Name: The Great Black Swamp
Brand: Patrick Wensink
SKU: 9781540270108
Price: 19.99 USD
Availability: InStock

Zito Madu

The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

9781953368669

$19.95

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.

Cover image for The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, isbn: 9781953368669

Matt Stansberry

Rust Belt Arcana

9781948742122

$19.95

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

Cover image for Rust Belt Arcana, isbn: 9781948742122

Elizabeth Catte

What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia

9780998904146

$18.95

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

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Vivian Gibson

The Last Children of Mill Creek

9781948742641

$18.95

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

Cover image for The Last Children of Mill Creek, isbn: 9781948742641

Martha Bayne

The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook

9781948742498

$24.00

“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

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Patrick Wensink

The Great Black Swamp

9781540270108

$19.99

In the summer of 2014, a strange thing happened to one of the largest freshwater bodies on the planet: Lake Erie’s western shore turned bright green with toxic algae that could have killed 400,000 Ohioans. Stranger still, it was kind of Patrick Wensink’s fault. Okay, partially his fault, but also to blame was industrial corn farming, greenhouse gasses, the Worst Road In America, his attraction to toxic relationships, Richard Nixon, Charles Dickens, cyanobacteria, high school bullies, and, most importantly, the untold history of the Great Black Swamp: a large swatch of what is now Ohio and Indiana that was once a dangerous, malaria-ridden wetland.

Toxic green algae has become a global problem. While the scientific community scrambles to find a solution, Wensink discovers that the answer might be hiding in his former home, a million acres of table-flat farmland so desolate that even other Ohioans look down upon it.

Great Black Swamp: Toxic Algae, Toxic Relationships, and the Most Interesting Place in America that Nobody’s Ever Heard Of mixes ecological reporting, Midwestern history, and memoir. As Wensink travels through Northwest Ohio, he tells us about his childhood there, his failing marriage, American history, Lake Erie, and the hopeful ecological interventions scientists are performing in the former Great Black Swamp.

Cover image for The Great Black Swamp, isbn: 9781540270108

Anne Trubek

Best of the Rust Belt

9781953368706

$19.99

The best personal essays from a contested region, from Belt Publishing’s ten years as a press.

Many have an opinion on what the Rust Belt is. It’s the "blue wall," "Trump country," the "flyover states," or the “real America.” Or maybe, as our own president has said, it's a place that no longer exists called by a name that has long outlived its usefulness. But undeniably, there’s something that connects the region. Maybe the question isn’t what defines that connection, but who.

Over the past ten years, Belt Publishing has been putting out books that prioritize the voices of the many people who live here. We’ve collected our favorite writing from our dozens of anthologies, from Pittsburgh to Gary, Chicago to St. Louis, Milwaukee to Cleveland, and more, documenting growing up in segregated St. Louis and elucidating the coded Islamophobia of southern Michigan. Featuring LaToya Ruby Frazier, Connie Schultz, Brian Broome, Megan Stielstra, Vivian Gibson, Aaron Foley, Kathleen Rooney, Sarah Kendzior, Phil Christman, and more.

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Edward McClelland

How to Speak Midwestern

9780997774276

$18.95

“A long-overdue study of the middle-American vernacular, and how that vernacular informs our identity . . . A regionally specific Urban Dictionary.” —Inside Hook

The Pittsburgh toilet. Squeaky cheese. City chicken. Shampoo Banana. Chevy in the Hole. These are all phrases that are familiar to Midwesterners, but foreign to anyone living outside the region. Find out what they mean in How to Speak Midwestern. Edward McClelland will not only explain what Midwesterners say, but how and why they say it. He examines the causes of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, one of the most significant changes in English pronunciation in a thousand years; explains why the accents in Fargo miss the nasality that’s a hallmark of Minnesota speech; and reveals why Chicagoans talk more like people from Buffalo than their next-door neighbors in Wisconsin. For outsiders, McClelland will include helpful information such as “How to Talk Through Your Nose,” “How to Mispronounce Foreign Place Names,” and “‘Well, That’s Different’: How to Passive-Aggressively Criticize People, Places and Things.”

If you’re from the Midwest, you’ll have a better understanding of why you talk the way you do. If you’re not, well, you’ll know exactly what to say the next time someone ends a sentence with “eh?”

“How to Speak Midwestern is a fascinating read, whether you hail from WOWOland, the UP, Cereal City, or Baja Minnesota.” —Chicagoist

“A dictionary wrapped in some serious dialectology inside a gift book trailing a serious whiff of Relevance.” —The New York Times

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Raechel Anne Jolie

Rust Belt Femme

9781948742634

$26.00

An NPR Best Book: “[Jolie's] story is both remarkable and utterly ordinary; any dreamy kid who grew up broke and weird will see a spark of themselves.” ―The New Republic

One of NPR’s Best Books of 2020
Winner, Independent Publisher Awards Gold Medal for LGBTQ+ nonfiction

Raechel Anne Jolie’s early life in a working-class Cleveland exurb was full of race cars, Budweiser-drinking men covered in car grease, and the women who loved them. After her father came home from his third-shift job, took the garbage out to the curb and was hit by a drunk driver, her life changed.

Raechel and her mother struggled for money: they were evicted, went days without utilities, and took their trauma out on one another. Raechel escaped to the progressive suburbs of Cleveland Heights, leaving the tractors and ranch-style homes in favor of a city with vintage marquees, music clubs, and people who talked about big ideas. It was the early ’90s, full of Nirvana songs and chokers, flannel shirts and cut-off jean shorts, lesbian witches and local coffee shops. Rust Belt Femme is the story of how these twin foundations―rural Ohio poverty and alternative ’90s culture―made Raechel into who she is today: a queer femme with PTSD and a deep love of the Midwest.

“A sharp coming-of-age portrait.” ―Kirkus Reviews

“This miraculous little book manages to plumb the depths of poverty, trauma, punk rock, maternal devotion, young love, and queer identity in language that is lyric and precise. I was blown away. You will be too.” —Steve Almond, New York Times–bestselling author of Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow

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Meredith Pangrace

Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen

9781953368119

$24.00

The author of Midwest Pie “looks to move the needle on diverse, plant-based, distinctively Midwestern cooking” (Michigan Stateside).

The Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen is a community cookbook created by professional and home chefs who live and work in the Rust Belt. Recipes collected here represent the diversity of the region, and include vegan versions of:

Polish pierogis
Detroit coney dogs
Hungarian paprikash
Slovak kolaches
Mexican conchas
German sauerkraut balls
Cincinnati chili
Slovenian fish fry
Chitterings, and many more.

The cooks and chefs collected here offer stories about their recipes as well as family and culinary traditions. The book also includes resources on how to stock a vegan pantry, guides to useful equipment, and basic how-tos for “veganizing” staples.

Infusing old world recipes with a new level of creativity for a changing audience, The Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen is unpretentious, accessible, and fun.

“Some readers will want this book for the recipes, some for the ‘unpretentious shortcuts’ that Pangrace promises, and some for the sheer crunchy wonder of the title concept.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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William Dean Howells

Stories of Ohio

9781948742214

$14.95

This unsung classic of American literature helps shed light on both Ohio and the career of a writer known as the “Dean of American Letters.”

With a new introduction by Anne Trubek

A novelist, critic, and playwright, William Dean Howells was friends with such luminaries as Mark Twain, Henry James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Though he’s best known for his East Coast novels like The Rise of Silas Lampham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells never forgot his roots in Ohio. And in Stories of Ohio, he offers a series of short vignettes that chronicle the state’s history, including:

the Native burial grounds of the Serpent Mound
the first European settlers on the frontier
Ohio’s role in the War of 1812
the Civil War generals and presidents the state birthed in the late nineteenth century.

Though this history primarily focuses on life in Ohio before the nineteenth century, it will help today’s reader see the state in a brand-new light.

“If these Stories distill into two hundred pages what Ohio was, they also suggest what Ohio could have been if compassion and a desire for intercultural exchange had superseded conquest as a motivating force on the frontier.” —James Bruggeman at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal

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Sara Catterall

Amelia Bloomer

9781953368898

$26.00

A fascinating look at an underappreciated woman in American history whose newspaper fostered a national conversation on women’s issues.

Those who recognize the name Amelia Bloomer usually do so because of bloomers, the clothing item named after her. While she was a rational dress advocate for a time—calling on women to abandon rigid corsets and heavy petticoats and opt for long trousers, shorter skirts, and sensible boots—it was “but an incident” in the larger story of her life and impact.

Bloomer edited and published The Lily, the first newspaper for and by women. Founded to promote temperance, it soon broadened to include some of the most important issues to women in that day, including the right to vote, and included contributions from thinkers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The groundbreaking paper brought the conversation from Seneca Falls right to the doorsteps of women across the expanding nation.

Guided by a rigid sense of morality and a Puritan work ethic, Bloomer remained open-minded to new ideas. She refused to be swayed by social norms and wrote cutting responses to those who tried to intimidate or shame her and her friends, a group that included Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. This deeply researched biography by Sara Catterall follows the many chapters of her life: her humble upbringing in upstate New York, her role in the temperance movement (and its true legacy as a wellspring of the women’s rights movement), her years at The Lily, her groundbreaking position as deputy postmaster in Seneca falls, her troubled health, and her eventual move to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where she continued to move the needle on women’s suffrage in the more flexible new governments of the West.

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Darius Stewart

Be Not Afraid of My Body

9781953368904

$19.99

A poet’s “dazzlingly propulsive” memoir of growing up Black and gay in Knoxville, Tennessee (Kaveh Akbar, New York Times–bestselling author of Martyr!).

Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.

“A memorable portrait of Black gay life, from poverty and adversity to accomplishment and poetry.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A mammoth creation . . . Just unbelievably rich art right here.” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times–bestselling author of Heavy

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Mark Athitakis

The New Midwest

9780997774283

$16.95

“Dives deep into Midwestern literature, unpacking the mythology of the region and how today’s writers are complicating our simple idea of the Heartland.” —Huffington Post

In the public imagination, Midwestern literature has not evolved far beyond heartland laborers and hardscrabble immigrants of a century past. But as the region has changed, so, in many ways, has its fiction. In this book, the author explores how shifts in work, class, place, race, and culture has been reflected or ignored by novelists and short story writers. From Marilynne Robinson to Leon Forrest, Toni Morrison to Aleksandar Hemon, Bonnie Jo Campbell to Stewart O’Nan this book is a call to rethink the way we conceive Midwestern fiction, and one that is sure to prompt some new must-have additions to every reading list.

“Using the lens of novels and short stories published over the past 30 or so years, Athitakis seeks to illuminate the ways we still lean on literary mythology of the Midwest when it comes to defining the region.” —Chicago Tribune

“[The New Midwest] rightly praises the Midwestern novels of Marilynne Robinson, Jeffrey Eugenides, Toni Morrison and Jonathan Franzen, but also points out works of comparable merit that warrant rediscovery.” —The Washington Post

“The New Midwest is a crisp, engaging tip sheet and guide for further reading.” —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“A journey through the Midwest and through some key works by writers [Athitakis] thinks are most effectively using the region in their fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews

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Martha Bayne

Red State Blues

9781948742061

$20.00

This anthology shares the experiences and perspectives of Rust Belt progressives in the era of Trump.

Much was made of the 2016 electoral flip when traditionally Democratic states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio tipped the presidency to Donald Trump. Countless commentators explored this newfound constituency of blue voters who suddenly swung red. But what about those in the Midwest who remain true blue?

Red State Blues speaks to the lived experience of progressives, activists, and ordinary Democrats who are pushing back against simplistic narratives of the Midwest as “Trump Country”—a narrative that has erased the region’s rich history of grassroots, progressive politics. They keep that legacy alive, and as the essays in this collection demonstrate, they're not leaving anytime soon.

Red State Blues is a nuanced look at the true complexity of a region that has always refused to submit to stereotypes about it. Edited by Martha Bayne, it includes work from:

Sarah Kendzior, author of The View from Flyover Country
Kenyon College president Sean Decatur
Pittsburgh city councilman Dan Gilman
Phil Christman, author of Midwest Futures

And many more

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Ryan Schuessler

Sweeter Voices Still

9781948742818

$20.00

“A collection of prose and poetry that aims to challenge clichés about LGBTQ+ life in the Midwest and Appalachia.” —The Buckeye Flame

The middle of America―the Midwest, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the Great Plains, the Upper South―is a queer place, and it always has been. The queer people of its cities, farms, and suburbs do not exist only to serve as “blue dots” within “red states.” Every story about a kid from Iowa who steps off the bus in Manhattan, ready to “finally” live, is a story about a kid who was already living in Iowa. Sweeter Voices Still is about that kid and has been written by people like them. This collection features queer voices you might recognize―established and successful writers and thinkers―and others you might not―people who don’t think of themselves as writers at all. You’ll find sex, love, and heartbreak and all the beings we meet along the way: trees, deer, cicadas, sturgeon. Most of all, you’ll find real people. If you’re seeking fully realized stories about the nuanced, joyous complexity of queer identity in the Midwest, Sweeter Voices Still is the book for you.

“A marvelous ode to humanity and its passions [and] a reminder that LGBTQ individuals and communities (and those who exist outside the confines of the acronym) have always kept the Heartland beating.” ―Little Village Magazine

Includes a foreword by Northwestern University professor Doug Kiel

Cover image for Sweeter Voices Still, isbn: 9781948742818

Mark Meyer

The Whiskey Rebellion and the Rebirth of Rye

9780998904160

$19.95

“A mix of elevating spirits and fractious politics” this history of the whiskey industry in the rust belt “goes down nice and smooth.” —John Allison, Pittsburgh Quarterly

A short history of rye whiskey’s founding, floundering, and current flourishing in Pittsburgh. The book takes the reader on a fun tour of the Whiskey Rebellion, the role of Pittsburgh robber barons in developing the rye industry, and the rebirth of craft distillery in the twentieth century. Includes an illustrated guide to making rye whiskey and recipes.

Cover image for The Whiskey Rebellion and the Rebirth of Rye, isbn: 9780998904160

Jack Brennan

Football Sissy

9781540270047

$20.00

"Jack's sports reporting was always fair, honest, and straightforward. He tells his own story in the same exact way." —Cris Collinsworth, NBC Sunday Night Football

In Jack Brennan’s decades-long career as a sports journalist, he covered teams like the MLB’s Reds and the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals. As the public relations director for the Bengals, he wrangled sports stories, reporters, and players. At home, he played basketball with the neighborhood husbands and raised three kids with his wife, to whom he was devoted. At the same time, he had a passion that never left him: he liked dressing as a woman. Blonde silky hair, bright lips, and smooth legs escaping short skirts, topped off with heels as high as they go.

He kept his life as a crossdresser mostly private, so his public coming out via The Athletic in 2021—one of the first men in the NFL to come out as LGBTQ+—was a surprise to many. Football Sissy offers a no-holds-barred trip through his dual lives, from his earliest love affair with a puff-sleeve blouse at age three through to his first jaunts dressed in public to surprise visits to the hospital alongside a fulfilling family life and an exciting career.

Told with the characteristic humor and ease of Brennan’s sports columns, Football Sissy is a heartwarming tale of acceptance and love, even within the most masculine of environments.