Ohio University Press is an academic unit that reports to the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost. The scholarly publishing arm of Ohio University, it operates under the guidance of an Editorial Advisory Board composed of some of the most engaged and acclaimed scholars on the Athens campus.

Originally incorporated in 1947 and formally organized in 1964 by President Vernon Alden, Ohio University Press is the largest scholarly press in the state of Ohio. With a staff of twelve, it publishes fifty titles a year and generates more than one million dollars in annual book sales.

Unique among university presses is Ohio University Press’s affiliation with Swallow Press. Swallow Press is a distinguished literary press founded in the 1940s by poet, professor, and publisher Allan Swallow. Over the years Swallow Press has published many leading literary lights, including Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, J. V. Cunningham, Anaïs Nin, and Frank Waters. Through an arrangement with the owners of Swallow Press, Ohio University Press has managed the acquisition, production, and distribution of Swallow Press titles for over twenty-five years, creating a balanced publishing program that appeals to a diverse mix of readers, from the professional scholar to the educated generalist. This partnership gives Ohio University Press real distinction as a publisher of fine books.

 

Featured Titles:

The Extinction of Menai
Chuma Nwokolo
$22.95
Paperback; ebook
Fiction
978-0-8214-2298-4; 978-0-8214-4620-1
March 2018
5 ½ x 8 ½”

“Poignant, thrilling, and funny … Nwokolo manages to brilliantly distill his branching plot into a singular portrayal of a threatened culture.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The place at The Extinction of Menai’s heart is the Niger delta village of Kreektown, even as the action spans continents. The cause of the trouble is an unethical drug trial administered to Kreektown residents—the fictional Menai people—in the early 1980s. And the unfolding tragedy is the looming end, decades later, of the Menai and their culture. Characters include continents-apart twin brothers separated at birth, an excommunicated Menai daughter living an urbane life with her doctor husband, and an infamous vigilante. And there is spiritual leader Mata Nimito, who retraces their ancient migration on his quest to preserve the soul of his people and resolve the consequences of a centuries-old betrayal. This epic for the modern era encompasses bioethics, language extinction, and Nigerian history and diaspora.

Chuma Nwokolo’s books include many novels and two poetry collections. His stories have appeared in the London Review of Books, La Internazionale, AGNI, and elsewhere. A lawyer by trade, he founded the Bribecode good governance campaign. He lives in Nigeria.

Marta
Eliza Orzeszkowa
Translated from Polish by Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft
$22.95
Hardcover; ebook
Fiction
978-0-8214-2313-4; 978-0-8214-4629-4
July 2018
6 x 9″

Eliza Orzeszkowa was a trailblazing Polish novelist who, alongside Leo Tolstoy and Henryk Sienkiewicz, was a finalist for the 1905 Nobel Prize in literature. Of her many works of social realism, Marta (1873) is among the best known, but until now it has not been available in English. Easily a peer of The Awakening and A Doll’s House, the novel was well ahead of the English literature of its time in attacking the ways the labor market failed women.

Marta burns with Orzeszkowa’s feminist conviction that sexism was not just an annoyance but a threat to the survival of women and children. Tightly plotted and exquisitely translated by Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft, Marta resonates beyond its Polish setting to find its place in women’s studies, labor history, and among other works of nineteenth-century literature and literature of social change.

Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841–1910) is one of the most prolific and esteemed Polish nineteenth-century prose writers. She was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature: in 1905 and in 1909. Her influence on Polish literary life was enormous. Most of the Polish women’s literature of the post-1863 Uprising period was written with the encouragement and guidance of Orzeszkowa, the most widely appreciated and highly respected Polish woman writer of that time.

Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn is a published translator of Polish poetry and prose in English.  She has been teaching Polish language and Polish literature for many years at various American universities, among them the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Pittsburgh, Loyola University, and Saint Xavier University.

Stephanie Kraft holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Rochester (New York) with a specialty in nineteenth-century literature. She is the translator of STONE TABLETS by Wojciech Żukrowski (Paul Dry Books, 2016).

 

Backlist:

 

Camp Life is Paradise for Freddy: A Childhood in the Dutch East Indies, 1933–1946
Fred Lanzing
Translated from Dutch by Marjolijn de Jager
$24.95, $60.00
Paperback; hardcover; ebook
978-0-89680-308-4; 978-0-89680-307-7; 978-0-89680-496-8
Jan. 2017
5 ½ x 8 ½”

In this lyrical memoir of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp for Dutch colonialists during World War II, Lanzing enlivens ongoing discussions of the politics of memory and the powerful—if contentious—contributions that subjective accounts make to historiography.

You Will Hear Thunder
Anna Akhmatova
Translated from Russian by D. M. Thomas
$19.95
Paperback; ebook
978-0-8040-1191-4; 978-0-8040-4084-6
Aug. 2017
5 ½ x 8 ½”

Intricately observed and unwavering in their emotional immediacy, these strikingly modern poems represent one of the twentieth century’s most powerful voices, in this republication of the classic Swallow Press edition.

Requiem and Poem without a Hero
Anna Akhmatova
Translated from Russian by D. M. Thomas
$12.95
Paperback; ebook
978-0-8040-1195-2; 978-0-8040-4088-4
March 2018
5 ½ x 8 ½”

With this edition of Requiem and Poem without a Hero, Swallow Press presents two of Anna Akhmatova’s best-known works, ones that represent the poet at full maturity, and that most trenchantly process the trauma she and others experienced living under Stalin’s regime.

Trapeze: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947–1955
Anaïs Nin
$34.95
Hardcover; ebook
978-0-8040-1181-5; 978-0-8040-4077-8
May 2017
6.125 x 9 ¼”

Trapeze is the sixth volume of Nin’s unexpurgated diaries, which Swallow Press continued publishing after Harcourt stopped. This begins where the previous volume, Mirages, left off: when Nin met Rupert Pole, the young man who became not only her lover but later her husband in a bigamous marriage.

Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories
Anaïs Nin
$16.95
Paperback
978-0-8040-1182-2
May 2017
5 ¼ x 8 ¼”

The stories collected here contain many elements familiar to those who know Nin’s later work as well as revelatory, early clues to themes developed in those more mature stories and novels.

Tales of the Metric System: A Novel
Imraan Coovadia
$18.95; $38.00
Paperback; hardcover; ebook
978-0-8214-2226-7; 978-0-8214-2225-0; 978-0-8214-4564-8
April 2016
5 ¼ x 8 ¼”

Coovadia explores a turbulent South Africa from 1970 into the present. He takes South Africa’s transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, in a gorgeously rendered multi-perspective examination of the country’s history and identity.

The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician: A Novel
Tendai Huchu
$18.95 pb, $35.00 hc
Paperback, hardcover, ebook
978-0-8214-2206-9; 978-0-8214-2205-2; 978-0-8214-4553-2
Feb. 2016
6 x 9″

The novel follows three Zimbabwean men as they struggle to find places for themselves in Scotland. Huchu creates a humorous but increasingly somber picture of love, loss, belonging, and politics in the Zimbabwean diaspora.

The Hairdresser of Harare
Tendai Huchu
$16.95 pb, $35 hc
Paperback; hardcover; ebook
978-0-8214-2163-5; 978-0-8214-2162-8; 978-0-8214-4529-7
Sep. 2015
5 ½ x 8 ½”

This delicious and devastating novel, which the New York Times called “a fresh and moving account of contemporary Zimbabwe,” handles bleak themes with humor and grace as it tells the story of the rise and collapse of a friendship.