Alice’s Picks
Alice reads mostly literary fiction and narrative non-fiction, but when she reads a good mystery, she wonders why she doesn’t do that more. And while she also likes to read poetry, she’d rather hear poets read or perform their work in person. Her favorite place to read is on her front porch on long summer evenings.
Love Is My Favorite Flavor: A Midwestern Dining Critic Tells All
Wini Moranville
Paperback/July 17, 2024
University of Iowa Press
In a remarkable career that has spanned nearly fifty years, Wini Moranville has witnessed the American restaurant landscape transform from the inside out.
At just shy of fourteen, she began a ten-year stretch working in a kaleidoscope of quintessential Midwestern eateries of the time—from a strait-laced cafeteria to a hippie-run vegetarian restaurant, from a depressing chain coffee shop to an iconic department store tearoom, and later, a formal dining club. Moranville’s hands-on experiences weave a vivid tapestry of the heart, humor—and the unforgettable people—she found on the scene in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the mid-1990s, the tables turned as Moranville became a prolific food and wine writer for national publications and the dining critic for The Des Moines Register, for which she wrote over 700 restaurant reviews.
Interwoven with Moranville’s reflections on bygone restaurants are more recent anecdotes recounting the joys and challenges of restaurant reviewing. From awkward mishaps when she was recognized at dining spots, to repeatedly being cornered by local readers who disagreed with her reviews—not to mention the hate-mail and social-media weirdness—reviewing restaurants could be a minefield.
Moranville also recounts the challenges of writing fairly and honestly about Des Moines restaurants after spending long stretches of each summer in France. Though she kept a razor-sharp focus on what Des Moines did best, she sometimes felt the Des Moines diner deserved better.
Amidst the vast changes that have occurred over the years, Love Is My Favorite Flavor underscores the timelessness of what it is we seek when we entrust restaurateurs with our hard-earned money and our hard-won leisure time. Dining out may have changed dramatically since the 1970s, but the joys of being in the hands of people who care deeply about our time at their tables have not.
A Grotesque Animal: A Memoir
Amy Lee Lillard
Paperback/June 4, 2024
University of Iowa Press
At the age of forty-three, Amy Lee Lillard learned she was autistic. She learned she was part of a community of unseen women who fell through the gaps due to medical bias and social stereotypes.
A Grotesque Animal explores the making, unmaking, and making again of a woman with an undiagnosed disorder. How did a working- class background and a deep-rooted Midwest culture of silence lead to hiding in plain sight for decades? How did sexuality and anger hide the roots of trauma among the women in her family? And what does it mean to be a queer, disabled, aging woman, a descendent of wild but tamed mothers and a survivor of the things patriarchy inflicts?
Through wide-ranging styles and a combination of personal storytelling and cultural analysis, Lillard dissects anger, sexuality, autistic masking, bodies, punk, and female annihilation to create a new picture of modern women.
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
Camille T. Dungy
Hardcover/May 2, 2023
Simon & Schuster
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013 with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant.
In resistance to the homogeneous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of the planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.
Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage readers to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
Fire Exit
Morgan Talty
Hardcover/June 4, 2024
Tin House Books
The blood that came out of me was blood that ran through her veins. It’s strange: all blood looks the same, yet it’s different, we’re told, in so many various ways and for so many various reasons. But one thing is for certain, I thought: you are who you are, even if you don’t know it.
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life—from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
Now, it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can—his home and property; his alcoholic, quick-tempered, and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever deeper into dementia—he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, in a hunting accident—a death he and Louise are at odds over as to where to lay blame—Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she’s ever known?
From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another
This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life
Lyz Lenz
Hardcover/February 20, 2024
Crown Publishing
A deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage (bad) and divorce (actually pretty good!) in America today, and an argument that the former needs a reboot—from journalist and proud divorcée Lyz Lenz
Studies show that nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women—women who are tired, fed up, exhausted, and unhappy. Lyz is one such woman whose life fell apart after she reached a breaking point in her twelve-year marriage. In this exuberant and unapologetic book, Lyz Lenz is flipping the script on that narrative and preaching the good gospel of the power of divorce.
The end of a marriage is often seen as the failure of the individual—most often, the woman. We’ve all seen how the media portrays divorced sad, lonely, drowning their sorrows in a bottle of wine, desperate for a new man. It’s as though they did something wrong, so they’ve been cast out from society. Lyz sees divorce as a practical and powerful solution for women to take back the power they are owed, while examining why we call divorce a failure, when it’s heterosexual marriage that has been flawed all along. How can women succeed in marriage when our relationships are based on inequality?
This book weaves reportage with sociological research, literature with popular culture, and personal stories of coming together and breaking up to create a kaleidoscopic and poignant portrait of American marriage today. Lyz argues that the mechanisms of American power, justice, love, and gender equality remain deeply flawed, and that marriage, like any other cultural institution, is due for a reckoning. Unlike any other book about divorce, this raucous manifesto for acceptance, solidarity, and collective female refusal takes readers on a riveting ride—all while pointing us all toward something a little more free.
Martyr!
Kaveh Akbar
Hardcover /January 23, 2024
Knopf
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.
Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South
Margaret Renkl
Paperback/September 26, 2023
Milkweed
For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection. “People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last , Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand. In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning. From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.
