PrairieLights: Emily Ogden – Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

Emily Ogden will read from her new book, Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe. Described as "A fascinating and intimate inquiry into Edgar Allan Poe’s shadowy life and horrifyingly compelling work" (penguinrandomhouse.com), Darkness Becomes Bright is praised by Meghan O’Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom, as "profoundly insightful," while Sarah Waters, author

Bonnie Jo Campbell: The Spirits

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

Bonnie Jo Campbell, a master of rural American fiction, brings us a hair-raising winter tale to warm us by the fireside. In this contemporary Christmas Carol, Campbell has created a gritty, spooky, and ultimately heartening holiday story that unfolds in an isolated farmhouse. It is the night before Christmas in a small town in Michigan, and

Pilar Quintana: La perra (The Bitch)

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

On a bluff overlooking Colombia’s rough Pacific coast, at the edge of the jungle—a world where nothing is taken for granted –Damaris lives in a shack with her fisherman husband. Her dream of a child unfulfilled and the warmth of her marriage cooled, she has reached the age “when women dry up,” as her uncle

Mark Leidner: Elegy for Pangaea

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

Mark Leidner’s third poetry collection, Elegy for Pangaea, is as funny, strange, and epic as his two previous collections, Returning the Sword to the Stone and Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me. His new poems explore faith, grief, money, myth, parenting, and poetry itself to create a collection as full of tantalizing ideas and dilemmas as “an

Patricia Foster: A Marriage in Startled Air

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

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

Ron Rindo: Life, and Death, and Giants

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

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

Harriet Clark: The Hill

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

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

Michael McCarty and Bruce Walters: Eerie Iowa

Prairie Lights Books 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA

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