NEW YORK TIMES and MIBA BESTSELLER From the St. Louis–based journalist often credited with first predicting Donald Trump’s presidential victory. "A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland...Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize." — Kirkus In 2015, Sarah Kendzior collected the essays she reported for Al Jazeera and published them as The View from Flyover Country, which became an ebook bestseller and garnered praise from readers around the world. Now, The View from Flyover Country is being released in print with an updated introduction and epilogue that reflect on the ways that the Trump presidency was the certain result of the realities first captured in Kendzior’s essays. A clear-eyed account of the realities of life in America’s overlooked heartland, The View from Flyover Country is a piercing critique of the labor exploitation, race relations, gentrification, media bias, and other aspects of the post-employment economy that gave rise to a president who rules like an autocrat. The View from Flyover Country is necessary reading for anyone who believes that the only way for America to fix its problems is to first discuss them with honesty and compassion. “Please put everything aside and try to get ahold of Sarah Kendzior’s collected essays, The View from Flyover Country. I have rarely come across writing that is as urgent and beautifully expressed. What makes Kendzior’s writing so truly important is [that] it . . . documents where the problem lies, by somebody who lives there.”—The Wire “Sarah Kendzior is as harsh and tenacious a critic of the Trump administration as you’ll find. She isn’t some new kid on the political block or a controversy machine. . . .Rather she is a widely published journalist and anthropologist who has spent much of her life studying authoritarianism.” —Columbia Tribune

"Blaze TV and ... radio host Dana Loesch [posits] that the biggest political problem today is that the people who run this country have no idea what life is really like for ordinary Americans. In fact, they have contempt for the very people they claim to represent ... [and there's a] growing disconnect between the government and media elites and the rest of us, the old-fashioned, hard-working, God-fearing Americans who are proud to live in middle America"--Amazon.com.

“[A] vivid . . . quest for roots. . . . Splendid.” —The New York Times Book Review Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of venturing off to see the world—and did. Now having traveled widely and lived part-time in Paris for many years, she is stung when a French friend teases her about Americans’ indifference to history. Could it be true? The j’accuse haunts Diane and inspires her to dig into her family’s past, working back from the Friday night football of her youth to the adventures illuminated in the letters and memoirs of her stalwart pioneer ancestors—beginning with a lonely young soldier who came to America from France in 1711. As enchanting as her bestselling novels, Flyover Lives is a moving examination of identity and the “wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us. As Johnson pays tribute to her deep Midwestern roots, she captures the perpetual tug-of-war between the magnetic pull of home and our lust for escape and self-invention.

Christ is present and at work in rural communities. How do we lead from that reality? The temptation to operate from a scarcity mindset is stronger than ever. The tensions unleashed over the past few years—which led to skepticism, breakdowns of trust, declining church attendance, and uncertainty around community ministry—continue to linger in and among our rural churches. Yet God’s loving, redemptive work is happening in all places, no matter how small or far-flung. In Flyover Church, Brad Roth, the author of God’s Country, describes how rural ministry shares soul-deep commonalities with the church in every place. And he speaks a hopeful message into the distinct challenges—and promises—faced by rural communities. Tracing Jesus’ ministry and bountiful work among the small-town people and places in the gospel of Mark, this book offers a vision for ministry tailored to rural settings. Pastors and leaders everywhere will be encouraged to approach ministry from the reality of God’s abundance.

Leading journalists between the coasts offer perspectives on immigration, drug addiction, climate change, and more that you won’t find in national mainstream media. After the 2016 presidential election, the national media fretted over what they could have missed in the middle of the country, launching a thousand think pieces about so-called “Trump Country.” Yet in 2020, the polling was way off—again. Journalists between the coasts could only shake their heads at the persistence of the false narratives around the communities where they lived and worked. Contributor Ted Genoways foresaw how close the election in 2016 would be and, in its aftermath, put out a public call on Facebook, calling on writers from those midland states to help answer the national media’s puzzlement. Representing a true cross-section of America, both geographically and ethnically, these writers highlight the diversity of the American experience in essays and articles that tell the hidden local truths behind the national headlines. For instance: -Esther Honig describes the effects of the immigration crackdown in Colorado -C.J. Janovy writes about the challenges of being an LGBTQ+ activist in Kansas -Karen Coates and Valeria Fernández show us the children harvesting our food -And Sydney Boles chronicles a miner’s protest in Kentucky. For readers willing to look at the American experience that the pundits don’t know about or cover, Midland is an invaluable peek into the hearts and minds of largely unheard Americans.

Flyover Country focuses on a group of baby boomers who graduated from high school in 1969 in the Midwest before setting off into the world in a time of turbulence to fight in Vietnam, to protest against that war, to find jobs, to have families, and to live lives throughout the United States and overseas. Many of these people have made significant contributions to their communities as business owners, doctors, lawyers, ministers, politicians, and teachers. Many have suffered through tough times, losing their way due to alcohol or drugs or facing family crises from divorce to the death of a spouse or a child. The story also is Harper's story. It is the story of a kid from flyover country who used what he learned in the Midwest to travel throughout the world as a journalist and then as a college professor to try to teach those lessons to his students.

A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as “memorable” (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and “impressive” (Chicago Tribune) Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop. In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled “The Light at the End,” suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Building on Smith’s reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world.

After being sold by her father to an eccentric Indian to settle a gambling debt, Harriet escapes her Pawnee captor and begins a trek to find her father, meeting a variety of strange characters and encoutering odd situations along the way.