Books published by University of Iowa Press

Although she is now best known as a writer of novels and short stories, Gilman was known to her contemporaries as an advocate of reform on social, economic and religious fronts. These essays seek to remind the reader that the main purpose of her writing was reform.

This guide to the prairie plants native to Iowa provides all the information necessary for identifying and distinguishing even the most similar species. Species are described from the ground up: stem, leaf, bud, flower, fruit and habitat. The time of flowering/fruiting is given for central Iowa.

How do historians represent the past? How do theatre historians represent performance events? The fifteen challenging essays in Representing the Past focus on the fundamental epistemological conditions and procedures that serve as the foundational ideas that guide all historians in their endeavours.

Travelling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent Ryden - himself a most careful listener and reader - asks the following questions. What categories of meaning do we read into our surroundings? What forms of expression serve as the most reliable maps to understanding those meanings?

At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book's Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism.

Presents an insightful collection of literary interviews with innovative female poets, with a selection of their poems and prefaced by short introductions. This work provides important cultural and historical contexts that help define notions of innovation and contribute to an understanding of these experimental poems.

Winner oF The 2014 Iowa short fiction award, Heather A. Slomski's debut story collection The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons brings us a fresh new voice in literary fiction. In prose spare and daring, elegant yet startling, these stories drop their roots in reality, but take intermittent leaps into the surreal.

Written in the aftermath of the American Civil War during the ferment of national Reconstruction, this title offers a diagnosis of democracy's failures and lays out its vast possibilities. It also includes an assessment of the ongoing social experiment known as the United States.

Examining three mid-twentieth-century texts, this book explores how the concept of autobiography as a referential genre is challenged and transformed in relation to autobiographical texts written about the same person, the same life, but differently, by different writers, at different points in time. It is useful to Stein and Toklas scholars.

Originally published in the June 11, 1984, New Yorker, this long essay is a sharp-edged inquiry into the generational institutions of US national life. George Trow's story of the Harvard Black Rock Forest is ultimately a symbolic tale that bears upon some of the most significant institutions, professions, and legacies in contemporary American life.

Among the more than 150 letters collected in this volume are numerous correspondence concerning Whitman's Civil War years, including a letter sending John Hay, the personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln, a manuscript copy of ""O Captain, My Captain!

The chipped stone projectile points that Native Americans fastened to the ends of their spears, darts and arrow shafts are the most common relics of the 12,000-year occupancy of the Upper Mississippi River Valley. This guide offers a detailed key to identifying the various styles of points.

This poetry is about the people and events that pass through a life, leaving a void; about finding a presence in that absence, and waking up to the realities of the moment. It is concerned with discovery and confrontation, and uncovering and witnessing.

Robyn Schiff's poems enquire about making, buying, selling and stealing in the material world, the natural landscape and the human soul. Schiff moves from Cartier and Tiffany to the Shedd Aquarium, from Marie Antoinette to the Civil War and from Mary Pickford to Marilyn Monroe.

These poems rush the reader into the urgency of feelings - lovelorn, bawdy, grieving, pleading - but, never self-pitying. Each poem turns upon and returns to the infuriating and glorious correlations between love and art (learning to love, trying to make beauty or art, trying to be a beauty).

Frank P. Donovan was one of the first writers to provide a complete exploration of the major steam railways that served Iowa. This collection of Donovan's essays describes the history of the state railroad systems and the companies who ran them.

This text contains seven short stories by Carrie Young.

This history of Ottumwa's meatpacking workers provides insights into the development of several forms of labour relations in Iowa during the Democratic party's ascendancy across much of industrial North America following World War II.

Early in the 20th century, Hohannes Gillhoff created the composite character of Juernjakob Swehn: the archetype of the upright, honest mensch who personified the German immigrant, on his way to a better life through ambition and hard work. This is an English translation of that book.

This text aims to provide a way to see, to make and to think about the forms of wheel-thrown vessels; the information and inspiration explain both the mechanics of throwing and finishing pots made simply on the wheel, and the principles and beauty arising from the traditional method.

This text's three sections mingle myth and history with style, grace and humour. The first essays are given over to memories of Paul Engle in his heyday. The second group focuses on the teachers who made the workshop hum on a daily basis, and the third section is devoted to storytelling.

The poems in this book explore the intersection of writing with the visual arts, particularly late medieval and early Reniassance paintings. They also explore writing as a visual vehicle, both as a pattern across a field and as a catalyst for imagery.

What connections can be drawn between oral history and the shopping mall? Gospel music and the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant? William Carlos Williams's Paterson and the Manhattan Project's secret cities? The answers lie in this insightful collection of essays that read and illuminate the American landscape. Through literature and folklore, music and oral history, autobiography, architecture, and photography, eleven leading writers and thinkers explore the dialectic between space and place in modern American life. The result is an eloquent and provocative reminder of the environmental context of events - the deceptively simple fact that events "take place".

A series of vividly rendered personal narratives, Trespasses: A Memoir recounts the coming of age of three generations in the rural Great Plains. In examining how class, race, and gender play out in the lives of two farm families who simultaneously love and hate the place they can't escape, Lacy Johnson presents rural whiteness as an ethnicity worthy of study.

Offers a loving ode to the prairies of the Midwest, to west central Iowa, and to family connections that stretch from the authors's Swedish ancestors to his parents to his wife and children. Throughout he embraces "the opportunity, as always, to settle, to remember, and be ready".