A “hauntingly effective” surrealist travel memoir about the mysterious transformations that may lurk inside us all (Library Journal, starred review).

Venice, 2020. As a pandemic rages across the globe, Zito Madu finds himself in a nearly deserted city, its walls and basilicas humming with strange magic. As he wanders a haunted landscape, we see him twist further into his own past: his family’s difficult immigration from Nigeria to Detroit, his troubled relationship with his father, the sporadic joys of daily life and solitude, his experiences with migration, poverty, foreignness, racism, and his own rage and regret. But as it is with all labyrinths, after finding its center, will he come away unscathed, or will he transform into the gripping, fantastical monstrousness that’s out to consume him whole?

With nods to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, this surrealist debut memoir takes us into the labyrinth of memory and the monsters lurking there.

An antidote to bigotry and a “perfect primer for readers seeking factual, realistic portrayals of the rural and working-class experience” (Los Angeles Times).
 
In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America’s “forgotten tribe” of white working-class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America’s recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to for Appalachians—ultimately offering a much-needed insider’s perspective on the region.
 
“The most damning critique of Hillbilly Elegy.” —New York Review of Books
 
“Succeeds in providing a richer, more complex view.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“A necessary response to the bigotry against a much-maligned culture.” —Chris Offutt, award-winning author of Code of the Hills

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 twenty-two 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.
 
“Original and insightful. A vivid exploration of the beauty and brokenness of life’s community. Stansberry’s writing reveals the many surprising ecological, psychological, and cultural connections among human and beyond-human lives.” —David George Haskell, Pulitzer finalist for The Forest Unseen
 
“A surprising, delightful book, filled with original insights about the rich diversity of nature in the Midwest. Highly recommended!” —Kenn Kaufman, author of Kingbird Highway
 
“The essays in Rust Belt Arcana are like meditations from a parallel world —a magical place of nature which persists against all odds alongside the cities and subdivisions and highway interchanges of the Great Lakes region.” —David Beach, GreenCityBlueLake Institute, Cleveland Museum of Natural History

A bestselling memoir of a vibrant childhood spent in a thriving St. Louis African American community before “urban renewal” changed everything.

Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek Valley, a segregated working-class neighborhood in St. Louis that was razed in 1959 to build a highway, an act of racism disguised under urban renewal as “progress.” A moving memoir of family life at a time very different from the present, The Last Children of Mill Creek chronicles the everyday lived experiences of Gibson’s large family―her seven siblings, her crafty, college-educated mother, and her hard-working father―and the friends, shop owners, church ladies, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit African American community. In Gibson’s words, “This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girl―a collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.”

Winner of a Missouri Humanities award for literary achievement, The Last Children of Mill Creek is an important book for anyone interested in urban development, race, and community history―or for anyone who was once a child.

Praise for The Last Children of Mill Creek

2022 Missouri Author of the Year Winner

Missouri's “Great Reads from Great Places” Selection for the 2023 National Book Festival

 

“This is a story borne aloft by the sheer human joy of storytelling, of memory, of tender love for a mother and a father and for a vanished time and place. It is a book that, while steadfastly refusing the American fiction of color blindness, just as steadfastly refuses to portray Black life through the single warped lens of white-induced pain.” —TheLos Angeles Review of Books

“Contributors from all corners of the city share space, each individual neighborhood weaving together into an evocative tapestry.” —Curbed Chicago
 
The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook offers an intimate, idiosyncratic look at the third-largest city in the country, exploring community history and identity in a global city through essays, poems, photo essays, and art articulating the lived experience of its residents.
 
What did one pizzeria mean to a boy growing up in Ashburn? How can South Shore encompass so much beauty and so much pain? Where’s the best borscht in Ukrainian Village? Who’s got a handle on the ever-shifting identity of Rogers Park? All this and more is explored in this lyrical, subjective, completely non-comprehensive guide to Chicago.
 
With contributions from more than forty writers, including Megan Stielstra, Audrey Petty, Dmitry Samarov, Lily Be, and many others, covering forty-three of Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods, it is a snapshot of a city at an inflection point, representing grassroots history at its finest—and a must for anyone keen to understand what makes Chicago tick.
 
“Required reading.” —Chicago Tribune
 
“Stirring, entertaining and informative . . . [Brings] to vivid life the diverse people and wildly divergent experiences that populate Chicago.” —Chicago Detours