This July, Vanity Fair included Northwestern University Press book Under the Spell by Benjamin Hedin as a July reading recommendation. Not one, not two or three, but four of NU Press titles were chosen in The Rumpus Roundup for 2021. We asked Parneshia Jones, Director of the Northwestern University Press, for her own list of summer reading recommendations from the Press.
Under the Spell can be borrowed from the Libraries, right now, and Parneshia has four more books to look forward to digging into this summer.
Once I Was Cool & Everyone Remain Calm, Megan Stielstra
Megan Stielstra is currently Creative Nonfiction faculty for the School of Professional Studies, and her two earlier works, Once I Was Cool and Everyone Remain Calm are set to be reprinted by Northwestern Press in August. While you’re waiting for Once I Was Cool and Everyone Remain Calm to release next month, try borrowing The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays, Stielstra’s 2017 essay collection. Stielstra’s writing manages to be laugh-out-loud funny and deeply insightful.
Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side, Lee Bey
In 2017, author and photographer Lee Bey created an exhibit for the Chicago Architecture Biennial called “Chicago: A Southern Exposure”. This exhibit went on to be expanded in Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side, filled with illustrations and photographs. Southern Exposure is first book devoted to the South Side’s rich and unfairly ignored architectural heritage. Chicago history or architecture lovers can appreciate Bey’s loving work. Southern Exposure is available in the library catalog here.
Gone Missing in Harlem, Karla FC Holloway
Gone Missing in Harlem is the most popular book in the Press catalog for 2021 so far, and for good reason. Author Karla FC Holloway explores the joy and the struggle of motherhood in this novel with nuanced characters, lyrical writing and insight on family, race, class, and justice in the United States.
From the synopsis; “The Mosby family, like other thousands, migrate from the loblolly-scented Carolinas north to the Harlem of their aspirations—with its promise of freedom and opportunities, sunlit boulevards, and elegant societies. The family arrives as Harlem staggers under the flu pandemic that follows the First World War. DeLilah Mosby and her daughter, Selma, meet difficulties with backbone and resolve to make a home for themselves in the city, and Selma has a baby, Chloe….
The panic of the early thirties is embodied in the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of the nation’s dashing young aviator, Charles Lindbergh. A transfixed public follows the manhunt in the press and on the radio. Then the youngest Mosby, Chloe, goes missing—but her disappearance does not draw the same attention. Wry and perceptive Weldon Haynie Thomas, the city’s first “colored” policeman, takes the case.”
The richness of the novel is not easily summarized, though. Gone Missing in Harlem is available in the library to borrow here.