Cryptonym: Presses Distributed by Chicago

The University of Chicago Press maintains a distinctive and diverse list of distributed publishers from around the world. We're your one stop source for everything from the Magna Carta to the Marquis de Sade.

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Your scholarship crosses boundaries and defies easy categorization. You are a philosopher, literary theorist, cultural critic, and teacher. Exploring the dimensions of oppression and otherness through multiple lens, you take on some of the most difficult philosophical concepts and confound those who seek easy answers. A passionate advocate of education for cultivating the habits of democracy, you teach in a rural school you founded in India as well as in universities around the world. Your intellect amazes your colleagues, your scholarship challenges convention, and your commitment to academic inquiry inspires us all. We are pleased to honor you as Doctor of Humanities.

Yale University, honoring Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with an Honorary Doctorate of Humanities

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Jacky Colliss Harvey of Royal Collection Trust on Queen Victoria's The Adventures of Alice Laselles

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The Guardian on The Adventures of Alice Laselles, to be published June 8 by Royal Collection and distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press.

"Always a diligent diary writer, Queen Victoria’s journals run to 141 volumes comprising 43,000 pages, from which extracts were published in what became a bestseller. But one of her earliest works, written when she was 10, is only now set to be published for the first time, giving a fascinating insight into the vivid imagination of the future monarch."

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Visit Original Link

Britain's longest ruling monarch, Queen Victoria, will soon have her name on a children's book - not as a character, but as the author and illustrator. The title: The Adventures Of Alice Laselles, by Alexandrina Victoria, Aged 10 and 3/4.

The Royal Collection Trust says the short story was written by the future monarch around 1829. Jacky Colliss Harvey is with the Trust and organized the publication of the story. Harvey says it was probably a writing exercise for the princess.

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"Queen Victoria was one of the most notable graphomaniacs of the 19th century, penning an estimated 60 million words of diaries and letters over her lifetime. But scholars and amateur Victoriaphiles alike will soon have a less daunting keyhole into the royal mind to peep through: a whimsical children’s story, written by the future monarch when she was still a child herself."

Read more about the book and preorder your copy here!

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Mind Over Money

Bloomberg News on the appointment of Zed Books author & academic Yanis Varoufakis as Greece's Finance Minister: http://bv.ms/1z2Fhyk "Varoufakis is an academic economist who was transformed by the European economic crisis into a public intellectual. His 2011 book “The Global Minotaur” argued that the hugely imbalanced global monetary system sometimes called Bretton Woods II, by keeping the dollar unnaturally high and allowing the U.S. to run endless current account deficits, had tipped the world into crisis. This wasn’t all that different from the analysis of, say, the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, but Varoufakis expressed himself in more colorful language (the “Global Minotaur” is his term for Bretton Woods II) and with more disdain for economic orthodoxy."

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Mutiny Aboard HMS Wager

The Guardian on The Wager Disaster (http://bit.ly/1EU5M9G), forthcoming from Unicorn Press: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/29/unpublished-letter-mutiny-hms-wager-royal-navy  "In his book, Layman writes that the Wager tale must be one of the most sensational and dramatic episodes in the Royal Navy’s history. “Compared to the Bounty mutiny, for example, it is practically unknown; but it exceeds [it] in … its supreme record of human endurance against almost overwhelming hardships.”

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Zed Author Is the New Greek Finance Minster

Yanis Varoufakis - a Zed Books author - is officially Greece's new Finance Minister!: http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2015/jan/26/profile-yannis-varoufakis-greece-finance-minister

Give yourself a primer on his plans by reading his book, The Global Minotaur: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/G/bo20842539.html

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50th Anniversary of Churchill's Death

In honor of tomorrow's 50th anniversary of the death and funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, take a look at some of Unicorn Press's recent publications about England's most infamous & beloved prime minister:

The State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill: http://bit.ly/1CL7597

Churchill, by his Granddaughter, Celia Sandys: http://bit.ly/1t8nMve

Sir Winston Churchill, His Life and Paintings: http://bit.ly/1xLqp2P

And the exciting, forthcoming Churchill's Cookbook: http://bit.ly/189aIfS

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The Wager Disaster

On BBC Radio 4 Midweek, Rear Admiral Kit Layman discusses his thrilling new book, The Wager Disaster: Mayhem, Mutiny, and Murder in the South Seas (Uniform Press): 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04xp63x

Rear Admiral Kit Layman's new book, The Wager Disaster, pieces together the shipwreck of HMS Wager in 1741. Using eyewitness accounts and diary entries, he tells the story of this little-known nautical tragedy involving murder, starvation, mutiny and an epic open boat voyage of 2500 miles through hostile seas

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The Global Culture of Christmas

Listen to this great interview with Reaktion Books's Tara Moore, author of Christmas: From Sacred to Santa, at WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show on the fascinating facts about Christmas that you've never heard. 

"With its roots in various solstice and gift-giving holidays, Christmas has always been a mash-up of the sacred and profane. Tara Moore, who teaches writing at Penn State York, shares the history of the holiday from her new bookChristmas: The Sacred to Santa (Reaktion Books, 2014), and talks about how cultural differences play out around December 25th."

http://www.wnyc.org/story/christmas-culture/

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'Tis All our Seasons: Politically Inclusive Glad Tidings

A wonderful essay on that bugger of the season, "Merry Christmas" versus "Happy Holidays," by Tara Moore, author of Christmas: The Sacred to Santa, up now at the Crick Center. 

"The ironies of Christmas promise an unavoidable future of December disputes. Today Christmas causes more money to be spent than some small countries have at their disposal; it also offers peace. Ironically, it brings about the height of commercialism as well as quiet reflection on a tiny child. In all this contradiction, one thing is certain: Christmas will continue."

http://www.crickcentre.org/blog/political-offensiveness-christmas/

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"These firsthand accounts make us feel the cost borne by those who fought and by the bereft and agonized at home, and also of the sense of purpose and belief in what they were doing, made all the more poignant by hindsight of World War I’s ongoing troubled legacy."

From a Washington Times review of From Downing Street to the Trenches, edited by Mike Webb and published by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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Trick and/or Treat

If you are in Estes Park this Friday--you know, home of the iconic Stanley Hotel, where The Shining was filmed--stop by the Estes Valley Library to see Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat, talk about the history of Halloween! Her talk starts at 4pm. It will be sure to be spooky!

http://www.eptrail.com/datebook/ci_26687940/horror-writers-book-expo-estes-park-oct-23

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"What makes Marks of Genius such a gem is the opportunity to witness the handwritten output of geniuses through the ages. You can find a photograph of equations concerning the age and expansion of the universe that Albert Einstein wrote on a blackboard during a talk in 1931. . . . You can also take in images of the Magna Carta . . . and the manuscript of The Wind in the Willows."

The Boston Globe on Marks of Genius: Masterpieces from the Collections of the Bodleian Libraries by Stephen Hebron, curator in the Department of Special Collections at the Bodleian.

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Via CNN, "Long before our traveling friends had Facebook and Instagram to taunt us, they had postcards. So what better way to celebrate World Post Day than thumbing through one of the biggest archives of postcards ever amassed? . . . Some of the best have been gathered in a book, The World in Pocket-Size Format, by Monika Burri. It's available from Swiss company Scheidegger and Spiess."

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Remembering the First World War with Satire, Rather Than Solemnity: The Bodleian Library’s Treasures Reveal that Mockery was a Potent British Wartime Weapon (via Maclean's Magazine) Samuel Fanous, medievalist and head of publishing at the Bodleian Library, talks with Maclean's about how the eminent British institution is marking the centennial of the First World War. The Huns Have Got my Gramophone! Ye Berlyn Tapestrie Secrets in a Dead Fish