Many authors have traveled and explored the out-of-doors, both in life and then in their books, proving themselves stalwart, audacious, even heroic; Andrew Farkas is not among them. He is brave enough to admit that the outdoors isn't for him. Instead, in these essays Farkas reports on his bold explorations of a very different territory: the in-of-doors, the waiting rooms, kitchens, malls, bars, theaters, roadside motel rooms, and other places that feature temperature control, protection from rampaging predators, and a higher degree of comfort than can be found outside. Farkas discovers that, just as the mannered and wonderfully (gloriously) artificial indoors influences us greatly, our lives are also controlled much more by fiction than by anything "real." So come in out of the weather (it's always terrible) and join the Great Indoorsman on his adventures, where he makes fun of pretty much everything, most of all himself.

Hinz-Penner details a history fraught with tensions between land ownership and former inhabitants, commodification of the land and love of the land, land use and management, the simple life and love of nature. As Elaine Enns, Co-Author of Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization puts it, "Hinz-Penner offers an engaging personal and political narrative that explores the contradictions, myths, and resilience of what we call her landlines, bloodlines, and songlines. Her memoir includes helpful distillations of significant historical periods and patterns of Mennonite migrations and Indigenous and settler histories. I hope it will inspire other settlers to venture their own decolonial re-memberings."

Starting with his coverage of the largest tornado in Kansas history, legendary correspondent, anchorman, and producer Bill Kurtis details his whirlwind career reporting American history as it unfolded, from the Chicago Seven to Charles Manson to Agent Orange. A fast-paced, entertaining, and inspiring story about the potent combination of talent and luck in the network era of television.

Recounting moments in his remarkable career as a television journalist, Kurtis brings us into some of the most iconic moments of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. He was in the streets during the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago; he uncovered the truth about the deadly effects of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War; he was the first US television journalist to return to Chernobyl after the infamous nuclear disaster; and much more. Kurtis also offers an insider look at how television evolved from an emerging news source to the dominating force in American media.

A natural storyteller, Kurtis remembers his career with honesty and insight and gives a rare picture of American history and broadcast journalism.

Finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award
A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family.
In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father's father had taken his own life; so had her mother's. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold?
In three graceful movements, Patterson explores these questions. In the winter of her father's death, she struggles to make sense of the loss--sifting through the few belongings he left behind, looking to signs and symbols for meaning. As the spring thaw comes, she and her mother depart Minnesota for her father's burial in her parents' hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas. A once-prosperous town of promise and of violence, against people and the land, Pittsburg is now literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes. There, Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the final days of the grandfathers--one a fiery pro-labor politician, the other a melancholy businessman--she never knew. And finally, she returns to her father: to the haunting subjects of goodbyes, of loss, and of how to break the cycle.
A stunning elegy that vividly enacts Emily Dickinson's dictum to "tell it slant," Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.

At 54, Lisa Stewart set out to regain the fearless girl she once had been, riding her horse, Chief, 500 miles home. Hot, homeless, and horseback, she snapped back into every original cell. On an extraordinary homegoing from Kansas City to Bates and Vernon Counties in Missouri, Lisa exhausted herself, faced her past, trusted strangers, and stayed in the middle of her frightened horse to document modern rural America, the people, animals, and land.