By Lana Goldsmith, OUP USA
This year we are delighted that beer geeks, foodies, industry professionals, and many others just curious about all-things-beer have added The Oxford Companion to Beer to their holiday wish list, along with other Oxford companions such as The Oxford Companion to Wine and The Oxford Companion to Food. But we also wanted to know what else the beer connoisseurs and oenophiles are putting on their holiday reading wish lists. Check out some of their recommendations below.
Bob Townsend from the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Drink: A Beer, Wine, and Spirits blog recommends these books:
- Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah by Jeremy Cowan with James Sullivan
- Brewed Awakening: Behind the Beers and Brewers Leading the World’s Craft Brewing Revolution by Joshua M. Bernstein
- The Great American Ale Trail: the Craft Beer Lover’s Guide to the Best Watering Holes in the Nation by Christian DeBenedetti
Jon Bonné at the San Francisco Chronicle recommends:
- Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All by Brad Thomas Parsons
- Terry Theise’s Reading Between the Vines
According to Esquire.com:
- “The New Beer Bibles a Man Should Read” include The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. by written by Greg Koch, Steve Wagner and Randy Clemens
But what do the book people want in their kitchen? What are they hoping to drink and eat through the holiday season? We took a survey and put together a list from OUP staff of all the things they’d like to go along with this stellar set of books.
JENNIFER ABRAMS, Senior Demand Planner
Le Creuset Signature Round Wide Dutch Oven:
This item from Le Creuset would be a perfect addition to my current cookware collection. I have a new love of making Jambalaya and this would be a wonderful pot to utilize!
All-Clad d5 Stainless-Steel 4-Qt Soup Pot:
I have recently found a great recipe for Wild Mushroom soup, and I’m looking to change over my cookware to stainless-steel. A soup pot would encourage me to find additional recipes.
TIM BARTON, Managing Director, Global Academic Publishing
A bottle of Barbera from Piemonte in Italy, since it reminds me of a fantastic year I spent there after university, teaching E
[Insert witticism here.]
Book Dominoes FTW! [Urlesque]
This week in unnecessarily large versions of unhealthy foods… [Good]
Esquire thinks we can balance the federal budget in 3 days. Good luck with that one, guys. [Esquire]
Type in your own handwriting! [Pilot via GalleyCat]
If you didn’t already know, being vegan is hard. [Gizmodo]
A new blog of short essays. [BOTA]
Former OUPblogger “Johnny” in his Halloween costume… [Bravo TV]
Are you ready to be Super Duper/Epic on Foursquare??? [Mashable]
IKEA gets into the cookbook biz. [Trendland]
“51% of Americans would live with a ghost as long as rent were free, while 27% would share space with a spectre for a 50% reduction in rent.” [USA Today via The Awl]
Author Kevin J. Hayes has been very busy writing American Literature: A Very Short Introduction, but he needs your help. Find out what you can do below. Check out his past posts here.
In a contribution to Esquire in 1972, Tom Wolfe called autobiography “the one form of nonfiction that has always had most of the powers of the novel.” The study of autobiography has since emerged as an important field in American literary history. Of course, some of the major works in the discipline — Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography comes to mind — have received serious critical treatment for decades. More recently, many other autobiographical writings have been recognized for their literary artistry.
With his comparison, Wolfe was not necessarily saying that autobiographers fictionalized their life stories. Some undoubtedly do, but for most autobiographers, the writing process is a matter of selection, not creation. They start with the various events that shaped their lives and choose the ones they want to shape the story of their lives. Franklin, for example, omitted or downplayed some famous events in his life to emphasize ones displaying himself as a humble and hardworking printer. He made himself into an example to be imitated. The scheme worked. His autobiography is the prototypical story of the self-made man. To a certain extent, all autobiography offers examples for emulation.
Franklin’s may be the most important autobiography in American literature, but the genre seems significant enough to deserve its own chapter in my forthcoming American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. I have received such good responses from my earlier blogs that I am anxious to hear what you have to say about autobiography. I intend to start with Franklin and then flashback to the seventeenth century to discuss Puritan spiritual autobiography, captivity narratives, and slave narratives. After that, I need help with structure and content. I would like to subdivide the chapter into different types of autobiography. What other categories are significant enough to deserve separate subsections? Should I include a section on presidential memoirs? (Does that mean I’ll have to read Bill Clinton’s My Life? What am I getting myself into?) Who else’s autobiographies should I include? What do I do about ghost-written or co-written autobiographies?
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By Anatoly Liberman
It is of course snuck that will interest us, but the origin of this illegitimate form should not be handled in isolation. We can begin with sneak, a verb whose recorded history is relatively short. The earliest examples with it turned up about four hundred years ago. Old English had snican “creep,” with short i, and this form could have yielded sneak, just as Middle English crike, from Scandinavian, yielded creek. But for snican to become sneak, it had to pass through the stage sneek (such is the phonetic regularity), which has not been attested. (more…)
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