The Iowa City Book Festival will be wrapping up soon! Check out their website for the final events and take a look at some of the titles that were featured by Book Festival authors this year:
The family chao : a novel
Chang, Lan Samantha, author.
FICTION Chang Lan
The residents of Haven, Wisconsin have dined on the Fine Chao restaurant's delicious Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, happy to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. But when brash, charismatic, and tyrannical patriarch Leo Chao is found dead-presumed murdered-his sons find they've drawn the exacting gaze of the entire town. The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers: Dagou, the restaurant's reckless head chef; Ming, financially successful but personally tortured; and the youngest, gentle but lost college student James. Brimming with heartbreak, comedy, and suspense, The Family Chao offers a kaleidoscopic, highly entertaining portrait of a Chinese American family grappling with the dark undercurrents of a seemingly pleasant small town.
This story will change : after the happily ever after : a memoir
Crane, Elizabeth, 1961- author.
BIOGRAPHY Crane, Elizabeth
Life is a work-in-progress, full of mystery and unexpected twists. The only certain thing is that whatever story you think you are telling yourself about your life, is that story will change. And then it will change again. One minute Elizabeth Crane and her husband of fifteen years are fixing up their old house in upstate New York, finally settling down roots after stints in Chicago, Texas, and Brooklyn, and the next she finds herself separated and in couples' therapy, living in a luxury apartment in the city with a old friend and his kid. It's understood that the fancy apartment and bonus family are temporary, but the situation brings unexpected comfort and much-needed healing for wounds even older than her strained marriage.
How not to drown in a glass of water
Cruz, Angie, author.
FICTION Cruz Angie
Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. Over the course of twelve sessions, Cara recounts her tempestuous love affairs, her alternately biting and loving relationships with her neighbor Lulu and her sister Angela, her struggles with debt, gentrification and loss, and, eventually, what really happened between her and her estranged son, Fernando. As Cara confronts her darkest secrets and regrets, we see a woman buffeted by life but still full of fight.
Cloud cuckoo land : a novel
Doerr, Anthony, 1973- author.
FICTION Doerr Anthony
Constantinople, 1453: Anna lives in a convent where women toil all day embroidering the robes of priests. She learns the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a better world, and reads it to her sister as the walls of Constantinople are bombarded by armies of Saracens. Lakeport, Idaho, 2020: Seymour, an activist bent on saving the earth, sits in the public library with two homemade bombs in pressure cookers. Upstairs, eighty-five-year old Zeno, a former prisoner-of-war, and an amateur translator, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon's adventures. The future: On an interstellar ark called The Argos, Konstance, alone in a vault with access to all the information in the world, knows Aethon's story through her father, who has sequestered her to protect her. All are dreamers, misfits on the cusp of adulthood in a world the grown-ups have broken.
The soul of the family tree : ancestors, stories, and the spirits we inherit
Erickson, Lori, author.
929.1 /Erickson
Travel with Lori Erickson as she finds unexpected spiritual guides among the seafaring Vikings and her hardscrabble immigrant forebears. Then explore how the spirits of your ancestral past can guide you today
They knew : how a culture of conspiracy keeps America complacent
Kendzior, Sarah, author.
RECEIVED
Sarah Kendzior explores the United States' "culture of conspiracy," putting forth a timely and unflinching argument: uncritical faith in broken institutions is as dangerous as false narratives peddled by propagandists. Conspiracy theories are on the rise because officials refuse to enforce accountability for real conspiracies. They Knew discusses conspiracy culture in a rapidly declining United States struggling with corruption, climate change, and other crises. As the actions of the powerful remain shrouded in mystery - like the Jeffrey Epstein operation - it is unsurprising that people turn to conspiracy theories to fill the informational void. They Knew exposes the tactics these powerful actors use to placate an inquisitive public. In Kendzior's signature whip smart prose and eviscerating arguments, They Knew unearths decades of buried American history, providing an essential and critical look at how to rebuild our democracy by confronting the political lies and crimes that have shaped us
Crushing it : poems
Knox, Jennifer L., 1968- author.
ON ORDER BOOK
The poems in Jennifer L. Knox's darkly imaginative collection, Crushing It, unearth epiphanies in an unbounded landscape of forms, voices and subjects--from history to true crime to epidemiology--while exploring our tenuous connections and disconnections. From Merle Haggard lifting his head from a pile of cocaine to absurdist romps through an apocalypse where mushrooms learn to sing, this versatile collection is brimming with dark humor and bright surprise. Alongside Knox's distinctive surrealism, Crushing It also reveals autobiography in poems about love, family, and adult ADHD, and Knox's empathetic depictions of the ego's need to assert its precious, singular "I" suggest that a self distinct from the hive, the herd, the flock, is an illusion. With clear-eyed spirit, Crushing It swallows all the world, and then some.
An American summer : love and death in Chicago
Kotlowitz, Alex, author.
363.33 /Kotlowitz
The numbers are staggering: Over the past twenty years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire. What does that do to the spirit of individuals and communities? Drawing on his decades of experience, Alex Kotlowitz set out to chronicle one summer in the city, writing of those who have emerged from the violence and whose stories reveal the capacity--and the breaking point--of the human heart and soul. The result is a spellbinding collection of deeply intimate stories that upend what we think we know about gun violence in America.
Belabored : a vindication of the rights of pregnant women
Lenz, Lyz, author.
306.8743 /Lenz
In Belabored, journalist Lyz Lenz lays bare the misogynistic logic of U.S. cultural narratives about pregnancy, tracing them back to our murky, potent cultural soup of myths, from the religious to the historical. In the present she details, with her trademark blend of wit, snark, and raw intimacy, how sexist assumptions inform our expectations for pregnant people, whether we're policing them, asking them to make sacrifices with dubious or disproven benefits, or putting them up on a pedestal in an "Earth mother" role. Belabored is an urgent call for us to embrace new narratives around pregnancy and the choice whether or not to have children, emphasizing wholeness and agency, and to reflect those values in our laws, medicine, and interactions with each other.
The hero of this book : a novel
McCracken, Elizabeth, author.
FICTION Mccracke Elizabet
The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. What begins as a question of filial devotion ultimately becomes a lesson in what it means to write. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that delights at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.
What if? 2 : additional serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions
Munroe, Randall, author.
500 /Munroe
The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Unfazed by absurdity, Randall consults the latest research on everything from swing-set physics to airplane-catapult design to clearly and concisely answer his readers' questions. As he consistently demonstrates, you can learn a lot from examining how the world might work in very specific extreme circumstances. Filled with bonkers science, boundless curiosity, and Randall's signature stick-figure comics, What If? 2 is sure to be another instant classic adored by inquisitive readers of all ages.
A time to mourn & a time to dance : a love story of grief, trauma, healing, and faith
Ohman-Rodriguez, Jennifer, author.
248.866 /Ohman-Rodriguez
Traumatized by the sudden loss of her husband Tony, himself a well-respected trauma therapist, and overwhelmed by the impact of his sudden death on their two sons, Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez was determined to blaze a path toward healing. Jennifer shares her personal story with raw authenticity, offering those impacted with trauma a path towards healing through both professional help and her deep faith in God.
On critical race theory : why it matters & why you should care
Ray, Victor (Victor Erik), author.
305.8 /Ray
On Critical Race Theory seeks to explain the centrality of race in American history and politics, and how the often mischaracterized intellectual movement became a political necessity. Dr. Ray draws upon the radical thinking of giants such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois to clearly trace the foundations of Critical Race Theory in the Black intellectual traditions of emancipation and the civil rights movement. From this foundation, Dr. Ray explores the many facets that CRT interrogates, from deeply embedded structural racism to the historical connection between Whiteness and property, ownership, and more.
Ain't burned all the bright
Reynolds, Jason, author.
811.6 /Reynolds
Jason Reynolds, using three longggggggg sentences, and Jason Griffin, using three hundred pages of a pocket-size moleskine, have mind-melded this fierce-vulnerable-brilliant-terrifying-whatiswrongwithumans-hopefilled-hopeful-tendere-heartbreaking-heartmaking manifesto on what it means not to be able to breathe, and how the people and things at your fingertips are actually the oxygen you most need.
How to make a slave and other essays
Walker, Jerald, author.
305.896 /Walker
Personal essays exploring identity, family, and community through the prism of race and black culture. Confronts the medical profession's racial biases, shopping while black at Whole Foods, the legacy of Michael Jackson, raising black boys, haircuts that scare white people, racial profiling, and growing up in Southside Chicago.
The Sisters Sweet : a novel
Weiss, Elizabeth, 1984- author.
FICTION Weiss Elizabet
All Harriet Szász has ever known is life onstage with her twin sister, Josie. As "The Sisters Sweet," they pose as conjoined twins in a vaudeville act conceived of by their ambitious father and managed by their practical mother, who were once theatrical stars in their own rights. Then, in an explosive act, Josie exposes the fraud in a spectacular fashion and runs away to Hollywood. Full of long-simmering tensions, buried secrets, questionable saviors, and broken promises, this is ultimately a story about how we are beholden to others and what we owe ourselves, and heralds the arrival of an accomplished new voice in fiction.