Library News – Page 2

Lost and Bound

A UI team uses medical technology to reveal secrets along the spine

“It was a goose bumps moment,” says Eric Ensley, curator of rare books and maps in Special Collections and Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries.

An interdisciplinary group of UI researchers had just found new layers of history beneath the surface of 16th-century books using medical CT scanning technology. The find: recycled medieval binding fragments, called “binder’s waste,” that came from a Latin Bible dating to the 11th or 12th century.

Now, the group is sharing its discoveries, which confirm that the method is a cost- and time-effective means to recover fragments hidden beneath bindings without damaging a valuable book. The full academic article, “Using computed tomography to recover hidden medieval fragments beneath early modern bindings, first results,” is available in Heritage Science.

Members of the IISICCA gather to analyze results as a volume of *Historia Animalium* undergoes CT scanning.
*Photo by Laura Moser.*

The UI Libraries is part of the Iowa Initiative for Scientific Imaging and Conservation of Cultural Artifacts (IISICCA). The group, composed of faculty and staff representing a range of disciplines, has been working since 2021 to learn more about the fragments found in the collections at Special Collections and Archives and the John Martin Rare Book Room in the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.

The IISICCA’s book spines and fragments project seeks to find new methods to help uncover hidden collections in the UI Libraries and others around the country and the world. Other methods of scanning medieval books face limitations, so the team of UI researchers decided to try CT scanning to see the fragments concealed within their bindings.

The group utilized CT technologies at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics and experimented using Special Collections’ copy of Conrad Gessner’s five-volume Historia Animalium. They chose this book, an early printed attempt at a holistic encyclopedia of the world’s animal kingdom, because its binding had already come undone and revealed evidence of binder’s waste.

Ensley; Giselle Simón, university conservator; Susan Walsh, technical director of the Small Animal Imaging Core (SAIC); and Katherine H. Tachau, professor emerita of history at the UI, reflected on their involvement with the project and the impact it has on the field of librarianship and beyond.

Q: What is your role in IISICCA?

Ensley: I’m one of the current co-directors of IISICCA and one of the project leads on the book spines and fragments project. While we often hear it said about some libraries that they “don’t have medieval manuscripts” in their collections, this is often not the case—the manuscripts typically are just hiding. Though other projects around the world have made these types of texts visible, we’re excited that this project makes it cheaper and more easily available for many institutions that lack the ability to purchase expensive equipment.

Simón: As university conservator, my role is to ensure that our collection materials are safe and cared for during the imaging process. It is all about preserving our collections. These materials are greatly affected by temperature and humidity, so when they get transported to a different location, I need to be aware of those factors. I’m also responsible for packing things for transport, making sure that transport is safe and items are insured, and overseeing their use during the imaging process.

Q: What value do you think these IISICCA projects have to your field and beyond?

Ensley: I think they offer a variety of positive impacts. From my perspective as a curator interested in the Middle Ages, our project is among the first that offers a solution to some of the expenses associated with working to recover fragments. I think the second important point is that this sort of work shows what can happen when humanities, sciences, and information professionals work together—we each bring different expertise to the table and think about problems in new ways.

Simón: Conservators are interested in using imaging techniques to inform treatment decisions. If we know chemical makeup, we can make better decisions about what materials we need to use in repairing an item. Imaging techniques also help conservators understand exactly what is causing damage or to determine the best long-term storage needs of an object, whether it be a book or a painting. It’s about knowing the facts about an object’s physicality to help make decisions. I’ll never be an expert in CT scanning, so collaboration with our science colleagues is critical.

Tachau: People have been writing and reading books for three or four thousand years, and most of the time we readers tend to think of a book’s text when we think of the information that the book contains. As material objects made by individual human beings, however, books give us much more knowledge. We were thrilled to see that technology, in this case CT scanning, is revealing there is a lot more information to be learned from the books themselves than merely what is written between its covers. Even if fragments found in books are not lost texts, they still offer glimpses of early forms of writing, clues to where the book was bound or who did the binding, and even hints of ownership.

Walsh: Having non-biological samples to image allows a bit of creativity to be included within the scientific method. This creative step can span answering a simple question as to how to coordinate transportation of the materials with the curator’s oversight to securing the sample while imaging and applying data analysis techniques to the images. Anytime the circle of collaboration is increased, the depth of understanding one’s own field of research deepens.

Q: What have you learned from your on-campus collaborators while working in IISICCA?

Ensley: The number one thing I’ve learned is that we should be asking each other for help more often. Not only do we all have different technical expertise, but we often think about things differently. For example, it may come as a surprise, but when fragments are wrapped around a spine, they’re not flat. So how do we read a fragment that’s not flat? Luckily, one of our researchers immediately compared this to CT scanning a human eyeball—there the CT needs to read the surface of the eye, which is, of course, curved. Our team used software used to help CTs read these curved surfaces to help read our curved fragments.

Simón: It’s great to understand, even just a little, the vastness of types of research that go on here at the UI. I have loved learning about what my colleagues from across campus are doing and what they are passionate about.

Tachau: It’s exciting to learn what technologies are available to bring to light evidence for historians to use that we could not otherwise discover; this evidence allows us to ask (and try to answer) new questions about the past.

Walsh: I remember the day we were using the human-sized CT scanner to scan the three manuscripts. Everyone was crowded around the control console of the CT scanner watching in real time as the data from the bindings was processed. The moment the first letter was visible to the eye and my IISICCA colleagues were able to see their hypothesis become reality was quite special.

Q: What is next?

Ensley: We’ll be continuing to work together. I think this research is a good example of how libraries have a central role to play in “crossing the river” between the humanities and the sciences. In many ways, librarians sit at the center, with some background in scientific inquiry and some background in humanistic inquiry. Here, our collections and knowledge helped inflect the project and create research that will help other libraries across the world better understand their collections and what lies just below the surface.

Simón: The potential for further research of our artifacts using noninvasive techniques is at the core of how it could be of value going forward. As a conservator, this idea speaks to me. Scholars continue to dig deeper, so to speak, to understand the material culture of the book, and the need to investigate the physical object will always be somewhat of a conundrum for preservation. In a library, the book is meant to be used. How can we accommodate that use and also find hidden elements in more investigative ways without doing harm? I think we are on the right track.

Walsh: Taking the long view, having this collaboration provides many avenues of study for students. As this approach to understanding library materials is gaining ground worldwide, it will be a benefit for UI students spanning departments, which is invaluable.

The IISICCA brings together UI faculty, staff, and researchers from the UI Libraries; Center for the Book; College of Engineering; departments of Art History, Classics, History, Religious Studies; Iowa Institute for Biomedical Imaging; Small Animal Imaging Core; the Iowa Initiative for Artificial Intelligence; and the Stanley Museum of Art.
Iowa has hosted two international conferences on closely related topics regarding manuscripts: the 2016-18 Mellon-Sawyer seminar and the 2020 “More Than Meets the Eye” Conference.

Collections management, writ large: Inside the UI Libraries Annex

This remarkable facility boasts towering shelves, millions of volumes, and a satellite—and that’s just the beginning.

Long bookshelves — The shelves at the Annex are a towering 22 feet tall, stacked high with materials.

The University of Iowa Libraries Annex sits on the outskirts of Iowa City, tucked between warehouses and against train tracks. Inside the 60,000-square-foot facility, long aisles extend into darkness—but when the motion-activated lights click on, they illuminate 22-foot shelves stacked floor-to-ceiling with trays of materials. The effect is kaleidoscopic, books of every color neatly in place.

This impressive space currently stores about 1.8 million volumes—not including thousands of Special Collections and Archives materials—but has capacity for up to 4.8 million. It’s the only facility of its kind in the state, and a critical component of the UI Libraries’ strategy, streamlining management, preservation, and access to physical book collections.

satellite — Hoberg and Halterman-Dess both cite this plasma detection package as their favorite item, adding that it has been sent into orbit twice.

Items from the UI Libraries can end up in the Annex for multiple reasons. Age and the rate of circulation are the most common deciding factors, but some materials also are ill-suited for the bookstacks due to their size or shape; others require the particular atmospheric conditions of the facility. Materials in the Annex are organized by size rather than the classification numbers used in the stacks. A separate room for cold storage contains dozens of delicate film reels, kept at an optimal chill by an HVAC system with air conditioner and dehumidifier units.

Library Annex Coordinator Maggie Halterman-Dess and Library Annex Assistant Madde Hoberg had no trouble identifying their favorite item stored at the Annex: an instrument called a plasma detection package. It’s a few feet tall, covered in solar panels, and has been to space twice. It was transferred from the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2013, becoming part of the Space Exploration Artifacts Collection in the UI Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives. It played a significant role in the history of space exploration, becoming the first object to be picked up and maneuvered by the remote manipulator arm of a shuttle.

Though the Annex is a repository of physical items, it has played a key role in the modernization of the UI Libraries. One beneficiary has been the Pomerantz Business Library, which is located in the BizHub at the Tippie College of Business. It’s been able to keep pace with a changing industry landscape by moving the contents of its former stacks to the Annex. Students and faculty can still request any book from the collection or the UI Libraries as a whole, but their physical space on campus has been transformed. In place of bookstacks, the BizHub is now able to host collaborative workspaces, a tutoring center, Bloomberg terminals, and a café.

“The UI Libraries Annex is an important resource for the preservation of materials,” says Jack B. King University Librarian John Culshaw. “It not only allows us to be discerning about which items remain in the on-campus bookstacks, but it also opens up possibilities for the use of space, which is always a consideration for us.”

One of the most promising—and daunting—projects for libraries worldwide is the digitization of vast collections. A team from the UI Libraries has been working alongside the Big Ten Academic Alliance and other peer institutions to send collections for digitization in partnership with Google Books.

The Annex plays a crucial role in this partnership, storing the physical copies of books from the UI Libraries after they have been digitized. This allows libraries to design spaces that keep up with technological progress. It also simplifies the discovery of electronic copies, many of which are instantly accessible to borrowers. The Google Books Project also serves a larger goal: the creation of a more connected and collaborative library landscape.

Books are placed in trays and then added to a cart before being loaded onto the cherry picker for shelving.

“As library collections include more born-digital content, there is less need to have immediate access to material on campus,” says Halterman-Dess. “The Annex fits into a larger library ecosystem of distributed storage and retention agreements, ensuring that items are committed for safekeeping and fast fulfillment of patron needs on a more regional basis, rather than every library needing to attempt to collect everything.”

The current Annex first opened in 2016, replacing a temporary storage space first used in a significant stacks-reorganization project necessitated by the flood of 2008. This first iteration was a standard-issue warehouse, effective as a stopgap measure but lacking the intentionality of its successor. Still, UI Libraries staff found that the first Annex met a need that persisted even under ordinary circumstances. One of the Annex’s primary benefits was that it created space for books that hadn’t circulated in years but still had something to offer.

Today’s UI Libraries Annex is a cavernous space with a controlled climate: always 65 degrees Fahrenheit, always 50% humidity. Workers step in from the summer heat and don sweaters. They navigate the aisles in a cherry picker, a piece of industrial equipment that requires operators to wear a full-body harness in case of falls. Full-time staff need training in the operation of heavy machinery. It’s a unique professional environment, and each day’s to-do list requires some improvisation.

“Flexibility is a big must for work at the Annex,” says Hoberg. “We often have to make do with what we have, come up with new shelving solutions for unique materials, and so on. It’s definitely not your ‘typical’ library job.”

Some items, like these reels, require storage at lower temperatures and are placed in a cold storage room.

Though faculty members and researchers sometimes ask to visit the facility in person, scans are also available. Halterman-Dess and Hoberg take pride in their ability to hunt down esoteric knowledge upon request. They work directly with borrowers to discern what kind of information they’re seeking in order to target the right materials, which they then scan and share electronically. The UI Libraries Annex team is able to provide these high-quality scans within a “pretty rapid” time frame, according to Halterman-Dess.

“There might be an assumption that if it’s not on-shelf at one of the campus libraries, there will be a lot of hassle from the user’s point of view to put in a request and receive it, but it’s really pretty slick,” says Halterman-Dess.

Physical items take longer to receive because they must be checked out and delivered, but this process, too, has been streamlined. Before the pandemic, the Annex restricted the delivery of items to campus addresses or locations farther than 25 miles from Iowa City. In 2020, the pandemic called for a reevaluation of that policy. The delivery radius was extended to include Iowa City and surrounding communities, regardless of proximity to the UI campus, allowing borrowers to receive materials at home. This option remains in effect. Items belonging to Special Collections and Archives and vinyl records from the Rita Benton Music Library can also be requested through the Aeon system, though they can’t be checked out.

“I think the scale of what we do out here surprises people. Even after the day-to-day tasks are done, we’re never without stuff to do.”
Madde Hoberg

The UI Libraries Annex is a vital resource, and its collection has room to grow. Other Iowa institutions have taken notice. Negotiations are in the works to collaborate with Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa, making materials from the Annex available for borrowers from any of the three institutions.

So much of the work that goes into maintaining an efficient library system is accomplished quietly, behind the scenes—and in this case, at an off-site location. Halterman-Dess and Hoberg happened upon this area of librarianship by coincidence, but they both expressed gratitude for the paths their careers have taken. Hoberg describes it as “satisfying and meaningful” work. Halterman-Dess agrees.

“As I often say, I’m pretty sure nobody plans to go into library storage work. There’s almost certainly no coursework that’s tailored directly to it,” says Halterman-Dess. But, she added, that’s part of what makes it so rewarding. “It’s very fulfilling to be able to work with so many other Libraries staff across the many departments and branches. I feel like we really manage to harness our efforts and synergize very well.”

New Big Ten Open Books First Collection provides open access to scholarly monographs

The university librarians of the Big Ten Academic Alliance have launched the Big Ten Open Books project, a collaboration between the university presses and libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

The first 100-title collection centered on gender and sexuality studies is now published. The works included in the collection have all been previously published in print by the partnering university presses and are now being made openly available in digital form to read and reuse at no cost.

This collection has established a distinctive model for unified, open-access publishing of scholarly monographs. It creates open content that is immediately and universally available, on open infrastructure, Fulcrum, hosted by the University of Michigan, using open distribution models (including Project MUSE, JSTOR, and OAPEN) to envision a robust programmatic future for open monograph publishing. This work is aligned with the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s development of the BIG Collection’s ambition of uniting the collections of the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and is supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge program. The partner presses are Indiana University Press, Michigan State University Press, Northwestern University Press, Purdue University Press, University of Michigan Press, and University of Wisconsin Press.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance continues its advocacy for a sustainable and open ecosystem of publication. Collectively, member institutions’ more than 50,000 faculty are supported by over $11 billion in research funding, and each has invested significantly in the BTAA’s capacity to further the research mission by advancing public knowledge through open publishing. Together, the BTAA produce roughly 15% of the research publications in the United States.

About the Big Ten Academic Alliance

The Big Ten Academic Alliance is the nation’s preeminent model for effective collaboration among research universities. For more than half a century, these world-class institutions have advanced their academic missions, generated unique opportunities for students and faculty, and served the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources, and collaborating on innovative programs. Governed and funded by the provosts of the member universities, Big Ten Academic Alliance mandates are coordinated by a staff from its Champaign, Illinois headquarters. The 15 world-class libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance members include Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Chicago.

Virtual New Book Display – July 26, 2023

Welcome to the University of Iowa Libraries’ virtual New Book Shelf. Here we will present new titles for you to browse and check out. Titles listed here will be monographs published in the current year. If you see a title you would like to borrow, please click the link below the item and sign in with your Hawk ID and Password to request a loan.

Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry

We treasure our greatest poetry, Brad Leithauser reminds us in these pages, “not for its what but its how.” In chapters on everything from iambic pentameter to how stanzas are put together to “rhyme and the way we really talk,” Leithauser takes a deep dive into that how—the very architecture of poetry. He explains how meter and rhyme work in fruitful opposition (“Meter is prospective; rhyme is retrospective”); how the weirdnesses of spelling in English are a boon to the poet; why an off rhyme will often succeed where a perfect rhyme would not; why Shakespeare and Frost can sound so similar, despite the centuries separating them. And Leithauser is just as likely to invoke Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, or Boz Scaggs as he is Chaucer or Milton, Bishop or Swenson, providing enlightening play-by-plays of their memorable lines.

Hereis both an indispensable learning tool and a delightful journey into the art of the poem—a chance for new poets and readers of poetry to grasp the fundamentals, and for experienced poets and readers to rediscover excellent works in all their fascinating detail.

Portions of this book have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847654380002771

The Ghost Dancers: A Novel

Adrian C. Louis’s previously unpublished early novel has given us “the unsayable said” of the Native American reservation. A realistic look at reservation life, The Ghost Dancers explores—very candidly—many issues, including tribal differences, “urban Indians” versus “rez Indians,” relationships among Blacks, Whites, and Indians, police tactics on and off the rez, pipe ceremonies and sweat-lodge ceremonies, alcoholism and violence on the rez, visitations of the supernatural, poetry and popular music, the Sixties and the Vietnam War, the aims and responsibilities of journalism, and, most prominently, interracial sexual relationships. Readers familiar with Louis’s life and other works will note interesting connections between the protagonist, Bean, and Louis himself, as well as a connection between The Ghost Dancers and other Louis writings—especially his sensational novel Skins.

It’s 1988, and Lyman “Bean” Wilson, a Nevada Indian and middle-aged professor of journalism at Lakota University in South Dakota, is reassessing his life. Although Bean is the great-grandson of Wovoka, the Paiute leader who initiated the Ghost Dance religion, he is not a full-blood Indian and he endures the scorn of the Pine Ridge Sioux, whose definition of Indian identity is much narrower. A man with many flaws, Bean wrestles with his own worst urges, his usually ineffectual efforts to help his family, and his determination to establish his identity as an Indian. The result is a string of family reconnections, sexual adventures, crises at work, pipe and sweat-lodge ceremonies, and—through his membership in the secret Ghost Dancers Society—political activism, culminating in a successful plot to blow the nose off George Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore.

Quintessentially Louis, this raw, angry, at times comical, at times heartbreaking novel provides an unflinching look at reservation life and serves as an unyielding tribute to a generation without many choices.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847651350002771

533 Days (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Though a tireless explorer of distant cultures, Cees Nooteboom has been returning for more than forty years to the Spanish island of Menorca. It is in his house on this “island of the wind,” with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of writing take place. The result is neither a diary nor a set of movements of the soul organized by dates but rather a “book of days,” with Nooteboom’s observations about what is immediately around him, his love for Menorca, and his thoughts on the world, on life and death, on literature and oblivion. Every impression opens windows onto vast horizons: The Divine Comedy and the books it generated, Borges’s contempt for Gombrowicz, the death of David Bowie, the endless flight of the Voyagers, the repetition of history as tragedy but never as farce. Nooteboom resists the noise of current events yet he must return to them several times, skeptically contemplating the threat of a disintegrating Europe. Reading 533 Days is like having a conversation with an extraordinary mind.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/18gddib/TN_cdi_proquest_journals_212307520

What Storm, What Thunder

At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince.

Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster——Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for a beautiful call girl; Sonia and her business partner, Dieudonné, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; Didier, an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; Sara, a mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, Olivier, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son, Jonas, who haunts them both; and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all. Artfully weaving together these lives, this gripping story gives witness to the desolation wreaked by nature and by man.

Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting, What Storm, What Thunder is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and——at the same time——an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847585510002771

Fashioning Spanish Cinema: Costume, Identity, and Stardom

Costume design is a crucial, but frequently overlooked, aspect of film that fosters an appreciation of the diverse ways in which film and fashion enrich each other. These influential industries offer representations of ideas, values, and beliefs that shape and construct cultural identities. In Fashioning Spanish Cinema, Jorge Pérez analyses the use of clothing and fashion as costumes within Spanish cinema, paying particular attention to the significance of those costumes in relation to the visual styles and the narratives of the films. The author examines the links between costume analysis and other fields and theoretical frameworks such as fashion studies, the history of dress, celebrity studies, and gender and feminist studies.

Fashioning Spanish Cinema looks at instances in which costumes are essential to shaping the public image of stars, such as Conchita Montenegro, Sara Montiel, Victoria Abril, and Penélope Cruz. Focusing on examples in which costumes have discursive autonomy, it explores how costumes engage with broader issues of identity and, relatedly, how costumes impact everyday practices and fashion trends beyond cinema. Drawing on case studies from multiple periods, films by contemporary directors and genres, and red-carpet events such as the Oscars and Goya Awards, Fashioning Spanish Cinema contributes a pivotal Spanish perspective to expanding interdisciplinary work on the intersections between film and fashion.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/18gddib/TN_cdi_crossref_primary_10_1353_hsf_2022_0019

Triumph Over Containment: American Films in the 1950’s

The long 1950s, which extend back to the early postwar period and forward into the early 1960s, were a period of “containment culture” in America, as the media worked to reinforce traditional family values and suspected communist sympathizers were blacklisted from the entertainment industry. Yet some brave filmmakers and actors still challenged the status quo to produce indelible and imaginative work that delivered uncomfortable truths to Cold War audiences.

Triumph Over Containment offers an uncompromising look at some of the era’s greatest films and directors, from household names like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick to lesser-known iconoclasts like Samuel Fuller and Ida Lupino. Taking in everything from The Thing from Another World (1951) to Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), acclaimed film scholar Robert P. Kolker scours a variety of different genres to find pockets of resistance to the repressive and oppressive norms of Cold War culture. He devotes special attention to two quintessential 1950s genres—the melodrama and the science fiction film—that might seem like polar opposites, but each offered pointed responses to containment culture.

This book takes a fresh look at such directors as Nicholas Ray, John Ford, and Orson Welles, while giving readers a new appreciation for the depth and artistry of 1950s Hollywood films.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21841061280002771

The Fugitivities

Like most recent college graduates, Jonah Winters is unsure of what’s next. A young black American raised in France and living in New York City, he tries on a couple of careers only to find that nothing feels right. And as Jonah struggles to envision his future, he feels pressured by his friends and family to put the struggles of his community before his search for self.

But then a chance encounter with an ex-NBA player with his own regrets, inspires Jonah to take his life into his own hands. Deciding to leave the country entirely, he sets off for Brazil. And as he makes and breaks friendships on the way, reflects on his past relationships, and learns to rely on himself, Jonah slowly forms an understanding of self, community, and freedom that is rarely afforded to young black men.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847638120002771

Mother Daughter Widow Wife

Wendy Doe is a woman with no past and no future. Without any memory of who she is, she’s diagnosed with dissociative fugue, a temporary amnesia that could lift at any moment—or never at all—and invited by Dr. Benjamin Strauss to submit herself for experimental observation at his Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research. With few better options, Wendy feels she has no choice.

To Dr. Strauss, Wendy is a female body, subject to his investigation and control. To Strauss’s ambitious student, Lizzie Epstein, she’s an object of fascination, a mirror of Lizzie’s own desires, and an invitation to wonder: once a woman is untethered from all past and present obligations of womanhood, who is she allowed to become?

To Alice, the daughter she left behind, Wendy Doe is an absence so present it threatens to tear Alice’s world apart. Through their attempts to untangle Wendy’s identity—as well as her struggle to construct a new self—Wasserman has crafted an “artful meditation on memory and identity” (The New York Times Book Review) and a journey of discovery, reckoning, and reclamation. “A timely examination of memory, womanhood and power,” (Time) Mother Daughter Widow Wife will leave you “utterly riveted” (BuzzFeed).

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847654030002771

Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020

For acclaimed British-Guyanese writer Fred D’Aguiar, 2020 was a year of personal and global crisis. The world around him was shattered by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States, California burned, and D’Aguiar was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

Year of Plagues is an intimate, multifaceted exploration of these seismic events. Combining personal reminiscence and philosophy, D’Aguiar confronts profound questions about the purpose of pursuing a life of writing and teaching in the face of overwhelming upheavals; the imaginative and artistic strategies a writer can bring to bear as his sense of self and community are severely tested; and the quest for strength and solace necessary to help forge a better future. Drawn from two cultural perspectives—his Caribbean upbringing and his American lifestyle—D’Aguiar’s beautiful and challenging memoir is a paean of resistance to despotic authority and life-threatening disease.

In his first work of nonfiction, D’Aguiar subverts the traditional memoir with highly charged language that shifts from the lyrical to the quotidian, from the metaphysical to the personal. While his experience could not be darker, its rendering is tinged with light and joy, captured in prose that unfolds in wonderful, unexpected ways. Both tender and ferocious, Year of Plagues is a harrowing yet uplifting genre-bending memoir of existence, protest, and survival.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847653440002771

The Hummingbird

Marco Carrera is “the hummingbird,” a man with an almost supernatural ability to remain still amid the chaos of an ever-changing world. Though his life is rife with emotional challenges—suffering the death of his sister and the absence of his brother; caring for his elderly parents; raising his granddaughter when her mother, Marco’s own child, is no longer capable; loving an enigmatic woman—Marco carries on with a noble stoicism that belies an intensity for living. As the years pass and the arc of his life bends, Marco finds himself filled with joy for the future as the baton passes from him to the next generation.

A beautiful and compelling journey through time told in myriad narrative styles, The Hummingbird is a story of suffering, happiness, loss, love, and hope—of a man who embodies the quiet heroism that defines daily life for countless ordinary folk. A thrilling novel about the need to look to the future with hope and live with intensity to the very end, Sandro Veronesi’s masterpiece—eminently readable, rich in insight, and filled with interesting twists and revelations—is a portrait of human existence, the vicissitudes and vagaries that propel and ultimately define us.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21844724240002771

Virtual New Book Display – July 19, 2023

The Faces: A Novel

From Tove Ditlevsen, the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, comes The Faces, a searing, haunting novel of a woman on the edge, portrayed with all the vividness of lived experience.

Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children’s book writer and married mother of three, is increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and voices. She is convinced that her husband, already extravagantly unfaithful, will leave her. Most of all, she is scared that she will never write again.

Yet as she descends into a world of pills and hospitals, she begins to wonder—is insanity really something to be feared, or does it bring a kind of freedom?

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21848772600002771

A Strange Woman: A Novel

The pioneering debut novel by one of Turkey’s most radical authors, originally published in the 1970s, tells the story of an aspiring intellectual in a complex, modernizing country.

Erbil’s groundbreaking coming-of-age novel, nominated for the Nobel upon original release, follows a young woman and aspiring poet in Turkey. Nermin frequents Istanbul’s coffeehouses and underground readings, but is torn between the creative, anarchist youth culture of Turkey’s capital and her parents, members of the old cultural guard who are wary of Nermin’s turn toward secularism.

In four parts, A Strange Woman narrates the past and present of a complicated Turkish family through the eyes of each of its members. This rebellious, avant-garde novel tackles sexuality, psychology, and history through the lens of a modernizing 20th-century Turkey. Deep Vellum brings this long-awaited translation of the debut novel by a trailblazing feminist voice to US readers.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21848503830002771

The Heap: A Novel

Standing nearly five hundred stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap. In exchange for digging gear, a rehabilitated bicycle, and a small living stipend, a vast community of Dig Hands removes debris, trash, and bodies from the building’s mountainous remains, which span twenty acres of unincorporated desert land.

Orville Anders burrows into the bowels of the Heap to find his brother Bernard, the beloved radio DJ of Los Verticalés, who is alive and miraculously broadcasting somewhere under the massive rubble. For months, Orville has lived in a sea of campers that surrounds the Heap, working tirelessly to free Bernard—the only known survivor of the imploded city—whom he speaks to every evening, calling into his radio show.

The brothers’ conversations are a ratings bonanza, and the station’s parent company, Sundial Media, wants to boost its profits by having Orville slyly drop brand names into his nightly talks with Bernard. When Orville refuses, his access to Bernard is suddenly cut off, but strangely, he continues to hear his own voice over the airwaves, casually shilling products as “he” converses with Bernard.

What follows is an imaginative and darkly hilarious story of conspiracy, revenge, and the strange life and death of Los Verticalés that both captures the wonderful weirdness of community and the bonds that tie us together.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847651610002771

In His Own Image: A Novel

From Goncourt Prize–winning author Jérôme Ferrari, a bewitching story of passion, death, and love, and a powerful reflection on the relationship between art and reality

Born in a small town in Corsican countryside, Antonia grows up in a place of deeply-rooted traditions and strong family ties. When she’s fourteen, her uncle, a priest, gives her a camera—igniting a passion that will prompt her to become a photojournalist.

Over two decades later, Antonia is walking around the port of Calvi when she runs into Dragan, a soldier whom she had met when she was reporting on the war in the former Yugoslavia. The two spend the night in deep conversation, reminiscing about their experience of the conflict. Shortly after saying goodbye, as she drives home Antonia loses control of her car, plunges off a cliff and is killed instantly. Tasked with officiating his niece’s funeral, Antonia’s uncle reflects on her life and legacy, and on the profound questions they beg about ambition and doubt, passion and guilt, representation and reality.

Wide in scope but rich in detail, restrained yet deeply moving, In His Own Image masterly weaves together the story of an individual life with universal themes that resonate across time and space.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21844943600002771

The Plague: A Novel

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation, and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr. Rieux, resist the terror.

An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France’s suffering under the Nazi occupation, as well as a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence. In this fresh yet careful translation, award-winning translator Laura Marris breathes new life into Albert Camus’s ever-resonant tale. Restoring the restrained lyricism of the original French text, and liberating it from the archaisms and assumptions of the previous English translation, Marris grants English readers the closest access we have ever had to the meaning and searing beauty of The Plague.

This updated edition promises to add relevance and urgency to a classic novel of twentieth-century literature.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21840318110002771

Quiet Places: Collected Essays

A career-spanning collection of essays by Nobel laureate Peter Handke, featuring two new works never before published in English

Quiet Places brings together Peter Handke’s forays into the border regions of life and story, upending the distinction between literature and the literary essay. Proceeding from the specificity of place (the mountains of Carinthia and Spain, the hinterlands of Paris) to specific objects (the jukebox, the boletus mushroom) to the irreducible particularity of our moods and mental impressions, these works—each a novella in its own right—offer rare insight into the affinities that can develop between a storyteller and the unlikeliest of subjects. Here, Handke posits a reevaluation of the possibilities and proper concerns of literature in a style unmistakably his own.

This collection unites the three essays from The Jukebox with two new works: “Essay on a Mushroom Maniac,” the story of a friend’s descent to and ascent from the depths of obsession, and “Essay on Quiet Places,” a memoiristic tour d’horizon of bathrooms and their place in Handke’s life and work. Featuring masterful translations by Krishna Winston and Ralph Manheim, this collection encapsulates the oeuvre of one of our greatest living writers.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21848092940002771

Harrow: A Novel

In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead,the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic.

“She practices … camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review

Khristen is a teenager who,her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.”

In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”?

Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21844003720002771

A Passage North: A Novel

A Passage North begins with a message from out of the blue: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has died under unexpected circumstances—found at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an impassioned yet aloof activist Krishnan fell in love with years before while living in Delhi, stirring old memories and desires from a world he left behind.

As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for Rani’s funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, as well as an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s thirty-year civil war, this procession to a pyre “at the end of the earth” lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek.

Written with precision and grace, Anuk Arudpragasam’s masterful novel is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation, and a poignant memorial for those lost and those still living.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/18gddib/TN_cdi_crossref_primary_10_1353_wlt_2022_0069

Sorrowland: A Novel

Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly and more!

A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction.

Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future—outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of Gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire nations. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847636100002771

Not Everybody Lives The Same Way: A Novel

Paul Hansen is in prison. He’s been in this prison on the outskirts of Montreal for a couple of years now, sharing a cell with a murderous Hells Angel who often reminds Paul that he could kill him at any moment. What did Paul do to end up here? And why does he jeopardize his life and release by refusing to show remorse?

Before prison, there were his parents. There were his friends at the Excelsior, the luxury apartment complex where Paul worked as caretaker as well as restorer of souls and comforter of the afflicted. And there was his partner, Winona, an intrepid seaplane pilot, and their beloved dog, Nouk. Many of those closest to him are gone now, but Paul still talks to them; they appear in his dreams and as ghosts in his cell.

From France in the sixties to the asbestos mines of Québec, from the sand dunes of the peninsula where the Baltic connects to the North Sea to the wild lakes and mountains of Canada, Jean-Paul Dubois’s extraordinary novel and winner of the Prix Goncourt Not Everybody Lives the Same Way, follows this man, Paul Hansen, as he reviews his life. A life of equilibrium, it has given Paul both tragedy and gifts––that is, until the moment when fate presents him with someone capable of breaking his balance. Not Everybody Lives the Same Way is a powerfully original and unusual novel. Masterfully translated by David Homel and brilliantly animated by Jean-Paul Dubois’s keen feeling for humanity and intense revolt against all forms of injustice, it asks the question: What does it takes to live a dignified life?

https://search.lib.uiowa.edu/permalink/f/9i2ftm/01IOWA_ALMA21847173120002771

Virtual New Book Display – July 12, 2023

Welcome to the University of Iowa Libraries’ virtual New Book Shelf. Here we will present new titles for you to browse and check out. Titles listed here will be monographs published in the current year. If you see a title you would like to borrow, please click the link below the book’s summary and sign in with your Hawk ID and Password to request a loan.

THINGS THEY LOST

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Vogue and Vulture.

“Alternately whimsical, sweet, and dark,” this astonishing debut novel about a lonely girl waiting for her mother “brim[s] with uncompromisingly African magical realism” (New York Times).

Ayosa is a wandering spirit—joyous, exuberant, filled to the brim with longing. Her only companions in her grandmother’s crumbling house are as lonely as Ayosa herself: the ghostly Fatumas, whose eyes are the size of bay windows, who teach her to dance and wail at the death news; the Jolly-Annas, cruel birds who cover their solitude with spiteful laughter; the milkman, who never greets Ayosa and whose milk tastes of mud; and Sindano, the kind owner of a café no one ever visits. Unexpectedly, miraculously, one day Ayosa finds a friend. Yet she is always fixed on her beautiful mama, Nabumbo Promise: a mysterious and aloof photographer, she comes and goes as she pleases, with no apology or warning.

Set at the intersection of the spirit world and the human one, Things They Lost sets out a rich and magical vision of “girlhood as a time of complexity, laced with unparalleled creativity and expansion” (Vogue). Heartbreaking, elegant, and written in “giddily exuberant prose” (Financial Times), it’s a story about connection, coming-of-age, and the dizzying dualities of love at its most intoxicating and all-encompassing.

THE HARD CROWD

From a writer celebrated for her “chops, ambition, and killer instinct” (John Powers, Fresh Air), a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture.

Rachel Kushner has established herself as “the most vital and interesting American novelist working today” (The Millions) and as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd, she gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times—and illuminates the themes and real-life experiences that inform her fiction.

In 20 razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.

These pieces, new and old, are electric, vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers. “Kushner writes with startling detail, imagination, and gallows humor,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly, and, from Paula McLain in the Wall Street Journal: “The authority and precision of Kushner’s writing is impressive, but it’s the gorgeous ferocity that will stick with me.”

THE FIVE WOUNDS

The Five Wounds is a miraculous debut novel from a writer whose stories have been hailed as “legitimate masterpieces” (New York Times).

It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path.

Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda’s uncle and keeper of the family’s history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo, who often solves his problems with a beer in his hand, doesn’t think he can live up to.

Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the final page, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.

AMERICAN GOSPEL

Radically personal and quintessentially American, an intimate drama at the heart of an apocalyptic vision.

On a small farm beside a lake in Minnesota’s north woods an old man is waiting for the Rapture, which God has told him will happen in two weeks, on August 19, 1974. When word gets out, Last Days Ranch becomes ground zero for The End, drawing zealots, curiosity seekers, and reporters—among them the prophet’s son, a skeptical New York writer suddenly caught between his overbearing father and the news story of a lifetime. Into the mix comes Melanie Magnus, a glamorous actress who has old allegiances to both father and son. Meanwhile, Nixon’s resignation has transfixed the nation.

Writing with clear compassion and gentle wit, Lin Enger draws us into these disparate yet inextricably linked lives, each enacting a part in a drama forever being replayed and together moving toward a conclusion that will take all of them—and us—by surprise. Set during a time that resonates with our own tension-filled moment, American Gospel cuts close to the battles occurring within ourselves and for the soul of the nation, and in doing so radiates light on a dark strain in America’s psyche, when the false security of dogma competes with the risky tumult of freedom.

AN ORDINARY WONDER

An extraordinary literary debut about a Nigerian boy’s secret intersex identity and his desire to live as a girl.

Oto leaves for boarding school with one plan: excel and escape his cruel home. Falling in love with his roommate was certainly not on the agenda, but fear and shame force him to hide his love and true self.

Back home, weighed down by the expectations of their wealthy and powerful family, the love of Oto’s twin sister wavers and, as their world begins to crumble around them, Oto must make drastic choices that will alter the family’s lives for ever.

Richly imagined with art, proverbs and folk tales, this moving and modern novel follows Oto through life at home and at boarding school in Nigeria, through the heartbreak of living as a boy despite their profound belief they are a girl, and through a hunger for freedom that only a new life in the United States can offer.

An Ordinary Wonder is a powerful coming-of-age story that explores complex desires as well as challenges of family, identity, gender, and culture, and what it means to feel whole.

I LOVE YOU BUT I’VE CHOSEN DARKNESS

A darkly funny, soul-rending novel of love in an epoch of collapse—one woman’s furious revisiting of family, marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.

Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. a) As much as I ever did. b) Not quite as much now. c) Not so much now. d) Not at all. Leaving behind her husband and their baby daughter, a writer gets on a flight for a speaking engagement in Reno, not carrying much besides a breast pump and a spiraling case of postpartum depression. Her temporary escape from domestic duties and an opportunity to reconnect with old friends mutates into an extended romp away from the confines of marriage and motherhood, and a seemingly bottomless descent into the past. Deep in the Mojave Desert where she grew up, she meets her ghosts at every turn: the first love whose self-destruction still haunts her; her father, a member of the most famous cult in American history; her mother, whose native spark gutters with every passing year. She can’t go back in time to make any of it right, but what exactly is her way forward? Alone in the wilderness, at last she begins to make herself at home in the world.

Bold, tender, and often hilarious, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness reaffirms Watkins as one of the signal writers of our time.

MONARCH

The cryptic worlds of Hanna and Stranger Things mingle with the dark humor of Dare Me in this debut novel about a teen beauty queen who discovers she’s been a sleeper agent in a deep-state government program.

After waking up with a strange taste in her mouth and mysterious bruises, former child pageant star Jessica Clink unwittingly begins an investigation into a nefarious deep state underworld. Equipped with the eccentric education of her father, Dr. Clink (a professor of Boredom Studies and the founder of an elite study group known as the Devil’s Workshop), Jessica uncovers a disquieting connection between her former life as a beauty queen and an offshoot of Project MKUltra known as MONARCH.

As Jessica moves closer to the truth, she begins to suspect the involvement of everyone around her, including her own mother, Grethe (a Norwegian pageant queen turned occult American wellness guru for suburban housewives). With the help of Christine (her black-lipsticked riot grrrl babysitter and confidante), Jessica sets out to take down Project MONARCH. More importantly, she must discover if her first love, fellow teen queen Veronica Marshall, was genuine or yet another deep state plant.

Merging iconic true crime stories of the ’90s (Lorena Bobbitt, Nicole Brown Simpson, and JonBenét Ramsey) with theories of human consciousness, folklore, and a perennial cultural fixation with dead girls, MONARCH questions the shadow sides of self-concept: Who are you if you don’t know yourself?

Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo

A superbly crafted study of Hunter S. Thompson’s literary formation, achievement, and continuing relevance.

Savage Journey is a “supremely crafted” study of Hunter S. Thompson’s literary formation and achievement. Focusing on Thompson’s influences, development, and unique model of authorship, Savage Journey argues that his literary formation was largely a San Francisco story. During the 1960s, Thompson rode with the Hell’s Angels, explored the San Francisco counterculture, and met talented editors who shared his dissatisfaction with mainstream journalism. Peter Richardson traces Thompson’s transition during this time from New Journalist to cofounder of Gonzo journalism. He also endorses Thompson’s later claim that he was one of the best writers using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon. Although Thompson’s political commentary was often hyperbolic, Richardson shows that much of it was also prophetic.

Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more than a decade after his death, Thompson’s celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. This book refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson’s influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. It concludes that Thompson was not only a gifted journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.

THE PULL OF THE STARS

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders—Dr. Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

THE LIVES OF LITERATURE

A passionate, wry, and personal book about how the greatest works of literature illuminate our lives.

Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor’s life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.

As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person—and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature’s knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even history: by entering these characters’ lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge—and come to understand its cost.

In The Lives of Literature, a master writer and teacher shares his love of the books that he has taught and been taught by, showing us that literature matters because we never stop discovering who we are.

Theatre Without Borders records now available to researchers

Roberta Levitow, director of TWB, with materials from the collection.

The records of Theatre Without Borders (TWB), donated to the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives in 2021, are now open for research. The collection contains seven linear feet of administrative files, conference materials, subject files on theatre arts activities around the world, scripts, and more dating from 1983 to 2020. Theatre Without Borders is a global, all-volunteer, grassroots, virtual community that shares information and builds connections between individuals and institutions interested in international theatre and performance exchange.

The University of Iowa’s Department of Theatre Arts is pleased to have the collection available to students enrolled in the Social Justice and Performing Arts Certificate that launched in fall 2022. The department regularly hosts artists from TWB, enriching student experience with the opportunity to discuss international artistic collaboration with active practitioners. Department Chair Mary Beth Easley notes that, “to have access to the work of Theatre Without Borders and to build relationships with their affiliated artists expands the world view of our students and will empower members of our university body and our broader community to imagine new possibilities, to believe that their own stories are worth living and re-telling.”

How-To: Uploading Your Datasets into IRO

Iowa Research Online (IRO) is the institutional repository managed by the University of Iowa Libraries for UI researchers to use for preserving and providing open access to data, code, and other research and creative scholarship.

These videos provide a quick introduction to four steps for sharing research data via IRO.

For more information, see our web pages about using IRO for research data, and how to provide documentation and metadata that will help others find and understand your data.

Step 1: Upload the data files

Step 2: Describe Your Dataset

Step 3: Specify Information

Step 4: Acknowledge Grant Funding

Videos produced by Nancy Henke, SLIS ’23

Announcing the 2024 OpenHawks OER Grant Recipients

The University Libraries has awarded 14 OpenHawks grants for the development of open educational resources (OER). OpenHawks is a campus-wide grant program that funds faculty efforts to replace or avoid high-cost textbooks with OERs for enhanced student success.

The projects, which are set to be completed in summer 2024, will save UI students nearly $200,000 in the first year alone. These funded OER projects, which were selected through a competitive application process, will benefit students in a wide range of disciplines, including Spanish language learning, law, otolaryngology, dentistry, finance, teaching and learning, social work, library and information science, Chinese language learning, and more.

The next call for proposals will be in spring 2024. For more information, visit www.lib.uiowa.edu/openhawks.

You can read more about each project below.

Rachel Klevar, OER Creation Grant

Semillas II: An Elementary Spanish II OER Textbook

Klevar will develop the second in a sequence of OER Spanish language textbooks that all sections of Elementary Spanish classes at the University of Iowa will use. This project will benefit students by providing educational savings and increasing the quality of Spanish language learning.

Mark McDermott, Travis Henderson, and Ann Browning, OER Creation Grant

Developing an OER for Secondary Orientation and Classroom Management

This team will design an OER specifically for a new course. It will allow instructors to provide a clear repository of the specific, updated and relevant resources, all in one source, for the concepts they encounter in class and provide the flexibility to add and revise these resources as course development continues.

Jason Rantanen, OER Creation Grant

Introduction to Intellectual Property: An Integrated Approach

Rantanen will develop an integrated open educational resource for teaching intellectual property law. The OER will consist of a written text, video lectures, knowledge assessment quizzes, and problem sets for in-class use. The coursebook and quizzes will be made available for free via Pressbooks, while the videos will be published on a publicly accessible platform and integrated into the Pressbooks site.

Michelle Higgins and Rustin Kashani, OER Creation Grant

OpenOto: Open-source, Online Dissection Courses for Otolaryngologists

Higgins and Kashani will create a single massive open online temporal bone dissection course that helps trainees learn otology through a series of videos showing human ear anatomy and surgical approaches. The MOOC will replace learners’ cost of enrollment in expensive commercial simulation courses.

Erica Teixeira, OER Creation Grant

Concise Dental Materials- Iowa OER

Teixeira’s objective is to develop an open and concise dental materials book. Currently, most open sources of dental materials books are a compilation of different research papers that do not address foundational concepts of applied materials science. This OER will fill these gaps.

Bonnie Sunstein and Jessica Kraemer, OER Creation Grant

Teaching Nonfiction Writing Pressbooks Resource

Sunstein and Kraemer will work with the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio to create a resource that can serve as a pillar of the Teaching Nonfiction curriculum. It will make existing but scattered resources searchable so future teaching assistants, students, and outside scholars can access pertinent materials reliably as they build curriculum. This resource will be a living document for the program, to be updated annually.

John Lewis and Yash Diwate, Course Redesign Grant

Introduction to Quantitative Finance Using Python

Lewis and Diwate plan to provide a comprehensive guide in practical quantitative techniques which will not require supplemental texts. The material will be an expansion of material used by John Lewis in his FIN 4340, 9160, 9200 and 9350 classes. The book will include the quantitative material for each course.

Julia Kleinschmit, Course Redesign Grant

Social Work Leadership Practice: Policy Analysis and Advocacy for Programs, Organizations, and Communities

Kleinschmit will create an OER to emphasize leadership skill development, requiring students to dig into current issues and develop policy analysis and advocacy projects and products that will leave them with abilities they can take beyond the course and into communities they serve. This OER will support a new required course, in which social work graduate students will develop policy analysis skills to understand how policies impact individuals, communities, and organizations.

Stephen Cummings, Course Redesign Grant

Death and Dying Course Redesign

Cummings will redesign an online class with OER materials to cover key theories, case studies, interactive learning modules. This will require reformatting modules that used to rely on lengthy text passages for surveys on principle theories, professional engagement, and various patient populations.

Jennifer Burek Pierce and Nancy Henke, Course Redesign Grant

Librarians Learning Together: Developing an OER Introductory Library Science Textbook

Pierce and Henke will begin developing an OER textbook for first semester library science students in a core course, generating a minimum of four chapters, so that issues in this dynamic field can be adequately addressed.

Huiqiang Zheng, Support Materials Grant

Interactive Activities for Chinese Learning

Zheng will create OER micro videos recordings of every single sound and common combinations in Chinese pronunciation, which will lower the anxiety of learners and also provide models in learning pronunciation. She will also create user-friendly interactive pre-lesson and post-lesson activities and games. These activities will replace a commercial workbook.

Jared Stiles, Support Materials Grant

A Virtual Experience in Radiation Therapy

This grant continues a 2023 OER Creation Grant by Stiles and Emily Heithoff. This project will add virtual reality videos simulating the localization and treatment procedures described in the OER content. The videos influence on students understanding of the content will be tremendous.

Sruti Prathivadhi-Bhayankaram, Boulos Nassar, and Shareef Mansour, Support Materials Grant

POCUS Anki: A Consolidated Resource for Point-of-Care-Ultrasound

Grantees will consolidate information and design flashcards on the topics of cardiac ultrasound, lung ultrasound, and abdominal ultrasound, as well as methods to measure hemodynamics and the volume status of patients. These flashcards will review the anatomy, technique, and pathologies for medical students. The project will be published under a Creative Commons license on Eyerounds.org.

Erica Kaldenberg and William Lloyd, Jr., OER Adoption Grant

Secrets to College Success

Kaldenberg and Lloyd will be using College Success, the OpenStax OER by Amy Baldwin in their first-year seminar. According to their proposal, the text aligns perfectly with the grantees’ course objectives.

John Martin Rare Book Room expanding, receiving new reading room

Changes are coming to the John Martin Rare Book Room (JMRBR) in the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences that will provide researchers more access to books and space for hosting classes and events.

anatomical drawing of an arm — William Cowper’s *The anatomy of humane bodies* (1698) is one of the distinctive items in the JMRBR collection that will benefit from these improvements.

A new, separate reading room will be constructed in the area just outside of the current JMRBR as part of a larger project to renovate the fourth floor of the library. The current JMRBR will be converted to a shelving space, helping to maintain the security and preservation of all JMRBR materials.

Access to the JMRBR collection will be limited during the remodel, but Curator Damien Ihrig will be available to assist researchers and instructors with their needs. Requests to use material will be considered on a case-by-case basis. The project is expected to begin in June 2023, with completion anticipated during spring 2024.

Additional work on the fourth floor as part of the larger area remodel project is moving forward, with much needed updates being made to individual studies as well as the open study areas. To accommodate the change, print books published before 2010 have been moved to the Library Annex, where they can be easily and quickly retrieved.

The fourth floor improvements are made possible by a generous grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust. The JMRBR improvements are made possible with support from the Friends of the UI Libraries.

Hardin Library is also undergoing a refresh in other areas and remodeled restrooms are now available on the third and fourth floors of the building near the elevators. In addition, work has started on the 24-hour study restrooms and progress is being made on the first and second floor restrooms.