Midwest thrillers are few and far between, but every time one crops up it scratches a special itch in my heart. There is something rich and powerful at having scenes from your childhood play out with hints of something absolutely foreign. Mindy Mejia is helping build the Midwest mystery genre with the third installment of her “Iowa Mysteries” series…
literature
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: More than 40 million pigs are slaughtered in Iowa annually. This author has a word for that.
Are the hills of Iowa enmeshed with a vast network of death camps, comparable in moral terms to those of the Holocaust? This is one of the questions raised, indeed hurled, by Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals (1999), a novella-of-ideas by the Afrikaner-Australian and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. In 1997, Coetzee was invited […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Back at Mission Creek as an author, Neko Case discussed going down the rabbit holes of her own origin story
Case, a Grammy-nominated singer, was in conversation about her recent memoir The Harder I Fight The More I Love You with best-selling author Melissa Febos, a Professor at UI’s Creative Nonfiction Program.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Review: Mission Creek’s Lit Walk is a sensory, choose-your-own adventure experience
While an author reads, she cannot know that three people are filming her: husband, daughter and granddaughter. It’s a moment to remember. That was the level of intimacy felt on Friday, April 4 during Mission Creek Festival’s Lit Walk. As much a part of the mythos of the Festival as the long list of past music headliners, the Lit Walk, as the MCF website states, gives festival-goers an opportunity to “…hear an unexpected variety of work from a mix of talented local and out-of-town writers.”
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Author Rachel Kushner describes writing ‘an ideas novel that’s not boring’ in conversation with Kim Gordon
The American woman watches people standing in line and waiting to pay at the cash register. It’s a highway travel center in France and the woman observes customers walk in and out. She’s at the same time bored and fascinated. People buy dried truffles or lavender oil or glass jars of something resembling cat food. […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: This ever-evolving American anthem recalls Iowa’s abolitionist glory days
In keeping with tradition, one dramatic beat of the presidential inauguration in January was the Naval Academy Glee Club’s performance of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” While it was standard inaugural fare, it was also, of course, a nauseating co-optation. A song of solidarity, bravery and liberation — an alternative national anthem — was […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Physical media is (still) king at The Source, Davenport’s storied two-story used bookstore
Started by George Pekios and passed down through several generations to longtime owner Dan Pekios, The Source has recently been moving out of the family’s ownership. Briefly owned by a loyal employee, it has now been sold to Stephen Zbornik and Anne Brown, a couple who’s passion for doing things has carried them through many walks of life.
Posted inBook Reviews
Plain Spoken: Casual lust and barbaric violence mingle in the minds of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s narrators
Horacio Castellanos Moya is one of the writers Iowa City is luckiest to have. He was born in Honduras but raised in El Salvador, where he lived and worked for many years—in addition to Mexico City, his address during the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s—as a journalist and influential newspaper editor.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: Listening to ‘God’s Trombones’ (1927), a tribute to Black preaching with Midwest origins
Today’s readers tend to associate poetry with the intense evocation of an individual speaker’s thoughts and feelings. Poems are short, usually no more than a few pages. They entail the cultivation of a distinct poetic “voice.” They put language to the otherwise private domain of the poet’s mental life. In doing so, they forge a personal connection between poet and reader.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: Revisiting ‘Iowa,’ Patrick Moore’s neglected gay novel
This monthly column will explore the long and diverse history of literature’s Midwestern engagements. There is an established canon of American literature in which the Midwest plays heavily, as a both physical and social place.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Camonghne Felix on calculating love and prose in her new book, ‘I want Black women to feel empowered by it’
Reading Camonghne Felix’s 2023 memoir Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation is a gut punch over and over and over again. It’s one of those books I had to put down every couple of pages to catch my breath. Felix’s innate ability to create empathy in her readers is unparalleled. I want to emphasize […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
DSM Book Festival to feature authors of ‘The Flight Attendant’, ‘The Lost Apothecary’ and other page-turners on March 25
“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature.” ―Maya Angelou Iowa has a national, even global, reputation as a place with a legacy of writers. The DSM Book Festival is central Iowa’s stellar literary event, an eagerly anticipated destination for bibliophiles, authors, readers and budding writers. It received […]
