“Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death — fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant; the more varied the moods, the richer the experience. I’ve learned to value every stab of pain and disappointment.” —Edna Ferber Edna Ferber (1885-1968) was […]
Iowa authors
Posted inArts & Entertainment
‘There is no escapism here’: Cronenberg scholar Violet Lucca on the auteur’s enticing repulsiveness, and how his most ‘offensive’ films are being reevaluated
Cedar Rapidian and University of Iowa alum Violet Lucca’s new book David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials steps past the usual canned controversies, and uses Jungian theory to structure fresh analysis on identity, potentiality and art’s place in human experience. For films often marked as being cold, flagrant or unapproachable, Lucca’s book is like a good friend next to you in a theater…
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Iowa City authors Rachel Yoder and Garth Greenwell discuss midlife crises, ‘re-wilding’ marriage and trusting in Amy Adams
When we learned the movie adaptation of Nightbitch — Iowa City author Rachel Yoder’s satirical 2021 novel about a new mother embracing her inner (and outer) beast — would be headlining FilmScene’s Refocus Film Festival in October, Little Village editors naturally began imagining a cover for the September Fall Arts Preview involving Yoder holding some […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Authors and journalists at the Okoboji Writers’ Retreat discuss the art of speaking truth to power
It’s a long drive from Iowa City to Lake Okoboji. Like most of my colleagues, I’ve never been to Northwest Iowa, and I was curious to visit this red and rural section of our former swing state. The scenery was serenely flat in all directions, punctuated by silos, windmills, telegraph poles, fenceposts, Trump signs and […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Storyhouse Bookpub invites three Iowa authors to drink and mingle with readers on Nov. 4
For Storyhouse Bookpub store owner Abigail Paxton, her upcoming “afterparty” is the main event. “We’ll start the evening in the bookstore with a more casual start to everything with getting everyone a drink and some dessert and some time to kind of mingle among the shelves and give the authors some time to interface a […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘Searching for Petco’ by Skylar Alexander
Searching for Petco (Forklift Books, 2022) opens like someone suddenly turned on a speaker. I felt accosted by author Skylar Alexander’s opening poems: clearly meant to be spoken, clearly friends with slam poetry. Extra-sensory and openly branded “millennial.” Alexander brazenly powers into an image, hands her reader an archetype and disarms them on entry. “Oh,” […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘Team Photograph’ by Lauren Haldeman
Little Village comic contributor Lauren Haldeman’s fourth book, Team Photograph (out Nov. 8 from Sarabande Books) is a poignant exploration of how we’re shaped by the places where we grow up. This graphic novel combines Haldeman’s iconic wolf-headed style with erasure poetry to rehash her youth on soccer fields 800 feet away from the battlefields […]
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Book Review and Q&A: Sarah Thankam Mathews — ‘All This Could Be Different’
When I started reading All This Could Be Different (Viking, 2022) by Sarah Thankam Mathews, I was nervous about the passive voice, tonally similar to other books I’ve recently read which I felt lacked substance. But this is intentional. Our narrator, Sneha, is apathetic, barely teasing interest, she merely exists for the first part of […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Get your Iowa lit fix at Beaverdale Books this fall
Nestled in a cozy town square off of Beaver Avenue, Beaverdale Books has been a space for Des Moines book-lovers since 2006. They offer a wide array of books from both local and farther flung authors, and the bookstore also boasts an impressive events calendar featuring author meet and greets, readings and book fairs throughout […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Rooms to grow: Erin Casey on stepping down from Writers’ Rooms leadership and launching toward her own success
Area author Erin Casey is in flux. She’s currently in the process of stepping back from her longtime leadership role for the Writers’ Rooms, a local organization that supports writers by creating communities of authors working in similar genres. And she’s celebrating the quick success of her first Kickstarter campaign, launched earlier this month to […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Eastern Iowa authors, arts organizations awarded $90,000 in NEA grants
Artists and arts organizations across the U.S. received good news Tuesday, as $33.2 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were announced. Five Iowa orgs and individuals were among the award recipients, receiving a total of $90,000 in grants. All five are located in eastern Iowa — two in Cedar Rapids, […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Five questions with: Author Elizabeth McKracken
Quirky and engaging, funny and serious at once, ‘Bowlaway’ is a book that makes you think. The story of a bowling alley and the family which owns it is part historical novel, part family saga and part pure whimsy.
