New at the Library

Calmar Campus

The Anthropocene is the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, bestselling author John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale--from the QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and Penguins of Madagascar. Funny, complex, and rich with detail, the reviews; chart the contradictions of contemporary humanity. As a species, we are both far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough, a paradox that came into sharp focus as we faced a global pandemic that both separated us and bound us together. The Anthropocene Reviewed is an open-hearted exploration of the paths we forge and an unironic celebration of falling in love with the world.

Description: From Carl Phillips asking how wildness is tamed, to Esmé Weijun Wang finding moments of stillness in the simple act of observing her dog, to Cal Flyn befriending a sled dog called Suka in Finland, here we see dogs at every stage of their life. This anthology promises to bring–much as our four-legged furry friends do–joy and delight, and surprising depth and poignancy. It goes beyond the wet snouts and wagging tails and gets to the heart of what makes dogs our true lifelong companions. These essays are also sometimes toothy, sometimes bloody, sometimes gentle; much like dogs. (publ.)

In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it. In "We Kin," Gay thinks about the garden (es­pecially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come in) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in "Share Your Bucket," he explores skateboard­ing's reclamation of public spaces; he considers the costs of masculinity in "Grief Suite"; and in "Through My Tears I Saw," he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying. In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love?

"This book explores writing produced by Japanese Americans during their WWII incarceration. In five of the ten War Relocation Authority camps, occasional literary magazines were published alongside weekly or daily newspapers. The newspapers communicated necessary information from camp administrators to the detained, but the literary magazines contained creative works written by Japanese Americans themselves. In Topaz, TREK captured the distinctive culture and community that developed in the Utah camp, as did the Pulse for Granada/Amache in Colorado, the Dispatch Magazine for Tule Lake in northern California, the Denson Magnet for Jerome, and The Pen for Rohwer, both in southeast Arkansas. The fiction, poetry, journalism, and artwork in the magazines provide insight into the daily realities and emotional experiences of the incarcerated.

Description: Chronicles what happens when a little girl who scorns the idea of marriage and children (in favor of becoming a stiletto-wearing, attache-carrying Secret Agent), majors in Russian, minors in Vodka, and then one day finds herself with child... and in-laws. (publ.)

Description: The crônica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers (or even soccer stars) to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector’s pieces for the Saturday edition of Rio’s leading paper, the Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays, aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about children or social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or love. (publ.)

Description: This anthology brings together the voices of both new and established Arab American writers, creating a compilation of essays and creative nonfiction that reveal the stories of the Arab diaspora. Writers from Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, and Syria explore issues related to politics, culture, and racism. Coming from different countries and religions and including first and second-generation immigrants as well as those whose identities encompass more than a single culture, these writers tell stories that speak to the complexity of the Arab American experience. They travel through time and geography to reveal the circular nature of identity, inviting the reader to enter into an ever evolving landscape. Ranging from the traditional to the experimental, these essays present narratives in innovative styles. At this point in our history, such stories are urgently needed, and this anthology gives greater insight into the lives of Arab Americans. Entering into these personal stories allows readers to engage with the complexity of the Arab American community. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 30 May 2021 p. SR4 (excerpt); PW 1 Feb. 2021 p. 61; NYT/BR 27 June 2021 p. 15.
Description: Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2019, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie’s own intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need, and what emerges is, in myriad ways, a love letter to literature itself. Rushdie explores what the work of authors from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison mean to him, often by telling vivid, sometimes humorous stories of his own personal encounters with them, whether on the page or in person. He delves deeper than ever before into the nature of “truth,” revels in the vibrant malleability of language, and the creative lines that can join art and life, and he looks anew at migration, multiculturalism and censorship. (publ.)
Holdings Note: Peosta library also owns: Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction, 1992-2002 (Random House, 2002; call no. 824.914 Rus).

Introduction -- Women's Work -- Banished to the Basement -- Parsing Desire -- All Consuming -- Mine to Choose -- Oh Crap -- Dirty Hands -- Consider the Lobster -- Footprint -- Buying Big Bird -- Paying Attention -- A few of My Favorite Things -- Thrifty Pig -- The Cunningham Gene -- The Rebuilding Warehouse -- Outfitting Oliver -- The Library -- Meditation on Plenty -- The People We Love Remain -- Muddying Walden -- Epilogue : Prime Days -- Works Referenced -- Acknowledgments

Supermoon -- This World is Not Your Home -- Notes for an Essay on Special Music -- How to Write a Love Story -- Keeper of the Flame -- Never Forget -- Ghost House -- The Other, Invented Man -- Music of the Spheres: a Meditation on NASA's Symphonies of the Planets -- Over the River and Through the Woods

Reviewed: NYT/BR 16 Jan. 2021 p. 11.
Description: One of the most acclaimed artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was a gifted novelist, playwright, and essayist. Drawn from three decades of her work, this anthology showcases her development as a writer, from her early pieces expounding on the beauty and precision of African American art to some of her final published works, covering the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing a white doctor. Among the selections are Hurston’s well-known works such as “How It Feels to be Colored Me” and “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience.” The essays in this essential collection are grouped thematically and cover a panoply of topics, including politics, race and gender, and folkloric study from the height of the Harlem Renaissance to the early years of the Civil Rights movement.

Jesus Rollerblading Christ--another helping of TheOatmeal! Mrow, MOAR kitty comics. Mr. Oats delivers a sidesplitting serving of cat humor in his new book, How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You. If your cat is kneading you, that's not a sign of affection. Your cat is actually checking your internal organs for weakness. If your cat brings you a dead animal, this isn't a gift. It's a warning. How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You is a hilarious, brilliant offering of comics, facts, and instructional guides about crazy cat behaviors from the creative wonderland at TheOatmeal.com. How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You presents fan favorites, such as "Cat vs. Internet," "How to Pet a Kitty," and "The Bobcats," plus 17 brand-new, never-before-seen cat-themed comic strips. This Oatmeal collection is a must-have for cat-lovers from Mr. Oats! A pullout poster is included at the back of the book.

The college years are a time of noble pursuit of knowledge, self-betterment--and unending peril! Students are at risk from the moment they receive their acceptance letters. Fortunately, the authors of the phenomenally best-selling Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook series have come to the rescue, offering all-new, hands-on, step-by-step instructions for surviving the worst that higher education has to offer, on campus and off. Learn how to identify a party school, engineer a hookup, survive "the spins," and escape a stadium riot. Discover the best way to sleep in class, pass a test you haven't studied for, avoid the "freshman fifteen," and pull an all-nighter. With practical advice for avoiding laundry and identifying unsafe institutional food, along with an appendix of excuses for missed deadlines and a back-up diploma, this is truly required reading for all college students--and a perfect high school graduation present.

Reviewed: TLS 14 June 2019 p. 14.
Description: Best known as a poet, Derek Mahon here gathers a selection of recent prose pieces, autobiographical, critical and speculative, notably on cinema, revision, clouds, caravans and horizons. The volume includes “Rubbish Theory,” reflections on refuse in contemporary culture, and “The Rain Bridge,” a story for children. “School Photo and Early Reading” remembers his young days in North Belfast; as does “Olympia and the Internet,” in praise of typewriters and dis-praise of information technology. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Sept. 2019 p. 31.
Description: In the course of a career thinking and writing about art, critic Martin Gay-ford has traveled all over the world both to see works of art and to meet artists. Gayford’s journeys, often to fairly inaccessible places, involve frustrations and complications, but also serendipitous encounters and out-comes, which he makes as much a part of the story as the final destination. In chapters that are by turns humorous, intriguing, and stimulating, Gay-ford takes us to places as varied as Brancusi’s Endless Column in Romania; prehistoric caves in France; the museum island of Naoshima in Japan; the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas; and an exhibition of Roni Horn’s work in Iceland. Interwoven with these tales are journeys to meet artists–Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, Marina Abramovic in Venice, Robert Rauschen-berg in New York–and travels with artists, such as a trip to Beijing with Gilbert & George. These encounters not only provide fascinating insights into the way artists approach and think about their art, but reveal the importance of their personal environments. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 44.
Description: Since the publication of her 1955 debut poetry collection, La Tierra Más Ajena [The Most Foreign Country], Alejandra Pizarnik has captivated the imaginations of many of Latin America’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, from Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar to Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Zurita. Over the last several years, the majority of Pizarnik’s poetry has been translated into English, garnering enormous acclaim in the U.S. and abroad, yet her extraordinary critical writings–including commentaries on figures such as Artaud, Borges, Breton, Michaux, and Pessoa, as well as intimate accounts of her own working methods–remain almost entirely unknown outside the Spanish-speaking world. A Tradition of Rupture makes these writings available to English-speaking readers for the first time, offering indispensable insight into the range of Pizarnik’s reading and the principle influences on her poetics. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Aug. 2018 p. 110.
Description: Equality for LGBT people has come a long way and all, but voices of per-sons of color within the community are still often silenced, and being black in America is ... well, have you watched the news? With the characteristic wit and candor that have made him one of today’s boldest writers on social issues, this book is Michael Arceneaux’s impassioned, forthright, and refreshing look at minority life in today’s America. Leaving no bigoted or ignorant stone unturned, he describes his journey in learning to embrace his identity when the world told him to do the opposite. He eloquently writes about coming out to his mother; growing up in Houston, Texas; that time his father asked if he was “funny” while shaking his hand; his obstacles in embracing intimacy; and the persistent challenges of young people who feel marginalized and denied the chance to pursue their dreams. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 10 Mar. 2019 p. 10
Description: A collection of previously published essays and profiles by the legendary critic Janet Malcolm. The title piece of this wonderfully eclectic collection is a profile of the fashion designer Eileen Fisher, whose mother often said to her, “Nobody's looking at you.” But in every piece in this volume, Malcolm looks closely and with impunity at a broad range of subjects, from Donald Trump’s TV nemesis Rachel Maddow, to the stiletto-heel-wearing pianist Yuja Wang, to “the big-league game” of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In an essay called “Socks,” Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are seen as the “sort of asteroid [that] has hit the safe world of Russian Literature in English translation,” and in “Dreams and Anna Karenina,” the focus is Tolstoy, “one of literature's greatest masters of manipulative techniques.” This book also includes “Pandora’s Click,” a brief, cautionary piece about e-mail etiquette that was written in the early two thousands, and that reverberates–albeit painfully–to this day. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 4 April 2019 p. 15.
Description: One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. This collection does more than present a decade’s worth of cult-reputation essays–it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force. In his celebrated and prescient essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” Yang explores the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter. In his National Magazine Award–winning “Paper Tigers,” he explores the intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner torment of the child exposed to “tiger mother” parenting. And in his close reading of New York Magazine’s popular Sex Diaries, he was among the first critics to take seriously today’s Internet-mediated dating lives. Yang catches these ugly trends early because he has felt at various times implicated in them, and he does not exempt himself from his radical honesty. His essays retain the thrill of discovery, the wary eye of the first explorer, and the rueful admission of the first ex-posed. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR 4/2018 p. 40
Description: Collects together previously unpublished works comprising around half of Fanon’s entire output which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take center stage. These writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of his entire output revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. Shedding new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, this disruptive and moving work will shape how we look at the world. (publ.)
Note: Originally published as: Écrits sur l’Aliénation et la Liberté (Paris: La Découverte, 2015).

Description: This collection of essays brings together pieces Hitchens published over the last two decades for the first time in one book, addressing the subjects he is best known for, including: the case against God, faith and religious observance; the case for intervention in Iraq; indictments of towering political figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, and Henry Kissinger; and celebrations of the writers and thinkers whose work meant most to him. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 14 Aug. 2017 p. 63; NYT/BR 3 Dec. 2017 p. 22 (100 Notable Books 2017); NYT/BR 10 Dec. 2017 p. 16.; TLS 9 Feb. 2018 p. 26
Description: Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon—the legacy of P.T. Barnum’s “humbug” culminating with the currency of Donald J. Trump’s “fake news.” Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, with race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and What is It?, an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution. (Publ.)
Local Interest: Read about the 9-year-old poet-prodigy Fern Gravel, declared “the lost Sappho of Iowa” … (PW)

Description: Though best known as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell left an even more lastingly significant achievement in his voluminous essays, which dealt with all the great social, political, and literary questions of the day and exemplified an incisive prose style that is still universally admired. Included among the more than 240 essays in this volume are Orwell’s famous discussion of pacifism, “My Country Right or Left,” his scathingly complicated views on the dirty work of imperialism in “Shooting an Elephant,” and his very firm opinion on how to make “A Nice Cup of Tea.” In his essays, Orwell elevated political writing to the level of art, and his motivating ideas–his desire for social justice, his belief in universal freedom and equality, and his concern for truth in language–are as enduringly relevant now, a hundred years after his birth, as ever. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 25 Mar. 2018 p. 26.
Description: Ursula K. Le Guin (who died in January, 2018) has taken readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explores new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice–sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical–shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Le Guin’s online writing, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters to her, her concerns with this world, and her unceasing wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.” (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 6 Apr. 2018 p. 32.
Description: In 1953, a man was found dead from cyanide poisoning near the Philadelphia airport with a picture of a Nazi aircraft in his wallet. Taped to his abdomen was an enciphered message. In 1912, a book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came into possession of an illuminated cipher manuscript once belonging to Emperor Rudolf II, who was obsessed with alchemy and the occult. Wartime codebreakers tried–and failed–to unlock the book’s secrets, and it remains an enigma to this day. In this lively and entertaining book, Craig Bauer examines these and other vexing ciphers yet to be cracked. Some may reveal the identity of a spy or serial killer, provide the location of buried treasure, or expose a secret society–while others may be elaborate hoaxes. Unsolved! begins by explaining the basics of cryptology, and then explores the history behind an array of unsolved ciphers. It looks at ancient ciphers, ciphers created by artists and composers, ciphers left by killers and victims, Cold War ciphers, and many others. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 16 Feb. 2018 p. 5 (excerpt)
Description: A new essay collection assesses today’s political climate and the mysteries of faith, from the influence of intellectual minds on society’s political consciousness to the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life. (publ.)
Note: Local author. Robinson teaches at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Her books, Gilead (2004) and Lila (2014) were “All Iowa Reads” selections. She lives in Iowa City.