As always, this fall some of the most serious and interesting books are on the lists of small and university presses. They don’t have the advertising budgets of the big trade houses, and their books may not be heaped in the windows at Barnes & Noble, but these publishers are responsible for a big part of what’s currently worth reading.

Ever since D.W. Griffith invented modern American cinema with The Birth of a Nation, Hollywood has loved history. But as Griffith and many later directors have demonstrated, what Hollywood does with the past is often simple-minded and even sinister. And since many people take Hollywood history for the real thing, this cultural tendency has political and moral consequences. In Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (University Press of Kansas, $17.95 paper), historian Robert Brent Toplin examines the good, the bad, and the ugly in historical films. He argues that, though many films do oversimplify the past, some movies — like Glory and Saving Private Ryan — succeed in communicating the truth despite taking liberties with the facts.

In Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, the son of a rich suburban family gets an unforgettable lesson in snobbery and compassion when he’s caught leaving a waitress’s tip at the bottom of his milk-shake glass. If only he could have read Alison Owings’s Hey, Waitress! (University of California Press, $29.95), probably the first oral history of waitressing in America. Here, Owings interviews waitresses across the country, including the oldest living waitress (95 years old, in Baltimore), to create a portrait of American labor in the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. Read it, and remember it the next time you think of leaving six percent.

James Joyce famously wrote that " History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. " Every country has its nightmares, of course, but Ireland’s are more durable and widespread than most: a nation whose identity is bound up with storytelling is sure to excel at making and making up history. That is the subject of R.F. Foster’s acerbic new book of essays, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (Oxford University Press, $28). Foster, author of the seminal history Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 and the official biographer of W.B. Yeats, tackles the history of Irish history, from the rebellion of 1798 to the Famine to the best-selling blarney of Frank McCourt. Scholarly but accessible, Foster’s essays show how the new postmodern trend in writing history, " with its stress on the personal and the unmediated, " risks becoming sentimental and nostalgic for a past that never was.

The galaxy of small presses and little magazines has been indispensable to American poetry ever since the beginning of modernism. The start of this phenomenon might be dated to 1912, when Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine, with the overbearing assistance of Ezra Pound. Its pioneering days ended long ago, but over the last nine decades, just about every American poet of note has appeared in its pages. Now The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002 (Ivan R. Dee, $29.95), edited by Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young, collects some of the best work the journal has published, from Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Lowell to Komunyakaa and Billy Collins. There’s a similarly impressive roll call in Horace: The Odes, New Translations by Contemporary Poets (Princeton University Press, $24.95), edited by J.D. McClatchy, in which dozens of contemporary poets translate the classical Latin poems into contemporary English.

The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn (Milkweed, $14.95), by Jean Nordhaus, is a sequence of narrative poems about the life of Mendelssohn, one of the great thinkers of the 18th century and the first Jew to publish a book in German. The title comes from the odd fact that, in keeping with an anti-Semitic law, Mendelssohn was ordered, upon his marriage, to buy 20 life-size apes from the state porcelain factory. The eminent poet Richard Howard also delves into the past in his latest collection, Talking Cures (Turtle Point Press, $16.95). Elegant and ruefully comic, the book contains a witty sequence in which writers like Henry James and Willa Cather comment on movies they have watched in the afterlife. And one of the most important books of poetry criticism in recent times, Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter? (Graywolf, $16), is back in print after 10 years, with a new introduction bringing its provocative arguments up to date.

Boston has long been known as a center of poetry; its painting scene is not nearly as celebrated. That’s why Painting in Boston: 1950-2000 (University of Massachusetts Press, $44.95), edited by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo and Nicholas Capasso, is such a useful book, containing color reproductions of work by 67 local artists. Critical essays explore how the city’s artistic institutions shape painters’ work, and illuminate the realist, abstract, and expressionist traditions in Boston painting. The book was produced in conjunction with an exhibition at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln.

The 18th-century painter Gilbert Stuart is just one of the Bostonians whose acquaintance you can make in Thomas H. O’Connor’s Eminent Bostonians (Harvard University Press, $26.95). O’Connor’s idea was to write the history of the city via brief biographies of more than 100 illustrious residents, from the Colonial period to the present. The list runs from Abigail Adams to Leonard Zakim, and there are some surprising juxtapositions: Crispus Attucks, killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770, next to George Apley, the fictional Brahmin satirized in John P. Marquand’s novel.

Finally, one of the strangest books from a small press this fall: You Shall Know Our Velocity, the new novel by Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s Books, $22). Eggers’s memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a bestseller and a cultural phenomenon, yet he chose to publish his follow-up through the books division of his own McSweeney’s magazine, in a very limited edition of 10,000 copies. It may already be too late to get a copy, but Eggers may relent and print more; regardless, you can learn more at www.mcsweeneys.net.

Adam Kirsch can be reached at abkirsch@aol.com