In these essays, the flatness of the Midwest becomes the author's canvas for a richly textured, multidimensional exploration of its culture and history. From depicting the details of mechanized cow-milking to relating the similarities between the Greek city of Sparta and Indianapolis, Martone subtly connects different cultures, times, and stories.

There are few truths about the modern world that are more self-evident than this: it is flat. We write on flat paper laid atop flat desks. We look at flat images on flat screens mounted on flat walls, or we press flat icons on flat phones while we navigate flat streets. Everywhere we go it seems the structures around us at one time or another had a level placed upon them to ensure they were perfectly flat. Yet such engineered planar surfaces have become so pervasive and fundamental to our lives that we barely notice their existence. In this highly original study, B. W. Higman employs a wide variety of approaches to better understand flatness, that level platform upon which the dramas of modern life have played out. Higman looks at the ways that humans have perceived the natural world around them, moving from Flat Earth theories to abstract geometric concepts to the flatness problem of modern cosmology. Along the way he shows that we have simultaneously sought flatness in our everyday lives and also disparaged it as a featureless, empty, and monotonous quality. He discusses the ways flatness figures as a metaphor for those things or people who are boring, dull, or lacking energy or inspiration, and he shows how the construction of flat surfaces has contributed to a degradation of visual diversity. At the same time, he also shows how we have pursued flatness as an engineering ideal and how we have used it conceptually in art, music, and literature. Written with wit and wisdom, and splendidly illustrated throughout, this book will appeal to all those who are interested in the topography of the modern world, to anyone who has ever marveled at the feel of its smooth surfaces or felt oppressed by the tyranny of its featurelessness.

Writing about a wide variety of subjects and in a multitude of styles, the twenty writers collected here share a mastery of language and an extraordinary ability to entertain. Ellen Akins from World Like a Knife, Her BookSteve Barthelme from And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, ZorroGlenn Blake from Drowned Moon, MarshJennifer Finney Boylan from Remind Me to Murder You Later, Thirty-six Miracles of Lyndon JohnsonRichard Burgin from Fear of Blue Skies, BodysurfingAvery Chenoweth from Wingtips, PowermanGuy Davenport from Da Vinci's Bicycle, A Field of Snow on a Slope of the RosenbergTristan Davies from Cake, CounterfactualsStephen Dixon from Time to Go, Time to GoJudith Grossman from How Aliens Think, RoveraJosephine Jacobsen from What Goes without Saying, On the IslandGreg Johnson from I Am Dangerous, Hemingway's CatsJerry Klinkowitz from Basepaths, BasepathsMichael Martone from Safety Patrol, Safety PatrolJack Matthews from Crazy Women, Haunted by Name Our Ignorant LipsJean McGarry from Dream Date, The Last TimeRobert Nichols from In the Air, Six Ways of Looking at FarmingJoe Ashby Porter from Lithuania, West BaltimoreFrances Sherwood from Everything You've Heard Is True, HistoryRobley Wilson from The Book of Lost Fathers, Hard Times

A unique collection of contemporary writings, this book explores the politics involved in the making and experiencing of architecture and cities from a cross-cultural and global perspective Taking a broad view of the word ‘politics’, the essays address a range of questions, including: What is the relationship between politics and the making of space? What role has theory played in reinforcing or resisting political power? What are the political difficulties associated with working relationships? Do the products of our making construct our identity or liberate us? A timely volume, focusing on an interdisciplinary debate on the politics of making, this is valuable reading for all students, professionals and academics interested or working in architectural theory.

Building on insights from the fields of textual criticism, bibliography, narratology, authorship studies, and book history, The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century examines the role that prefaces played in the development of professional authorship in America. Many of the prefaces written by American writers in the twentieth century catalogue the shifting landscape of a more self-consciously professionalized trade, one fraught with tension and compromise, and influenced by evolving reading publics. With analyses of Willa Cather, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Toni Morrison, Ross K. Tangedal argues that writers used prefaces as a means of expanding and complicating authority over their work and, ultimately, as a way to write about their careers. Tangedal’s approach offers a new way of examining American writers in the evolving literary marketplace of the twentieth century.

Engaging memoir about growing up in rural Southern California and identifying as a "Californian" for life.

Collected early fiction of one of Indianas premier writers

Every existence has its pulse points," writes Ted Leeson in this latest book, "those places where life rises somehow closer to the surface and makes itself more keenly felt. Spring creeks have been mine." Jerusalem Creek is an exploration into the unique landscape of the "driftless area" in southwest Wisconsin, "a geography of small concealments"-of coves and hollows, oak groves and shady bends, winding brooks and trout. "It is not a landscape that you hike up, or climb down into, or stand out looking upon; it is one that you slip inside of," and this book presents the view from within. Leeson reflects on waters and people, and the experiences and ideas that shaped his understanding of spring creek country. By turns thoughtful and hilarious, passionate and wry, he journeys into the special charms of small-scale waters and pastoral spaces; the nature of meandering trout streams and fishermen; ruminations on dairy cows, honeybees, and the midwestern character; family and angling companions; Amish farmsteads; the memory of a missing photograph; the equivocal dream of owning a trout stream; the ways in which the past endures in the present. Layered and overlapping, like the limestone geology of driftless country, the meditations in this book cumulatively tell the story of how we create the places we love, and how they in turn create us. Jerusalem Creek is a wise, poignant, and haunting book about those places that remain with us long after we've left them.

This indispensable anthology brings together works from fifty contemporary writers including Cheryl Strayed, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, and more. Selected by five hundred writers, English professors, and creative writing teachers from across the country, this collection includes only the most highly regarded nonfiction work published since 1970—from memoir to journalism, personal essays to cultural criticism. Contributors include: Jo Ann Beard, Wendell Berry, Eula Biss, Mary Clearman Blew, Charles Bowden, Janet Burroway, Kelly Grey Carlisle, Anne Carson, Bernard Cooper, Michael W. Cox, Annie Dillard, Mark Doty, Brian Doyle, Tony Earley, Anthony Farrington, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Diane Glancy, Lucy Grealy, William Harrison, Robin Hemley, Adam Hochschild, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Kingsolver, Ted Kooser, Sara Levine, E. J. Levy, Phillip Lopate, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lynch, Lee Martin, Rebecca McClanahan, Erin McGraw, John McPhee, Brenda Miller, Dinty W. Moore, Kathleen Norris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lia Purpura, Richard Rhodes, Bill Roorbach, David Sedaris, Richard Selzer, Sue William Silverman, Floyd Skloot, Lauren Slater, Cheryl Strayed, Amy Tan, Ryan Van Meter, David Foster Wallace, and Joy Williams.