University of Iowa Press Fall 2014 catalog of books

where great writing begins
IOWA
African American
Studies 20
Art 15
Business 1
Criminology 3
Current Events 1, 3
Fiction 6–7, 16–17
Film 8
Food 2
History 20
Iowa 4–5
Literature 12
Literary Criticism
18–19, 21–23
Media Studies 13
Memoir 9
index by subject
Fall 2014 Titles 1–23
New Regional & Iowa Titles
3, 4–5, 14
Order Form 24
Sales Information 25
contents
www.uiowapress.org
Recently published by the
University of Iowa Press
IOWA where great writing begins
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Nature 14
Photography 4–5
Poetry 10, 11
Poetics 18, 22
Politics 1
Popular Culture 13
Reference 8
America’s
Athletic
Classic
DAVI D PE T E RS ON






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E R I C L I N S K E R
La Far
by ALEXANDRI A PEARY
Control
Bird
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CARL KURTZ A Year of Iowa Nature
D i s c o v e r i n g W h e r e W e L i v e
EDI TED BY KAREN HELLEKSON
AND KRI STI NA BUSSE
1 www.uiowapress.org
september
224 pages
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6 x 9 inches
$19.00 paper original, 978-1-60938-269-8
$19.00 e-book, 978-1-60938-287-2
politics / business / current events
Campaign Inc.
How Leadership and Organization Propelled
Barack Obama to the White House
by Henry F. De Sio, Jr., 2008 Obama for America cOO
iT TAkes mOre ThAn an excellent candidate to win elections;
it takes an outstanding campaign organization, too. Campaign Inc.
is the story of how leadership and organization propelled Barack
Obama to the White House. As the chief operating offi cer of Obama’s
2008 presidential campaign, Henry F. De Sio, Jr., was positioned to
view this historic campaign as few others could. In this fascinating
behind-the-scenes account, he whisks readers into Obama’s national
election headquarters in Chicago to glimpse the decision-making
processes and myriad details critical to running a successful and in-
novative presidential campaign. From the campaign’s early chaos to
the jubilation and drama of winning the Iowa caucus, to the drawn-
out Democratic nomination process, to Obama’s eventual election
as president of the United States, De Sio guides readers through the
challenges faced by the Obama for America campaign in its brief
twenty-one-month lifespan.
De Sio shows readers that Obama himself was direct about his
vision for the campaign when he instructed his staf to “run it like a
business.” Thus, this is less the story of Barack Obama, candidate,
and more the story of Barack Obama, CEO. Because campaigns
are launched from scratch during every election cycle, they are the
ultimate entrepreneurial experience. In the course of the election,
the Obama campaign scaled up from a scrappy start-up to a nearly
$1 billion operation, becoming a hothouse environment on which the
glare of the media spotlight was permanently trained.
Campaign Inc. allows readers to peek behind the curtain at the
underdog organization that brought down the Clinton campaign
and later went on to defeat the Republican machine, while ofering
lessons in leadership and organization to innovators, executives,
and entrepreneurs.
Henry F. De Sio, Jr., was the 2008 Chief Operating Offi cer (COO)
at Obama for America and was appointed deputy assistant to Presi-
dent Barack Obama during his first term in offi ce. De Sio currently
promotes the principles of personal and organizational leadership
through his writings and public speaking engagements. He has been
a featured speaker at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford (UK), Ben
& Jerry’s Social Entrepreneurship Summit 2013, and on C-SPAN’s
“Road to the White House” series airing in October 2012. De Sio
earned his BA in Political Science from University of California, Santa
Barbara, and an MA in Public Administration from Harvard’s Ken-
nedy School. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife, Sine,
and two sons, Dante and Zane. Learn more at www.henrydesio.com.
“Not just a fascinating read (which it is) but
chock full of leadership lessons that entre-
preneurs, innovators, and executives across
sectors will want.”—Jerry Greenfield, co-
founder, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream
“In Campaign Inc., Henry De Sio tells the real
story about politics and power. Both in 2008
and again in 2012, a finely tuned organiza-
tion turned the tide of history and shocked
experts with a remarkable grasp of how to
define, identify, and turn out the vote. No
campaign has ever been better run, and the
result was the United States’ first African
American president. While books by other
political insiders focus on personality and
politics, Campaign Inc. details the science
of political victory. Henry De Sio’s book is a
must-read for those who care about winning
the right way.”—Nick Lowery, Kansas City
Chiefs Hall of Fame kicker, former White
House Stafer to 3 presidents, and speaker
“If you’re looking for a book that conveys what
it’s like to lead by continual experimenta-
tion and ongoing innovation in the midst of
chaos, this is a must read. Henry De Sio has
written a timely book that will benefit lead-
ers in all sectors.”—Frank J. Barrett, author,
Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons
from Jazz
How Leadership and Organization Propelled
Barack Obama to the White House
Henry F. De Sio, Jr.
2008 OBAMA FOR AMERICA COO
Campaign Inc.
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228 pages
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5 b&w photos
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2 tables
$19.00 paper original, 978-1-60938-277-3
$19.00 e-book, 978-1-60938-301-5
food
2
India’s Organic Farming Revolution
What It Means for Our Global Food System
by Sapna E. Thottathil
shOuld yOu Buy OrGAnic FOOd? Is it just a status symbol, or
is it really better for us? Is it really better for the environment? What
about organic produce grown thousands of miles from our kitchens,
or on massive corporately owned farms? Is “local” or “small-scale”
better, even if it’s not organic? A lot of consumers who would like to
do the right thing for their health and the environment are asking
such questions.
Sapna Thottathil calls on us to rethink the politics of organic
food by focusing on what it means for the people who grow and sell
it—what it means for their health, the health of their environment,
and also their economic and political well-being. Taking readers to
the state of Kerala in southern India, she shows us a place where the
so-called “Green Revolution” program of hybrid seeds, synthetic
fertilizers, and rising pesticide use had failed to reduce hunger while
it caused a cascade of economic, medical, and environmental prob-
lems. Farmers burdened with huge debts from buying the new seeds
and chemicals were committing suicide in troubling numbers. Farm
laborers sufered from pesticide poisoning and rising rates of birth
defects. A sharp fall in biodiversity worried environmental activists,
and everyone was anxious about declining yields of key export crops
like black pepper and cofee.
In their debates about how to solve these problems, farmers, en-
vironmentalists, and policymakers drew on Kerala’s history of and
continuing commitment to grassroots democracy. In 2010, they took
the unprecedented step of enacting a policy that requires all Kerala
growers to farm organically by 2020. How this policy came to be and
its immediate economic, political, and physical efects on the state’s
residents ofer lessons for everyone interested in agriculture, the en-
vironment, and what to eat for dinner. Kerala’s example shows that
when done right, this kind of agriculture can be good for everyone
in our global food system.
An advocate of sustainable food systems, Sapna E. Thottathil is cur-
rently a senior program associate for Health Care Without Harm/
Physicians for Social Responsibility, where she promotes sustainable
food purchasing by health care institutions and organizes medical
professionals around environmental policy. A member of the board
of directors for the San Francisco Women’s Environmental Network,
she earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. In
her spare time, Sapna enjoys cooking, gardening, and identifying
wildflowers and birds. She lives in Oakland, California.
“A breath of fresh air in the organic/local
food production discussion, this very en-
gaging book provides a significant example
of the structural conditions for the scaling
up of organic agriculture.”
—Eric Holt-Giménez, executive director,
Food First/Institute for Food and Develop-
ment Policy
“This book will make an important contribu-
tion to the field of organic literature as well
as to the field of such food and agriculture
transitions. I am not aware of many eforts
to provide the reader with such a compre-
hensive treatment of such transitions in the
context of a specific community.”
—Frederick Kirschenmann, author,
Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays
from a Farmer Philosopher
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3 www.uiowapress.org 3
Up in Here
Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side
by Mark Dostert
rAised in A cOmFOrTABle Dallas suburb, Mark Dostert crossed
cultural and socioeconomic boundaries as a college student by volun-
teering as a counselor at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Deten-
tion Center, Chicago’s infamous 500-cell juvenile jail, known locally
as the Audy Home. Inmates there had been indicted on first-degree
murder, rape, and carjacking charges, yet some enthusiastically met
with him for weekly Bible-based lessons and discussions. Dostert
formed friendly relationships with his students and envisioned be-
coming an even closer mentor to the legally troubled boys when he
became an employee there after graduating from college.
The juveniles’ attitudes toward Dostert change, however, once he
begins working as a “Children’s Attendant” at the Audy Home, clock-
ing in for eight hours every day to enforce rules and maintain order
on the cellblocks. His colorblind, altruistic volunteer world fractures
into a full-time, emotionally charged reality of white and black and
brown. When the boys change, he must change too. Despite want-
ing to help them feel human in such a dehumanizing environment,
Dostert realizes he needs to make sure his kindness is not perceived
as weakness. Dostert learns to march the juveniles through the facil-
ity to school, recreation activities, and chapel. He must strip-search
them, interrupt their brawls, root through their cells for drugs and
handcrafted weapons, and monitor group showers to thwart sexual
extortion and the inscription of gang symbols in soap on walls and
mirrors. Week after week and month after month, the job exposes
hidden views not only of the juveniles and the “system” incarcerating
them, but of Children’s Attendant Dostert himself.
From one man’s struggle to reconcile his humanitarian intentions
with his actual job responsibilities in what, to him, is a strange new
world, emerges a sincere efort to confront the realities of America’s
persisting racial tensions and institutionalized poverty. Dostert’s
story is an honest and unflinching journey from thinking he has many
of the answers for how to change this world to discovering how little
he really knows about the world he is trying to change.
Mark Dostert holds degrees from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago
and University of North Texas. His writing has appeared in Ascent,
Cimarron Review, Houston Chronicle, Southern Indiana Review, and The Sum-
merset Review, and been cited as notable in The Best American Nonrequired
Reading 2011, The Best American Essays 2011, and The Best American Essays
2013. Presently, he teaches Engli sh Language Arts in the Houston
Independent School District.
“Mark Dostert’s Up in Here is a fine book in the
spirit of Ted Conover’s Newjack. Dostert, who
writes heartbreaking sketches of his juvenile
charges, charts his evolution as a ‘children’s
attendant’ in Chicago’s Audy Home, brightly
illuminating the irony of a correctional system
that too often shapes all connected to it for
the worse.”—Alexander Parsons, author,
Leaving Disneyland and In the Shadows of the Sun
september
254 pages
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5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches
$19.00 paper original, 978-1-60938-270-4
$19.00 e-book, 978-1-60938-288-9
criminology / current events
JAILING KIDS ON CHICAGO’S OTHER SIDE
MA R K D O S T E R T
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144 pages
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10 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
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106 b&w photos
$25.00 paper original, 978-1-60938-278-0
$25.00 e-book, 978-1-60938-302-2
iowa / photography
The Iowa State Fair
by Kurt Ullrich
iOwA And The midwesT exPerience
William Friedricks, series editor
eVery yeAr in eArly AuGusT, a breeze borne by
silent messengers from another time blows through
Iowa. It carries a whif of something wonderful, some-
thing far of and a bit unclear, yet oddly familiar. It’s a
reminder that an extraordinary annual event is about
to take place, just as it has for more than 150 years: the
Iowa State Fair.
In 2013, Kurt Ullrich set out to chronicle the magic of the Iowa
State Fair in words and photographs. Join him as August days and
nights blow warm and easy over the fairgrounds, brushing lightly
against fellow travelers on this earth, both human and not. He cap-
tures precious moments of extreme joy and unbridled delight in
these beautiful black-and-white images, celebrating the brash rural
energy of the fair, from Big Wheel races to people-watching goats,
fair queen contestants to arm wrestlers, Percherons to ponies. Prize
pigs, prize sheep, prize apples, and the famous butter cow all have
their moment in the limelight. Iowa’s very best ear of corn and old
friends reminiscing outside their RVs draw the photographer’s fond
eye, as do brightly lit beer stands and the brilliant arc of the Ferris
wheel against the night sky.
If you always go to the Iowa State Fair, this book is for you. If
you’ve never been, it will show you what you’re missing—and you’ll
understand why it’s well past time you dropped by.
Kurt Ullrich’s essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore
Sun, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel, Houston Chronicle, Des Moines Register, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Quad-
City Times, Dubuque Telegraph Herald, and many others. His photographs
have appeared in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Des
Moines Register, and many other newspapers. He lives in rural Jackson
County, Iowa, with his wife, Bobbi Alpers.
“You just can’t beat all the fun you have at
the Iowa State Fair. It is Iowa and Iowans at
our best!”—Governor Terry E. Branstad
“Kurt Ullrich immersed himself in the 2013
Iowa State Fair with awe and curiosity.
He competed, conversed, indulged, and
enjoyed himself as a true Iowan while docu-
menting the process. His images show the
diversity and beauty of the state’s greatest
event.”—Mary Willie, multimedia journal-
ist, Des Moines Register
“You can almost smell the corndogs. . . . In
his photographs, Kurt Ullrich captures the
food, the fun, and, best of all, the faces—
everything that makes the Iowa State Fair
unforgettable.”—Sally Finder, editor,
Meredith Corporation
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146 pages
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5 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches
$16.00 paper original, 978-1-60938-282-7
$16.00 e-book, 978-1-60938-299-5
fiction
The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons
by Heather A. Slomski
2014 iOwA shOrT FicTiOn AwArd
“Never far from a dining table, the characters in Heather A. Slomski’s
limpid and elegant debut collection are not given to melodramatics.
Civility reigns, voices are not raised, much goes unsaid. But just beneath
the sophisticated composure are longing, loss, heartbreak. And how
intensely familiar is the table itself, which made this reader suddenly
understand how much of our real life takes place there. Heather A.
Slomski is truly a fresh voice on the scene, and The Lovers Set Down Their
Spoons is that rare thing, a new book as innovative in its design as it is
compulsively readable.”—Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award winning
author, Lord of Misrule
winner OF The 2014 iOwA shOrT FicTiOn AwArd, Heather
A. Slomski’s debut story collection The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons
brings us a fresh new voice in literary fiction. In prose spare and dar-
ing, elegant yet startling, these stories drop their roots in reality, but
take intermittent leaps into the surreal. Two couples meet for dinner
to acknowledge an afair. A mannequin recalls a lover and the life she
mysteriously lost. Two girls observe a young widow’s grief through
a café window. A man’s hat has the power of Cinderella’s shoe.
In the fifteen stories that comprise this collection—some nearly
novellas, others short as breaths—Slomski writes with a keen eye
about relationships. About the desires that pull us together and the
betrayals that push us apart. About jealousy, obsession, loneliness,
and regret—the byproducts of loving someone that keep us awake
at night.
The characters in these stories share meals, drink wine, buy fur-
niture and art. They live domestic lives, so often wanting to love
someone yet ending up alone. In one story, a woman’s fiancé leaves
her when she goes to post some mail. In another story, a man can’t
move past an afair his wife almost had. Another story describes a
series of drawings to piece together a couple’s end. But while loss
and heartache pervade these stories, there is also occasional hope.
For, as the title story shows us, sometimes a breakup isn’t an end at
all, but the beginning of your life.
After earning her MFA from Western Michigan University, Heather
A. Slomski held the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of
Louisville. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, American Letters &
Commentary, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Normal School,
and elsewhere. A recipient of a Minnesota State Artist Initiative Grant
and a Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant, she currently teaches writ-
ing at Concordia College and lives in Moorhead, Minnesota, with her
husband, their son, and their dog.
“The stories in The Lovers Set Down Their
Spoons comprise an implacable, uncommon
contemplation of the systems of disquiet
that underpin the common life. In prose
of rare leanness and refinement, Heather
A. Slomski accomplishes a powerful inves-
tigation into how we live and sufer and
dine.”—Wells Tower
“Heather A. Slomski’s stories are downright
addictive. I kept promising myself to turn
of the light after just one more, and then
breaking that promise, beguiled by her
cool, measured prose and by the surprises,
tensions, and uncanny encounters simmer-
ing beneath its elegant surface.”
—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author,
Madeleine Is Sleeping
“The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons is a debut
collection of tremendous charm. Charm
as in delight; charm as if by magic. In a
prose that’s never less than lucidly grace-
ful, Heather A. Slomski conjures stories
distinguished by, and memorable for, their
imaginative power.”—Stuart Dybek
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206 pages
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6 x 9 inches
$16.00 paper original, 978-1-60938-283-4
$16.00 e-book, 978-1-60938-290-2
fiction
When Mystical Creatures Attack!
by Kathleen Founds
2014 JOhn simmOns shOrT FicTiOn AwArd
“I first encountered these mystical animals when Kathleen Founds was
in my writing class many years ago. I approached them with my pencil
gripped firmly in hand, ready to analyze and criticize. The next thing I
knew, I was doodling in the margins of her story, actually drawing hearts
and flowers all over it. I couldn’t stop myself! I still don’t know what hap-
pened; it was a very mystical and magical attack! All I can say is read this
book and let it happen to you!”—Mary Gaitskill
in When Mystical Creatures Attack!, Ms. Freedman’s high school English
class writes essays in which mystical creatures resolve the greatest
sociopolitical problems of our time. Students include Janice Gibbs,
“a feral child with excessive eyeliner and an anti-authoritarian com-
plex that would be interesting were it not so ill-informed,” and Cody
Splunk, an aspiring writer working on a time machine. Following
a nervous breakdown, Ms. Freedman corresponds with Janice and
Cody from an insane asylum run on the capitalist model of cognitive-
behavioral therapy, where inmates practice water aerobics to rebuild
their Psychiatric Credit Scores.
The lives of Janice, Cody, and Ms. Freedman are revealed through
in-class essays, letters, therapeutic journal exercises, an advice col-
umn, a reality show television transcript, a diary, and a Methodist
women’s fundraising cookbook. (Recipes include “Dark Night of the
Soul Food,” “Render Unto Caesar Salad,” and “Valley of the Shadow
of Death by Chocolate Cake.”) In “Virtue of the Month,” the ghost of
Ms. Freedman’s mother argues that suicide is not a choice. In “The
Un-Game,” Janice’s chain-smoking nursing home charge composes
a dirty limerick. In “The Hall of Old-Testament Miracles,” wax figures
of Bible characters come to life, hungry for Cody’s flesh.
Set against a South Texas landscape where cicadas hum and the air
smells of taco stands and jasmine flowers, these stories range from
laugh-out-loud funny to achingly poignant. This surreal, exuberant
collection mines the dark recesses of the soul while illuminating the
human heart.
Kathleen Founds has worked at a nursing home, a phone bank,
a South Texas middle school, and a Midwestern technical college
specializing in truck-driving certificates. She got her undergraduate
degree at Stanford and her MFA at Syracuse. She teaches social jus-
tice themed English classes at Cabrillo College and lives in Marina,
California, where she writes while her toddler is napping. Her fiction
has been published in The Sun, Epiphany, Booth Journal, The MacGuffi n,
and Stanford Alumni Magazine.
“With the antic fearlessness of Mark Leyner
and the compassion and inventiveness of
Karen Russell, Kathleen Founds takes mad
risks in tone and form and wins. These hilari-
ous, heartbreaking stories build a new archi-
tecture between the novel and the postmod-
ern parable, revising our notions of what the
short story is and might be.”—Wells Tower
“Kathleen Founds is a comic genius, and few
comic writers can deliver such wisdom and
pathos along with the laughs. Her characters
are unforgettable, in part because they are
so original, and in part because they so poi-
gnantly resemble ourselves. Hers is a voice
that will resonate long after you’ve stopped
laughing.”—Mary Caponegro
“When Mystical Creatures Attack! is a collection
of stories that reads like a dazzling, intricate,
and electric novel. Kathleen Founds shows
a true empathy towards these memorable
characters, and I felt incredibly attached to
them. Founds is a wonderful new talent, and
her prose and voice are incredibly charming,
witty, and stirringly graceful.”—Tom Kealey,
Thieves I’ve Known
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literature
An Infuriating American
The Incendiary Arts of H. L. Mencken
by Hal Crowther
muse BOOks: The Iowa Series in Creativity and Writing
Robert D. Richardson, series editor
As AmericAn JOurnAlism shAPe-shiFTs into multimedia pan-
demonium and seems to diminish rapidly in influence and integrity,
the controversial career of H. L. Mencken, the most powerful indi-
vidual journalist of the twentieth century, is a critical text for anyone
concerned with the balance of power between the free press, the
government, and the corporate plutocracy. Mencken, the belligerent
newspaperman from Baltimore, was not only the most outspoken
pundit of his day but also, by far, the most widely read, and accord-
ing to many critics the most gifted American writer ever nurtured in
a newsroom—a vanished world of typewriter banks and copy desks
that electronic advances have precipitously erased.
Nearly 60 years after his death, Mencken’s memory and monu-
mental verbal legacy rest largely in the hands of literary scholars and
historians, to whom he will always be a curious figure, unchecked
and alien and not a little distasteful. No faculty would have voted him
tenure. Hal Crowther, who followed in many of Mencken’s footsteps
as a reporter, magazine editor, literary critic, and political columnist,
focuses on Mencken the creator, the observer who turned his impres-
sions and prejudices into an inimitable group portrait of America,
painted in prose that charms and glowers and endures. Crowther,
himself a working polemicist who was awarded the Baltimore Sun’s
Mencken prize for truculent commentary, examines the origin of
Mencken’s thunderbolts—where and how they were manufactured,
rather than where and on whom they landed.
Mencken was such an outrageous original that contemporary writ-
ers have made him a political shuttlecock, defaming or defending him
according to modern conventions he never encountered. Crowther
argues that loving or hating him, admiring or despising him, are
scarcely relevant. Mencken can inspire and he can appall. The point
is that he mattered, at one time enormously, and had a lasting ef-
fect on the national conversation. No writer can aford to ignore his
craftsmanship or success, or fail to be fascinated by his strange mind
and the world that produced it. This book is a tribute—though by no
means a loving one—to a giant from one of his bastard sons.
Hal Crowther is a critic and essayist, and a former syndicated colum-
nist and newsmagazine editor at Time and Newsweek. His most recent
collection of essays, Gather at the River, was a finalist for the National
Book Critics Circle prize in criticism. His syndicated columns won
the Baltimore Sun’s H. L. Mencken Writing Award in 1992. He is also
the author of Unarmed But Dangerous and Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal
Landscape of the South, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award for com-
mentary and the Fellowship Prize from the Fellowship of Southern
Writers. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife, the
novelist Lee Smith.
“This is the sort of book H. L. Mencken him-
self would have written if he had set out to
do a study of an earlier American writer—a
book that is essentially an extended essay,
insightful, witty, and very readable, one
that gets at the meaning of Mencken better
than many other books that are five times
longer. Crowther gets Mencken just right,
understands him fully, tells his story beauti-
fully.”—Fred Hobson, author, Mencken: A Life
“H. L. Mencken was the perpetrator of some
of the gaudiest tirades ever written in the
great American language. He was a master
of gale force invective and gobsmacking
insult, a writer who leaves his readers laugh-
ing and appalled. Hal Crowther, one of the
best American journalists of our time, brings
Mencken roaring back to life in this compul-
sively readable and unforgettable portrait—
and perp walk—of America’s fulminator-
in-chief. An Infuriating American is a splendid
achievement.”—Robert D. Richardson,
author, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson
on the Creative Process
An Infuriating
American
Te Incendiary Arts of
H. L. Mencken
by Hal Crowther
«
9 www.uiowapress.org
september
216 pages
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5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches
$18.00 paper original, 978-1-60938-274-2
$18.00 e-book, 978-1-60938-296-4
memoir
Leaving the Pink House
by Ladette Randolph
“Like most ordinary lives, Ladette Randolph’s has been secretly extraor-
dinary—odd, diffi cult, beautiful, in its understated way heroic. Set in my
home state, Leaving the Pink House is a deeply evocative and clear-eyed
depiction of a quintessentially American search for home that reminds
me of both Willa Cather and Alexander Payne, of why I love Nebraska and
why I left.”—Kurt Andersen, author, True Believers
lAdeTTe rAndOlPh undersTAnds her life best through the
houses she has inhabited. From the isolated farmhouse of her child-
hood, to the series of houses her family occupied in small towns
across Nebraska as her father pursued his dream of becoming a
minister, to the equally small houses she lived in as a single mother
and graduate student, houses have shaped her understanding of her
place in the world and served as touchstones for a life marked by both
constancy and endless cycles of change.
On September 12, 2001, Randolph and her husband bought a di-
lapidated farmhouse on twenty acres outside Lincoln, Nebraska, and
set about gutting and rebuilding the house themselves. They had nine
months to complete the work. The project, undertaken at a time of
national unrest and uncertainty, led Randolph to reflect on the houses
of her past and the stages of her life that played out in each, both
painful and joyful. As the couple struggles to bring the dilapidated
house back to life, Randolph simultaneously traces the contours of a
life deeply shaped by the Nebraska plains, where her family has lived
for generations, and how those roots helped her find the strength
to overcome devastating losses as a young adult. Weaving together
strands of departures and arrivals, new houses and deep roots, cycles
of change and the cycles of the seasons, Leaving the Pink House is a
richly layered and compelling memoir of the meaning of home and
family, and how they can never really leave us, even if we leave them.
Ladette Randolph is the editor-in-chief of Ploughshares, the editor
of three literary anthologies, and the author of the novels Haven’s
Wake and the award-winning A Sandhills Ballad and the short-story
collection This Is Not the Tropics. She is on the faculty of the Writing,
Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson College and is the
recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jafe grant, a Virginia Faulkner
Award, a Best New American Voices citation, and two Nebraska Book
Awards. She currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
“Ladette Randolph gets right to the heart of
our primal fascination with houses, with heri-
tage, and with the ever shifting definitions of
home. I can’t decide which I’m more in love
with; the soul comforts of the pink house, the
unwieldy romance of the country house, or
all the magical and maddening places that
came before them. This book charmed me
and moved me—and, I daresay, made me
want to move.”—Meghan Daum, author,
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
“Like the best memoirs, Leaving the Pink House
is not one story but many. It’s a medita-
tion on love and marriage; an elegy for lost
things, including houses and faith; a medi-
tation on risk and gratitude; and, finally,
a paean to the landscape and people of
Ladette Randolph’s native Nebraska.”
—Jennifer Brice, author, Unlearning to Fly
leavi ng
the
pi nk house
A Memoir
L ADET T E RANDOL PH
10 UNIVERsItY of IoWA PREss
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fAll ����
september
80 pages
.
6 x 8 inches
$18.50 paper original, 978-1-60938-307-7
$18.50 e-book, 978-1-60938-308-4
poetry
Congotronic
by Shane Book
kuhl hOuse POeTs
Mark Levine and Emily Wilson, series editors
AT Once OriGinAl, sTrAnGe, Funny, and unnerving, Shane
Book’s Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where mul-
tiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems
have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle
the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence
of high Romanticism.
Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book’s
poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array
of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip-hop
lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. In fusing disparate texts,
each poem in this collection attempts to create a community in lan-
guage. Thus, at its core, the project is utopic—or more precisely, to
borrow from Duke Ellington—the project is “blutopic.”
The book’s anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative
grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic
history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here elements of
Afrofuturism coagulate with an R&B grin as social forces challenge
a sense of personhood, prompting free-jazz inflected conversations
between the pieces of a shattered, polyvocal self.
Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a North-
ern Hemispheric glow suit, high “on Coltrane, on Zeus” but also on
the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert
Ryle, Freud, and Jay-Z, among others—or as one poem puts it, the
“aural truths.”
Shane Book is the author of Ceiling of Sticks, winner of the Prairie
Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Great Lakes Colleges As-
sociation New Writers Award. He is also a filmmaker whose award-
winning work has screened around the world in numerous film fes-
tivals and on television. He is a graduate of New York University and
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford
University.
Janelas
I have a home in my son’s hand.
The pier is out, the quay closed at noon.
You can sob, so be it, as if dates, as
though you had an oven of dough
everyone wanted. Day, I’m a over it;
out rowing an O.K. used pear,
sailing your barcode, you shop with the pain
you’re out now, avowing.
Our row cake vice squeezing through
sewer hour, I sail mystery O
sewer! Made on that pall of rat veil
A forms a dream navy
in the unclear I don’t miss saying.
“Welcome to the bounding dream and song
of Congotronic! This kind of visionary music
will ‘leave every jaw dropped, cocked and
locked.’ It’s as if John Berryman was alive
in the spiral of Shane Book’s ear. These are
oral, oracular, and thoroughly original po-
ems. Anyone who enters them will be trans-
formed.”—Terrance Hayes, author, Lighthead
“With an immediate and sustaining wit, and
all fingers on the pulse of language, Shane
Book seeks to blow the ghost out of the
machine and the dust of of history. No mind-
body split here; instead a learned, restive,
blues-based exploration of poetic modes and
poetic potentialities, of layered identities
and polyvocal echoes.”—Michael Palmer,
author, Thread
“Shane Book crosses tremendous territory—
from the social through the political and the
philosophical to the sheerly imaginative; it’s
travel in every sense of the word, motivated
by the urgency of pluralistic experience, of
the imperative to witness. And to bring that
witnessing to life, to speak out, which he
does with a marvelous range of dictions,
vernaculars, and linguistic stances—making
voice an active, even acrobatic thing. He
performs a stunning high-wire act that man-
ages to remain extremely well-grounded at
the same time.”—Cole Swensen, author,
The Book of a Hundred Hands
Congotronic
SHANE BOOK
Artwork: Jef Donaldson, Wives of Sango, 1969,
©
2014 by Jameela K. Donaldson
11 www.uiowapress.org
september
92 pages
.
6 x 8 inches
$18.50 paper original, 978-1-60938-284-1
$18.50 e-book, 978-1-60938-295-7
poetry
Trickster
by Randall Potts
kuhl hOuse POeTs
Mark Levine and Emily Wilson, series editors
Trickster opens with a crank call to the reader: “How was I to know /
You were thin, your garden / Was covered in smoke / That you sat in
your house / Coughing?” Over the course of these beautiful and eerily
accomplished poems, Potts’s reader is taken on a journey that is at
once time-scarred and resolutely contemporary, earthy and haunted,
moving from estrangement to reconciliation. Amidst a deepening
sense of crisis, the Trickster of Potts’s imagination emerges as ag-
gressor, prankster, victim, and healer, forging resilient music from
the aflictions of the mind’s “infested nest.”
Trickster veers quickly from meditation and narrative to song,
plunging the reader into a liminal world of dreams, archaic lyrics, and
fables, populated with figures ranging from the Hawk and Worm, the
Cat and Dove, to Cold and Death. It is a wilderness in which all things
are alive: “a blade of grass / equal to the sufering / of a lifetime.” Yet it
is also a place of menace, “where a fly with one wing, keeps / tipping
over in the grass, where / the ants will have him.” Whether or not the
Trickster reaches utopia, he reckons with the world that is achievable
on earth and in words, “those dreams of woods / relayed to you.”
Randall Potts is the author of a previous collection of poems, Collision
Center, and chapbook, Recant: (A Revision), both published in 1994. His
poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review,
Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Fingers Review, The Iowa Review,
Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, The West Marin Review, Unsplendid, and
other publications. He attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and
has taught creative writing at the graduate and undergraduate levels
at the University of San Francisco and California College of the Arts.
He lives in Berkeley, California. 
Dream
I dream a reactor to ruin
A dam to rubble—
“Someday machines
Can finish your work,” I shout
To the Watchmen—
To dark city hills I sing:
“Sleep, sleep
Let us vanish without trace!”
To myself I whisper, “My body is a fuse
I have begun to burn.”
“I admire the clarity, the urgency, the inven-
tion, the intelligence, and the commitment
of Randall Potts’s new book of poems. A
terrific book.”—Gerald Stern
“Potts writes poems charged with an intense
and loving empathy with the living and non-
living things of the Earth and the spirit that
animates them. His poems are grounded
in images and borne aloft by the song of
ancient and modern traditions. They are
touched by the spirit that moves through
the work of Merwin, Trakl, and Tarkovsky, a
spirit that endows things with the luminous
efects of golden sunlight scattered through
leaves, illuminating darkness with hope.”
—Geofrey Nutter, author, The Rose of
January and Christopher Sunset
TRICKSTER
RANDALL POTTS
poems by
12 UNIVERsItY of IoWA PREss
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october
268 pages
.
5 1/4 x 8 1/2 inches
$24.00 paper original, 978-1-60938-276-6
$24.00 e-book, 978-1-60938-300-8
reference / film
Screenwriting for Neurotics
A Beginner’s Guide to Writing a Feature-Length
Screenplay from Start to Finish
by Scott Winfield Sublett
Screenwriting for Neurotics is a quirky and accessible handbook for be-
ginning screenwriters. Whether you are a student in a screenwriting
class or just someone who wants to try their hand at writing for film
or television, this handy guidebook makes the entire process simple
and unintimidating. Scott Winfield Sublett, a veteran screenwriter
and screenwriting teacher, walks you step by step from start to finish
and helps you navigate potential and unforeseen diffi culties along the
way, ofering handy tips and suggestions to keep you from becoming
blocked or stalled.
Rather than throwing you into the writing process headfirst, Sub-
lett guides you through the various decisions you need to make—
about plot, character, structure, conflict—in the order you need to
make them. He explains in straightforward terms the terminology
and jargon, the theory and industry standards, and dispels com-
mon myths about screenwriting that can discourage or hold back a
beginning writer.
Balancing theory and practice and ofering valuable and insightful
examples from recognizable and well-known classic and contempo-
rary films, ranging from Casablanca to A Christmas Story to Clerks, Sublett
provides the new writer with the necessary tools to successfully write
a feature-length screenplay and ofers a roadmap of where to go next.
With an emphasis on helping a writer not just to begin, but also to
finish a script, Screenwriting for Neurotics is the screenwriting book to
help you actually write one.
Scott Winfield Sublett is a screenwriter, director, playwright, lyricist,
producer, journalist, and educator. He wrote and directed Generic
Thriller, featuring Oscar-winner Shirley Jones. As a librettist and lyri-
cist he wrote the musicals Die, Die, Diana; Bye-Bye Bin Laden (named
“Best Feature” at the South Beach International Animation Festival);
and Senorita X. Among his numerous screenwriting awards is a First
Prize at the 2013 Fade In Magazine screenwriting competition. He was
executive producer of All About Dad, named one of Top Ten Asian
American Films of the year. A professor of screenwriting, playwrit-
ing, and film history at San Jose State University, he holds an MFA in
screenwriting from University of California, Los Angeles. He lives
in San Jose, California .
“What comes through is not just the author’s
deep understanding of screenwriting but
also his deep love of classic cinema. A de-
lightful read and an essential guide to writ-
ing for the screen.”—Peter Bogdanovich,
director, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up
Doc?, Paper Moon, and Mask
“Scott Sublett guides you through the
screenwriting process with wisdom and
humor. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro-
fessional, you’ll feel as if you have a private
screenwriting professor at your side.”
—Pamela Gray, screenwriter, A Walk on the
Moon, Music of the Heart, and Conviction
“The techniques he teaches are so efective,
and the writing is so readable. This is one of
the few screenwriting books you can actu-
ally read with pleasure.”—Charles Busch,
screenwriter and playwright, Psycho Beach
Party and Die, Mommie, Die!
screenwriting
for Neurotics
A Beginner’s Guide to Writing
a Feature-Length Screenplay
from Start to Finish
Scott Winfield Sublett
“What comes through is not just the
author’s deep understanding of
screenwriting but also his deep love of
classic cinema.” — PETER BOGDANOVICH,
director, The Last Picture Show; What’s
Up Doc?; Paper Moon; Mask
13 www.uiowapress.org
november
202 pages
.
6 x 9 inches
.
3 b&w and 16 color
illustrations
$27.50 paper original, 978-1-60938-275-9
$27.50 e-book, 978-1-60938-298-8
media studies / popular culture
What Is Your Quest?
From Adventure Games to Interactive Books
by Anastasia Salter
“What Is Your Quest? ofers a significant contribution to
the general field of cyberculture studies, in particular
to gaming, electronic literature, e-books, and mobile
computing.”—Bryan Alexander, author, The New
Digital Storytelling
What Is Your Quest? examines the future of electronic literature in a
world where tablets and e-readers are becoming as common as
printed books and where fans are blurring the distinction between
reader and author. The construction of new ways of storytelling is
already underway: it is happening on the edges of the mainstream
gaming industry and in the spaces between media, on the foundations
set by classic games. Along these margins, convergent storytelling
allows for playful reading and reading becomes a strategy of play.
One of the earliest models for this new way of telling stories was
the adventure game, the kind of game centered on quests in which
the characters must overcome obstacles and puzzles. After they fell
out of fashion in the 1990s, fans made strenuous eforts to keep them
alive and to create new games in the genre. Such activities highlight
both the convergence of game and story and the collapsing distinc-
tion between reader and author. Continually defying the forces of
obsolescence, fans return abandoned games to a playable state and
treat stories as ever-evolving narratives. Similarly, players of mas-
sive multiplayer games become co-creators of the game experience,
building characters and creating social networks that recombine a
reading and gaming community.
The interactions between storytellers and readers, between pro-
grammers and creators, and among fans turned world-builders are
essential to the development of innovative ways of telling stories. And
at the same time that fan activities foster the convergence of digital
gaming and storytelling, new and increasingly accessible tools and
models for interactive narrative empower a broadening range of
storytellers. It is precisely this interactivity among a range of users
surrounding these new platforms that is radically reshaping both
e-books and games and those who read and play with them.
Anastasia Salter is an assistant professor in Science, Information Arts
and Technologies at the University of Baltimore, where she directs
the graduate programs in interaction design and information archi-
tecture. Her work spans the future of narrative, from transformative
works to video games and comics. She is the co-author, with John
Murray, of Flash: Building the Interactive Web (2014). A contributing
author for ProfHacker, a blog on pedagogy and technology hosted by
the Chronicle of Higher Education, she resides in Columbia, Maryland.
“In What Is Your Quest?, we find adventure
games situated in their many important
contexts and we are shown their relationship
to the sometimes overlapping categories of
electronic literature, tabletop role-playing
games, gamebooks, interactive fiction,
transmedia storytelling, and the e-book.
Anastasia Salter considers overlooked
threads (including several sorts of fan
production) as she traces the history and
extent of this genre, clearly and accessibly
mapping out a fascinating constellation of
digital works.”—Nick Montfort, author,
Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to
Interactive Fiction
“Not even the most wonderful book can
be magical in itself—readers are the true
magicians, and the heart of their power lies
in seeing beyond the letter of any text, into
that space of possibility where words make
worlds. Reading and writing must remain in
play. Salter has produced a notably magical
book that examines the fresh generation
of writer-designers who are now creating
works with roots in both library and arcade.”
—Stuart Moulthrop, University of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Artwork: Detail from (Plate 7) “Adventure:
The Inside Job.” Akril, 2008
14 university of iowa press
.
fall ����
Moths in Your Pocket
A Guide to the Saturn and Sphinx Moths
of the Upper Midwest
by Jim Durbin, Frank Olsen, and Tom Jantscher
A Bur OAk Guide
Holly Carver, series editor
This welcOme AddiTiOn TO Iowa’s popular series of laminated
guides—the twenty-seventh in the series—illustrates fifty-one spe-
cies commonly found in the Upper Midwest states of Illinois, Iowa,
Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
The Saturniid, or Giant Silk moths, are well named. Their large
size—up to 6.5 inches for the cecropia moth—and the soft silky
browns, greens, and oranges of their wings are unforgettable when
they appear at a lighted window at night. Equally well named are the
Sphinx or Hawk moths, important pollinators that hover like hum-
mingbirds when nectar-feeding at dusk and even in daylight. The
caterpillars of both families can be just as distinctive as the adults,
as anyone who has ever come upon a tobacco or a tomato hornworm
can attest.
For each species the authors have included common and scientific
names, wingspan, and time of flight for the adults at this final stage in
their life cycle. Striking photographs of the adult moths and of their
larval stages make this guide as beautiful as it is useful.
For all naturalists captivated by the clear window eyespots of a
Swallow-tailed Luna moth, the dark eyespots and bright yellow
“pupils” of an Io moth, or the extendable proboscis of a White-lined
Sphinx moth flitting from one moss rose to another, the photographs
and descriptions in Moths in Your Pocket will be an invaluable reference.
Photographer, birdwatcher, and former avionics engineer Jim Durbin
is past president and current board member of the Cedar Rapids
Audubon Society. Frank Olsen, a retired software installer, conducts
butterfly surveys for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Iowa Depart-
ment of Natural Resources, Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, and
county conservation departments. Tom Jantscher is a civil engineer
who studies moths and butterflies as a hobby, including informal
surveying, photographing, collecting, and rearing.
january 2015
laminated fold-out guide
73 color photos
16 3/4 x 16 7/8 inches folds to 4 1/8 x 9 inches
$10.95,

978-1-60938-305-3
$10.95 e-book,

978-1-60938-306-0
nature Artwork: Promethea silkmoth, Callosamia promethea
15 www.uiowapress.org
Dancing with Tears in My Eyes
drawings by the poet Gerald Stern
FOr decAdes One OF Our mOsT honored and beloved
poets, Gerald Stern is also, it turns out, a prolific doodler.
Sometimes charming, sometimes scathing, sometimes
both, the odd little figures and scenes here are reproduced
from drawings on napkins, hotel stationery, and the mar-
gins of what seem to be lecture handouts. These are remark-
able expressions of a quirky world and a clear vision.
Long recognized as one of the most original poets in America,
Stern is known for his tragicomic, irascible vision that has been vividly
rendered in hundreds of poems. All along, he has also been drafting
these whimsical sketches. The Thurberesque drawings represented
here are daft, graphic expressions of Stern’s fearless and shameless
sense of self.
In addition to expressing a forgiving and cavalier attitude toward
aging, these saucy drawings, until now a well-kept secret of Stern’s
creative life, capture something essential about his character. By turns
profane and playfully romantic, they are another expression of the
cutting wit and inimitable charm of Gerald Stern.
Gerald Stern’s recent books of poetry are Early Collected Poems: 1965–
1992; Save the Last Dance; This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won
the National Book Award; Odd Mercy; and Bread without Sugar. His
collection of essays What I Can’t Bear Losing was published in 2009.
His honors include the Award of Merit Medal from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners
Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four Na-
tional Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor’s
Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize
from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of
American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,
and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005 Stern was selected
to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry.
For many years a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
Stern now lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.
“Our romance with children begins with
their idealism, their playfulness, their unfil-
tered imaginations and infinite capacity for
wonder. We bear witness to their raucous,
devilish clowning with the taboo and their
instantaneous mood changes: one moment
infantile, the next wise beyond their years.
But the boyish wonder who—with surpris-
ing facility—sketched these cartoons, doo-
dles, marginalia, visual and verbal puns,
is in his eighties, one of our greatest and
most prolific poets. Now we don’t have to
imagine what our favorite satyr does while
he eats dinner, listens to you read, or waits
for the bus. You can’t take a pen out of this
poet’s hands and we’re glad.”—Ira Sadof
PrAirie liGhTs BOOks
november
88 pages
.
6 1/8 x 9 inches
.
68 drawings
$20.00 paper original, 978-09859325-7-2
Distributed by the University of Iowa Press
art
16 UNIVERsItY of IoWA PREss
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fAll ����
november
318 pages
.
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
$17.50 paper, 978-1-60938-267-4
fiction
BAck in PrinT BAck in PrinT
Dexterity
A Novel
by Douglas Bauer
“Douglas Bauer is a novelist of enormous power and
boundless talent.”—William Kennedy
“From his supple prose to his common touch, one can
detect in Douglas Bauer a substantial talent. The genius
of Dexterity is that it is scrupulously organized and yet
seamless in its narrative structure. In other words, Mr.
Bauer is himself extremely dexterous.”—New York Times
Book Review
“An altogether stunning debut. . . . Bauer’s prose is rich,
startlingly resonant and stylistically powerful.”
—The Detroit News
dOuGlAs BAuer’s PrOFOund and exquisitely
written first novel quickly established him as one of
America’s best new writers. This is the story of Ed and
Ramona, high school lovers who married young. And
when Ramona, seeing the ever-clearer reality of life
with Ed, turns and walks away from her house, from
her life, and from her small baby boy, Ed is stunned
into a depth of uncomprehending rage. With a deer
hunter’s patience and a maniacal precision, Ed gathers
what he needs and, in the dark of early winter, leaves
to find his wife.
This darkly poetic novel is imbued with the same
tough and tender understanding of the emotional lives
of real people that distinguishes Bauer’s subsequent
novels, The Very Air and The Book of Famous Iowans.
The Very Air
A Novel
by Douglas Bauer
“Chillingly eloquent and very much in the American grain.”
—Newsday, Dan Cryer
“. . . suspenseful, poignant, and irresistibly entertaining.
Bauer makes some wonderful observations about life in
America during the 1900s, and about humanity’s eternal
need for illusion, and his characterization is sharp and
funny.”—Publisher’s Weekly
luTher mAThiAs sells “snake oil” in scrubby West
Texas dirt towns. He learns that substance is never a
substitute for style and eventually develops his own
remedies that promise to cure any ailment a man might
sufer. In time, his imagination and ambition combine
to mold him into medicine’s version of Elmer Gantry:
loved and hated, imponderably wealthy and famous,
powerful and pursued.
The Very Air is a compelling exploration of human
motives and hidden meanings. It is a detailed picture
of America’s myth of the rugged individual in the psy-
chological and narrative tradition of The Great Gatsby
and Citizen Kane. With a resonant sense of the period
and culture, Douglas Bauer evokes the freewheeling
feel of the old Southwest in the charlatans of our own
era. The Very Air shows, through storytelling both ex-
hilarating and chilling, that the past is prologue and
that our personal histories indeed shape the course of
our individual futures.
november
378 pages
.
5 1/2 x 8 1/8 inches
$18.50 paper, 978-1-60938-268-1
fiction
Dougl as Bauer
Dexterit y
a novel
Dougl as Bauer
The Ver y Ai r
a novel
17 www.uiowapress.org
november
256 pages
.
5 1/2 x 8 1/8
$17.50 paper,

978-1-60938-266-7
fiction
The Book of Famous Iowans
A Novel
by Douglas Bauer
“Douglas Bauer renders his Midwestern place with delving care, turning
the circumstance of soil and weather into something deep and animate.
Through one long moody summer a complex play of fates unfolds. The
atmosphere grows electric as the barometer keeps falling. The reader
is drawn into the life of young Will Vaughn just as his world is about to
come apart. Here is the true grain of American life, pathos but also com-
edy and stoicism. The Book of Famous Iowans belongs on the shelf right
beside the best of Larry Woiwode and William Maxwell.”
—Sven Birkets
will VAuGhn, A mAn OF lATe middle AGe living in Chicago
with his second wife, remembers the month of June 1957 in his home-
town, the rural village of New Holland, Iowa. More precisely, Will
remembers just a few days of that month and the quick sequence
of astonishing events that have colored, ever since, the logic of his
heart and the moods of his mind. He tells of his stunningly beautiful
young mother, Leanne, who liked to recall the years of the Second
World War, during which she sang with a dance band in a lounge
in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He tells too of his father, Lewis, a soldier
in the war who one night saw the “resplendently sequined” Leanne
step onstage and began at that instant to plot his courtship of her.
But mostly what Will summons up in his intimate remembrance
are those few catastrophic days in early June when he was “three
months shy of twelve,” more than a decade after his parents have
married and returned to the Vaughns’ home place, where Lewis farms
his family’s land. For it is during those days that Leanne’s afair with
a local man named Bobby Markum becomes known—first to Lewis
and then, in a fiercely dramatic public confrontation, to young Will, to
his beloved Grandmother Vaughn, and by nightfall to all the citizens
of the town. The knowledge of such scandal, in so small a place, sets
of a series of highly charged reactions, vivid consequences that surely
determine the fates of every member of this unforgettable family.
A tale of memory and hero worship and the restless pulse of long-
ing, The Book of Famous Iowans examines those forces that define not
only a state made up of a physical geography, but more important,
those states of the wholly human spirit.
Douglas Bauer is the author of several books, including What Hap-
pens Next? Matters of Life and Death (Iowa, 2013), Prairie City, Iowa: Three
Seasons at Home (Iowa, 2008), The Stuf of Fiction: Advice on Craft, and
three novels, Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans. His
edited works include Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals
and Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows. He lives in Boston
and teaches literature at Bennington College.
BAck in PrinT
“The Book of Famous Iowans is a perfect novel—
beautifully written and emotionally compel-
ling in a way that made me wish it would
never end even as I raced to the next page.
I don’t know when I have felt such love and
compassion for a cast of characters. I already
miss them, and will, I am sure, for a long
time to come.”—Jill McCorkle
“You hear a tractor, you smell the ploughed
earth, you see the gently rolling Iowa land-
scape, and most of all Doug Bauer’s dazzling
prose makes you feel the sweetness of young
Will Vaughn’s love for his beautiful, spar-
kling mother, a woman doomed to veer away
from the people who love her best. The Book
of Famous Iowans is a compelling story about
the bonds between mother and son which
will break your heart as you nod in recogni-
tion.”—Susan Cheever
“This book is like the best of Midwestern
America—plain and rich without trying.
Bauer tells what might have been a common
story in other hands. What is uncommon is
the utter devotion to the passion of a broken
family—such concentration as Dostoyevsky
would have admired.”—Barry Hannah
a novel
Dougl as Bauer
The Book of
Famous Iowans
a novel
18 university of iowa press
.
fall ����
december
236 pages
.
6 x 9 inches
$49.95s paper original, 978-1-60938-303-9
$49.95s e-book, 978-1-60938-304-6
literary criticism / poetics
Bodies on the Line
Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading
by Raphael Allison
cOnTemPOrAry nOrTh AmericAn POeTry series
Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, & Adalaide Morris, series editors
Bodies on the Line ofers the first sustained study of the poetry read-
ing in its most formative period: the 1960s. Raphael Allison closely
examines a vast archive of audio recordings of several key postwar
American poets to explore the social and literary context of the six-
ties poetry reading, which is characterized by contrasting difering
styles of performance: the humanist style and the skeptical strain.
The humanist style, made mainstream by the Beats and their imita-
tors, is characterized by faith in the power of presence, emotional
communion, and afect. The skeptical strain emphasizes openness
of interpretation and multivalent meaning, a lack of stability or con-
sistency, and ironic detachment.
By comparing these two dominant styles of reading, Allison argues
that attention to sixties poetry readings reveals poets struggling be-
tween the kind of immediacy and presence that readings suggested
and a private retreat from such performance-based publicity, one
centered on the text itself. Recordings of Robert Frost, Charles Olson,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Larry Eigner, and William Carlos Williams—all
of whom emphasized voice, breath, and spoken language and who
were inveterate professional readers in the sixties—expose this strug-
gle in often surprising ways. In deconstructing assertions about the
role and importance of the poetry reading during this period, Allison
reveals just how dramatic, political, and contentious poetry readings
could be. By discussing how to “hear” as well as “read” poetry, Bodies
on the Line ofers startling new vantage points from which to under-
stand American poetry since the 1960s as both performance and text.
Raphael Allison has published numerous articles on American poets
of the twentieth century, including James Schuyler, David Antin, and
Muriel Rukeyser. He has taught at Bard College, Harvard University,
and Barnard College. He currently teaches at Princeton University
and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
“This is a fascinating, timely study that
makes a convincing bid to reshape the can-
on of midcentury American poetry. Allison
teaches us to hear freshly famous poems
by Frost, Brooks, Williams, and others: the
book’s funny evocations of their recita-
tion styles are based on careful attention
to a massive audio archive, revealing how
each performer’s conflicts and commit-
ments evolve over time, and demonstrating
how crucial it is to listen as well as read.
Balancing high-stakes scholarship with
a lively, conversational style, Bodies on the
Line is an immensely readable book that
will appeal to anyone curious about poetry,
creative writing, performance, disability
studies, and the broader culture of the
sixties.”—Lesley Wheeler, author, Voicing
American Poetry: Sound and Performance from
the 1920s to the Present
“Most critics who write about postwar
poetry mention the significance of poetry
readings, but few develop the implications
of readings for the publics they address
or the voices produced. Raphael Allison is
acutely aware of what ‘voice’ means as a
trope for ontological presence during this
period, but he is rightly skeptical about the
authenticity claimed by that voice in these
situations. He deconstructs assertions
of presence by showing—through bril-
liant readings of William Carlos Williams,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, Larry
Eigner, and Charles Olson—how strategic,
variable, and unsettling poetry readings
can be.”—Michael Davidson, author, On the
Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics
19 www.uiowapress.org
november
228 pages
.
6 x 9 inches
.
1 b&w photo
$45.00s paper original, 978-1-60938-273-5
$45.00s e-book, 978-1-60938-294-0
literary criticism
Pynchon’s California
edited by Scott McClintock and John Miller
The new AmericAn cAnOn
The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Samuel Cohen, series editor
Pynchon’s California is the first book to examine Thomas Pynchon’s use
of California as a setting in his novels. Throughout his 50-year career,
Pynchon has regularly returned to the Golden State in his fiction.
With the publication in 2009 of his third novel set there, the signifi-
cance of California in Pynchon’s evolving fictional project becomes
increasingly worthy of study. Scott McClintock and John Miller have
gathered essays from leading and up-and-coming Pynchon scholars
who explore this topic from a variety of critical perspectives, reflect-
ing the diversity and eclecticism of Pynchon’s fiction and of the state
that has served as his recurring muse from The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)
through Inherent Vice (2009).
Contributors explore such topics as the relationship of the “Cali-
fornia novels” to Pynchon’s more historical and encyclopedic works;
the significance of California’s beaches, deserts, forests, freeways,
and “hieroglyphic” suburban sprawl; the California-inspired noir tra-
dition; and the surprising connections to be uncovered between drug
use and realism, melodrama and real estate, private detection and the
sacred. The authors bring insights to bear from an array of critical,
social, and historical discourses, ofering new ways of looking not
only at Pynchon’s California novels, but at his entire oeuvre. They
explore both how the history, geography, and culture of California
have informed Pynchon’s work and how Pynchon’s ever-skeptical
critical eye has been turned on the state that has been, in many ways,
the flagship for postmodern American culture.
Scott McClintock is an associate professor of English and compara-
tive literature at National University in San Bernardino. His research
interests include literatures of the Americas, anti-terror discourse
critique, the Indian novel in English, and Cold War cultural studies.
He has published on Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Franz Kafka,
Laureano Alban, and the culture of the Cold War. He lives in Big Bear
City, California. John Miller is a professor of English at National
University in Costa Mesa. His scholarly publications have dealt with
a variety of topics, from the early modern prose of Francis Bacon,
Robert Burton, and Izaak Walton to the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien
and Thomas Pynchon, as well as the science fiction short story, hy-
perfiction and role playing games, and online pedagogy. He lives in
Irvine, California.
“McClintock and Miller’s terrific collec-
tion of essays on Pynchon’s California
reveals just how much is still to be gained
from sustained attention to a feature that
became really salient only with the publi-
cation of Inherent Vice in 2009. To be sure,
critics have long been aware of the special
place California occupies in the Pynchon
Imaginary, but only now can we see the ex-
tent to which all of the fiction is illuminated
by scrutiny of the important thematic frame
provided by this particular setting.”
—David Cowart, author, Thomas Pynchon
and the Dark Passages of History
“Impressively various and wide-ranging in
their scholarship, the chapters of this vol-
ume make a compelling case for grouping
Pynchon’s three shortest novels together
and examining them jointly as a kind of
accidental trilogy. Especially welcome is
the rehabilitation of the underrated novels
Vineland and Inherent Vice, which deserve,
and richly repay, close attention of the kind
that these essays devote to them. Kudos to
McClintock and Miller for assembling this
uniquely valuable volume.”—Brian McHale,
author, Postmodernist Fiction
cOnTriBuTOrs
Hanjo Berressem
Christopher Cofman
Stephen Hock
Margaret Lynd
Scott MacLeod
Scott McClintock
Bill Millard
John Miller
Henry Veggian
20 university of iowa press
.
fall ����
november
300 pages
.
6 x 9 inches
.
13 illustrations
$37.50s paper original, 978-1-60938-280-3
$37.50s e-book, 978-1-60938-289-6
african american studies / history
Douglass in His Own Time
A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn
from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs
by Family, Friends, and Associates
edited by John Ernest
wriTers in Their Own Time
Joel Myerson, series editor
One OF The mOsT incrediBle sTOries in American history is
that of Frederick Douglass, the man who escaped from slavery and
rose to become one of the most celebrated and eloquent orators,
writers, and public figures in the world. He first committed his story
to writing in his 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave. Over the course of his life, he would ex-
pand on his story considerably, writing two other autobiographies,
My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, as
well as innumerable newspaper articles and editorials and orations.
As valuable as these writings are in illuminating the man, the story
Douglass told in 1845 has become rather too easy to tell, obscuring
as much as it reveals. Less a living presence than an inspiring tale,
Frederick Douglass remains relatively unknown even to many of
those who celebrate his achievements. Douglass in His Own Time ofers
an introduction to Douglass the man by those who knew him. The
book includes a broad range of writings, some intended for public
viewing and some private correspondence, all of which contend with
Douglass’s tremendous power over the written and spoken word,
his amazing presence before crowds, his ability to improvise, to
entertain, to instruct, to inspire—indeed, to change lives through his
eloquent appeals to righteous self-awareness and social justice. In
approaching Douglass through the biographical sketches, memoirs,
letters, editorials, and other articles about him, readers will encounter
the complexity of a life lived on a very public stage, the story of an
extraordinary black man in an insistently white world.
Professor and chair of the Department of English at the University
of Delaware, John Ernest is the author or editor of twelve books and
more than twenty-five journal articles and book chapters. His recent
books include Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the
Challenge of History, 1794–1861, Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American
Literary History, and A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African Ameri-
can Communities before the Civil War. Before arriving at the University
of Delaware, he was the Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of
American Literature at West Virginia University for seven years. He
also taught for twelve years at the University of New Hampshire,
where he received several awards for teaching and for his commit-
ment to social justice.
“In Douglass in His Own Time, John Ernest has
compiled a rich resource of documents
that reveal the abolitionist’s life and ideas
as well as his place in public memory. The
collection is extraordinarily wide-ranging,
including contemporary correspondence
by and about Douglass, reminiscences,
poetry, tributes, and critiques well into the
early twentieth century. Especially valuable
are Ernest’s selections on religion and on
controversies in Douglass’s personal and
public life.”—David W. Blight, author,
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American
Memory
“How well I remember this flutter our suburban
and aspiring neighborhood was thrown into
when, some time in 1847, soon after Frederick
Douglass came to Rochester to live, it was known
that he had bought a house on our street—and
a very good house, too—and was about to move
his family into the same! . . . Naturally, there
was open protest. . . . One of the first things he did
after settling in [the house], and making a private
study of a hall bedroom on the upper floor, was
to write a letter to his old master, Thomas Auld,
in which he said: ‘So far as my domestic afairs
are considered, I can boast of as comfortable a
dwelling as your own.’ [. . .] Frederick Douglass
was highly esteemed by his neighbors, and most
popular with the children. When the boys stole his
apples he made them ashamed, and they became
his loyal admirers forever after. If he knew that a
group of children were gathered before his window
on a warm summer night when he was singing
to his violin, he was sure to give them what he
knew they were waiting for—‘Nelly Was a Lady’
or ‘Old Kentucky Home’—coming to the door
and bowing his acknowledgment of their hearty
applause.”—Jane Marsh Parker, “Reminiscences
of Frederick Douglass,” Outlook 51.14 (April 6,
1895), 552–553.
L
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21 www.uiowapress.org
october
276 pages
.
6 x 9 inches
.
9 illustrations
$47.50s paper original, 978-1-60938-272-8
$47.50s e-book, 978-1-60938-293-3
literary criticism
Whitman among the Bohemians
edited by Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley
The iOwA whiTmAn series
Ed Folsom, series editor
FOr seVerAl yeArs JusT BeFOre And JusT AFTer his 1860 edi-
tion of Leaves of Grass appeared, Walt Whitman regularly frequented
Pfaf’s beer cellar in downtown Manhattan. The basement bar was
the very center of mid-nineteenth-century American bohemian activ-
ity and was heavily patronized by writers, artists, musicians, actors,
intellectuals, and radicals such as free-love advocate Henry Clapp,
Jr., and Broadway succès de scandale Adah Isaacs Menken. Numerous
creative and political ventures emerged from this environment, and
at least two bohemian literary weeklies, The New-York Saturday Press and
Vanity Fair, shared origins around the tables at Pfaf’s.
In this milieu, Whitman found sympathetic supporters of his po-
etic vision, professional connections, rivals, romantic partners, and
close friends, and left a lasting impression on poet and critic Edmund
Clarence Stedman, an erstwhile bohemian who later in the century
emerged as a tastemaker of American poetry. Yet for many years,
the bohemians associated with Pfaf’s have served merely as minor
background characters in Whitman scholarship. Whitman among the
Bohemians corrects that by exploring in depth the connections Whit-
man made at Pfaf’s and the impact they had on him, his poetry, and
his career. In telling the story of these intersecting social and profes-
sional links that converged at Pfaf’s in the late 1850s and early 1860s,
the essays in this volume powerfully demonstrate just how much we
can learn about Whitman and his work by viewing him within the
context of American bohemia.
Joanna Levin is an associate professor of English at Chapman Univer-
sity. She is the author of Bohemia in America, 1858–1920, winner of the
2010 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. She lives in Tustin,
California. Edward Whitley is an associate professor of English at
Lehigh University. He is the author of American Bards: Walt Whitman
and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet and the coeditor of The
Vault at Pfaf’s, a digital archive about the bohemian writers and art-
ists of antebellum New York. He lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
“Walt Whitman had an enormous creative
surge just before the Civil War, composing
many of his greatest poems. During the
same period, he was also frequenting Pfaf’s,
a beer cellar in lower Manhattan that was
home to a raffi sh crowd of artists, actors,
writers, and drinkers. We’ve long needed a
study that places Whitman within this bo-
hemian context; thanks to Joanna Levin and
Edward Whitley’s collection, we at last have
one. Whitman among the Bohemians is filled
with theoretically sophisticated essays that
ofer important new interpretations not only
of Whitman’s poetry, but also of the culture
of American bohemianism.”
—Michael Robertson, author, Worshipping
Walt: The Whitman Disciples
“Incisive in argument and rich in historical
detail illuminating the material, social, and
cultural conditions of the poet’s authorship,
Whitman among the Bohemians tells us of ad-
vertisements, pufery, parodies, controver-
sies both ginned-up and real, factions and
flub-drub and feuilletons, modern technol-
ogy and German beer, presses and publics
and the Fred Gray Association. A terrific,
stimulating collection of essays.”
—Daniel Cottom, author, International
Bohemia
cOnTriBuTOrs
Stephanie Blalock
Ruth Bohan
Leif Eckstrom
Logan Esdale
Amanda Gailey
Karen Karbiener
Joanna Levin
Mary Loefelholz
Eliza Richards
Ingrid Satelmajer
Robert J. Scholnick
Edward Whitley
Artwork: Detail from caricature by John McLenan,
ca. 1860. The New York Public Library.
22 university of iowa press
.
fall ����
september
288 pages
.
6 x 9 inches
$47.50s paper original, 978-1-60938-271-1
$47.50s e-book, 978-1-60938-291-9
literary criticism / poetics
A Place for Humility
Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World
by Christine Gerhardt
The iOwA whiTmAn series
Ed Folsom, series editor
emily dickinsOn And wAlT whiTmAn are widely acknowl-
edged as two of America’s foremost nature poets, primarily due to
their explorations of natural phenomena as evocative symbols for cul-
tural developments, individual experiences, and poetry itself. Yet for
all their metaphorical suggestiveness, Dickinson’s and Whitman’s
poems about the natural world neither preclude nor erase nature’s
relevance as an actual living environment. In their respective poetic
projects, the earth matters both figuratively, as a realm of the imagi-
nation, and also as the physical ground that is profoundly afected
by human action. This double perspective, and the ways in which it
intersects with their formal innovations, points beyond their tradi-
tional status as curiously disparate icons of American nature poetry.
That both of them not only approach nature as an important subject in
its own right, but also address human-nature relationships in ethical
terms, invests their work with important environmental overtones.
Dickinson and Whitman developed their environmentally sug-
gestive poetics at roughly the same historical moment, at a time
when a major shift was occurring in American culture’s view and
understanding of the natural world. Just as they were achieving poetic
maturity, the dominant view of wilderness was beginning to shift
from obstacle or exploitable resource to an endangered treasure in
need of conservation and preservation.
A Place for Humility examines Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry in
conjunction with this important change in American environmental
perception, exploring the links between their poetic projects within
the context of developing nineteenth-century environmental thought.
Christine Gerhardt argues that each author’s poetry participates in
this shift in diferent but related ways, and that their involvement with
their culture’s growing environmental sensibilities constitutes an
important connection between their disparate poetic projects. There
may be few direct links between Dickinson’s “letter to the World” and
Whitman’s “language experiment,” but via a web of environmentally-
oriented discourses, their poetry engages in a cultural conversation
about the natural world and the possibilities and limitations of writ-
ing about it—a conversation in which their thematic and formal
choices meet on a surprising number of levels.
Christine Gerhardt is a professor of American Studies at the Univer-
sity of Bamberg. She has published essays on Whitman, Dickinson,
and ecocriticism in Profession, The Forum for Modern Language Studies, The
Mississippi Quarterly, and The Emily Dickinson Journal. Her research and
teaching interests include 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century American
literature, environmental literature and literary criticism, American
migration poetry, African American literature, and the literature and
culture of the American South. She lives in Bamberg, Germany.
“Christine Gerhardt’s A Place for Humility su-
persedes all other books (including my own)
as the best study of both Whitman’s and
Dickinson’s nature poetry. No ecocritic, not
even leaders in the field, brings a stronger
comprehension of nineteenth-century proto-
ecological discourse to such an extensive
reading of the best poetry of the day, and no
other scholar draws a stronger connection
between two poets often considered polar
opposites—Whitman and Dickinson—their
mutual ecopoetics (and surprisingly even
their gender politics) proving here a sturdy
bridge that will bear enduring use for some
time to come. The emergence of ecology as
a science and worldview in the nineteenth
century provides the common ground for
realizing the deep relationship of Whitman
and Dickinson not only as poets but also as
thinkers and ethicists.”
—M. Jimmie Killingsworth, author, Walt
Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics
“Readers wishing to broaden the ecocritical
canon will welcome this searching, deeply
informed and eloquent environmental reap-
praisal of Whitman and Dickinson, which
puts environmental humility at the heart of
their poetics and points the way to reading
a far broader range of literature through
contemporary debates in environmental
science and politics.”—Laura Dassow Walls,
University of Notre Dame
23 www.uiowapress.org
october
258 pages
.
6 x 9 inches
.
2 b&w photos
$47.50s paper original, 978-1-60938-279-7
$47.50s e-book, 978-1-60938-292-6
literary criticism
The Myth of Emptiness and the
New American Literature of Place
by Wendy Harding
FrOm The mOmenT The FirsT English-speaking explorers and
settlers arrived on the North American continent, many have de-
scribed its various locations and environments as empty. Indeed,
much of American national history and culture is bound up with the
idea that parts of the landscape are empty and thus open for coloni-
zation, settlement, economic improvement, claim staking, taming,
civilizing, cultivating, and the exploitation of resources. In turn, most
Euro-American nonfiction written about the landscape has treated it
either as an object to be acted upon by the author or an empty space,
unspoiled by human contamination, to which the solitary individual
goes to be refreshed and rejuvenated.
In The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place, Wendy
Harding identifies an important recent development in the literature
of place that corrects the misperceptions resulting from these tropes.
Works by Rick Bass, Charles Bowden, Ellen Meloy, Jonathan Raban,
Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Sullivan move away from the tradition of
nature writing, with its emphasis on the solitary individual commun-
ing with nature in uninhabited places, to recognize the interactions
of human and other-than-human presences in the land. In diferent
ways, all six writers reveal a more historically complex relationship
between Americans and their environments. In this new literature of
place, writers revisit abandoned, threatened, or damaged sites that
were once represented as devoid of human presence and dig deeper
to reveal that they are in fact full of the signs of human activity. These
writers are interested in the role of social, political, and cultural rela-
tionships and the traces they leave on the landscape.
Throughout her exploration, Harding adopts a transdisciplinary
perspective that draws on the theories of geographers, historians,
sociologists, and philosophers to understand the reasons for the en-
during perception of emptiness in the American landscape and how
this new literature of place works with and against these ideas. She
reminds us that by understanding and integrating human impacts
into accounts of the landscape, we are better equipped to fully reckon
with the natural and cultural crisis that engulfs all landscapes today.
Wendy Harding is a professor of English language and cultures and
codirector of the American Studies group at the University of Tou-
louse. She is the coauthor, with Jacky Martin, of A World of Diference:
An Inter-Cultural Study of Toni Morrison’s Novels and Beyond Words: The
Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature. She lives near
Montpellier, France.
“Wendy Harding ofers an engaging and
provocative analysis of the traditional
American myth of empty landscapes either
awaiting human presence (and exploita-
tion of resources) or existing virtuously in
their primeval vacancy, ultimately critiquing
the very notion of emptiness. Her discus-
sion of place-writing as the production
of living ‘scripts’ rather than as fixed and
finished aesthetic patterns is a particularly
important contribution to place-oriented
ecocriticism.”—Scott Slovic, editor, ISLE:
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment
“Wendy Harding has taken on a nervy and
large project in The Myth of Emptiness and the
New American Literature of Place; first, to iden-
tify a particular kind of discursive formation
in the history of the American landscape,
the (immensely contradictory and unstable)
‘sign of empty,’ and then to suggest that this
discursive formation undergirds an emerg-
ing genre at the convergence of nature writ-
ing and multimodal documentary form, ‘the
new literature of place.’ I really admire the
confidence and big thinking of the project,
and the author carries it of quite well.”
—Douglas Reichert Powell, Columbia
College Chicago
24
Allison, Raphael 18
Bauer, Douglas 16–17
Book, Shane 10
Crowther, Hal 8
De Sio, Henry F., Jr. 1
Dostert, Mark 3
Durbin, Jim 14
Ernest, John 20
Founds, Kathleen 7
Bodies on the Line 18
The Book of Famous Iowans 17
Campaign Inc. 1
Congotronic 10
Dancing with Tears in My Eyes 15
Dexterity 16
Douglass in His Own Time 20
India’s Organic Farming Revolution 2
An Infuriating American 8
The Iowa State Fair 4–5
Leaving the Pink House 9
The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons 6
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Gerhardt, Christine 22
Harding, Wendy 23
Jantscher, Tom 14
Levin, Joanna 21
McClintock, Scott 19
Miller, John 19
Olsen, Frank 14
Potts, Randall 11
Randolph, Ladette 9
Moths in Your Pocket 14
The Myth of Emptiness and the New American
Literature of Place 23
A Place for Humility 22
Pynchon’s California 19
Screenwriting for Neurotics 12
Trickster 11
Up in Here 3
The Very Air 16
What Is Your Quest? 13
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Whitman among the Bohemians 21
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Salter, Anastasia 13
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index By TiTle
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Cover illustration by Kathleen Founds (kathleenfounds.com), author of the
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Nature 14
Photography 4–5
Poetry 10, 11
Poetics 18, 22
Politics 1
Popular Culture 13
Reference 8
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