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The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook
9780998904139
Regular price $20.00 Sale price $15.00 Save 25%Part of Belt's Neighborhood Guidebook Series, The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook is an exploration of the Motor City's hidden corners told by the people who live and work there.
It seems like everybody in Detroit thinks they know the city's neighborhoods, but because there are so many, their characteristics often become muddled and the stories that define them are often lost. Edited by Aaron Foley, the author of How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook is a genuinely felt, wide-ranging collection that gives unique perspective on a city that many people think they have figured out. A homegrown portrait about the lesser-known parts of the city, it showcases the voices and people who make up:
- Cass Corridor
- West Village
- Minock Park
- Warrendale
- Hamtramck
- and almost every other spot in the city.
With short essays and poems by Zoe Villegas, Drew Philip, Hakeem Weatherspoon, Marsha Music, Ian Thibodeau, and dozens of others.
In this guidebook, Detroiters will recognize their hometown and the stories it tells, while readers from outside Detroit will get an insiders' look at an oft-misunderstood American city.
Rust Belt Chicago
9780997774375
Regular price $20.00 Sale price $15.00 Save 25%A part of Belt's City Anthology Series. "A lively grab bag of essays, fiction and poetry that reads at times like a who's who of contemporary Chicago writers/residents."--The Chicago Tribune
Chicago is a city built on meat, railroads, and steel, on opportunity and exploitation. But its identity has long involved so much more than manufacturing. Today, the city continues to lure new residents from around the world, and from across a region rocked by recession and deindustrialization.
The problems that plague the region don't disappear once you pass the Indiana border, though. In fact, they're often amplified. And Chicago is a complicated city because of that, defined by movement that's the anchor of the Midwest, but bound to its neighbors by a shared ecosystem and economy.
Rust Belt Chicago collects essays, fiction, and poetry from more than fifty writers who speak directly to the concerns the city shares with the region at large, and the elements that set it apart. With contributions from writers like Aleksandar Hemon, Kathleen Rooney, and Zoe Zolbrod, and here you'll find stories about:
- Buying Bread on Devon Street
- The Cantinas of Pilsen
- Bike commutes through the North Side
- Adventures on the El.
Writing with affection, frustration, anger, and joy, the writers in this collection capture all the harmony and dissonance that define one cacophonous place.
A wide-ranging insider's look at one of the world's most iconic cities.
How to Be Normal: Essays
9781953368294
Regular price $17.95 Sale price $13.46 Save 25%Grand Rapids Grassroots
9780998018829
Regular price $20.00 Sale price $15.00 Save 25%Part of Belt's City Anthology Series.
While Grand Rapids, Michigan is known for large-scale events like ArtPrize; major businesses like Meijer, Steelcase, and Amway; and the philanthropic and political contributions of its wealthiest residents, there are hundreds--if not thousands--of grassroots activists working day-in and day-out to make Grand Rapids what it is. This collection seeks to raise the voices of those individuals and grassroots groups. The editors have joined forces to compile articles, poetry, and personal narratives about and by the grassroots activists of Grand Rapids. Edited by Ashley E. Nickels and Dani Vilella, in this collection, readers will find first-hand stories about:
- The lasting effects of discrimination in the city's Southeast community
- Disability advocacy and food justice
- Traversing the city on moped
- The furniture workers strike of 1911.
A complex portrait of an American city in transition and the tireless work of activists to make it a wonderful, just place to live.
Pure America
9781953368195
Regular price $17.95 Sale price $13.46 Save 25%Longlisted for the 2022 PEN America John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, a "riveting and tightly argued" history of eugenics and its ripple effects, by acclaimed historian Elizabeth Catte.
Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte’s Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia’s eugenics program was not the misguided initiative of well-meaning men of the day, writes Catte, it was a manifestation of white supremacy. It was a form of employment insurance. It was a means of controlling “troublesome” women and a philosophy that helped remove poor people from valuable land. It was cruel and it was wrong. As was amply evidenced by her acclaimed 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Catte has no room for excuses; no patience for equivocation. What does it mean for modern America, she asks here, that such buildings are given the second chance that 8,000 citizens never got?
“Grounded, well-rendered, and highly disturbing,” Pure America is another necessary corrective to the historical record, a must-read for anyone concerned with how to repair its damage.
Rust Belt Arcana
9781948742122
Regular price $16.95 Sale price $12.71 Save 25%An insightful take on the Tarot through the lens of the industrial Midwest, and a beautiful piece of nature writing in its own right.
What can the Tarot tell us about the flora and fauna of the industrial Midwest? In what ways might this ancient practice connect us to the Rust Belt today? Rust Belt Arcana uses the Tarot's time-tested structure to answer these questions, juxtaposing the characteristics of the cards with the creatures and plants that surround us every day. The 22 idiosyncratic essays here--one for every card in the Major Arcana--bridge biology, natural history, and the human condition. They tell stories of abundance and loss, and they remind us of the Rust Belt's persistent remnant wilderness, a landscape often dismissed as unremarkable.
A magical book both for Tarot enthusiasts and for those who are seeking to see beauty in a beleaguered landscape and define their remarkable place within it.