University of Iowa Press – förlag

Gather your party, it’s time to level up your parenting game!For years, millions of fans have looked to the beloved role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons for fun, friendship, and entertainment. And now parents and parents-to-be can use it to gain inspiration and how-to when it comes to their most challenging and rewarding role yet. Dungeon Masters are not just expert storytellers and arbiters of the rules, they’re compassionate, creative, quick-thinking leaders who embody the same traits that make a great parent.Where do you find an adventuring party who will have your back? What must-have starting equipment should you own before venturing into babyland? How does your gaming style reflect your parenting style? You don’t have to know how to be a Dungeon Master to master parenting—just think like one. Kids may not come with rulebooks, but now their parents do.

In A Potter's Workbook, renowned studio potter and teacher Clary Illian presents a textbook for the hand and the mind. Her aim is to provide a way to see, to make, and to think about the forms of wheel-thrown vessels; her information and inspiration explain both the mechanics of throwing and finishing pots made simply on the wheel and the principles of truth and beauty arising from that traditional method.Each chapter begins with a series of exercises that introduce the principles of good form and good forming for pitchers, bowls, cylinders, lids, handles, and every other conceivable functional shape. Focusing on utilitarian pottery created on the wheel, Illian explores sound, lively, and economically produced pottery forms that combine an invitation to mindful appreciation with ease of use. Charles Metzger's striking photographs, taken under ideal studio conditions, perfectly complement her vigorous text.

The year was 1988, and Denis Johnson was at a low point. He caught malaria on a reporting trip into the jungles of the Philippines and was nearly pronounced dead. The disease left him unable to write. His second wife left him. He didn’t have enough money to pay his taxes. His publisher was waiting for a book that he hadn’t started. But in the life of Denis Johnson, when things were at their bleakest, something good was usually waiting around the next corner. This time, what emerged from the chaos was his masterpiece Jesus’ Son, a book that would tap into the zeitgeist of the 1990s and become a bible for Generation X and an American classic.Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures tells the complete story of Johnson’s fascinating life, his thrill-seeking trips into war zones as a magazine correspondent, his battles with addiction, his live-it-before-you-write-it style of fiction. It follows the arc of his tremendous body of work as a novelist, journalist, poet, and playwright, and in the process recovers the true stories from the hazy myths that one of our most beloved, yet enigmatic, writers left behind.

This study introduces and explores Lacan's complex theories of subjectivity and desire through close readings of cananical children's books such as "Charlotte's Web", "Stellaluna", "Holes", "Tangerine" and "The Chocolate War". It provides an introduction to this body of work while making the claim that children's textual encounters are as significant as their existential ones in constituting their subjectivities and giving shape to their desires. The texts render lucid Lacan's theory, and the theory helps explain why the text remain so profoundly influential in constructing a childs's sense of self.

A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, this argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else.

Before Superman, before Batman, there was—the Phantom! Making its debut as an American newspaper comic strip in 1936, The Phantom was the forerunner of the comic-book superhero genre that today animates vast billion-dollar franchises spanning print, film, television, video games, and licensed merchandise. But you’ve probably never heard of it—you probably think Superman inaugurated the genre. That’s because, despite its American origins, The Phantom comic strip has enjoyed far greater popularity with international audiences, most notably in Australia, Sweden, and India, where it has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and comic books. The paradox of the character’s relative obscurity in the United States, offset by his phenomenal success in these three markedly different countries, is the subject of The Phantom Unmasked.By tracing the publication history of The Phantom in magazines and comic books across international markets since the mid-1930s, author Kevin Patrick delves into the largely unexplored prehistory of modern media licensing industries. He also explores the interconnections between the cultural, political, economic, and historical factors that fueled the character’s international popularity. The Phantom Unmasked offers readers a nuanced study of the complex cultural flow of American comic books around the world. Equally important, to provide a rare glimpse of international comics fandom, Patrick surveyed the Phantom’s “phans”—as they call themselves—and lets them explain how and why they came to love the world’s first masked superhero.

In this whip-smart study, Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsideration of the work of many male New York School writers and artists from a feminist perspective.With contagious enthusiasm, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions ranges widely and covers collaborations between poets and painters in the 1950s and 1960s; the complex role played by the “true abstraction” of the feminine in the work of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler; the intricate weave of verbal and visual arts throughout the postwar period, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop to Conceptualism to feminist and queer performance art; and the unfolding, diverse careers of Mayer, Notley, and Myles from the 1970s to the present. Along the way, Nelson considers provocative questions of anonymity and publicity, the solitary and the communal, the enduring and the ephemeral, domesticity, boredom, sex, and politics.By asking us to rethink the ways in which we conceptualize “schools” and “avant-gardes” and eventually drawing our attention to larger, compelling questions about how and why we read—and how gender and sexuality inform that reading in the first place—Maggie Nelson not only fills an important gap in the history of American poetry and art but also gives an inspired performance of the kind of lively, audacious, and personally committed criticism that befits her subject.

The Perturbation of O tells the comic story of how a loser became a winner with the publication of his memoir, Gideon’s Confession, and the chaotic aftermath that the book and an encounter with Oprah Winfrey have had on two people: Gideon Anderson and Regina Blast, a woman about whom Gideon wrote intimately in his memoir.Told mostly in a single conversation between Gideon and Regina as they sit on a spring morning drinking coffee and eating pastries, The Perturbation of O deals with concepts of fame and intimacy, and who has the right to speak about whom.

As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by economic globalisation, neoliberalism, and financialisation, writers and artists have addressed the problem of representing the economy with a new sense of political urgency. Anxieties over who controls capitalism have thus been translated into demands upon literature, art, and mass media to develop strategies of representation that can account for capitalism’s power.Reading Capitalist Realism presents some of the latest and most sophisticated approaches to the question of the relation between capitalism and narrative form, partly by questioning how the “realism” of austerity, privatisation, and wealth protection relate to the realism of narrative and cultural production. Even as critics have sought to locate a new aesthetic mode that might consider and move beyond theorisations of the postmodern, this volume contends that narrative realism demands renewed scrutiny for its ability to represent capitalism’s latest scenes of enclosure and indebtedness.Ranging across fiction, nonfiction, television, and film, the essays collected here explore to what extent realism is equipped to comprehend and historicise our contemporary economic moment and what might be the influence or complicity of the literary in shaping the global politics of lowered expectations. Including essays on writers such as Mohsin Hamid, Lorrie Moore, Jess Walter, J. M. Coetzee, James Kelman, Ali Smith, Russell Banks, William Vollmann, and William Gibson, as well as examinations of Hollywood film productions and The Wire television series, Reading Capitalist Realism calls attention to a resurgence of realisms across narrative genres and questions realism’s ability to interrogate the crisis-driven logic of political and economic “common sense.”

The language of Molly Brodak's first full-length collection, ""A Little Middle of the Night"", is ever shifting, brightly sonic, and disarming while exploring the margin between nature and art, darkness and beauty, dreams and awakenings. As echoed in one epigraph from Emerson, these poems capture 'the Exact and the Vast' of consciousness in intense lyric verse with an angular and almost scientific sensitivity. Here is a speaker intent on discovery: 'Oh whole world, we choose / another.' This award-winning collection simmers with wit as Brodak confronts tragedy, childhood losses, transcendent love, and the question of art itself. Tinged with a suffering - 'I was the littlest wastebasket. I was my own church. Except - scared, scared"" - that rises above personal sorrow, her fierce and painterly poems redefine nature and art and what exists between: 'Lately, there is spangled shade in my space / and a cold apple orchard to tend in place of consciousness'. As Reginald Shepherd said about the poems in Brodak's first collection, the chapbook ""Instructions for a Painting"", 'her world is 'small enough to sing in all directions,' and large enough to take us there'.

Originally published in November 1939, two months after World War II officially began, James Thurber's parable in pictures - a graphic novel ahead of its day - about the eternal cycles of war, peace, love, and the resilience of one little flower remains as relevant today as it was then. ""The New York Times"" called it ""at once one of the most serious and one of the most hilarious contributions on war."" E. B. White wrote, ""In it you will find his faith in the renewal of life, his feeling for the beauty and fragility of life on earth."" Civilization has collapsed after World War XII, dogs have deserted their masters, all the groves and gardens have been destroyed, and love has vanished from the earth. Then one day, ""a young girl who had never seen a flower chanced to come upon the last one in the world."" Written amid the sorrow and chaos of war, dedicated to his only child ""in the wistful hope that her world will be better than mine,"" Thurber's ""The Last Flower"" is a wise and loving testimony to the salvation found in nature. This new printing will feature new scans of Thurber's original 1939 drawings.

Since her first collection, The Keep, Emily Wilson has forged a singular voice in American poetry, one that traces and complicates the dynamic relationships between language and the natural, aesthetics and science, material forms and inwardness. Her new collection, Burnt Mountain, is set on the rugged slopes of an inauspicious mountain, densely wooded, long ago scoured by fire, and marked by generations of human presence. Fiercely attuned to the match and mismatch between mind and mountain—the ways in which the natural and the human construct and deconstruct each other in the contested realms of art, wilderness, history, devotion, and politics—Wilson’s poetics reckon with resistant forces of nature and with the human drive to subdue what eludes us. Above all, these poems encounter the flickering, flowing matrices of being—“that far-forged interior / Outlandish green and flaming cause unknown”—and give voice to the elemental question of what can and cannot be known or understood—and what can sustain us.

How do historians represent the past? How do theatre historians represent performance events? The fifteen challenging essays in Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography focus on the fundamental epistemological conditions and procedures that serve as the foundational ideas that guide all historians in their endeavors. Unified by their investigations into how best to understand and then represent the past, this diverse group of scholars in the field of theatre history and performance studies offers insights into the abiding issues that all historians face in the task of representing human events and actions. Five primary ideas provide the topics as well as the intellectual parameters for this book: archive, time, space, identity, and narrative. Taking these as the conceptual framework for historical research and analysis, the essayists cover an expansive range of case studies and problems in the historical study of performance from the Americas to Africa and from Europe to India and China. Considering not only how historians think about these concepts in their research and writing but more pointedly—and historiographically—how they think with them, the essayists demonstrate the power and centrality of each of these five ideas in historical scholarship from initial research to the writing of essays and books. Performance history has a diversity of identities, locations, sources, and narratives. This compelling engagement with the concepts essential to historical understanding is a valuable contribution to the historiography of performance—for students, teachers, and the future of the discipline itself. Expanding upon its classic predecessor, Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, this exciting new collection illustrates the contemporary richness of historical thinking and writing in the field of performance history.

Learning how to revise may well be the most excruciating part of writing - frequently it is what makes or breaks new writers. Now, in this unique and highly useful book, Jay Woodruff gives some of America's finest contemporary writers an opportunity to talk with passion and professionalism about revision - about the hard work of their writing. Books on writing generally offer prescriptions and proscriptions about this "craft so hard to learn" instead of evidence. But in A Piece of Work Woodruff's incisive questions guide five writers - Tobias Wolff, Tess Gallagher, Robert Coles, Joyce Carol Oates, and Donald Hall - through specific examples that enable the reader to see how good writing becomes better. From the first draft through various revisions and finally to the printed version of a single piece of each author's work, Woodruff traces the full course of the revision process. While we might prefer to picture all authors as Coleridge, with the perfectly formed lines and stanzas of "Kubla Khan" emerging from a dream, the truth of the matter is that the development of a final text is often as much a hard-won discovery as it is an initial inspiration. A Piece of Work offers a road map to that discovery.

Any landscape has an unseen component: a subjective component of experience, memory, and narrative which people familiar with the place understand to be an integral part of its geography but which outsiders may not suspect the existence of—unless they listen and read carefully. This invisible landscape is make visible though stories, and these stories are the focus of this engrossing book.Traveling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent Ryden—himself a most careful listener and reader—asks the following questions. What categories of meaning do we read into our surroundings? What forms of expression serve as the most reliable maps to understanding those meanings? Our sense of any place, he argues, consists of a deeply ingrained experiential knowledge of its physical makeup; an awareness of its communal and personal history; a sense of our identity as being inextricably bound up with its events and ways of life; and an emotional reaction, positive or negative, to its meanings and memories. Ryden demonstrates that both folk and literary narratives about place bear a striking thematic and stylistic resemblance. Accordingly, Mapping the Invisible Landscape examines both kinds of narratives. For his oral materials, Ryden provides an in-depth analysis of narratives collected in the Coeur d'Alene mining district in the Idaho panhandle; for his consideration of written works, he explores the “essay of place,” the personal essay which takes as its subject a particular place and a writer's relationship to that place. Drawing on methods and materials from geography, folklore, and literature, Mapping the Invisible Landscape offers a broadly interdisciplinary analysis of the way we situate ourselves imaginatively in the landscape, the way we inscribe its surface with stories. Written in an extremely engaging style, this book will lead its readers to an awareness of the vital role that a sense of place plays in the formation of local cultures, to an understanding of the many-layered ways in which place interacts with individual lives, and to renewed appreciation of the places in their own lives and landscapes.

A solid introductory guide to classical jazz naming the greats, their influences, and providing neophyte listeners with keys to listening and appreciating this musical genre. Free-lance music critic Piazza explains the science of riffing and the development of bebop and harmonic ensemble thinking.

The Sleeping Beauty in Roberta Seelinger Trites' intriguing text is no silent snoozer passively waiting for Prince Charming to energize her life. Instead she wakes up all by herself and sets out to redefine the meaning of “happily ever after.” Trites investigates the many ways that Sleeping Beauty's newfound voice has joined other strong female voices in feminist children's novels to generate equal potentials for all children.Waking Sleeping Beauty explores issues of voice in a wide range of children's novels, including books by Virginia Hamilton, Patricia MacLachlan, and Cynthia Voight as well as many multicultural and international books. Far from being a limiting genre that praises females at the expense of males, the feminist children's novel seeks to communicate an inclusive vision of politics, gender, age, race, and class. By revising former stereotypes of children's literature and replacing them with more complete images of females in children's books, Trites encourages those involved with children's literature—teachers, students, writers, publishers, critics, librarian, booksellers, and parents—to be aware of the myriad possibilities of feminist expression.Roberta Trites focuses on the positive aspects of feminism: on the ways females interact through family and community relationships, on the ways females have revised patriarchal images, and on the ways female writers use fictional constructs to transmit their ideologies to readers. She thus provides a framework that allows everyone who enters a classroom with a children's book in hand to recognize and communicate—with an optimistic, reality-based sense of “happily ever after”—the politics and the potential of that book.

Blood and Bone: Poems by Physicians explores the profound connections between medicine and poetry through the eyes of contemporary physician-poets. These one hundred poems record instances of pain and recovery, joy and grief, humor and irony within the restricted society of caregivers and their patients.

This guide to the prairie plants native to Iowa provides all the information necessary for identifying and distinguishing even the most similar species. Species are described from the ground up: stem, leaf, bud, flower, fruit and habitat. The time of flowering/fruiting is given for central Iowa.

This text's three sections mingle myth and history with style, grace and humour. The first essays are given over to memories of Paul Engle in his heyday. The second group focuses on the teachers who made the workshop hum on a daily basis, and the third section is devoted to storytelling.

This history of Ottumwa's meatpacking workers provides insights into the development of several forms of labour relations in Iowa during the Democratic party's ascendancy across much of industrial North America following World War II.