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With the holiday season upon us, the University of Michigan Press has put together a list of books that make great gifts! Along with being one of the easiest gifts to wrap, books can be enjoyed over and over again. While we publish in a number of different subject areas, we’ve chosen to highlight some of our newest books (and a few classics) for you to share with the readers in your life.

Don’t forget to take advantage of 40% off our entire list of titles during our holiday sale, running November 25th to December 11th! Use coupon code HOLIDAY22 at checkout.

Unfortunately, delivery times continue to be unpredictable due to national and international supply chain disruptions. We encourage customers to place their orders as early as possible if books are needed for the holiday season. Orders taking advantage of this promotion’s free shipping offer will be sent by USPS BPM or a comparable service.

Gifts for Michiganders

Guardians of Michigan

Guardians of Michigan features stories and over 1,200 full-color photos of the architectural sculpture found on Michigan's buildings. Author Jeff Morrison spent years exploring Michigan’s largest cities and smallest towns, using telephoto photography to capture the sculptural details hidden from the naked eye, and researching the beautiful historic architecture he encountered. Organized alphabetically by city, each section documents the history and design of an individual building, accompanied by beautiful photos of the building and its unique ornamentation. This beautiful book makes a perfect coffee table book or gift for fans of art and architecture!

Example pages:

Rouge River Revived: How People Are Bringing Their River Back to Life

Rouge River Revived is a great gift for anyone interested in environmental activism or Michigan history. While not geographically large, the river has played an outsized role in the history of southeast Michigan. After pollution from the Ford complex and neighboring factories literally caused the river to catch on fire in 1969, community groups launched a Herculean effort to restore and protect the watershed. Today the Rouge stands as one of the most successful examples of urban river revival in the country! Rouge River Revived describes the river’s history from pre-European times into the 21st century. This book is not only a history of the environment of the Rouge River, but also of the complex and evolving relationship between humans and natural spaces.

Up North in Michigan: A Portrait of Place in Four Seasons

This Michigan Notable book will remind every reader why Michigan is such a special place.
"Dennis is always seeking a larger, transcendent view, even in seemingly mundane activities, like paddling a canoe... These transcendent views surface over and over again, and yet, they remain remarkably unexpected - one of the many pleasures of reading this book. No one, it seems, is more delighted than Dennis himself when nature reveals a new perspective. He accepts these moments as gifts he shares with the reader..."
—Inland Seas

Cheers to Michigan: A Celebration of Cocktail Culture and Craft Distillers

Based on Cheers!, Lester Graham and Tammy Coxen’s popular cocktail segment on Michigan Radio (NPR), this book gathers forty-five of the authors’ favorite cocktail recipes celebrating the Great Lakes State—its history, its people, its culture, even its weather!
“Michigan’s cocktail culture goes way beyond The Last Word. I learned a lot from Cheers to Michigan, and the information goes down easy thanks to Tammy and Lester’s personal anecdotes. I’ll definitely bust this book out at my next cocktail party.”
—Lee DeVito, Editor-in-Chief of Detroit Metro Times

Gifts for Writers and Poets

A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson

"A Beat Beyond is a collection for the weary writer, for poets who feel themselves becoming invisible, and for any person who desires a liberation of language and lyric. With prose that transcends the bounds of mere musicality, Major Jackson invites us to investigate just how poetry ‘puts in an appearance.’ From the academy, to conversations in the grocery store, to churches, to hip-hop music, poetry is a sound guide that can lead us to the center of language."
—Kashif Andrew Graham, Chapter 16

Going to the Tigers: Essays and Exhortations

Going to the Tigers is the perfect gift for writers. In this funny and perceptive collection, novelist and essayist Robert Cohen shares his thoughts on the writing process and then puts these prescriptions into practice—from how to rant effectively as an essayist and novelist, how to achieve your own style, naming characters (and creating them), how one manages one’s own identity with being “a writer” in time and space, to the use of reference and allusion in one’s work. Cohen is a deft weaver of allusion himself. Rooted in his own experiences, this collection of essays shows readers how to use their influences and experiences to create bold, personal, and individual work.

From the Valley of Bronze Camels: A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry

Fans of poetry will identify with author Jane Miller as she writes about her love of the form. In provocative and deeply insightful essays, she unpacks the work of giants like Adrienne Rich, Paul Celan, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Federico García Lorca alongside painters such as Caravaggio and Paul Klee, as well as ancient Chinese music and techniques of the contemporary poem. This masterful work can be read as advice to a young writer, but it also invites us into the mind of a writer who has developed her craft through the course of a lifetime of writing, reading, and exploring the world, showing not only the ideas that influenced her—feminist, lesbian, and international works—but also how Miller has, in turn, influenced ideas.

Gifts for Fans of the Classics

Tales of Dionysus: The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis

Tales of Dionysus is the first English verse translation of one of the most extraordinary poems of the Greek literary tradition, the Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis. The Dionysiaca is by far the longest poem surviving from the classical world, a massive mythological epic stretching to over 20,000 lines, written in the tradition of Homer, using Homer’s verse, Homer’s language, his narrative turns and motifs, and invoking his ancient Muses. Tales of Dionysus brings together forty-two translators from a wide range of backgrounds, with different experiences and different potential relationships to the text of Nonnus’ poem. All work in their own styles and with their own individual approaches to the poem, to translation, and to poetic form. This variety turns Tales of Dionysus into a showcase of the multiple possibilities open to classical translation in the contemporary world.

Find more great gifts from University of Michigan Press at press.umich.edu.