New Book Releases

A debut essay collection of remarkable breadth and erudition by a young Pakistani American doctor and writer. Wry and smart.―The New York Times Book Review

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Selina Mahmood―in the middle of the first year of a neurology residency―found scraps of time between grueling shifts to write. The resulting collection is her personal and meticulous chronicle of an unprecedented year in medicine. It's also the debut of a young and uncommon talent.

In the tradition of Oliver Sacks and Paul Kalanithi, Dr. Mahmood takes the science of neurology and spins it into poetry, exploring theories of the mind, Pakistani-American identity, immigration, family, the history of medicine, and, of course, the challenges of becoming a physician in the midst of a global health crisis. Skipping nimbly across continents and drawing inspiration from an array of sources ranging from Thomas Edison to Yuval Harari to Beyoncé, she has crafted an elegant, incisive, and utterly original investigation. As Salon put it, this book is A profound, moving and unfiltered account of not just a frontline worker's experience at an unprecedented moment, but a story of family and identity, of pop songs and PPE.

A must-read for anyone seeking insight into the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as a broader understanding of our universal search for meaning.

This book made me laugh out loud and also gave me glimpses of an entire horizon of possibility I hadn't seen before.--Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes

End the filibuster. Abolish the Senate. Make everyone vote. Only if we do this (and then some), says Thomas Geoghegan, might we heal our fractured democracy.

In 2008, Geoghegan―then an established labor lawyer and prolific writer―embarked on a campaign to represent Chicago's Fifth District in Congress, in a special election called when Rahm Emanuel stepped down to serve as President Barack Obama's chief of staff. For ninety days leading up to the election, Geoghegan, a political neophyte at age sixty, knocked on doors, shook hands at train stations, and made fundraising calls. On election night he lost, badly.

But this humbling experience helped him develop a framework for reimagining American government in a way that is truly just, fair, and constitutional. Taking its title from Walt Whitman, The History of Democracy Is Yet to Be Written: How We Have to Learn to Govern All Over Again, combines hilarious tales from his time on the campaign trail with an incisive vision of how we might be able to create an America that fulfills its great promise. In a polarized country, where 100 million citizens don't vote, and those who do are otherwise rarely politically engaged, he makes an impassioned case for the possibility of a truly representative democracy, one built on the ideals of the House of Representatives, the true chamber of the people, and inspired by the poet who gives the book its name.

At once an engaging memoir and a call to arms, The History of Democracy Is Yet to Be Written will inspire and invigorate political veterans and young activists alike.

Ed Simon tells the story of Pittsburgh through this exploration of its hidden histories--the LA Review of Books calls it an epic, atomic history of the Steel City.

The land surrounding the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers has supported communities of humans for millennia. Over the past four centuries, however, it has been transformed countless times by the many people who call it home. In this brief, lyrical, and idiosyncratic collection, Ed Simon, a staff writer at The Millions, follows the story of America's furnace through a series of interconnected segments, covering all manner of Pittsburgh-beloved people, places, and things, including:

- Paleolithic Pittsburgh

- The Whiskey Rebellion

- The attempted assassination of Henry Frick

- The Harmonists

- The Mystery, Pittsburgh's radical, Black nationalist newspaper

- The myth of Joe Magarac

- Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington, Andy Warhol, and much, much more.

Accessible and funny, An Alternative History of Pittsburgh is a must-read for anyone curious about this storied city, and for Pittsburghers who think they know it all too well already.

Part of Belt's city anthology series, a reconsideration of one of America's most misunderstood cities.

Is Indianapolis just another midwestern city to fly over on the way to bigger and better destinations? Or is it, as locals know, a place where different peoples and ideals converge to create a rich cultural center? The Indianapolis Anthology showcases Naptown's vibrancy and diversity with pieces from journalists, poets, historians, established community voices, and first-time writers. The Circle City is more than the home of the Indianapolis 500, John Dillinger, Kenneth Babyface Edmonds, Kurt Vonnegut, Prozac, and Wonder Bread. In these pages, you'll find:

- lawn chairs in the beds of pick-ups

- Punk rock in Naptown

- suffragists and entrepreneurs

- cement pietàs

- dog bakeries and yoga studios

- red brick bungalows and war memorials

- steakburgers and Mexican seafood; pho and sauerbraten.

In other words, you'll find images from a city that is truly a cross section of today's America. Edited by Norman Buzz Minnick and with contributions from Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes, Michael Martone, and Karen Kovacik.

An insiders' look that will make you see a great midwestern city in a brand-new light.

Part of Belt's Revivals Series and with a new introduction by Belt Publishing founder, 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.

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.

I have yet to meet a person who is drawn to pawpaws who is not a good person.

Pawpaws are found in the fleeting, honeyed weeks between August and October. They are fleshy and awkward to eat, sweetly fragrant, and they do not travel well at all. But they were once a favorite of Native Americans, and George Washington presumably loved them for dessert. Today, they are beloved by foragers, keepers of regional food traditions, and anyone seeking relief from the industrial food chain.

In The Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook, Sara Bir sets the humble pawpaw center stage, with detailed information on how to harvest, source, store, and―of course―cook with these uniquely midwestern delicacies. Here you'll find recipes for:

- pawpaw cornbread

- pawpaw pudding

- key lime pawpaw cheesecake

- banana-pawpaw ketchup

Sidebars address questions as varied as Where can I buy frozen pawpaws? and How do I use pawpaw in a cocktail? Written with humor and love for a curious subject, The Pocket Pawpaw Cookbook will inspire you to experiment in the kitchen and get out into the woods. With an introduction by Alexis Nikole Nelson, TikTok star and @blackforager.

A succinct and impassioned call to reimagine the small liberal arts college, by two veteran educators.

Private liberal arts colleges have struggled for decades; now, as the COVID-19 pandemic widens cracks latent in many American institutions, they are facing a possibly mortal crisis. In The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College: A Manifesto for Reinvention, Steven Volk and Beth Benedix call for small colleges to seize this moment and reinvent themselves. With the rise of rankings that set peer institutions against each other, tuition that outpaces income, creeping pre-professionalism, and a race to build student “customers” the splashiest new amenities, many private liberal arts colleges have strayed from their founders’ missions. If they could shed the mantle of exclusivity, reduce costs, facilitate true social mobility, and collaborate with each other, the authors argue, they might both survive and again become just, equitable, accessible institutions able to offer the transformative and visionary education that is their hallmark.

Educators, students, parents, and anyone invested in the future of higher ed should read this book.

Detroit in 50 Maps shows you the Motor City from entirely new perspectives, from neighborhood coffee shops to the legacy of redlining.

There are thousands of ways to map a city. Roads, bridges, and railways help you navigate the twists and turns; topography gives you the lay of the land; population growth shows you its changing fortunes. But the best maps let you feel what that city's really like. Detroit in 50 Maps deconstructs the Motor City in surprising new ways. Track where new coffee shops and coworking spaces have opened and closed in the last five years. Find the areas with the highest concentrations of pizzerias, Coney Island hot dog shops, or ring-necked pheasants. In each colorful map, you'll find a new perspective on one of America's most misunderstood cities and the people who live here.

A conversation starter for Detroiters past, present, and future, Detroit in 50 Maps is for anyone keen to understand the city in new and surprising ways.

The coronavirus pandemic laid bare the unsustainability of our public higher education system. In Sustainable. Resilient. Free., author and educator John Warner maps out a path for change.

In 1983, U.S. News and World Report started to rank colleges and universities, throwing them into competition with each other for students and precious resources. Over the course of the next thirty or so years, a Reagan-era ethos of privatization and competition transformed students into consumers and colleges into businesses.

Now, tuition is unaffordable. Student loan debt is more than $1.6 trillion, and a majority of college faculty work in adjunct positions for low pay and with no job security. Colleges seem to exist only to enroll students, collect tuition, and hold classes. When learning happens, it is in spite of the system, not because of it.

In Sustainable. Resilient. Free., John Warner (Why They Can't Write) envisions a future in which our public colleges and universities are reoriented around enhancing the intellectual, social, and economic potentials of students while providing broad-based benefits to the community at large. As Warner explains, it's not even all that complicated. It's no more costly than the current system. We just have to choose to live the values we claim to hold dear.

A critical read for anyone invested in the future of public higher education.

Part of Belt's City Anthology Series. [A] mosaic of a book.--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Milwaukee Anthology is a book about hope and hurt in one of America's toughest zip codes. In the essays, narratives, poems, and art included here, you won't find Summerfest or Laverne and Shirley, but you will find honest first-hand stories about Riverwest, Sherman Park, Hmong New Year's shows, 7 Mile Fair, and the Rolling Mill commemoration. Edited by Justin Kern, and with more than 50 contributors including Dasha Kelly, Pardeep Kaleka, and Michael Perry, this collection includes stories about:

- Redlining in the city

- Painting a community mural in Sherman Park

- Reflections after the Oak Creek Sikh Temple Shooting

- The city's upstart microbrewing industry

- The rise of Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks.

It's an anthology about a place on the lake that can make you say yes and wonder why in the same thought. A place that's both a big town and small city, run down and redeveloped, tararrel and terror.

A collection that shows the Cream City is much weirder and more wonderful than you may think it is.

The Midwest finally gets its due through essays penned by architects and critics, who shine a much-deserved spotlight on the region's architecture, from its celebrated landmarks to its lesser-known projects.

Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright may be the Midwest's (and the nation's) most famous architects, but the region has always been fertile ground for both master and amateur builders. Through a gorgeous array of photographs and short essays, Midwest Architecture Journeys takes readers on a trip to visit some of the region's most inventive buildings by architects such as Bertrand Goldberg, Bruce Goff, David Haid, Earl Young, and Lillian Leenhouts. It also includes stops at less obvious but equally daring sites, such as:

- The Cahokia mounds

- Buffalo grain silos

- Flint parking lots

- Dayton flea markets

- Fermilab

- New Glarus restaurants

- Minneapolis underground buildings

- Bronzeville churches

- Pruitt-Igoe public housing

- Cleveland's abandoned warehouses.

This vital collection of essays, full of stunning photographs, proves that what might seem flat is actually monumental, and what we assume to be boring is brimming with experimentation.

The perfect coffee table book that's also perfect for your next road trip.

Part of Belt's Neighborhood Guidebook Series, The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook is an intimate exploration of the Windy City's history and identity. Required reading--The Chicago Tribune

Officially, Chicago has 77 neighborhoods. Unofficially, though, that number's closer to 200. But what does that mean for the people who actually call Chicago home? In an eclectic collection of essays, poems, photos, and visual art, The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook aims to explore the city's overlooked corners. Edited by Martha Bayne, and with help from the Read/Write Library, the book builds on 2017's critically acclaimed Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology. Here, you'll find compelling stories from all over the city:

- What one pizzeria meant to a boy growing up in Ashburn

- The South Shore's beauty and pain

- The best borscht in Ukranian Village

- The alleys of the Gold Coast

- Rogers Park's ever-shifting identity.

This lyrical and subjective guide to Chicago features work by Megan Stielstra, Audrey Petty, Alex Hernandez, Sebastián Hidalgo, Dmitry Samarov, Ed Marszewski, Lily Be, Jonathan Foiles, and many more. It's a book about the day-to-day lives of people in the city and above all else, about the changes those people have witnessed, suffered, and enacted.

In this idiosyncratic guidebook, Chicagoans will recognize both their streets and their stories, and readers from outside the city will get an intimate portrait of one of America's most iconic cities.

An urban atlas that is about so much more than directions, Cleveland in 50 Maps offers new perspectives on one of America's most misunderstood cities.

The best maps let you feel what a place is really like, and Cleveland in 50 Maps deconstructs the Forest City in a way that's never been done before. With colorful maps and insightful commentary, follow the changing locations of breweries, music venues, and commuter rail lines. Track the Cleveland Clinic's growing east side footprint, year-by-year attendance at the Jake, and the addition of communities to the Cultural Gardens. Find out which local high schools produce the most NFL players and which locations major presidential candidates visited in 2016. Discover the massive salt mine under Lake Erie and the barricades on the border of Shaker Heights. In each one of these artful gems, you'll gain a deeper understanding of how people actually experience the city of Cleveland and how its diverse communities actually take shape there.

A beautiful insider's look that's perfect for native Clevelanders or urban explorers who are looking to get to know their city even better.

A collection of poetry and prose by six incarcerated men. Featuring an introduction by Amber Epps and an afterword by novelist John Edgar Wideman.

The six authors of Life Sentences―Fly, Faruq, Khalifa, Malakki, Oscar, and Shawn―met at the State Correctional Institution in Pittsburgh and came together in 2013 to form the Elsinore Bennu Think Tank for Restorative Justice. The men met weekly for years, along with other writers, activists, and political leaders who bonded over the creation of this book, a hybrid of prison memoir, philosophy, history, policy document, and manifesto.

Centered around the principles of restorative justice, which aims to heal communities broken by criminal and state violence through collective action, Life Sentences is more than a literary collection. It is a how to guide for those who are trapped inside any community. It's also a letter of invitation, asking readers to join with the incarcerated and their families so we can all continue to fly over walls, form loving connections with each other, and teach one another to be free.

An urgent collection that sheds light on the criminal justice system, written by those most directly involved in it.

Jonathan Foiles weaves together psychology and public policy, exploring the trauma underlying urbanization in a book Kirkus Reviews calls an urgent call for reform.

When Jonathan Foiles was a graduate student in social work, he had to choose between specializing in either mental health or public policy. But once he began working, he found it impossible to tell the two apart. As he counseled poor patients from Chicago's South and West Sides, he realized individual therapy couldn't account for all the ways unemployment, poverty, lack of affordable housing, and other policy decisions impacted the well-being of both individuals and communities.

Through a series of beautifully written and accessible case studies, Foiles lets us in on the stories of individual poor Chicagoans. He teaches us how he makes diagnoses, explains how therapists before him would analyze his patients, and teaches us about the profound ways that policy decisions contribute to individual suffering.

A remarkable, unique work of medical writing that serves as a call to action, this report by an experienced mental health professional is a must-read for anyone interested in the overlaps between mental health, public policy, and urbanization.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, One of Ours is the story of Claude Wheeler, the son of a Nebraska farmer. As a young man, Claude is dissatisfied with Nebraska farm like as well as his marriage to a childhood friend, desperate for a more cosmopolitan life. When America joins the Great War, Claude decides to enlist, where he finds excitement and fulfillment--as well as tragedy--on the battlefield.

One of Ours was considered a failure by some male critics of the day: H. L. Mencken said it drops to the level of a serial in the Ladies' Home Journal, fought out not in France, but on a Hollywood movie-lot, and Ernest Hemingway panned Cather for not having experienced the front-line herself.

However, the Pulitzer committee considered it the greatest novel of the year, and this accessible, dramatic novel sold many more copies than Cather's more famous ones, O, Pioneers! and My Antonia.

A dazzling portrait of a Midwestern city whose relationships among socio-economics, religion, civil rights, and class are consistently complex. A part of Belt's City Anthology Series.

St. Louis is a fragmented place. It's physically dissected by rivers, highways, walls, and fences, but it's also a place where one's race, class, religion, and zip code may as well be cards in a rigged poker game, where the winners' prize is the ability to ignore the fact that the losers have drastically shorter life expectancies. But it can also be a city of warmth, love, and beauty―especially in its contrasts.

Edited by Ryan Schuessler (Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America), the collection features nearly 70 essays penned by St. Louis writers, journalists, clerics, poets, and activists including Aisha Sultan, Galen Gritts, Vivian Gibson, Maja Sadikovic, Nartana Premachandra, Sophia Benoit, Robert Langellier, Samuel Autman, Umar Lee, and more. Here you'll learn about:

- The rent strike of 1969

- Religious life in Pruitt-Igoe public housing

- Protest art in Ferguson

- Segregation in the Vandeventer neighborhood

- A church closing in Kinloch.

The St. Louis Anthology dares to confront the city's nostalgia and its traumas, celebrating those who have faced both who live complex lives in this city against a backdrop of its red brick, muddy rivers, and sticky summer nights when the symphony of cicadas and jazz is almost loud enough to drown out the gunshots.

A perfect introduction to St. Louis for people who want to learn more about it and a great resource for those people from St. Louis who want to hear stories told by their own neighbors.

Radical Suburbs is a revelation. Amanda Kolson Hurley will open your eyes to the wide diversity and rich history of our ongoing suburban experiment.--Richard Florida

America's suburbs are not the homogenous places we sometimes take them for. Today's suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse, with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliche of broad lawns and white picket fences is well past its expiration date.

The history of suburbia is equally surprising. Rather than bland, sprawling cookie-cutter developments, some American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially conscious design, and integrated housing. In Radical Suburbs, Amanda Kolson Hurley, an editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, takes us on a tour of some of these radical communities, including:

- the co-housing commune of Old Economy, Pennsylvania

- a tiny-house anarchist community in Piscataway, New Jersey

- a government-planned garden city in Greenbelt, Maryland

- a racially integrated subdivision (before the Fair Housing Act) in Trevose, Pennsylvania

- experimental Modernist enclaves in Lexington, Massachusetts

- and the mixed-use, architecturally daring Reston, Virginia.

Here you will find blueprints for affordable, walkable, and integrated communities, filled with a range of environmentally sound residential options. It's a timely reminder, as NPR put it, that any place, even a suburb, can be radical if you approach it the right way.

An insightful study that will make you rethink your assumptions about suburbia and possibly remake its future.

Who We Lost is the first book that directly acknowledges the free-floating grief of the COVID-bereaved, affirms that it must be addressed, and offers a purposeful activity that respects mourners as well as the mourned. 

In 2020, Martha Greenwald invited mourners to write memories of loved ones lost to COVID on the Who We Lost website. The site has been growing ever since, as the bereaved continue to write and publish stories, and the writers’ toolbox section of the website offers guidance and prompts for anyone wishing to contribute their story about who they lost to this grassroots public memorial. 

The resultant book, Who We Lost: A Portable COVID Memorial, contains dozens of essays and a writing guide for those wishing to add their own story about a loved one who died from COVID. It is a community-generated tribute, a eulogy, a handbook, and a collective memorial.

From the best-selling author of Giant and So Big, a sweeping look at the lives of three generations of women on Chicago's South Side. Part of Belt's Revivals series and with a new introduction by Kathleen Rooney (Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk).First published in 1921, Edna Ferber's The Girls revolves around the three Charlottes of the Thrift family--Great-Aunt Charlotte, her niece Lottie, and Lottie's niece Charley. All single old maids, as the narrator describes them, their lives weave together as they deal with issues involving money, work, friendship, family, and love as they strive to join Chicago's growing middle class in the early twentieth century. With a historic span that travels from the Civil War to World War I, Ferber highlights how the three generations of Charlottes lead very different lives. But we also see the ways their experiences rhyme with one another and how, despite the social advances in America, as Kathleen Rooney writes in her introduction, all three have to confront a sexist and claustrophobic societal atmosphere in which any little act of self-assertion can feel like a leap from a precipice. Told through Ferber's assured and generous style, and full of her signature strong female characters, this rediscovered American classic deserves a spot on the shelf next to other great Chicago novels like Sister Carrie and The Adventures of Augie March.

A historical tour of midwestern pies that recalls when recipes were shared through faded note cards and junior league cookbooks.

New England may say it's the Great American Pie Belt, but pie has a rich and varied history in the American Midwest too. Stop by any church or community event in the heartland today and you're likely to see as many types of pie on the dessert table as there are people who made them. Midwest Pie highlights the treats, both sweet and savory, that have come to define this region. Here, you'll learn about bean pie's origins in the Nation of Islam, the popularity of desperation pies during the Depression, how Michigan miners ate lunch pasties in the mines, and much more. Full of accessible instructions and helpful sidebars, you'll learn the stories behind a variety of pies, including: Hoosier Pie

• Schnitz Pie
• Sawdust Pie
• Ohio Buckeye Pie
• Runza

Midwest Pie is the perfect collection for any home chef looking to learn more about the diversity and deliciousness of one of the region's most enduring culinary contributions.

Lincoln Steffens's Tweed Days in St. Louis, published in McClure's magazine in October 1902, is considered the first work of muckraking journalism, exposing corruption between businessmen, politicians, police officers and other municipal actor, as well as how apathetic citizens allow machine politics to proceed unfettered.

The article also highlights residents who do fight back, including civil rights lawyer Joseph W. Folk and the workers involved in the St. Louis Streetcar Strike of 1900. Tweed Days was so successful that Steffens traveled on to Minneapolis to report The Shame of Minneapolis, which appeared in the same 1903 issue of McClure's as another muckraking classic, Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company.

Steffens would go on to expose machine politics in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City. In 1904, McClure's published the series as a book, The Shame of the Cities, which remains stubbornly timely and prescient more than a century later.

A charming and accessible collection of poems dedicated to one of the most American of inventions--fast food.

El Dorado Freddy's may be the first book of fast-food poetry. In poems like Olive Garden, Culver's, Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen, Cracker Barrel, Applebee's (after James Wright), Caine--owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas--reviews chain restaurants, bringing our attention to a slice of American life we often overlook, even though it's everywhere. Along the way, he touches on such topics as parenting, the Midwest, politics, and the pitfalls of nostalgia. Caine's wry, deceptively accomplished poems are paired with Tara Wray's color-drenched photos. The result is a literary yet goofy homage to American food and identity, set in a midwestern landscape dotted by the light of fast-food restaurants' glowing signs.

Perfect for those readers who love both poetry and Popeye's.

From the best-selling author of Giant and So Big, a sweeping look at the lives of three generations of women on Chicago's South Side. Part of Belt's Revivals series and with a new introduction by Kathleen Rooney (Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk).First published in 1921, Edna Ferber's The Girls revolves around the three Charlottes of the Thrift family--Great-Aunt Charlotte, her niece Lottie, and Lottie's niece Charley. All single old maids, as the narrator describes them, their lives weave together as they deal with issues involving money, work, friendship, family, and love as they strive to join Chicago's growing middle class in the early twentieth century. With a historic span that travels from the Civil War to World War I, Ferber highlights how the three generations of Charlottes lead very different lives. But we also see the ways their experiences rhyme with one another and how, despite the social advances in America, as Kathleen Rooney writes in her introduction, all three have to confront a sexist and claustrophobic societal atmosphere in which any little act of self-assertion can feel like a leap from a precipice. Told through Ferber's assured and generous style, and full of her signature strong female characters, this rediscovered American classic deserves a spot on the shelf next to other great Chicago novels like Sister Carrie and The Adventures of Augie March.

The third entry in Belt's urban cartography series, Buffalo in 50 Maps offers a truly unique view of the City of Good Neighbors, from the East Side to Millionaires' Row to Cazenovia Park.

The best maps give you a feeling for what a place is really like, and Buffalo in 50 Maps offers a brand-new look at both the past and present of the Queen City of the Great Lakes. Through its colorful maps and insightful commentary, you'll discover the history of the city's changing boundaries, its numerous breweries, and its most popular bus routes. Learn how long it takes to get to a Bills game on Sunday, why the city smells like Cheerios, or where the city's immigrants have recently opened businesses. You'll also discover the city's food deserts, how the layout of its streets led to intense segregation, and how its vacant lots reveal where reinvestment and development have actually taken place.

It's a beautiful and nuanced look that's perfect for Buffalo natives but also for those who just want to get to know the city a little bit better.

When Rubén Castilla Herrera died suddenly in 2019, he left an acute void in Ohio's grassroots organizing community. Notably at the forefront of many regional social justice campaigns, his life and work still reverberate through the lives of those he fought so hard for: immigrants, refugees, farmworkers, the displaced, and many, many others who refuse to simply comply with injustice. Synthesizing oral histories, community voices, and ideas from queer Latinidad and migrant worker activism, Trust the Circle details Herrera's intimate and vulnerable way of seeing the world and his role in it as an agent of change. Here, you'll learn about: - His childhood in Texas and Oregon, where he and his siblings were forced into agricultural labor after the early death of their mother, and where Herrera first encountered the Chicano activism of César Chávez and Dr. José Ángel Gutiérrez. - His move to Columbus, Ohio, and the development of his unique circle-based leadership approach. - His coming-out as a queer Latinx man in middle age. - His tireless work toward the end of his life to help provide sanctuary for undocumented migrants during the Trump administration.  Marked by the voices and remembrances of those who knew Herrera best, Trust the Circle is a biography about one grassroots organizer and the profound changes he was able to accomplish. But it's also about the ways that an intersectional and inclusive approach to organizing can be applied anywhere there is injustice.

Sonya Huber, author of the award-winning Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System, offers a candid, lyrical look inside the unsung world of exurban Illinois.New Lenox, Illinois, is a small town deep in the corn grid of the Midwest, where it runs up against the grid of south Chicagoland, a placeless location marked by geographical flatness and dwindling industry. It's also where Sonya Huber grew up, and in the twenty essays collected here, she lovingly explores the ways New Lenox--and the Midwest more generally--has come to define her life. Here, you'll find portraits of Huber's parents as they tirelessly run a small business, homages to the Gen-X joys of wearing flannel, secret insights about being a Pizza Hut waitress, and odes to the ecstasy of blasting classic rock as your car hurls along I-80. Whether she's writing about All in the Family, detailing the region's influence on David Foster Wallace, or exploring the poetry embedded in a can of Miller High Life, her vision is astute and her prose convincing. Sometimes experimental and always inventive, Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook takes seriously Chicagoland's farthest reaches--gritty, sweeping, a region full of its own distinct feelings of almostness--and transforms them into a map of the heart, a ramshackle territory marked by memory, family, regret, determination, and wonderment

The Youngstown story often is told with a beginning in iron and steel and ending in decay with a subplot driven by violent mobsters and corrupt politicians. Aiming to provide a more well-rounded examination of Youngstown, this collection of essays provides an authentic look at the city through a diverse set of experiences from the perspectives of those who have lived there. Readers will gain a sense of the past, present, and future of the city. Edited by Jacqueline Marino and Will Miller, the book features contributions by Christopher Barzak, Rochelle Hurt, Eric Murphy, Ed O’Neill, Sarah Sepanek, David Skolnick, Sarah Stankorb, C Lee Tressell, Jay Williams, Andrea Wood & 35 others.

In So You Want to Publish a Book?, Anne Trubek, founder of Belt Publishing, demystifies the publishing process.

This insightful guide offers concrete, witty advice and information to authors, prospective authors, and those curious about the inner workings of the industry. Learn the differences between Big Five and independent presses, and how advances and royalties really work. Discover the surprising methods that actually move books off the shelves. Develop the lingo to make editors swoon, and challenge yourself to find the errors intentionally embedded in the text!

From the author of Clean Time comes a firsthand account of the organizing effort inside one of the world's largest tech companies and its impact on one Pittsburgh family.In 2019, Ben Gwin played an integral role in organizing the contract workers at Google's Pittsburgh offices. In Team Building, he takes us inside the employees' fight for better benefits and more flexible scheduling, offering us a candid account of today's labor movement and the forces in America that aim to divide workers and maintain the status quo. But this is also a personal story of struggle and triumph. As Ben works with the union, he's suddenly faced with the prospect of raising his teenage daughter alone after her mother dies of a drug overdose. As he juggles work and the challenges of single fatherhood, he offers us a frank portrait of daily American life, where it sometimes feels like every moment is an uphill battle. Expertly crafted and tightly structured, Team Building artfully explores the ways our working conditions reach deeply into our lives outside the office. It's an honest and ultimately hopeful look at the importance of building solid foundations with the teams that matter most.

The Belt Cookie Table Cookbook celebrates the Rust Belt tradition of the cookie table with forty-one classic recipes from authentic Mahoning Valley cooks.

What's a cookie table? Funny you should ask! The cookie table is a tradition beloved by residents of Youngstown, Pittsburgh, and parts in between. It has its roots in a time when wedding cakes were far too dear for newly arrived immigrants to purchase. Instead, family and friends showed their love for a bride and groom by baking from scratch hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cookies and other small sweet treats to be shared at the reception.

The Belt Cookie Table Cookbook includes cookies from different cultures, cookies with different textures, spices, shapes, and a trove of interesting backstories. Simple cookies, ridiculously indulgent cookies, experimental cookies―they're all here. And most of all, this cookbook shares the tradition of the cookie table, a heartfelt way of building community that has endured through generations. In the tradition of the community cookbook. Author Bonnie Tawse, a former Atlas Obscura Field Agent, collects 41 recipes that include everything from pizzelles to potato chip cookies. Buy it with Belt's Car Bombs to Cookie Tables: The Youngstown Anthology for the full experience!

A wonderful testament to a local baking tradition of the Midwest and a must for any kitchen large or small.

A virtuoso book about midwestern identity and the future of the region. Named a Commonweal Notable Book of 2020, a finalist for a Midwest Independent Book award, and winner of the Independent Publisher Awards' 2020 Bronze Medal for Great Lakes Nonfiction.

The Midwest: Is it middle? Or is it Western? As Phil Christman writes in this idiosyncratic, critically acclaimed essay collection, these and other ambiguities might well be the region's defining characteristic. Deftly combining history, criticism, and memoir, Christman breaks his exploration of midwestern identity, past and present, into a suite of thirty-six brief, interconnected essays. Ranging across material questions of religion, race, class, climate, and Midwestern myth making, the result is a sometimes sardonic, often uproarious, and consistently thought-provoking look at a misunderstood place and the people who call it home.

As James Fallows of The Atlantic noted, it's A combination of history, memoir, reportage, and lit-crit that taught me a lot about a region I've reported on.... Check it out.

For anyone who has ever wondered why being from the Midwest is synonymous with normalcy, even when nothing could be further from the truth.

One of NPR's Best Books of 2020, and winner of the 2020 Independent Publisher Awards' gold medal for LGBTQ+ nonfiction, Raechel Anne Jolie's blazing memoir is now available in paperback.

Raechel Anne Jolie's early life in a working-class Cleveland exurb was full of race cars, Budweiser-drinking men, and the women who loved them. When she was four, though, her life changed forever when her father was hit by a drunk driver and suffered a debilitating brain injury.

Rust Belt Femme is the chronicle of her survival. Fearlessly honest, wry, and tender, Jolie digs into both the pain of past traumas and the joy of teenaged discovery to craft a love letter to the brassy, big-haired women who raised her and the 90s alternative, riot grrrl culture that shaped her into who she is today: a queer femme with PTSD and a deep love of the Midwest.

Personal and political, lyrical and fierce, Rust Belt Femme speaks to anyone who was once a misfit kid trying to find their place in the world.

Vivian Gibson's bestselling memoir of growing up in the 1950s in a segregated St. Louis neighborhood has been hailed by critics as a spare, elegant jewel of a work and a love letter to Gibson's childhood.

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.

M is for Michigan is an A-Z tour of The Great Lakes State. From the automobile industry that built Detroit to the sandy dunes of the shores of Western Michigan and Lake Michigan, M is for Michigan will charm children and adults alike. With bright, bold graphics and whimsical rhymes, highlights include Big Red Lighthouse, Michigan Cherries, University of Michigan and Michigan State football, Mackinac Bridge and the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. Perfect for any Michigander, or those that spend their summers on the lakes and beaches of Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Lake Huron or the scores of inland lakes in Michigan. M is for Michigan is a pure delight that celebrates Pure Michigan!