TACOMA, Wash. – A woodcarver named Mary Bluestone, who has lived in an isolated mountain town in California’s High Sierra for many years, impulsively puts herself between a river and a dam. Her husband, the county sheriff, must arrest her, and a flood of unintended consequences ensues as the 21st-century global scramble for energy invades a pristine canyon and those who live there.
Hans Ostrom’s new book, Honoring Juanita (Congruent Angle Press, March 2010), is a story of greed, power, memory, and love, of entangled histories and divided loyalties, set in the Sierra Nevada mountain range where the author grew up. Mary Bluestone, haunted by the legend of Juanita, a woman lynched during the Gold Rush era, becomes a protester in spite of herself, taking on a modern-day monster that moves blindly in a landscape that the author, and inevitably the reader, revere.
Ostrom, a poet, novelist, and scholar who is professor of African American studies and English at University of Puget Sound, delivers in this, his second novel, the beauty and vulnerability of a place, the powerful values of a people, and the horrors of a contemporary clash of political and personal wills on an issue that few readers have known in such human terms.
Ostrom, James Dolliver National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor, has published poetry, short stories, novels, and academic articles and books. He has also edited anthologies and written screenplays. His books include The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976–2006; Three to Get Ready; A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia; and Subjects Apprehended: Poems. He co-wrote Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively and co-edited The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature (five volumes). Ostrom is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the PEN/American Center. Since 2007 he’s kept the blog Poet’s Musings going, as well as the online Red Tales, an evolving collection of flash fiction and other short prose pieces.
Published by Congruent Angle Press, an independent publisher, the book is the product of a unique collaboration between a novelist and a computer scientist, Rob Beezer, professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Puget Sound—hence the name Congruent Angle. Beezer typeset the book with Donald Knuth’s TEX system, using Leslie Lamport’s LaTex document preparation system. He also designed the interior and cover, including the logo. Beezer is a leading proponent of open source publishing, and he has published his own textbook, A First Course in Linear Algebra, which other professors may access and edit online, and which is available inexpensively to students at http://linear.ups.edu/index.html. The publishing system allows books to be downloaded and read electronically on a computer or hand-held reading device, or to be printed out at a low cost.
Honoring Juanita is manufactured in paperback by Lightning Source, a division of Ingram Book Company, and is available in this format on amazon.com (including Kindle), barnesandnoble.com, and other online sources. Booksellers order the novel from Ingram Book Company. Beezer and Ostrom are working on an e-Pub version of the book—an electronic publication that adheres to the free and open e-book standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum—and other accessible formats. The University of Puget Sound campus bookstore carries copies of the novel.
Honoring Juanita Facebook page (with photos of the Sierra Nevada): www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Honoring-Juanita/113221995384978?ref=ts
Press-quality photos of Hans Ostrom are available on request.
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