Book Reviews

Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations (Graywolf Press) sees its greatest impact when panned out to see the full picture. Zooming out adds nuance. On the whole, Kelly is, as the title suggests, rejecting the contents inside. They are framed within units of time that repeat: NOW, THEN, AFTER. The renunciations, then, are Kelly’s reckoning. This elegiac […]

When Brandon Taylor read an excerpt from Filthy Animals (Riverhead Books; out June 22) as part of the Mission Creek Festival Duos programming at the end of April, I was riveted. His language is made to live like that, off of the page, as much poetry as prose. But it is just as compelling in […]

At the center of an otherwise tightly drawn plot, We Are 100 (Red Oak Press), the March 2021 debut novel from Iowa City comedian Nathan Timmel, there is a hole big enough to drive a truck through. A key element of the story hinges on the Big Bad’s ability to monitor the FBI as they […]

Local author and University of Iowa professor Rachel Marie-Crane Williams’ beautiful new book, Run Home If You Don’t Want to Be Killed (The University of North Carolina Press), is a tense work of graphic history. Many people are aware of the riots in Detroit in 1967, but fewer know of the earlier riot in 1943, […]

When I received the email that there was a new book forthcoming that featured the talents of Iowans Jacqueline Briggs Martin of Mount Vernon and Iowa City’s Claudia McGehee, I honestly got so excited. Their previous collaboration, Creekfinding, is a favorite of mine, and I leap at the chance to explore their work. Whenever I […]

How do we teach empathy? Numerous studies have been done that attribute increases in empathy to reading fiction — any fiction. But (and this may just be my own personal biases speaking here) I’d argue that science fiction has the edge. In it, we’re faced with characters that are so, well, alien from ourselves that […]

The backstory begins like this: Imagine Other Worlds with Authors (I.O.W.A.), a yearly multi-genre book signing event that began in the mid-2010s to uplift and highlight regional writers, was once plagued by the presence of a soda machine stuck in a musical loop. Throughout their entire event, the thing repeated and repeated and repeated. So, […]

I love to tell people that I want to learn everything. When I was asked to read a book about the history of crossword puzzles I thought, “well, that’s not a topic I would have picked,” and agreed. When the first page told me that the crossword puzzle was invented in 1913 I could not […]

In the 1950s, the University of Iowa was the setting for groundbreaking work being done on the condition of clubfoot, a congenital deformity which causes an infant’s foot or feet to turn inward. When left untreated, the condition — which affects one in every thousand births, the vast majority of which are in developing countries […]