Take Five: Previewing the Iowa City Book Festival
You should go see everything, but if you want to pick and choose, here are five authors from across the week-long schedule to seek out
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
Today I’m doing things a bit differently. Technically, these are still five things I’ve spent time with, but not in the usual way. I didn’t just come across them or rediscover them. I have been working with these five authors for weeks as I assembled the lineup for the 2024 Iowa City Book Festival. I haven’t had time for much else lately (though there may be something coming next week that touches on seeing the “Eno” film, Mike Viola, and, if I can stay awake late enough tonight, MJ Lenderman) so it made sense to shine a light on some of the most-exciting parts of the schedule.
I do so by picking small things from the work of each of these five writers, elements of their books that drew me in and made me want to share them and their stories with Iowa City.
These are five of more than 50 events scheduled between Oct. 13-20. Click here for the full schedule.
1. Stuart Dybek, Monday, 7 p.m., Prairie Lights
I would say we are bringing Stuart Dybek out of retirement for this year’s festival, but he did publish a piece of flash fiction, "Blue Island," in a 2023 New Yorker, so I’m choosing to believe there still might be more to come from one of the country’s best short story writers.
In the very least, he has slowed down. The Iowa Writers' Workshop grad is 82, so it seems reasonable. His last new books were published in 2014 (Ecstatic Cahoots: 50 Short Stories and Paper Lantern: Love Stories, issued on the same day). He agreed to come chat with his friend, Tracy Kidder, for another Book Festival event, and given that he would be back in Iowa City, I wasn't going to let him leave without talking about his own work.
Looking for something to write about here, I returned to my favorite of his books, The Coast of Chicago, a 1990 short story collection. There, I was drawn to "Pet Milk," an O. Henry Award winner from 1986. It's a shorter story, barely seven pages, but it packs in so much detail, so much that hints at larger worlds yet to be explored. I found a recent interview with Dybek where he was asked about his relationship with his native Chicago. “There is a personal relationship one has with a city,” he said. “Chicago writers don't really write about Chicago. It is a city of neighborhoods, and in writing about that neighborhood, you can write about a small space that then takes credit for the big space."
Here, he is writing about small spaces. There is the kitchen where the radio plays Geek, Spanish or Ukrainian stations because "In Chicago… all the incompatible states of Europe were pressed together down at the staticky right end of the dial." The after-work bar, where a stolen glimpse of his girlfriend in the mirror "was like seeing a future from which she had vanished." A subway car where, while kissing his girlfriend, "she was moving her hips to pin us to each jolt of the train."
Speaking more than 30 years ago about the Chicago of his work, he said, "I mean, sometimes I forget that there's a real Chicago. That is, you've invented enough so that you think, Geez, I've made up everything. And it's only when you go back and you're suddenly startled to see that you've been more precise in describing reality than you thought you were being." That ability to capture the real and make it fantastical, to convey the surprising and make it real, has characterized all of Dybek's fiction.
2. Bruna Dantas Lobato, Tuesday, 6 p.m., Prairie Lights
I was aware of Bruna Dantas Lobato as a literary translator, an award-winning one at that. The graduate of the MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature for her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel. My organization pays attention to and celebrates such things, frequent though they may be. So when her publicist got in touch to see about sending her to the festival, I was surprised to learn it was for her debut novel, Blue Light Hours.
It should be no surprise, however, that a talented translator is also a talented writer of fiction. Literary translators walk a fine line, maintaining fidelity to the source material while finding creative forms of expression to tell the proscribed story.
Here, Lobato tells of the relationship between a daughter away at college in Vermont, and a mother 4,000 miles away in Brazil. With a son newly away at college just two hours away, and knowing the emotions that now color that relationship, I was immediately immersed in Lobato’s tale. These two people, tethered through a Skype window on their respective devices, grapple with what it means to be a mother who misses a daughter, or a daughter who wants to care for an ailing mother. It is a short, simple novel with power in its prose.
The daughter, reading to her mother in English because she has nothing Portuguese at hand in her American apartment, watches as the mother falls asleep. “I muted my mic and kept watch for most of the night. Her occasional stirring, her face glowing in the dark, her hair over her eyes. The restlessness of her sleep.”
Interestingly, the story of this novel began as a flash fiction piece in the The New Yorker from 2022.
I wrote about Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz’s The Indian Card in a previous Take Five. She appears on Wednesday, Oct. 16, at 7 p.m. at Prairie Lights.
3. Jennifer Croft, Saturday, Oct. 19, Prairie Lights
Jennifer Croft is another award-winning literary translator who is a graduate of the UI program. There, the similarities with Lobato end, at least from a fictive standpoint. While Lobato’s novel is short and contemplative, Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey is a densely packed swirl of language and intrigue. It is difficult to summarize, but it is essentially the story of eight translators from various countries coming together in a primeval Polish forest to begin work on the titular author’s new novel.
For fans of translated literature, this will be a romp, but in its own odd way, it is also a typical workplace novel, with all of the infighting, romance, and camaraderie one expects from the genre. It’s also quite funny. One can read intently in search of veiled references to Croft’s own work. She is best known as a translator of Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, the two winning the Man Booker in 2018 for Flights. But this background is not necessary to enjoy the novel.
Croft has been outspoken — and rightly so — about the need to put translator’s names on the covers of books. She wrote an essay for the Guardian about it in 2021. She starts,
‘Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.’ This quote, attributed to Israeli author Etgar Keret, proliferates in memes, and who doesn’t love a pithy quote involving ninjas? Yet this idea – that a literary translator might make, at any moment, a surprise attack, and that at every moment we are deceiving the reader as part of an elaborate mercenary plot – is among the most toxic in world literature.
I won’t suggest that one led to the other, but there are worse ways to describe elements of The Extinction of Irena Rey than to say “a literary translator might make, at any moment, a surprise attack, and that at every moment we are deceiving the reader as part of an elaborate mercenary plot.”
4. Willy Vlautin, Saturday, Oct. 19, 1 p.m., Masonic Building
I listened to Willy Vlautin before I read him. I went through a deep alt-country phase, and Vlautin’s Richmond Fontaine was among the more heralded acts in the genre. His songs were always what would be described as “novelistic,” so when he shifted into writing, I took notice. His first three novels were good, the next three even better, and 2021’s The Night Always Comes was a favorite. Still, I always saw him as a musician who also wrote books. He sometimes created music related to the books, strengthening that perception.
Oddly enough, with the new The Horse, which tells of an aging musican attempting to navigate a solitary life in rural Nevada, I’m starting to think of Vlautin as a novelist who also plays music. Perhaps it is his ability to more fully inhabit his protagonist, but this feels like everything in Vlautin’s career was leading to this book.
His prose style is spare but full of pertinent details. The portions that deal directly with music ring true in a way that seems so elusive to even the best writers. And that old musician, Al Ward, feels real and lived in.
Much of the story revolves around the titular horse, who shows up outside Ward’s trailer one day. You could argue that it is and is not a horse, is and is not a larger metaphor, but Vlautin doesn’t try to trick the reader or get too clever for his own good. Instead, he sends Ward on the road.
There was no choice left but to make the thirty-mile walk to Morton’s ranch to get help. So that’s what he would do. He put more things in his backback: the tequila, another can of soup, a pack of matches, and a lighter. He refilled his canteen. In a plastic storage tote he found new batteries for the portable radio and replaced them. A Mormon station out of Provo came in the strongest, and he set the radio outside under a sagebrush ten feet from the horse. He turned the volume up as loud as it could handle in hope that the sound might somehow scare a predator away. “I’m going to get you help. You just have to hang on a bit longer,” he said to the horse, and left.”
5. Ari Berman, Saturday, Oct. 19, 2:30 p.m., Iowa City Public Library
One of the most successful Book Festivals on my watch was in 2018, when Art Cullen (Storm Lake), Dan Kauffman (The Fall of Wisconsin), and Silvia Hidalgo (How to Be an American) kept the meeting room in the Iowa City Public Library filled for most of a Saturday. But the prelude to all of that came earlier in the week when Ari Berman packed that room for his book, Give Us the Vote! It was two years into the Trump presidency, the midterms were looming, and people were hungry for change.
Six years later, we're on the precipice of another election, and Berman returns with a new book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It. The topic may have changed — or at least shifted — but the goal is the same, to highlight the problems and offer solutions. It's a fascinating book, all the more so given the times.
From the prologue, where he details Pat Buchanan's nakedly white nationalist 1995 campaign for president, through 12 chapters that outline how the right has used the rules of the Senate, the Electoral College, and the courts to protect their minority positions, it can be a demoralizing read. Never dull, always energizing in that “we need to do something about this!” way, it feels necessary.
But after all of this, I needed the epilogue, that ray of light offered to the reader as he shakes them and sends them out the door armed for battle.
On November 6, 2018, Katie Fahey stepped to the podium at a ballroom in Detroit’s Atheneum Suite Hotel carrying a flute of cahmpagne in each hand.
“Hey Michigan,” she told a crowd of jubilant supporters. “We just amended the state Constitution!”
It is not prescriptive, but it is hopeful. Now that we have named the problem and disected it in great detail, we can start to fight it, knowing others have done so and succeeded. Looking toward November 5 with a blend of trepidation, expectation, and fear, I feel better prepared with Berman’s work on the shelf.
I previously wrote about Marc Ribot, who appears at the festival at 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 19, to talk about his book, Unstrung: Rants & Stories of a Noise Guitarist.
