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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alice's Tulips'
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Big Thaw'
Don't let the title of this dry suspense novel fool you. It's very cold in January in Iowa, the setting for Donald Harstad's third outing in his series featuring Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman and his partner Hester Gorse. The only thing mild is the humor in this spare procedural, which involves the usual turf battle between the white hats (local law enforcement) and the black hats (the FBI) as a sidebar to the main plot. Instead of the mean streets and criminal underclass of urban thrillers, we get the militant extremists who frequent the vast, empty reaches of the Midwest. In this case, the black hats are onto the crazies, and the local good guy, Deputy Carl, is caught in the crossfire. The crazies want enough money to blow the heartland (who wouldn't, in January?), and to get it, they're prepared to blow up Iowa's biggest economic asset, a riverboat casino on the Mississippi. They're being manipulated by a chief crazy (or maybe an arch crazy) named Gabriel, and (naturally) the feds have been a few steps behind Gabriel for a while now. Deputy Carl is a nice guy, but irony is not his strong suit, and he's not particularly fast on the uptake, either. Eventually he does save the day in this somewhat pedestrian and slow-motion regional mystery. If you liked the movie Fargo, you'll love The Big Thaw. --Jane Adams [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Biography of a Grizzly'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blooming'
Slumber parties, swimming pools, boyfriends, lakeside summers, family holidays--Susan Allen Toth has captured it all in this delightful account of growing up in Ames, Iowa, in the 1950's. Charming, wise, funny, poignant, and true, Blooming celebrates an innocent and very American way of life. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blue Jasmine'
When twelve-year-old Seema Trivedi learns that she and her family must move from their small Indian town to Iowa City, she realizes she'll have to say good-bye to the purple-jeweled mango trees and sweet-smelling jasmine, to the monsoon rains and the bustling market. More important, she must leave behind her best friend and cousin, Raju. Everything is different in Iowa City, where Seema feels like an outsider to the language and traditions. As she begins to plant roots in the foreign soil, however, her confidence starts to bloom, and she learns she can build a bridge between two homes. With lyrical language and poignant scenes, Kashmira Sheth unearths the meaning of "home" and "family" in this tender debut novel. Kashmira Sheth's own experiences as a teenager who moved by herself from India to America inspired her to write this novel. She is a microbiologist and lives with her family in Madison, Wisconsin. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bridges of Madison County'
The legendary love story, the bestselling hardcover novel of all time, and the major motion picture starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. This is the story of Robert Kincaid, the photographer and free spirit searching for the covered bridges of Madison County, and Francesca Johnson, the farm wife waiting for fulfillment of a girlhood dream. It shows readers what it is to love and be loved so intensely that life is never the same again. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bridges of Madison County: The Film'
This is an ideal collector's item for admirers of both Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep, as well as of the novel, movie, AND covered bridges. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Buggies, Blizzards, and Babies'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Code 61'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Code Sixty-One'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Complete Prose and Poetry of William Blake'
This is a carefully edited text of the writer's chief work and selections from his lesser writings and letters without which it would be impossible to form a picture of his life's work and genius. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Discover! America's Great River Road: Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Discover!: America's Great River Road Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Discover! America's Great River Road: Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois/a Guide to the Heritage Natural History, and Recreational Resources of th'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eleven Days'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fairly Oddparents 4: Let the Games Begin'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Firegold'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gilead: A Novel'
Twenty-four years after her first novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Writing in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Marilynne Robinson's beautiful, spare, and spiritual prose allows "even the faithless reader to feel the possibility of transcendent order" Slate . In the luminous and unforgettable voice of Congregationalist minister John Ames, Gilead reveals the human condition and the often unbearable beauty of an ordinary life. Gilead is the winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Iowa Walks: 50 Strolls, Rambles, Hikes, and Treks'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Growing Up in Iowa: Reminiscences of 14 Iowa Authors'
14 Authors and their memories of growing up in Iowa. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of Iowa'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In No Time at All'
![[???]: Iowa Atlas & Gazetteer [???]: Iowa Atlas & Gazetteer](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0899333362.01._SL160_SCLZZZZZZZ__.jpg)
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Iowa Baseball Confederacy'
Gideon Clarke is a man on a quest. He is out to prove to the world, as his father tried before him, that the world-champion Chicago Cubs traveled to Onamata, Iowa, in the summer of 1908 for an exhibition game against all-stars from the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, an amateur league. The game, which was to be short, pleasant, and, the Cubs thought, one-sided, turned into a titanic battle of over two thousand innings, played mostly in the pouring rain. This game is not on the record books. No one remembers it or the Confederacy. But Gideon Clarke knows it happened, and he is determined to set the record straight. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Iowa Birds'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Iowa Inside Out'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Iowa's Archaeological Past'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Iowa's Lost Summer: The Flood of 1993'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jack Shelley and the News'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Known Dead'
Donald Harstad was an Iowa deputy sheriff for 26 years, and only retired so that he could pursue his passion for writing. His first book was a well-received police mystery, Eleven Days. The same solid foundation of experience anchors Harstad's second mystery about Iowa deputy sheriff Carl Houseman, a sharp and likable 50-year-old with weight and blood pressure problems and strong opinions on every aspect of policing.
Known Dead begins with the murder of a state narcotics agent killed on Houseman's Nation County turf while staking out a marijuana patch. Blasts of gunfire from a band of mysterious shooters take out the agent and one local smalltime dealer. Then, while various federal and state agencies wrestle for control of the case, two more Nation County cops are shot down at the farm of a local extremist with links to a large militant group. As the resourceful Houseman tries to connect the shootings and keep some of the investigation in his own office, we learn all sorts of information about guns, bullets, trajectories, stakeouts, interagency rivalries, and the eating habits of cops of all kinds--taken no doubt from the author's lively memory and imagination. --Dick Adler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Las Correcciones'
Las Correcciones / The Corrections (Spanish Edition) (View amazon detail page) ASIN: 9584203274 [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir'
From one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s
Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century1951in the middle of the United StatesDes Moines, Iowain the middle of the largest generation in American historythe baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)in his headas "The Thunderbolt Kid."
Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normalitya life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and OF his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Brysons earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.
Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America'
A travelogue by Bill Bryson is as close to a sure thing as funny books get. The Lost Continent is no exception. Following an urge to rediscover his youth (he should know better), the author leaves his native Des Moines, Iowa, in a journey that takes him across 38 states. Lucky for us, he brought a notebook.
With a razor wit and a kind heart, Bryson serves up a colorful tale of boredom, kitsch, and beauty when you least expect it. Gentler elements aside, The Lost Continent is an amusing book. Here's Bryson on the women of his native state: "I will say this, however--and it's a strange, strange thing--the teenaged daughters of these fat women are always utterly delectable ... I don't know what it is that happens to them, but it must be awful to marry one of those nubile cuties knowing that there is a time bomb ticking away in her that will at some unknown date make her bloat out into something huge and grotesque, presumably all of a sudden and without much notice, like a self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked."
Yes, Bill, but be honest: what do you really think? [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moo'
The hallowed halls of Moo University, a midwestern agricultural institution (aka "cow college"), are rife with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic one-upsmanship. In this wonderfully written and masterfully plotted novel, Jane Smiley, the prizewinning author of A Thousand Acres, offers a wickedly funny, darkly poignant comedy. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Old Orchard Farm: The Story of an Iowa Boyhood'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'One Degree of Separation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America'
Postville, Iowa (population 1,478), seems an unlikely place to find a sizable Jewish population, let alone an ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher population. It is, after all, in the heart of pork country, and the world headquarters of the Lubavitchers is far away in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. But when the Hygrade meat processing plant, just outside Postville, went belly-up, threatening the town with decline, Sholom Rubashkin bought it and turned it into a glatt kosher processing plant, complete with shochtim and a rabbinical inspectorate. By the late 1980s, "Postville had more rabbis per capita than any other city in the United States, perhaps the world."
The enterprise was a huge international success, with its kosher meats exported even to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Jewish population grew to 150, and they were rich. The town was saved, and the people were grateful. All's well that ends well? Not quite. The Hasidim kept to themselves, did things their own way, and basically had no interest in integrating into Postville. And why would they? Their laws are strict, their mission clear, their community defined by race and religion. They are not interested in watermelon socials or coffee klatches at the diner. Their little boys do not swim with their little girls, are not educated together, and do not go on play dates with goyim. Small-town Iowans, on the other hand, are very friendly. They know each other's news, they support each other's businesses, they wish each other Merry Christmas, they want you to feel at home. They don't like that the new townspeople stomp up the street hunched over, talking in a foreign language and looking straight through them when greeted. They really don't like it when one of the newcomers drives around town with a 10-foot candelabra strapped to his car playing music at full volume for eight consecutive winter nights. They don't actually know about menorahs or Hanukkah.
Into this comes secular Jew Stephen Bloom, a professor at the University of Iowa. By the time he arrived in Postville, the town was riven along religious lines. One of the townspeople was running for mayor on the sole platform of annexation of the land on which the plant stood. Rubashkin was threatening that he'd shut the plant and leave if that came to pass. Bloom closely considers both sides, and the result is a wonderful book. It is a fascinating tale of culture clash in the American heartland: the John Deere cap meets the black fur hat. It is a book about identity and community and what it means to be American. It covers all the things you aren't supposed to talk about at the dinner table--religion, politics, and even sex. It is full of suspense: Will the plant be annexed? Will the Jews leave? And it is also Bloom's exploration of his own sense of belonging. --J. Riches [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pure Nostalgia: Memories of Early Iowa'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rogues and Heroes from Iowa's Amazing Past'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s'
Following the brutal murders of two children in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1954, police, in an attempt to quell public hysteria, arrested 20 men whom the authorities never claimed had anything to do with the crimes. Labeled as sexual psychopaths under an Iowa law that lumped homosexuals together with child molesters and murderers, the men were sentenced to a mental institution until cured. Their shocking story is brought to light for the first time by award-winning journalist Neil Miller, author of Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. Shedding a harsh light on 1950s attitudes toward homosexuality, Miller's carefully researched account shows how the paranoia of the McCarthy era destroyed the lives of gay men in the American heartland. Interviews with the formerly incarcerated men, law enforcement officials, lawyers, mental hospital staff, and relatives of the murder victims provides a vivid and disturbing glimpse of a town that betrayed its own sons and a mental institution where patients provided cheap labor and shock treatment was the therapy of choice. A gripping story of murder and antigay hysteria, Sex-Crime Panic presents a dark chapter in the history of postwar America.
Marketing Plans:
Advance reader copies.
Major media targets: NPR: Morning Edition, All Things Considered.
Regional media, including Des Moines Register, Sioux City Journal, Iowa City Press Citizen, Quad City Times and others.
Neil Miller is the author of Out in the World: Gay and Lesbian Life From Buenos Aires to Bangkok, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present, and In Search of Gay America, the winner of the 1990 American Library Association prize for gay and lesbian nonfiction as well as the Lambda Literary Award. As a freelance journalist, his writing has appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Advocate, and Out. He teaches journalism and nonfiction writing at Tufts University in Medford, Massachussetts.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shoeless Joe'
W. P. Kinsella plays with both myth and fantasy in his lyrical novel, which was adapted into the enormously popular movie, Field of Dreams. It begins with the magic of a godlike voice in a cornfield, and ends with the magic of a son playing catch with the ghost of his father. In Kinsella's hands, it's all about as simple, and complex, as the object of baseball itself: coming home. Like Ring Lardner and Bernard Malamud before him, Kinsella spins baseball as backdrop and metaphor, and, like his predecessors, uses the game to tell us a little something more about who we are and what we need. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sleeping With the Enemy'
'Sara slept with the enemy but survived. She was one of the lucky ones. Any woman contemplating leaving a violent relationship would do well to read this book' - Erin Pizzey. She is a stranger in a small town. She changed her name. Her looks. Her life. All to escape the most dangerous man she ever met. Her husband. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Stones of Summer'
This book was originally published in 1972. Despite critical acclaim that compared the first-time novelist to Dylan Thomas & Mark Twain, Malcom Lowry, etc, the author of this remarkable novel were quickly forgottne by the literary world, and Down Mossman never wrote another book. More than a quarter-century after the book's 1st appearance, it becase the inspiration for the award-winning documentary film, STONE READER, and a sought-after volume in the rare book market. Out-of-print for nearly three decades and nearly impossible to find, this American epic is coming-of-age is now made available for a new generation of readers. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Thousand Acres'
Aging Larry Cook announces his intention to turn over his 1,000-acre farm--one of the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa--to his three daughters, Caroline, Ginny and Rose. A man of harsh sensibilities, he carves Caroline out of the deal because she has the nerve to be less than enthusiastic about her father's generosity. While Larry Cook deteriorates into a pathetic drunk, his daughters are left to cope with the often grim realities of life on a family farm--from battering husbands to cutthroat lenders. In this winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Smiley captures the essence of such a life with stark, painful detail. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Trails Books Great Iowa Weekend Adventures'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Treasury of Iowa Tales : Unusual, Interesting, and Little-Known Stories of Iowa'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vandemark's Folly'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'We Have All Gone Away'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Wildflowers of Iowa Woodlands'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Witch Way To Murder: An Ophelia And Abby Mystery'
Bewitched meets Murder She Wrote in this delightful new cozy mystery series featuring Ophelia Jensen, small town librarian and reluctant psychic, and her grandmother Abby, a benevolent witch. Thirty something Ophelia Jensen wants to live a quiet life as a small town librarian. She's created a comfortable existence with her kooky, colorful grandmother Abby, and if it were up to her, they could live out their days-along with Ophelia's dog Lady and cat Queenie-in peace and quiet. But, to Ophelia's dismay, she and Abby aren't a typical grandmother/granddaughter duo. She possesses psychic powers, and Abby is a kindly witch. And while Ophelia would do anything to dismiss her gift-harboring terrible guilt after her best friend was killed and she was unable to stop it-threatening events keep popping up, forcing her to tap into her powers of intuition. To make matters worse, a strange-yet devastatingly attractive-man is hanging around Ophelia's library, and no matter how many times she tells him she's sworn off men forever, he persists. Soon this handsome newcomer reveals he's following a lead on a local drug ring, and then a dead body shows up right in Abby's backyard. And much as Ophelia would like to put away her spells forever, she and Abby must use their special powers to keep themselves, and others, out of harm's way. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Las Corecciones'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'En el Camino'
Este libro fue la Biblia y el manifiesto de la generacion beat y se ha convertido en una novela de culto y en un clasico de la literatura norteamericana. Se narran aqui los viajes enloquecidos, a bordo de Cadillacs prestados y Dodges desvencijados, de un mitico hipster y un narrador. Esta es la cronica de unos protagonistas que fueron en la vida real: Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg y William Burroughs. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Le Correzioni'
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