How much pain can you handle? This is a question that Nina Lohman asks readers of The Body Alone, her upcoming book set to release July 3 with The University of Iowa Press. The question above comes up repeatedly in Lohman’s book. Sometimes a whole page will be blank save that one simple, barbarous inquiry, […]
Author Interview
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Five questions with author Adib Khorram, who explores queerness through the lens of a boy band in his latest YA novel
If you thought you left young adult novels in your past, Adib Khorram is going to make you rethink your choices. The Kansas City native is the bestselling author of the YA series Darius the Great and a 2021 picture book, Seven Special Somethings: A Nowruz Story. His 2022 release, Kiss and Tell, is a […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Gina Nutt talks terror ahead of her Mission Creek Festival 2021: Duos reading
Night Rooms is unlike anything I have ever read. So much so that I have repeated that phrase to anyone who will listen, including the author. I asked Gina Nutt, over email, light-headed at the opportunity to talk to someone I had already decided was a pioneer, how this book came to be. “I have […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Melissa Febos talks ‘Girlhood’ and Iowa transitions ahead of Friday reading
In interviews, Melissa Febos is invariably asked about what it is like to be so open and honest in her writing. Little wonder, as her debut memoir from 2010, Whip Smart, details her former career as a professional dominatrix, and she has since written with the same fierce intimacy about relationships, sexuality and addiction. At […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
‘There are no rules’: Long-time ‘Iowa Review’ editor David Hamilton talks family influence, the lure of nature and recent memoir ‘A Certain Arc’
I met David Hamilton, author of A Certain Arc: Essays of Finding my Way (Ice Cube Press), at a local Iowa City coffee shop in February of 2020, before the world began to social distance and wear masks due to COVID-19. The coffee shop was filled with people, in a way that wouldn’t be possible […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book review and interview: Andrew Ridker, ‘The Altruists’
To read Andrew Ridker’s sparkling novel ‘The Altruists’ is to find oneself inside the claustrophobic confines of a dysfunctional family. The Alters are apparently normal St. Louis residents; parents Arthur and Francine are respectively a professor of engineering and a couples’ counselor, and the children, Ethan and Maggie, are being prepared for successful careers. Yet under their upper-middle-class veneer, there is a profound disconnection.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Sympathy for the Devil: An interview with Amy Butcher
Three months after the release of her debut memoir, Visiting Hours, Amy Butcher has returned to Iowa City, where she graduated from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program in 2012. This summer she’s leading a workshop for …
