How do you store 425,000 prisoners of war? What sounds like the setup for a tasteless joke was an actual concern for the US in World War II. England ran […]

In her new book Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook Sonya Huber offers a collection of effective essays mostly about her Midwest identity. A longtime essayist and Fairfield University professor, […]

A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America By Benjamin Sells Northwestern University Press Let me tell you: I’m a huge Chicago history […]

Good Time Party Girl: The Notorious Life of Dirty Helen Cromwell, 1886–1969 Helen Cromwell & Robert Dougherty Originally published in 1966, Good Time Party Girl is the life story of […]

Midwest Futures By Phil Christman Belt Publishing The Midwest is a deeply mysterious place to the coastal essayists, pundits, and politicians. Rarely visiting, save to write clunky closed factory and […]

Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore Harper, 306 pages, $26.99 Elizabeth Wetmore’s Valentine, set in 1976 rural West Texas, is a novel of relentless and brutally raw outrage. A fury-filled howl of […]

Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning By John W. Reps Princeton University Press, 827 pages, out of print, available on the internet starting at $40 […]

Saturday Night Sage by Noah C. Lekas Blind Owl Reviewed by Carr Harkrader In Noah Lekas’ new poetry collection, Saturday Night Sage, Buddha’s divine path is paved over with Wisconsin […]