NewPages Blog :: Books

Memorandum from the Iowa Cloud Appreciation Society
Fiction by Joseph G. Peterson
University of Iowa Press, November 2022

When his girlfriend, Rosemary, asks about his life, Jim Moore, a successful salesman whose territory covers the entire continental United States and parts of Canada, doesn’t think there is anything to say and so he tells her “nothing happened,” or maybe he doesn’t know how to put it all into words or maybe he doesn’t want to. Stuck in an airport because of blizzard conditions, and packed into a crowded terminal with other travelers, Moore has come to believe that his life is not worth reporting about because it has largely been a life lived without incident. However, chance encounters with a yoga instructor, a man traveling to bury his mother, and an enigmatic woodsman reawaken long dormant emotions about his father’s suicide and cause Jim to newly reflect on his own life and on a memorandum that he later discovered in his deceased father’s papers, which lists all the names of the clouds, and which Jim now, from time to time, recants as if it were his own private kaddish to memorialize his lost father.

Butcher’s Work: True Crime Tales of American Murder and Madness
Nonfiction by Harold Schechter
University of Iowa Press, November 2022

In Butcher’s Work, Harold Schechter explores the story of a Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children. A Gilded Age “Bluebeard” who did away with as many as fifty wives throughout the country. A decorated World War I hero who orchestrated a murder that stunned Jazz Age America. While other infamous homicides from the same eras—the Lizzie Borden slayings, for example, or the “thrill killing” committed by Leopold and Loeb—have entered into our cultural mythology, these four equally sensational crimes have largely faded from public memory. A quartet of gripping historical true-crime narratives, Butcher’s Work restores these once-notorious cases to vivid, dramatic life. Harold Schechter is professor emeritus at Queens College, CUNY. Among his more than forty books are a series of historical true-crime narratives about America’s most infamous serial killers, including Hell’s Princess. He is married to the poet, Kimiko Hahn.

The Beckoning World
Fiction by Douglas Bauer
University of Iowa Press, November 2022

Douglas Bauer’s newest work, The Beckoning World, is set in the first quarter of the twentieth century and follows Earl Dunham, whose weeks are comprised of six days mining coal followed by Sundays playing baseball. Then, one day, a major-league scout happens on a game, signs Earl, and he begins a life he had no idea he could even dream. But dreams sometimes suffer from a lovely abundance, and in Earl’s case, her name is Emily Marchand. They fall quickly and deeply in love, but with that love comes heartbreaking complications. The Beckoning World gathers a cast of characters that include Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, a huge-hearted Pullman steward offering aphoristic wisdom, and countless others, not least of which is the 1918 Spanish flu taking vivid spectral form. At the center is a relentless love that Earl and Emily are defenseless against, allied as they are “in this business of their hearts.” Douglas Bauer has written several books, including Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home (Iowa, 2008). He teaches writing at Bennington College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Six-Minute Memoir: Fifty-Five Short Essays on Life
Memoir by Mary Helen Stefaniak
A Bur Oak Book
University of Iowa Press, October 2022

Culled from two decades’ worth of Mary Helen Stefaniak’s “Alive and Well” column in the Iowa Source, each essay invites readers into the ordinary life of a woman “with a family and friends and a job . . . and a series of cats and a history living in one old house after another at the turn of the twenty-first century in the middle of the Middle West.” One great aunt presides over nineteen acres of pecan grove profitably strewn with junk. A borrowed hammer rings with the sound of immortality. Famous poets pipe up where you least expect them. Living and dying are found to be two sides of the same remarkable coin. Writing prompts at the end of the book invite readers to search their own lives for such moments—the kind that could be forgotten but instead are turned, by the gift of perspective and perfectly chosen detail, into treasure. The Six-Minute Memoir encourages people to tell their own stories even if they think they don’t have the kind of story that belongs in a memoir.