In A Marriage in Startled Air, Patricia Foster shares the dramatic story of how the diagnosis of her husband’s rare cancer changed the dynamics of their marriage and opened the door to the hidden world of his childhood, revealing the seeds of trauma and childhood PTSD. In vivid, often poetic prose, Foster reflects on how the

Told from the alternating perspectives of five friends who grew up together on the same council estate, I See Buildings Fall like Lightning asks what happens when all the expectations we have of our lives are dashed. Only Rian has made it out of the estate and moved away to another city, but his money

Gerry Sass is not who he appears to be. On the surface, he is the proud owner of a local country music station outside of Mystic, Iowa. Beneath it, he’s a mob-connected hitman-for-hire who launders money through the station WIOA. One morning in 1986, his life of crime catches up to him when two men

Gabriel Fisher was born an orphan, weighing eighteen pounds and measuring twenty-seven inches long. No one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of him. He walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and seems to possess extraordinary athletic talent. But when the older brother who has been caring for him dies, Gabriel is taken

At the age of eight, Brian Lackey is found bleeding under the crawl space of his house, having endured something so traumatic that he has blacked out an entire five-hour period. During the following years he slowly recalls details from that night, fragments that hint at yet cannot explain what happened to him, leaving him

In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Tisa Bryant’s Residual retrieves and catalogs what remains of her home, her psyche, and her creative practice. She filters through the remnants of her mother’s everyday life, asking what becomes an archive—a bookshelf, a dresser, a relationship, a secret? Drawing on personal memories as well as archives of renowned

Carousel opens as a professor begins delivering a lecture to a hot room. Her students have the internet in their pockets, screens on their wrists, seeing in more directions than students ever could before. But what, in fact, are they looking at? In the spirit of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Sarah Minor’s Carousel explores how the pursuit of

Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards

If you were a moviegoer in the early aughts, you had a front-row seat to a golden age of comedy. Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, Steve Carell, and Vince Vaughn became unlikely leading men—a band of rowdy wedding crashers, hungover bachelors, and 40-year-old virgins dubbed the “Frat Pack” that took Hollywood by

Witness the Darker Side of the Hawkeye State The farmlands and rural areas of Iowa are no stranger to the weird, dark and mysterious. Learn about a terrestrial sighting from 1903, a creepy cryptid that terrorized the town of Van Meter. Find out about Bigfoot sightings in Calhoun County. Peer under the waters of Lake

As graduates of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program gather to celebrate the program’s 50th anniversary, we will hear from three about their most recent work and their time writing in Iowa City: Helen Betya Rubenstein (Feels Like Trouble), Stephanie Krzywonos (The Blue Hours), and Angela Pelster (The Evolution of Fire) 

Trailblazing filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun will join Refocus Film Festival for a reading and conversation to discuss their latest creative project, Public Access Afterworld, their first novel. Schoenbrun will visit Iowa City as the first stop on a promotional book tour. Spanning decades and realities, with an unforgettable ensemble of outcasts and nerds—especially the messy but