Books published by University of Iowa Press

Who writes novels about war? For nearly a century after World War I, the answer was simple: soldiers who had been there. The assumption that a person must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction was taken for granted by writers, reviewers, critics, and even scholars. Contemporary American fiction tells a different story. Less than half of the authors of contemporary war novels are veterans. And that's hardly the only change. Today's war novelists focus on the psychological and moral challenges of soldiers coming home rather than the physical danger of combat overseas. They also imagine the consequences of the wars from non-American perspectives in a way that defies the genre's conventions. To understand why these changes have occurred, David Eisler argues that we must go back nearly fifty years, to the political decision to abolish the draft. The ramifications rippled into the field of cultural production, transforming the foundational characteristics-- authorship, content, and form--of the American war fiction genre.

Presents a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists. This vibrant and diverse selection includes essays by award-winning writers such as Zadie Smith, Chris Kraus, Teju Cole, Orhan Pamuk, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

The discipline of fan studies is famously undisciplined. But that doesn't mean it isn't structured. This is the first comprehensive primer for classroom use that shows students how to do fan studies in practical terms.

Moving between the American South and Mexico, these stories explore how immigrant and native characters are shaped by absent family and geography.

Follow a food trail and you'll find yourself crisscrossing oceans. Join Nina Mukerjee Furstenau in Green Chili and Other Impostors as she picks through lost tastes with recipes as codes to everything from political resistance to comfort food and much more.

What is the appeal of film tourism, and what can its rise tell us about contemporary fandom? Fan Sites explores why and how we experience film and television-related places, and what the growth of this practice means for contemporary fandom.

The historic and mythic elements of the American Old West have exerted a global fascination for more than 200 years and became the foundation for fan communities who have endured for generations. This book examines some of those communities.

Told at times with lighthearted humour or heartbreaking candour, Abdur-Rahman's story of adolescent Arabic lessons, fasting, and Muslim mosque, funeral, and Eid services speaks to the challenges of bridging generational and cultural divides and what it takes to maintain family amidst personal and societal upheaval.

What can organizational leaders in business, education, government, and most any enterprise learn from an unemployed, unmarried woman who lived in patriarchal, misogynistic rural England more than 200 years ago? As it turns out, a great deal.

Perhaps the first of its kind, Radicals is a two-volume collection of writings by American women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special attention paid to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Asian American women.

This collection holds a mirror to the self and in its reflection we find the elegiac and the ecological, as in 'how much of enjoying a place / is destroying it?', the worlds both domestic and natural, as in 'when the redbird strikes the window, it is me / who takes blame', a daughter 'shattered, but not without humor'.

In this first book of essays devoted entirely to Nathaniel Mackey's work, critics respond to a major oeuvre that is at once affirmative and utopic, negational and dystopic. Mackey's work envisions cultural creation as cross-cultural, based in the damaging relationships of Africans brought against their will to the Americas.

Archives and analyses Black feminist stand-up comedy in the United States over the past sixty years. Looking closely at the work of Jackie 'Moms' Mabley, Mo'Nique, Wanda Sykes, Sasheer Zamata, Sam Jay, and others, this book shows how Black feminist comedy and the laughter it ignites are vital components of feminist, queer, and anti-racist protest.

William Gibson is frequently described as one of the most influential writers of the past few decades, yet his body of work has only been studied partially and without full recognition of its implications for literature and culture beyond science fiction. It is high time for a book that explores the wide-ranging impact of Gibson's fiction.

Explores modern and contemporary American prose literature through the lens of place, showing how authors like William Least Heat-Moon, Willa Cather, Richard Wright, and Leslie Marmon Silko represent and reimagine real places in the world and the human-environment relationships therein.

Argues that Iowa must reckon with its past and the fact that its farm economy continues to pollute waterways, while remaining utterly unprepared for climate change. Iowa must recognize ways in which it can bolster its residents' standard of living and move away from its demographic tradition of whiteness.

How does one live a good life? If you're Pat Graves, you change your name to Cecile Collette, move to Cleveland, and join three churches and the Rotary Club. For Cecile, it may be possible to make Michigan and everything else she touches beautiful, but she'll come to grief when she tries to redesign another human being.

Traces the theatrical repertoire of a small group of white Anglo-American actresses as they reshaped the meanings of girlhood in Britain, North America, and the British West Indies during the first half of the nineteenth century.