ASTROLOGY

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Hexes nullified! Jinxes abolished! Demons banished! Adversaries outwitted! Liabilities diminished! Bad habits replaced with good habits! These are some of the glorious developments possible for you in the coming months, Cancerian. Am I exaggerating? Maybe a little. But if so, not much. In my vision of your future, you will be the embodiment of a lucky charm and a repository of blessed mojo. You are embarking on a phase when it will make logical sense to be an optimist. Can you sweep all the dross and mess out of your sphere? No, but I bet you can do at least 80 percent.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In the book *Curious Facts in the History of Insects*, Frank Cowan tells a perhaps legendary story about how mayors were selected in the medieval Swedish town of Hurdenburg. The candidates would set their chins on a table with their long beards spread out in front of them. A louse, a tiny parasitic insect, would be put in the middle of the table. Whichever beard the creature crawled to and chose as its new landing spot would reveal the man who would become the town’s new leader. I beg you not to do anything like this, Leo. The decisions you and your allies make should be grounded in good evidence and sound reason, not blind chance. And please avoid parasitical influences completely.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): I rebel against the gurus and teachers who tell us our stories are delusional indulgences that interfere with our enlightenment. I reject their insistence that our personal tales are distractions from our spiritual work. Virgo author A. S. Byatt speaks for me: “Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.” I love and honor the stories of my own destiny, and I encourage you to love and honor yours. Having said that, I will let you know that now is an excellent time to jettison the stories that feel demoralizing and draining—even as you celebrate the stories that embody your genuine beauty. For extra credit: Tell the soulful stories of your life to anyone who is receptive.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In the Mayan calendar, each of the 20 day names is associated with a natural phenomenon. The day called Kawak is paired with rainstorms. Ik’ is connected with wind and breath. Kab’an is earth, Manik’ is deer, and Chikchan is the snake. Now would be a great time for you to engage in an imaginative exercise inspired by the Mayans. Why? Because this is an ideal phase of your cycle to break up your routine, to reinvent the regular rhythm, to introduce innovations in how you experience the flow of the time. Just for fun, why not give each of the next 14 days a playful nickname or descriptor? This Friday could be Crescent Moon, for example. Saturday might be Wonderment, Sunday can be Dazzle Sweet, and Monday Good Darkness.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): From 998 till 1030, Scorpio-born leader Mahmud Ghaznavi ruled the vast Ghaznavid empire, which stretched from current-day Iran to central Asia and northwestern India. Like so many of history’s strong men, he was obsessed with military conquest. Unlike many others, though, he treasured culture and learning. You’ve heard of poet laureates? He had 400 of them. According to some tales, he rewarded one wordsmith with a mouthful of pearls. In accordance with astrological omens, I encourage you to be more like the Mahmud who loved beauty and art and less like the Mahmud who enjoyed fighting. The coming weeks will be a favorable time to fill your world with grace and elegance and magnificence.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): About 1,740 years ago, before she became a Catholic saint, Margaret of Antioch got swallowed whole by Satan, who was disguised as a dragon. Or so the old story goes. But Margaret was undaunted. There in the beast’s innards, Margaret calmly made the sign of the cross over and

By Rob Brezsny

over with her right hand. Meanwhile, the wooden cross in her left hand magically swelled to an enormous size that ruptured the beast, enabling her to escape. After that, because of her triumph, expectant mothers and women in labor regarded Margaret as their patron saint. Your upcoming test won’t be anywhere near as demanding as hers, Sagittarius, but I bet you will ace it—and ultimately garner sweet rewards.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn-born Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was an astronomer and mathematician who was an instrumental innovator in the Scientific Revolution. Among his many breakthrough accomplishments were his insights about the laws of planetary motion. Books he wrote were crucial forerunners of Isaac Newton’s theories about gravitation. But here’s an unexpected twist: Kepler was also a practicing astrologer who interpreted the charts of many people, including three emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. In the spirit of Kepler’s ability to bridge seemingly opposing perspectives, Capricorn, I invite you to be a paragon of mediation and conciliation in the coming weeks. Always be looking for ways to heal splits and forge connections. Assume you have an extraordinary power to blend elements that no one can else can.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Dear Restless Runaway: During the next 10 months, life will offer you these invitations: 1. Identify the land that excites you and stabilizes you. 2. Spend lots of relaxing time on that land. 3. Define the exact nature of the niche or situation where your talents and desires will be most gracefully expressed. 4. Take steps to create or gather the family you want. 5. Take steps to create or gather the community you want.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): I’d love you to be a deep-feeling, free-thinker in the coming weeks. I will cheer you on if you nurture your emotional intelligence as you liberate yourself from outmoded beliefs and opinions. Celebrate your precious sensitivity, dear Pisces, even as you use your fine mind to reevaluate your vision of what the future holds. It’s a perfect time to glory in rich sentiments and exult in creative ideas.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Visionary author Peter McWilliams wrote, “One of the most enjoyable aspects of solitude is doing what you want when you want to do it, with the absolute freedom to change what you’re doing at will. Solitude removes all the ‘negotiating’ we need to do when we’re with others.” I’ll add a caveat: Some of us have more to learn about enjoying solitude. We may experience it as a loss or deprivation. But here’s the good news, Aries: In the coming weeks, you will be extra inspired to cultivate the benefits that come from being alone.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The 18th-century French engineer Étienne Bottineau invented nauscopy, the art of detecting sailing ships at a great distance, well beyond the horizon. This was before the invention of radar. Bottineau said his skill was not rooted in sorcery or luck, but from his careful study of changes in the atmosphere, wind, and sea. Did you guess that Bottineau was a Taurus? Your tribe has a special capacity for arriving at seemingly magical understandings by harnessing your sensitivity to natural signals. Your intuition thrives as you closely observe the practical details of how the world works. This superpower will be at a peak in the coming weeks.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): According to a Welsh proverb, “Three fears weaken the heart: fear of the truth; fear of the devil; fear of poverty.” I suspect the first of those three is most likely to worm its way into your awareness during the coming weeks. So let’s see what we can do to diminish its power over you. Here’s one possibility: Believe me when I tell you that even if the truth’s arrival is initially disturbing or disruptive, it will ultimately be healing and liberating. It should be welcomed, not feared.

Widow7

Our New Doomsday FACEBOOK.COM/WIDOW7OFFICIAL

There were a handful of years when I had a strange fixation on the post-grunge band Breaking Benjamin. Strange only because my general taste would grow to bend toward alternative and folk music, though a selection of Breaking Benjamin songs have never gone out of rotation for me.

I’d never quite pinned down what drew me to those songs, but this week, Widow7 helped me figure it out.

Widow7 is a Des Moines-based, modern rock band existing adjacent to nu metal and grunge. This past March, the group released Our New Doomsday, an eight-song EP that includes songs like “Hopeless” and “Shadow Me” (both standouts) which were released as singles in 2021 and 2020 respectively.

In 2021, Widow7 also opened for fellow Iowa-grown band Slipknot as part of that year’s Knotfest.

The handful of years I briefly latched onto select grunge/ rock sounds came during my high school career. A period where I took court-mandated trips between the houses of two parents—a mom who was stretched thin, and a flagrantly abusive father—while trying to find a sense of personal autonomy.

There was a feeling that this kind of music, when it hit right, could cathartically express my distress.

By and large, Our New Doomsday hits just right.

If you don’t get at least the smallest sense of rebellious self affirmation from lines like “Feels like I’m wasting away … but I got nothing if I ain’t got me” sung to electric minor chords and a storm of drum beats—as in the song “Therapy”—alongside sentiments to burn the world down, then you and I have nothing to talk about.

Songs like “Fire” and “Crooked Flames” deploy rap breaks with degrees of success. In “Fire” the use is brief but contributes to a nice build which, paired with smart sound design, makes this one of the punchiest songs here. Meanwhile, in “Crooked Flames,” the rapping—and song as a whole—never fits together as well as it feels it should despite a killer guitar hook.

Across the album, though, the performers are firing on all cylinders. Vocalist Mark Leon hits both tender melodies and throaty chants with equal proficiency. Jayson Kremf and Jake Schrek on guitars, Seth Peters on bass and Shane

80/35 Music Festival

Western Gateway Park, Bud & Mary’s Stage, Des Moines, 3 p.m., July 8, $55-275

Chip Tha Ripper. When Mac isn’t tapped into his gritty and raw rap style, his whimsical, laid-back rap brings me back to 2011 listening to The Cleveland Show

In a dozen tracks, Chill Mac touches several styles and integrates some excellent guitar riffs from Taylor King. Songs like “Cousin of Death” and “HOWiFEEL” display grittier influences—while songs like “I’m Chill” and “Contact High” hit on, what I would call, “smoker flows.”

Mills on drums are all just as bombastic and relentless as you’d hope for them to be when the songs shift focus to them.

Given these allusions to my own early teenage years, I want to make it clear that I don’t want to paint Widow7’s music as juvenile, rather, I want to illustrate that it is head-bangingly joyous.

I know Widow7 won’t bend my taste away from the more mellow tones I gravitate toward. That said, I can easily imagine that instead of playing “I Will Not Bow” to belt away the bad feelings—as I still do on occasion—I instead select Widow7’s “Therapy” or “Low Life” as musical medication.

—Isaac Hamlet

The moment you press play on “Heart & Soul,” the first track of None Chiller, Dom Russell (performing as Chill Mac) establishes himself as more than just a rapper. “This is deeper than rap, I got a story to tell,” he says. Mac paints pictures of his past, and expresses his innermost desires to inspire, “I’m just tryna touch souls like DMT, on another level get on my frequency.”

On top of that, the album is downright groovy from front to back. Chill Mac presents a lofi, introspective vibe here, using unique vocal distortions and creative downsampling.

Of course, anyone who listens to an artist for the first time naturally draws comparisons; so, after my first listening, here are some names that came to mind. First, is Curren$y who shares some of Chill Mac’s immediately apparent groovy/smoker vibes. Second, is Schoolboy Q because of a sharedraw and aggressive style of rap, mixed with introspective lyrics and gritty but simplistic storytelling.

My last comparison is for 2010’s rap fans, King Chip a.k.a.

On “Hollows” he uses storytelling to lyricize the violent struggle he and his peers have gone through with lines like, “Swallowed by the system, n***** got swallowed by the streets/ Everybody plays the victim, n***** got plenty enemies.” Juliano Dock also shines as a feature on this track, offering a compelling complement to Mac’s style.

While I do appreciate the chill flows and the whimsical rap performances on this album, there were times when the melodies felt a little loose from a performance perspective. Some rap fans don’t listen to rap music for any sort of sing-along melody, but—for those who do—I can say the tone and melody lost me in a few places.

I think Chill Mac makes it clear that he is highly intentional and cerebral with his bars. That being said, the content is usually deeper than the composition; there’s a lot of simple rhyme schemes with little lyrical complexity.

Overall this was a solid project for Chill Mac, his thoughtfulness is apparent here. Local music scenes are often filled with cringe-worthy rap and crusty bars—and while the album might be flawless from top to bottom, it certainly wasn’t a blooper.

Aside from some grittier tones, the album is a lot of fun and loaded with good vibes. It’s very well-rounded display from Mr. Russell. In terms of rap albums from the Des Moines music scene, one can imagine “none chiller.”

—Rhys Davis

Christine Moad, who records under the moniker Miss Christine, gave themself an unenviable task: to take the dumpster fire of the last three years and turn it into music.

Miss Christine’s latest album Bittersweet released in June, and in both its construction and its resultant music, this is a pandemic album through and through. None of the musicians who play on the record were ever in the same room together, and the musicians all recorded and communicated through a music software called LANDR. In spite of this, the album is both sonically cohesive and verbally focused, a musical dispatch rooted in a not-so-distant time.

Opening with the power rocker “Can’t See,” Miss Christine proves to be adept at tackling whatever genre that the song calls for. For example, “Love With You” feels like a 2010’s pop radio ballad with a slightly stronger drum beat. “Isn’t It Funny“ plays a little closer to the charm of a ‘90s-era indie strummer.

Throughout the album, Miss Christine invokes love and understanding, and it feels earnest every time. But their music is arguably most successful when it leans a little further into the weird. From a seemingly straightforward pop number, “I’m Not Okay” increasingly grows exasperated, repeating the line: “How long must this go on?” When the titular payoff finally does arrive, not only do we believe the admission, we feel a communion with it.

On “Google University,” Miss Christine tackles a 21st century threat: “the buffoons who graduated Google University.” With a wry eye and unapologetic approach, Miss Christine takes down fake moon landing believers and COVID-19 deniers alike. The word “buffoon” is rarely used in pop songs, and this song highlights what a shame that is.

“My Brain” holds the key to the entire album. Here, Miss Christine channels pure doom pop for a two-minute tone poem full of pandemic-era angst and musical catharsis. “2020” ends with a plea for hope, but the song’s greatest strength is in its lumbering and justified anger. On the bridge, Miss Christine sings “Has anyone read the history books?/This country was founded by a bunch of crooks.” Though it winds up optimistic, it’s a full three minutes to get there.

Across 10 songs, Bittersweet establishes Miss Christine as both a hook-seeker and lyrically incisive songwriter, equally as comfortable in a straight ahead pop chorus as a punk rock breakdown. The fact that this album was recorded entirely independently and pieced together afterwards speaks to the strength of these songs and the respective players, including Will Larson, John Tyler Kent, Andrew Teutsch and Alex Ricchiuto.

But make no mistake: this is fully Miss Christine’s show. Playing the bass and standing in front of it all, on Bittersweet, Miss Christine captures the full gamut of the last three years. Now, wiith a slate of area performances throughout the summer, it’s clear Miss Christine is only getting started.

––Avery Gregurich

SAMUEl lOCKE WARD Thrift Store Gtr Gold ORBTAPES.BANDCAMP.COM/ALBUM/

“Everything that they ever warned us about, all the sad things, all the bad things, all of those things, they are coming. They are all coming to pass.” So singeth Samuel Locke Ward, master of minimalism, grim jester and bard of Iowa in the unhinged 2020s.

In a just world, Samuel Locke Ward would be the state of Iowa’s fully-funded artist laureate. But a just world would not require the catharsis of Thrift Store Gtr Gold, in which Ward distills his acerbic, howlingly funny vision to a brisk 22-song, 43-minute set of disarmingly listenable music.

In the wake of the downhill political slide of 2022, Ward sat down in front of a microphone with his trusty, gaudy-green Oscar Schmidt acoustic guitar, rescued (as the title suggests) from a thrift store, and recorded an album as angry and passionate as any of his recent works.

“Restraint” is an odd word to direct at Ward, especially when all the usual weirdness is present, like twisted-Beach Boys harmonies, absurd lyrics and atonal gamelan-esque guitar (used to illustrate the menace of “Bad Energy.”) But there’s no hollerin’, no hardcore gang-vocals, no sax skronk, just artfully-contained and tuneful disgust directed at the craven monsters lurking in the Iowan halls of power (and their easily-fooled enablers).

Whether or not Ward intentionally made it his mission to make his music a total reflection of Iowan life is irrelevant; at this point it’s impossible to separate one from the other. The characters and situations depicted in Thrift Store Gtr Gold are as Iowan as it gets, from the vexed citizen seeking priestly guidance for the wayward subject of “She’s Troubled” to the warped nostalgia of “That Iowa Sky” (in which cigarettes are boosted from senile relatives, nasty ditchweed is smoked on gravel roads and witchy kids dance in graveyards).

The most timely tune is “Banned Books,” described by Ward as the new “Iowa state anthem.”

It’s not all despair -“Insubordination” is a call to (in) action: “Do not obey, don’t do what they say, don’t give an inch, don’t let them have their way.”

And closer “Wasteland” (from which the opening lines of this review are taken) is awash in the glory of love, even when all else seems hopeless: “. . . there’s no one else in this whole wide world, not a single person that I’d rather walk this dystopian nightmare with than you.”

Thrift Store Gtr Gold is a reminder of the power of transgressive art in repressive times, right down to the amorous gayliens embracing on the cover. Hold on to each other, keep creating and keep this (and Ward’s other albums) in rotation; their effects may surprise you.

—Loren Thacher

June 5 - August 18

All stops are open to the public!

For regular scheduling, weather alerts, and more info about the Bookmobile, visit: icpl.org/bookmobile

KERRy HOWlEy

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

ALFRED A. KNOPF

Kerry Howley, you had me the title.

Maybe your brain hasn’t been colonized by internet worms for the better part of three decades, but I immediately recognized the reference to a 2014 viral video in which a middle-aged white woman presents a practiced spiel breaking down alleged satanic symbolism on a can of Monster Energy. Near the end of the video, she points to a cross shape on the label, says, “What is witchcraft? When the cross goes upside down,” and tips the can as if drinking. Her mic drop: “Bottom’s up, and the devil laughs.”

Howley’s new nonfiction novel, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, focuses on Reality Winner, the NSA whistleblower who, in 2018, was given the longest prison sentence ever handed down for a violation of the Espionage Act: 63 months. Winner pleaded guilty to leaking an intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, which inadvertently revealed Winner to the NSA while trying to validate her report.

So why not call the book Winner, the title of an in-production biopic with a screenplay penned by Howley? (Reality, an HBO docu-drama depicting Winner’s initial interrogation by FBI agents, was released in May.)

Perhaps because this book is less about Winner than the United States—specifically, how the government has used and abused tools of surveillance since 9/11, and how a nation that pins the health of its “way of life” on the ability to secure an ever-expanding hoard of classified data (everything from cringy Google searches to CIA torture reports) is doomed to be undone by its own disgruntled bureaucrats.

Howley doesn’t miss the dark humor in these stranger-than-fiction scenarios. Along with investigative journalism, she offers well-deployed anecdotes and crack insights with omniscient detachment. “Surveillance is made of us,” she reiterates throughout the text, along with, “To study surveillance is to learn, over and over, that we cannot escape ourselves.”

Yet Howley has an uncanny knack for humanizing figures Americans have been conditioned to dismiss as evil. She embraces contradictions represented by people like Winner, John Lindh, Julian Assange and Joe Biggs, while directing a red-hot laser pointer at fatal fallacies in the United States’ approach to intelligence and national security.

“‘We kill people based on metadata’ a CIA director once said, which is true, and they are often the wrong people.”

So why title the book with a line from a viral video? I’ll let readers discover for themselves, but suffice to say Howley doesn’t forget to address the new satanic panic that has infected online and real-life political discourse, and played a role in the rise of Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the like.

In her acknowledgements, Howley thanks fellow University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing professor John D’Agata “for bringing me to Iowa, where a certain melancholic quiet made writing possible.” If this state helped inspire such an innovative, important book, I can’t help but feel a little proud—and a little melancholic.

—Emma McClatchey

BART yATES

The Language of Love and Loss

KENSINGTON BOOKS

As Noah York says of his mother: “Of course I love her, but that’s beside the point.” She is the “most complicated person” he knows, “running the gamut from holy woman to gargoyle, depending on the day.”

Oakland to be “a pretty little town, but it’s so sleepy I’m not sure anyone who lives there has a pulse.” The uncouth nature of the town is only one of the ghosts haunting our narrator in this tale. There are old bullies, an ex-boyfriend named J.D. and being reminded “how much I fucked up my life.”

Another spector is lingering embarrassment and bitterness over a poem written by Virgina.

After Noah dropped out of the Rhode Island School for Design at 20 years old, Virginia wrote a somewhat notorious poem titled “The Lost Soul,” which cast her son as the unwitting title character and lamented him “wasting his talent.” That publication of that poem does a lot to color the dynamic between mother and son.

In The Language of Love and Loss, it has been eight months since 37-year-old Noah—a struggling artist who teaches part-time at a community center in Providence, Rhode Island—has seen his mother, the 68-year-old woman known as Virginia York, a Pulitzer Prizewinning writer teaching at Cassidy College in the small town of Oakland, New Hampshire.

This text is a standalone sequel to Iowa City author Bart Yates’ novel Leave Myself Behind, which featured Noah as a younger narrator of 17 years old. This latest story finds Noah beckoned back home one summer. He coughs up just enough cash for a bus ticket and embarks to Oakland.

Returning home, Noah estimates

Usually the spats between the two are ignited shortly after his arrival. This time, however, Noah receives a relatively warm welcome, which makes him uneasy. He says to his mother, “You’ve lost weight. Do you have a parasite or something?” She responds, “Not since you were in my womb.” Not long after, Noah discovers that Virginia has been diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The book as a whole is hilarious and biting, but also tender and heartfelt, this exchange summarizes much about their relationship, and the piercing humor in Yates’ prose.

This is the first work I’ve read from Yates, but it won’t be the last. With marvelously drawn characters and profound, at times puckish narration and dialogue, Yates has crafted an entertaining story where the sentimental can be barbed, humorous, sad. This is an honestly and sharply drawn tale presented without compromise.

––Mike Kuhlenbeck

ANNE MylES

What Woman That Was FINAL THURSDAY PRESS

n elaborate persona collection for American feminism, What Woman That Was (Final Thursday Press, 2023) by Anne Myles explores the foundations of a culture that would both vilify and glamorize actions of rebellion.

This poetry collection is an incredible homage to “the courageous and troublesome women throughout history whose stories have been lost.”

Myles, an associate professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, blends her discovery of one Mary Dyer—a follower of religious dissenter Anne Hutchinson in the early American colonies—with a personal perspective. In doing so, she weaves realities through the poems in this collection, building a world around both her contemporary readers and her 17th century subject.

The book—using found elements and a keen understanding of poetic form–follows Dyer, a woman all but lost to history save for her letters urging for gender equality and emphasizing her understanding of a just god who cares for all of humanity.

The collection takes its title from John Winthrop’s A Short Story of the Rise, reign, and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists, & Libertines written in 1644. There, Winthrop documents Hutchinson being “cast out of the Church” and Dyer following: “[A] stranger observing, asked another what woman that was, the other answered, it was the woman who had the

Monster…”

A curious reader could surely research Dyer on their own. However, I suggest those interested in the stories of “monstrous women” first explore these poems. With empathy and deep investment in her subject, Myles puts herself and her readers in the position of both witness to Dyer’s trials and in Dyer’s shoes for much of her struggle.

Early in the collection we learn that Dyer, before coming to the Americas, spent a year in isolation as a plague overtook London where she studied the Bible and grew passionate about the text as it gave her some peace during an epidemic.

While the poem “Plague Year” discusses London in 1625, it is clear that we are experiencing a mirror to many of our own societal realizations from 2020. The poem ends with Dyer awakening to an unexpected compassion for her community, “Dead, they’re not lost—not rot / but glory. Inside the white cage of her ribs / something nameless beats its wings.”

Later, we see Myles speak as herself as she notices Dyer in her own life. When Myles visits Dyer’s grave in the poem “Bones” we hear pain, “the past is a locked gate,” Myles thinks, “time itself is a violence” and then, “a gravespot locals once showed travelers / is gone now … This sound / of small waves shushing on the beach: / how many billion, uninterrupted, each / break like a rung on a ladder I could climb / back to a day she stood here living?”

There is pain in what is lost in Dyer’s story, and this is where the power of this collection lies. We know that stories are lost, that rebellions for which people given their lives are forgotten, but in What Woman That Was we experience both the story and heartbreak of losing it.

––Sarah Elgatian

JAMES AlAN MCPHERSON, ED. By ANTHONy WAlTON

On Becoming an American Writer GODINE

Iam constantly amazed by how long I was in Iowa City without really hearing about James Alan McPherson.

In part, I attribute this to being a student during my first few years in the state. Yet it stands to reason that—as an English student, no less—there was no better time for me to have been taught about the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and who called Iowa City home.

McPherson, who would have turned 80 this September, was awarded the Pulitzer for Elbow Room, a short story collection published in 1977. He studied at Harvard Law School, taught at the University of Iowa and was among the inaugural recipients of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981.

On Becoming an American Writer was published this past January, nearly seven years following McPherson’s passing. This collection of essays and nonfiction does not include any lost or previously unpublished work from the author; rather, it hopes to shine a light on McPherson, to give readers a cursory understanding of his work.

“McPherson’s nonfiction resides alongside that of contemporaries such as James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson,” writes Anthony Walton, who selected the collected writings, in his introduction. “What distinguishes McPherson from these writers, however, is the astonishing breadth of his frame: He draws from legal, regional, and classical perspectives to give his arguments nuances …”

The first three or four essays feature McPherson writing on social issues faced by Americans, particularly Black Americans, in the 1980s and ’90s. In the same way one may not entirely agree with the theses put forward by W.E.B. Du Bois or Langston Hughes, it is easy to imagine dissenting opinions to what McPherson puts forward. However, his stances are well reasoned and articulated.

After these first few pieces, Walton moves to more personal essays from McPherson’s life. Here, McPherson grapples with the death of a tenant and the ethics of being a landlord (this occurs in “Crabcakes,” which is also the title of his memoir). We see him fighting for fatherhood following a devastating divorce in “Disneyland” (which made me cry), he grapples with the death of his friend Ralph Ellison in “Gravitas,” and he recounts being treated for a coma at Iowa City’s Mercy Hospital in late 1998 in “Ukiyo.”

The final two entries—“Reading” and “On Becoming an American Writer”—weave together the personal and the philosophical. Walton appears to have front-loaded McPherson’s social and political beliefs, easing the reader into his more personal writings, the triumphs and foibles, before presenting a synthesis of the two worlds.

I had little familiarity with McPherson’s work prior to this book. But as I moved through it I found that, for better or worse, McPherson’s social critique from 30 years ago is often still applicable today. Even when I did not agree with him, I was always interested in what he had to say and longed to hear more.

—Isaac Hamlet

ACROSS

1. Appeal for a better grade, say

5. “Drink up, fellow German-speakers!”

10. Erstwhile Iowa straw poll town

14. Owned by us both

15. Record producer Blanco or ABBA member Andersson

16. ___ Salamanca (Better Call Saul enforcer)

17. Goes from first to third, say?

19. Serving edge

20. Article of faith

21. Digital assistant voiced by Susan Bennett

22. Version for testing

23. Dash ___

25. British singer with the disco hit “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing”

27. Certain official symbol of Massachusetts

31. Apocryphal Roberto Durán quote, on losing to Sugar Ray Leonard

32. Bunch of bullshit

33. Molly, initially

36. Bad start?

37. Dime prez

38. Artist whose name is represented in this grid four times, in a way

40. “Great job avoiding that bull!”

43. With 45-Across, certain bleaching ingredient, briefly

45. See 43-Across

46. Typical rock cover?

47. Darken, in poetry

49. “What was that you said?”

51. “Bye!”

54. The last video they played was “...Baby One More Time” before going off the air in 2008

55. Edge

56. Broadcasted, as seeds

58. Elementary school classroom spinner

62. Passing piece of writing?

63. Left bank district in Paris

65. Gift shoppe adjective

66. Mohawk Valley city

67. Arthur ___ Stadium

68. Filled one’s bowl, in a sense

69. First name in beauty/ fragrances

70. Little kids

Down

1. Washington or New York paper name

2. Grimes of Yellowstone

3. Cork’s home, poetically

4. Dimensions

5. Ten-pin org.

6. Some cosplaying fans of the more recent Star Wars movies

7. Reporter April who rolled with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

8. Kit part

9. Peter’s Game of Thrones role

10. Southern state that’s home to Ono Island (note to self: file this away for future ONO clues)

11. “Sorry, sucker, nothin’ to see”

12. Privileged sorts

13. Detection system that uses echolocation

18. Rating unit

24. Bit of Corn Kid content, e.g.

26. A few

27. Member of a certain D&D race

28. Cover in canning

29. Liverpool’s county

30. Company that invented rocky road

34. [Milk me!]

35. Common connections

38. Russian buckwheat pancake

39. Caveman’s rank: Abbr.

41. Where Joe Burrow played college football: Abbr.

42. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” ability

44. Took into the family

46. Archetypical 1980s teen

47. Fancy tchotchke

48. “The ___ of the Red Death” (Poe story that chills in less than 2,500 words)

50. Proof word

51. Journalist’s pursuit

52. Bests handily

53. Sit tight for

57. Milquetoast descriptor

59. Venison ___ buco

60. Currency with Rama X’s portrait

61. Spots for crow’s feet

64. Raya and the Last Dragon voice Daniel ___ Kim