of poems focuses on the nature of women, the ocean, and the way the past relationship of the O'odham with the ocean may still inform present day experience. These fine poems will give the outside reader a rich insight into the daily life of the Tohono O'odham people.

  • Copyright year: 1995
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Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation

in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin

UBC Press

The pioneering authority on Chinese historical phonetics Edwin Pulleyblank has compiled this Lexicon to present the result of his researches on the phonology of Middle Chinese and its evolution to Mandarin.

  • Copyright year: 1991
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Words We Call Home

Celebrating Creative Writing at UBC

Edited by Linda Svendsen
UBC Press

Gives voice to several generations of Canadian writers in their restless search for literary identity. - Calgary Herald

  • Copyright year: 1990
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Native Writers and Canadian Writing

Edited by W. H. New
UBC Press

A co-publication with the journal Canadian Literature – Canada's foremost literary journal – this collection examines the growing prominence of contemporary Native writing.

  • Copyright year: 1991
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The Letters of Malcolm Lowry and Gerald Noxon, 1940-1952

UBC Press

These letters observe the mind of eminent author Malcolm Lowry at play on questions of literary technique, on films, and on the beauties and rigors of life in his Dollarton shack on an inlet near Vancouver.

  • Copyright year: 1988
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Cervantes, Volume 2

An Old-Spelling Control Edition Based on the First Editions of Parts 1 & 2

Edited by R. M. Flores
UBC Press

This old-spelling edition of Don Quixote provides scholars with a text closer to that of Cervantes's original manuscript than any previous edition.

  • Copyright year: 1988
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Cervantes, Volume 1

Don Quixote de la Mancha: An Old-Spelling Control Edition Based on the First Editions of Parts 1 & 2

Edited by R.M. Flores
UBC Press

This old-spelling edition of Don Quixote provides scholars with a text closer to that of Cervantes's original manuscript than any previous edition.

  • Copyright year: 1988
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Ethel Wilson

Stories, Essays, and Letters

UBC Press

The fullest biography of the Ethel Wilson to date.

  • Copyright year: 1987
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A Bookman's Catalogue Vol. 2 M-End

The Norman Colbeck Collection of Nineteenth-Century and Edwardian Poetry and Belles Lettres

Edited by T. Bose and R. N. Colbeck
UBC Press

Focusing primarily on British essayists and poets of the nineteenth century from the Romantic Movement through the Edwardian era, the collection features nearly 500 authors and lists over 13,000 works.

  • Copyright year: 1987
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