Böcker utgivna av University of Iowa Press

From the intersection of public and private fear, Kerri Webster's award-winning collection speaks of anxiety and awe, vanishings and reappearances. A city both rises and falls; worlds are simultaneously spoken into being and torn down by words.

Gathering personal essays, scholarly articles, and creative writings on the death penalty in American culture, this striking collection brings human voices and literary perspectives to a subject that is often overburdened by statistics and angry polemics. Contributors include death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars.

Whether wandering the paths of the imagination, driving through sparsely populated countryside, or listening for the voices of animals, Joseph Campana's poems attend to the ways we are indelibly marked by habitat. Shot full of accidental attachments and reluctant transience, Natural Selections produces from vibrant contradiction potent song.

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".

A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, this argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else.

Explores the intriguing cooperation of America's writers-including major figures such as Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and Herman Melville-with reformers, politicians, clergymen, and periodical editors who attempted to end the practice of capital punishment in the US during the 1840s and 1850s.

A vivid archive of memories, Beth Alvarado's Anthropologies layers scenes, portraits, dreams, and narratives in a dynamic cross-cultural mosaic. Bringing her lyrical tenor to bear on stories as diverse as harboring teen runaways, gunfights with federales, and improbable love, Alvarado unveils the ways in which seemingly separate moments coalesce to forge a communal truth.

Just prior to his death in 2005, August Wilson, arguably the most important American playwright of the last quarter-century, completed an ambitious cycle of ten plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century. This title examines from myriad perspectives the way his final works give shape and focus to his complete dramatic opus.

Revealing the miniature beauties hidden among the patches of prairie, woodland, and wetland that remain in Iowa's sadly overdeveloped landscape, the seventy-five color photographs in this book presents a cross section of the state's smallest inhabitants.

In 1959, seventeen-year-old Gary Presley was standing in line, wearing his favorite cowboy boots and waiting for his final inoculation of Salk vaccine. Seven days later, a bad headache caused him to skip basketball practice. This memoir tells the story of his journey from the iron lung to life in a wheelchair.

The Romantic poet John Keats, considered by many as one of the greatest poets in the English language, has long been the subject of attention from scholars who seek to understand him and poets who seek to emulate him. Bridging these impulses, A Brighter Word Than Bright is neither historical biography nor scholarly study, but instead a biography of Keats's poetic imagination.

Robert Scholes's now classic Rise and Fall of English was a stinging indictment of the discipline of English literature in the United States. In English after the Fall, Scholes moves from identifying where the discipline has failed to provide concrete solutions that will help restore vitality and relevance to the discipline.

Exploring a wide range of poetry from the nineteenth century to the present, Poetry after Cultural Studies showcases the unexpectedly rich intersection of cultural studies theory and current poetry scholarship. These essays show forcefully that cultural studies and poetics - once thought incommensurable - in fact are mutually informative and richer for the effort.

More than any other American before or since, Abraham Lincoln had a way with words that has shaped our national idea of ourselves. Showing not only the development of a powerful mind but the ways in which our sixteenth president was perceived by equally brilliant American minds of a decidedly literary and political bent, Harold K. Bush provides some of the most significant contemporary meditations on the Great Emancipator's legacy and cultural significance.

Douglas Bauer's profound and exquisitely written first novel quickly established him as one of America's best new writers. This is the story of Ed and Ramona, high school lovers who married young. And when Ramona, seeing the ever-clearer reality of life with Ed, turns and walks away from her house, from her life, and from her small baby boy, Ed is stunned into a depth of uncomprehending rage.

A tale of memory and hero worship and the restless pulse of longing, The Book of Famous Iowans examines those forces that define not only a state made up of a physical geography, but more important, those states of the wholly human spirit.

If you could meet one deceased literary figure, who would that be? What would you ask? What would you say, and why? Here eighteen distinguished authors respond to this challenge by creating imagined conversations with a constellation of British and American authors, from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett to Edith Wharton.

Examines the future of electronic literature in a world where tablets and e-readers are becoming as common as printed books and where fans are blurring the distinction between reader and author. The construction of new ways of storytelling is already underway: it is happening on the edges of the mainstream gaming industry and in the spaces between media, on the foundations set by classic games.