Belt Publishing

“A brief, cogent analysis of gentrification in Chicago . . . an incisive and useful narrative on the puzzle of urban development.”—Kirkus Reviews

There was a time when Chicago’s affluent Lincoln Park was the forefront of a battle for a new kind of urban life. In the years after World War II, a movement began to reverse the middle-class flight to the suburbs. In place of the old, poorly maintained apartments and dense streetscapes of taverns and butchers in the North Side neighborhood, rehabbers imagined a new kind of community—a renovated, modern one that held on to the convenience, diversity, and character of a historic urban quarter but also enjoyed the prosperity and privileges of a new subdivision.

But as the old buildings came down, cheap studios were combined to create ever more spacious, luxurious homes. Property values swiftly rose, and the people who were being evicted to make room for progress began to assert their own ideas about the future of Lincoln Park, with the help of the Young Lords Organization. Over the course of the 1960s, divisions within the community deepened. Letters and picket lines gave way to increasingly violent strikes and counterstrikes as each camp tried to settle the same existential questions that beguile so many cities today: Who is a neighborhood for? And who gets to decide?

This revised edition features striking archival photos, new maps, and a foreword by devin michelle bunten explaining the lasting impact and relevance of the book to Chicagoans, planners, urbanists, and all who are curious about the way cities change.

Financial ambition, a tortured marriage, and an American city on the rise are brilliantly depicted in Frank Norris’ 1903 masterpiece. Curtis Jadwin is obsessed with speculating on the market, manipulating it so he can control the nation’s wheat supply. He neglects his wife, Laura, who seeks refuge in the arts, and in particular one artist, Sheldon Corthell. The Jadwin’s wealth buys them a mansion on Lincoln Park with an art gallery that strangers gawk at, but inside they struggle. And is Jadwin’s gambling sustainable, or is there a bear market in his future?

Curtis and Laura play out this American Dream scenario in the streets of Chicago, where they attend the opera at the Auditorium Building, visit the new art museum on the lake, and, from the comfort of their carriage, watch the trains and grain elevators. At the Board of Trade, in the pit, men yell and knock against each other, performing the theater of capitalism in front of an always crowded visitor’s gallery.

Few novels depict the struggles of marriage, the world of finance, or the rise of Chicago from the flatlands of the Midwest, as viscerally as this novel, originally published in 1903. Norris’s novel may immerse readers in a historic setting, but it’s punishing and profound themes are anything but dated.

This Belt Revivals edition features archival photographs and an introduction by Whet Moser.

A collection of stories, originally published in 1928, from the author of The Grandmothers and The Pilgrim Hawk.

A couple set fire to an old farmhouse to collect insurance money. A groom contemplates an old sexual escapade while he waits for his bride at the altar. A young farm boy returns to tell his brother about his capers while stationed in France in the Navy. The eleven stories in this collection, including an introductory essay by Wescott on returning to his parents’ West Allis home outside Milwaukee, deal with themes of exile—often self-imposed—and return.

This Belt Revivals edition features a new introduction by Patrick Nathan. 

A complicated friendship blooms during a fated meeting in northern Michigan between two nineteenth-century women writers.

In the mid-1830s, the author Anna Brownell Jameson was called from Britain to Canada to see her husband. Before she returned back home, she embarked on a trip around the Great Lakes to gather material for a book on the “plight of the Indian woman.”

In a remarkable interaction on Mackinac Island, where the current-day lower peninsula of Michigan meets the upper peninsula, she met Jane Johnston Schoolcraft—an Ojibwe American poet and translator married to the geologist Henry Schoolcraft, who was working as an Indian agent for the United States government. The two women talked extensively, bonding over their interests and plights, and sharing private demons.

After their meeting, Anna continued to gain recognition for her writing and become a larger part of the literary scene in Britain and the Continent, entangling herself in the affairs of the likes of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Ottilie von Goethe, Lady Byron, and Ada Lovelace. Jane became sicker and less able to work.

In Andrew Wittkop’s sensitive, subtle retelling, complete with Anna's sketches and other historical images, the nuances of the relationship between the two women reveal much about the complicated nature of connection and disconnection and Anna’s blindnesses and missed opportunities. This inventive debut opens a window on two under-remembered writers. 

A part of Belt's City Anthology Series, A deft, well-considered collection of essays, illustrations and photographs that represents...'the visions of those who have fallen madly in love with the city of Cincinnati, either for the first time or all over again.'--Cincinnati CityBeat

The Cincinnati Anthology brings together some of the Queen City's most notable residents, native sons and daughters, and creatives to tell tales of a city's triumphs and tribulations.

Edited by Zan McQuade, this collection reflects Cincinnati's true complexity: its present and its past, its transitions and its legacies; what defines it and distinguishes it; what makes us love it and what makes some eventually leave it. It is an anthology on genealogy and geology, race and progress, and experiences from the suburbs to Over-the-Rhine. Included are contributions from Curtis Sittenfeld, John Curley, Cedric Michael Cox, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Jack Heffron, Polk Laffoon IV, Katie Laur, Sam LeCure, Over the Rhine, Michael Wilson, and many more. Here you'll find:

- Portraits of Price Hill Residents

- The dog parks of Over-the-Rhine

- 5 Things a Relief Pitcher for the Reds loves about the city

- A legacy of segregation that still resonates today

- The Freestore Foodbank

- An ode to Pete Rose.

An insider's guide to the story of Cincinnati and the myriad lives that are lived there.