Presented by the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature, the 2024 Iowa City Book Festival is a week of excellent, one-of-a-kind, free, literary programming from October 13th through October 20th, 2024. This list contains new and recent titles from authors presenting at this year's festival. For a full schedule of events go to www.iowacitybookfestival.org
After the fact : if & when and here & now
Bell, Marvin, 1937- author. https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PBJgRVdPCRvQB767wGQbjmd
811.54 /Bell
After the Fact is a lively and imaginative conversation between two legendary poets. Marvin Bell, writing from Iowa City and Port Townsend, and Christopher Merrill, writing from around the world, give us an intimate look into collaboration at its best.
América del Norte
Mora, Nicolás Medina, author.
FICTION Mora Nicolas
"Sebastián lived a childhood of privilege in Mexico City. Now in his twenties, he has a degree from Yale, an American girlfriend, and a slot in the University of Iowa's MFA program. But Sebastián's life is shaken by the Trump administration's restrictions on immigrants, his mother's terminal cancer, the cracks in his relationship with his American girlfriend, and his father's forced resignation at the hands of Mexico's new president. As he struggles through the Trump and López Obrador years, Sebastián must confront his father's role in the Mexican drug war and his whiteness in Mexican contexts even as he is often perceived as a person of color in the US. As he does so, the novel moves through centuries of Mexican literary history, from the 17th century letters of a peevishly polymathic Spanish colonizer to the contemporary packaging of Mexican writers for a US audience. Split between the US and Mexico, this stunning debut explores whiteness, power, immigration, and the history of Mexican literature, to wrestle with the contradictory relationship between two countries bound by geography and torn apart by politics"--
October 19 @ 4:30 pm / Prairie Lights Books
- Anne M
Another woman
Bonner, Hannah, author.
811.6 /Bonner
Through compressed prose and a fierce attentiveness to the natural landscape, Another Woman depicts the atomization of heartbreak with, what Dwight Garner writes of Frank Stanford’s poetry, a “dirt-flecked” urgency. The collection culminates in new gradations and understandings of what it means to be a woman—and the multiplicity of selves that live within one body.
October 19 @ 2:30 pm / FilmScene at The Chauncey
- Anne M
Blue light hours : a novel
Dantas Lobato, Bruna, author.
ON ORDER BOOK
"From the National Book Award-winning translator, an atmospheric and wise debut novel of a young Brazilian woman's first year in America, a continent away from her lonely mother, and the relationship they build over Skype calls across borders. In a small dorm room at a liberal arts college in Vermont, a young woman settles into the warm blue light of her desk lamp before calling the mother she left behind in northeastern Brazil. Four thousand miles apart and bound by the angular confines of a Skype window, they ask each other a simple question: What's the news? Offscreen, little about their lives seems newsworthy. The daughter writes her papers in the library at midnight, eats in the dining hall with the other international students, and raises her hand in class to speak in a language the mother cannot understand. The mother meanwhile preoccupies herself with natural disasters, her increasingly poor health, and the heartbreaking possibility that her daughter might not return to the apartment where they have always lived together. Yet in the blue glow of their computers, the two women develop new rituals of intimacy and caretaking, from drinking whiskey together in the middle of the night to keeping watch as one slides into sleep. As the warm colors of New England autumn fade into an endless winter snow, each realizes that the promise of spring might mean difficult endings rather than hopeful beginnings. Expanded from a story originally published in The New Yorker, Bruna Dantas Lobato paints a powerful portrait of a mother and a daughter coming of age together and apart and explores the profound sacrifices and freedoms that come with leaving a home to make a new one somewhere else"--
October 15 @ 6:00 pm / Prairie Lights Books
- Anne M
The body alone : a lyrical articulation of chronic pain
Lohman, Nina, author.
616.0472 /Lohman
"The Body Alone is a lyrical nonfiction inquiry into the experience, meaning, and articulation of pain. It is a hybrid account incorporating research, scholarship, and memoir to examine pain through the lenses of medicine, theology, and philosophy. Broken bodies tell broken stories. This is why the pain experience is portrayed through an engaging but tangled, cyclical narrative of primers, vocabulary lessons, prescription records, and hypothesized internal monologues. The Body Alone is fractured not for the sake of experimentation but because the story itself demands it. A personal account of a societal problem, The Body Alone will appeal to readers who experience or are impacted by chronic illness. Like the author, the majority of the 51 million Americans who suffer chronic pain identify as women and are young or middle-aged. Research reveals the uncomfortable truth that medicine continues to be a gendered institution where 70% of chronic pain patients are women but 80% of pain studies are conducted on men or male mice. This is one of the many disparities that leave women systemically underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and even gaslighted on account of inequitable access to research funding, clinical trials, and effective medications. Pain is more than personal; it is a political issue prime for reformation. In both form and content, The Body Alone represents boundary-pressing work that subverts the traditional narrative by putting pressure on the medical, cultural, and political systems that impact women's access to fair and equal healthcare. The Body Alone is more than an illness narrative. It is a battle cry demanding change"--
October 19 @ 4:00 pm / Iowa City Masonic Building
- Anne M
Code of the hills
Offutt, Chris, 1958- author.
FICTION Offutt Chris
"Mick Hardin is back in the hills of Kentucky. He'd planned to touch down briefly before heading to France, marking the end of his twenty-year Army career. In Rocksalt, his sister Linda the sheriff is investigating the murder of Pete Lowe, a sought-after mechanic at the local racetrack. After another body is found, Linda and her deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver wonder if the two murders are related. Linda steps into harm's way just as a third body turns up and Mick ends up being deputized again, uncovering evidence of illegal cockfighting, and trying to connect all the crimes."--
October 19 @ 2:30 pm / Iowa City Masonic Building
- Anne M
Dark archives : a librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin
Rosenbloom, Megan, 1981- author.
002 /Rosenbloom
"A medical librarian presents a fascinating, terrifying look into history's rarest books-- those bound in human skin-- and the stories of their creation and collection"--
October 16 @ 6:00 pm / Shambaugh Auditorium, University of Iowa Main Library
- Anne M
Ecstatic Cahoots : Fifty Short Stories
Dybek, Stuart, 1942-
FICTION Dybek Stuart
A collection of fifty original mini-stories explores the need to achieve ecstatic self-transcendence as well as trust between lovers, friends, family, and strangers.
October 14 @ 7:00 pm / Prairie Lights Books
- Anne M
The extinction of Irena Rey : a novel
Croft, Jennifer (Translator), author.
FICTION Croft Jennifer
From the International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, an utterly beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest. Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets-and deceptions-of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself. This hilarious, thought-provoking debut novel is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.
October 19 @ 10:30 am / Prairie Lights Books
- Anne M
The horse : a novel
Vlautin, Willy, author. https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PBJfGVGM9GfgdYPWJThfKBP
FICTION Vlautin Willy
Award-winning author Willy Vlautin explores loneliness, art, regret, and hard-won empathy in this poignant novel--his most personal to date--that captures the life of a journeyman musician unable to escape the tragedies of his past. Al Ward lives on an isolated mining claim in the high desert of central Nevada fifty miles from the nearest town. A grizzled man in his sixties, he survives on canned soup, instant coffee, and memories of his ex-wife, friends and family he's lost, and his life as a touring musician. Hampered by insomnia, bouts of anxiety, and a chronic lethargy that keeps him from moving back to town, Al finds himself teetering on the edge of madness and running out of reasons to go on--until a horse arrives on his doorstep: nameless, blind, and utterly helpless. Al hopes the horse will vanish as mysteriously as he appeared. Yet the animal remains, leaving him in a conundrum. Is the animal real, or a phantom conjured from imagination? As Al contemplates the horse's existence--and what, if anything, he can do--his thoughts are interspersed with memories, from the moment his mother's part-time boyfriend gifts him a 1959 butterscotch blonde Telecaster, to the day his travels begin. He joins various bands--all who perform his songs once they discover his talent--playing casinos, truck stops, clubs, and bars. He falls in love, and finds pockets of companionship and minor success along the way. Never close to stardom or financial success, he continues as a journeyman for decades until alcoholism and a heartbreaking tragedy lead him to the solitude of the barren Nevada desert. A poignant meditation on addiction, heartbreak, and the reality of life on the road in smalltime bands, The Horse is a beautiful, haunting tale from an author working at the height of his powers.
October 19 @ 1:00 pm / Iowa City Masonic Building
- Anne M
Inconsolable objects
Gomez, Nancy Miller, author.
ON ORDER BOOK
"Part cautionary tale, part love letter to the broken objects and people of this world, Inconsolable Objects is driven by the search for beauty in the forsaken. The poems are populated with sentient tornados, fetal mice floating in a snow globe, soldiers marching past a disembodied heart, and birds that have learned to imitate the sound of an AK47. In her spectacular debut, Gomez offers a call and response to all of us stumbling towards connection. These poems witness, interrogate, mourn, praise, and provide a hopeful glimpse into the mysteries of our shared experience."
October 16 @ 7:00 pm / PorchLight Literary Arts Center
- Anne M
The Indian card : who gets to be native in America
Schuettpelz, Carrie Lowry, 1984- author.
ON ORDER BOOK
"A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States "Candid, unflinching....Her thorough excavation of the painful history that gave rise to rigid enrollment policies is a courageous gift to our understanding of contemporary Native life." --The Whiting Foundation Jury. Who is Indian enough? To be Native American is to live in a world of contradictions. At the same time that the number of people in the U.S. who claim Native identity has exploded--increasing 85 percent in just ten years--the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not. While the federal government recognizes Tribal sovereignty, being a member of a Tribe requires navigating blood quantum laws and rolls that the federal government created with the intention of wiping out Native people altogether. Over two million Native people are tribally enrolled, yet there are Native people who will never be. Native people who, for a variety of reasons ranging from displacement to disconnection, cannot be card-carrying members of their Tribe. In The Indian Card, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity-formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes. With archival research, she pieces together the history of blood quantum and tribal rolls and federal government intrusion on Native identity-making. Reckoning with her own identity--the story of her enrollment and the enrollment of her children--she investigates the cultural, racial, and political dynamics of today's Tribal identity policing. With this intimate perspective of the ongoing fight for Native sovereignty, The Indian Card sheds light on what it looks like to find a deeper sense of belonging"--
October 16 @ 7:00 pm / Prairie Lights Books
- Anne M
Liontaming in America
Willis, Elizabeth, author.
ON ORDER BOOK
""To disrupt the relationship of predator and prey, to reshape one's relation to power, is to renovate the lived and living world," Elizabeth Willis writes in this visionary work that delves deep into the ancient enchantments of the circus and its timeless disciplinary displays. Liontaming in America investigates the utopian aspirations fleetingly enacted in the polyamorous life of a nineteenth-century religious community, interweaving archival and personal threads with the histories of domestic labor, extraction economies, and the performance of family in theater, film, and everyday life. Lines reverberate between worldliness and devotion, between Peter Pan and Close Encounters, between Paul Robeson and Maude Adams, between leaps of faith and passionate alliances, between everyday tragedy and imaginative social possibility. As Willis writes in her afterword to the book, "The repeated unmaking and remaking of America, as a concept and as an ongoing textual project, is not impossible. It is happening all the time.""--
October 19 @ 12:00 pm / Prairie Lights Books
- Anne M
Minority rule : the right-wing attack on the will of the people-and the fight to resist it
Berman, Ari, author.
305.8 /Berman
"A riveting account of the decades-long effort by reactionary white conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power-and the movement to stop them"--
October 19 @ 2:30 pm / Iowa City Public Library
- Anne M
Mojave ghost : a novel poem
Gander, Forrest, 1956- author. https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PBJgCGt8b76pMvMhcWDfTHC
ON ORDER BOOK
"Mojave Ghost initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Moving through grief and loss towards a renewal that never sidesteps the wholeness of experience, Gander's new collection discovers an articulate language for the merging of exterior and interior landscapes. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked along much of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault toward the desolate town of his birth and found himself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating his emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions: the fractures and folds underlying not only our country, but any self in its relationship with others. The result is this moving new collection that unforgettably describes a spiritual and physical journey. With its confiding tones and candid self-examination, Mojave Ghost is Gander's most inviting and poignant book yet"--
October 19 @ 1:30 pm / Prairie Lights Books
- Anne M
Pool parties
MacBain-Stephens, Jennifer, author.
811.6 /MacBain-Stephens
In a post pandemic world, how do we rebuild what is broken? Pool Parties dives into dinosaurs, pop culture, hospital beds, barnacles, geology, and the soil of the midwest to dig through and sift our aching to heal psyche. Found poems about crystals, Sabrina the teenage witch, and building trails are just some of the topics of these playful yet sometimes dark poems. Once shielding ourselves from the world in tiny boxes, we now long to break the glass, feel the sun, and one another, but it is scary. Try to connect we must, if we fail, we must fail better.
October 20 @ 1:00 pm / MERGE
- Anne M
The privateers : how billionaires created a culture war and sold school vouchers
Cowen, Josh, author.
ON ORDER BOOK
"A deep-dive investigation of education privatization that reveals voucher programs as the faulty products of decades of work by wealthy patrons and influential conservatives In The Privateers, Josh Cowen lays bare the surprising history of tax-funded school choice programs in the United States and warns of the dangers of education privatization. A former evaluator of state and local school voucher programs, Cowen demonstrates how, as such programs have expanded in the United States, so too has the evidence-informed case against them. This thought-provoking work traces the origins of voucher-based education reform to mid-twentieth-century fears over school desegregation. It shows how, in the intervening decades, a cabal of billionaire conservatives supporting a host of special political interests-including economic libertarianism, religious choice, and parental rights-have converged around the issue of education freedom in an ongoing culture war. Through deliberate policymaking, legislation, and litigation, Cowen reveals, an insular advocacy network has enacted a flawed system for education finance driven largely by dogma. Far from realizing the purported goal of educational equity, privatization is failing students and exacerbating income inequality, Cowen finds. He cites multiple research studies that conclude that voucher programs return poorer academic outcomes, including lower test scores on state exams, especially among students who are at greater academic risk because of their race, their religion, their gender identity, or their family's income. Continued advancement of these policies, Cowen argues, is an assault on public education as a defining American institution. "--
October 19 @ 11:30 am / Iowa City Public Library
- Anne M
Something in the woods loves you
Anderson, Jarod, author.
ON ORDER BOOK
"Bats can hear shapes, plants can eat light, and bees can dance maps. When his life took him to a painfully dark place, Jarod K. Anderson found comfort and redemption in these facts and the massive shift in perspective that comes from paying a new kind of attention to nature. SOMETHING IN THE WOODS LOVES YOU tells the story of the darkest stretch of a young man's life, and how deliberate and meditative encounters with plants and animals helped him see the light at every turn. Ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of a single mushroom, Anderson has written a lyrical love letter to the natural world and given us the tools to see it all anew"--
October 19 @ 1:00 pm/ Iowa City Public Library
- Anne M
That librarian : the fight against book banning in America
Jones, Amanda (Librarian), author.
025.213 /Jones
One of the things small town librarian Amanda Jones values most about books is how they can affirm a young person's sense of self. So in 2022, when she caught wind of a local public hearing that would discuss "book content," she knew what was at stake. Schools and libraries nationwide have been bombarded by demands for books with LGTBQ+ references, discussions of racism, and more to be purged from the shelves. Amanda would be damned if her community were to ban stories representing minority groups. She spoke out that night at the meeting. Days later, she woke up to a nightmare that is still ongoing. Amanda Jones has been called a groomer, a pedo, and a porn-pusher; she has faced death threats and attacks from strangers and friends alike. Her decision to support a collection of books with diverse perspectives made her a target for extremists using book banning campaigns--funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians--in a crusade to make America more white, straight, and "Christian." But Amanda Jones wouldn't give up without a fight: she sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance. Mapping the book banning crisis occurring all across the nation, That Librarian draws the battle lines in the war against equity and inclusion, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.
October 19 @ 10:00 am / Iowa City Public Library
- Anne M
Unexplained presence
Bryant, Tisa, author. https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PCjHCXH3TDpWDfb7xMJwV4q
CATALOGING /
"In Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence, readers are spectators of mise-en-scènes in which black subjectivity has been distorted and denied within various visual narratives. Moving from cultural analysis to cinematic (re)creation, Bryant's prose traverses like a tracking shot through John Schlesinger's Darling, Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park and Virginia Woolf's Orlando, giving voice to characters whom have otherwise been structurally silenced. As Pulitzer-prize winning author Margo Jefferson aptly points out in her afterword, Tisa Bryant doesn't merely write about film; she is an "auteur," a "cultural anthropologist," and a "virtuosic critic-artist." Since its original publication with Leon Works in 2007, Unexplained Presence has been foundational among poets, scholars, and film critics and with this publication, Tisa Bryant's legacy as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary literature is preserved"--
October 20 @ 4:00 pm / Iowa City Public Library
- Anne M
Unstrung : rants and stories of a noise guitarist
Ribot, Marc, author.
787.87092 /Ribot
Throughout his genre-defying career as one of the most innovative musicians of our time, iconoclastic guitar player Marc Ribot has consistently defied expectation at every turn. Here, in his first collection of writing, we see that same uncompromising sensibility at work as he playfully interrogates our assumptions about music, life, and death. Through essays, short stories, and the occasional unfilmable film "mistreatment" that showcase the sheer range of his voice, Unstrung captures an artist whose versatility on the page rivals his dexterity onstage
October 19 @ 4:00 pm / Iowa City Public Library
- Anne M
Upgrade soul : a graphic novel
Daniels, Ezra Claytan, author, illustrator.
GRAPHIC NOVEL Daniels
For their 45th anniversary, Hank and Molly Nonnar decide to undergo an experimental rejuvenation procedure, but their hopes for youth are dashed when the couple is faced with the results: severely disfigured yet intellectually and physically superior duplicates of themselves. Can the original Hank and Molly coexist in the same world as their clones? In Upgrade Soul, McDuffie Award-winning creator Ezra Claytan Daniels asks probing questions about what shapes our identity-Is it the capability of our minds or the physicality of our bodies? Is a newer, better version of yourself still you? This page-turning graphic novel follows the lives of Hank and Molly as they discover the harsh truth that only one version of themselves is fated to survive.
October 18 @ 4:30 pm / Daydreams Comics
- Anne M
Wastelands : the true story of farm country on trial
Addison, Corban, 1979- author.
346.73038 /Addison
"A once idyllic American landscape is home to a closely knit, rural community that, for more than a generation, has battled the polluting practices of large-scale farming that had been making them sick and damaging their homes. After years of frustration and futile attempts to bring about change, an impassioned cadre of local residents, led by a team of intrepid and dedicated lawyers, brought suit against one of the world's most powerful corporations-and, miraculously, they won. As vivid and fast-paced as a novel, Wastelands takes us into the heart of a legal battle over the future of America's farmland, and into the lives of the people who found the courage to fight. With unparalleled entrée in the courtroom, Corban Addison captures the stirring and unforgettable struggle to bring a modern-day monopoly to its knees, to force a once invincible power to change, to vindicate the rights of a long-suffering community, and finally to restore their heritage"--
October 20th @ 3pm / Boyd Law Building.
- Anne M
Writing on empty : a guide to finding your voice
Goldberg, Natalie, author. https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PBJhXdYy6QmDvWJk9v8TPwC
808.02 /Goldberg
"Bestselling author and teacher Natalie Goldberg shares her inspiring personal journey out of a devastating period of writer's block and back into a life of growth, creativity, and healing. Natalie Goldberg has been writing for the past fifty years. But at the beginning of the pandemic, she suddenly wasn't able to write anymore. Her imaginative wellspring had dried up, and she was forced to ask herself: what do I do when what has always worked for me doesn't work anymore? In this beautifully written, inspiring personal account, Natalie shares her harrowing journey out of creative paralysis and back onto the page. When all of her tried and true methods - meditation, sitting still, writing practice - stopped working, she had to take drastic action. She got into her car and left New Mexico in search of a new inventive source. In her journey through the western states, she visited famous literary sites, searching for the spark that would reignite her ability to write. And, next to Hemingway's grave, she found it. "Get going," he seemed to say to her, and she did. Now, Natalie shares her story of traveling through literary and personal memory to clarify her way forward, struggling to make sense of her difficult relationships with parents and teachers, and digging into her long-held grief. Ultimately, she discovers how to write through the emptiness in order to fill up the world with compassion, healing, and renewed liveliness. For anyone struggling to reconnect with their own creative source, Writing on Empty is a gentle and instructive guidebook back to remembering what truly matters"--
October 19 @ 3:00 pm / Prairie Lights Books
- Anne M
October 19 @ 10:00 am / Iowa City Masonic Building
- Anne M