Christine Dumaine Leche, editor of Outside the Wire: American Soldiers’ Voices from Afghanistan, appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition to describe the creative writing class she taught in occupied Afghanistan and her amazing students, all of whom were American soldiers. You may listen to the interview here. In the following piece, “Flight to Salerno,” Leche takes us behind the scenes of this powerful new book. The trying journey described here is only the beginning of military life in Afghanistan.

For nearly fifty years, no one has covered the Commonwealth like the University of Virginia Press. Order now and save 25% on William Wooldridge’s Mapping Virginia, as well as numerous other titles on colonial Virginia, the Founding Era, the antebellum south, the Civil War, and modern Virginia. A full list of titles and their discounted prices can be found here. This discount is available only with the official order form and is good through December 31, 2012.

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To celebrate its 75th year, the AAUP is sponsoring the first annual University Press Week. Among the many activities commemorating the week is a series of blog posts to which 26 university presses are contributing. Each piece testifies to the dynamic and irreplaceable role university presses play in publishing. For Virginia’s contribution, we turned to one of our favorite authors, Catherine Allgor, who wrote the award-winning Parlor Politics and whose new book, The Queen of America, is just out.