Wayne State University Press imprint: 405 books

The well-crafted lines in Michael Lauchlan’s Trumbull Ave. are peopled by welders, bricklayers, gas meter readers, nurses, teachers, cement masons, and street kids. Taken together, they evoke a place—Detroit—in its bustling working-class past and changeable present moment. Lauchlan works in the...

Examines the barbershop as a rhetorical site in African American culture across genres, including fiction, film, poetry, and theater.

A collection that greatly enriches our understanding of who told (and tells) märchen (Italian folktales) to whom, why and how they are told, and, perhaps most important, under what conditions.

A unique blend of memoir and scholarship, Keith Gilyard's Voices of the Self is a penetrating analysis of the linguistic and cultural "collision" experienced by African-American students in the public education system. Gilyard examines black students "negotiate" their way through school and discusses...

Saving Arcadia: A Story of Conservation and Community in the Great Lakes is a suspenseful and intimate land conservation adventure story set in the Great Lakes heartland. The story spans more than forty years, following the fate of a magnificent sand dune on Lake Michigan and the people who care about...

Brief encounters with the suffering and triumphs of characters living in northern Michigan by Phillip Sterling.

At a time when television offered limited opportunities for women, Donna Reed was an Oscar-winning Hollywood actress who became both producer (though largely uncredited) and star of her own television show. Distinct from the patriarchal family sitcoms of the era, The Donna Reed Show's storylines focused...

This is the first in-depth biography of Rebecca Gratz (1781-1869), the foremost American Jewish woman of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the best-known member of the prominent Gratz family of Philadelphia, she was a fervent patriot, a profoundly religious woman, and a widely known activist for poor women....

A gripping and original debut collection of short stories from Michigan writer Dorene O’Brien.

Half a century after Hasidism blossomed in Eastern Europe, its members were making deep inroads into the institutional structure of Polish Jewish communities, but some devotees believed that the movement had drifted away from its revolutionary ideals. Menashe Unger’s A Fire Burns in Kotsk dramatizes...

Charles Perrault published Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (“Stories or Tales of the Past”) in France in 1697 during what scholars call the first “vogue” of tales produced by learned French writers. The genre that we now know so well was new and an uncommon kind of literature in the epic...

Hell on Earth is the second book written by Avigdor Hameiri (born Feuerstein; 1890–1970) about his experiences as a Russian prisoner of war during the second half of World War I. Translator Peter C. Appelbaum first became interested in Hameiri’s story after learning that one quarter of the Austro-Hungarian...

Since 1887, Detroit’s Eastern Market, the largest open-air market of its kind in the United States, has been home to an amazing community of farmers, merchants, and food lovers. Specialty shops, bakeries, spice companies, meat and poultry markets, restaurants, jazz cafés, old-time saloons, produce...