Here are 100 books that Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa fans have personally recommended if you like
Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa.
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I love short-story collections. I’ve read dozens to hundreds of them, starting as a child reading Richard Scarry, and I still make them a regular part of my reading diet. I started trying my own hand at short fiction in 2012 and have since finished more than one hundred stories, including the ones in Animal Husbandry. I’m now working on my first novel after years as a short-story writer, and it gives me additional admiration for how many outstanding novelists are also able to master short fiction. It’s two different skill sets, and the five authors I mentioned here (among many others) excel at both.
Vonnegut has been one of my favorite authors for a long time, and this might be the first collection I read that wasn’t specifically for young readers. Some of the future-set stories like “Harrison Bergeron” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” changed how I saw science fiction.
Welcome to the Monkey House introduced me to Vonnegut and to a love of short-story collections as a form, and it holds up remarkably well.
A MASTERFUL COLLECTION OF TWENTY-FIVE SHORT STORIES FROM THE INIMITABLE AUTHOR OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, KURT VONNEGUT
'Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer...a zany but moral mad scientist' Time
A diabolical government asserts control by eliminating orgasms. A scientist discovers the secret to unlocking instant happiness, with unexpected consequences. In an America where everyone is equal every which way, a tennage boy plans to overthrow the system.
Welcome to the Monkey House gathers together twenty-five of Kurt Vonnegut's short stories from the 1950s and 1960s. Shot through with Vonnegut's singular humour, wit and bewilderment…
I love short-story collections. I’ve read dozens to hundreds of them, starting as a child reading Richard Scarry, and I still make them a regular part of my reading diet. I started trying my own hand at short fiction in 2012 and have since finished more than one hundred stories, including the ones in Animal Husbandry. I’m now working on my first novel after years as a short-story writer, and it gives me additional admiration for how many outstanding novelists are also able to master short fiction. It’s two different skill sets, and the five authors I mentioned here (among many others) excel at both.
This is a truly beautiful collection, and I love the way many of the stories place the protagonists in fraught situations that reveal what they will do to survive.
Some of my favorites are “The Worst You Ever Feel” and “The Briefcase” for how they show war’s impact on survivors, and “Painted Ocean, Painted Ship” and “The Miracle Years of Little Fork” for combining the tragic and the absurd in creative ways.
A short-story collection from the acclaimed author of The Great Believers
Named a must-read by the Chicago Tribune, O Magazine, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and The L Magazine
Rebecca Makkai's first two novels, The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, have established her as one of the freshest and most imaginative voices in fiction. Now, the award-winning writer, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of The Best American Short Stories, returns with a highly anticipated collection bearing her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart.
A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, even…
I love short-story collections. I’ve read dozens to hundreds of them, starting as a child reading Richard Scarry, and I still make them a regular part of my reading diet. I started trying my own hand at short fiction in 2012 and have since finished more than one hundred stories, including the ones in Animal Husbandry. I’m now working on my first novel after years as a short-story writer, and it gives me additional admiration for how many outstanding novelists are also able to master short fiction. It’s two different skill sets, and the five authors I mentioned here (among many others) excel at both.
I really enjoy all of Gaiman’s collections, but this one is my favorite. “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale” and “The Price” are two stories I particularly love, one so darkly comic I laughed nonstop the first time I read it and one that gave me a genuine chill.
But it’s a deep collection with lots of great stories spanning genres and emotions, and one I’ve read a few times.
***This short fiction collection includes 'Chivalry', this year's Radio 4 Neil Gaiman Christmas Day special, starring Glenda Jackson and Kit Harington. This is the story of Mrs Whitaker, who finds the Holy Grail in a charity shop.***
Open your mind to one of the brightest, most brilliant writers of our generation...
'Gaiman is god in the universe of story' - Stephen Fry
'There's no one quite like Neil Gaiman' - George R. R. Martin
An elderly widow finds the Holy Grail beneath an old fur coat. A stray cat fights and refights a terrible nightly battle to protect his unwary…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I love short-story collections. I’ve read dozens to hundreds of them, starting as a child reading Richard Scarry, and I still make them a regular part of my reading diet. I started trying my own hand at short fiction in 2012 and have since finished more than one hundred stories, including the ones in Animal Husbandry. I’m now working on my first novel after years as a short-story writer, and it gives me additional admiration for how many outstanding novelists are also able to master short fiction. It’s two different skill sets, and the five authors I mentioned here (among many others) excel at both.
While I don’t think it’s possible to have one favorite novel, anytime I need to list just one on an author questionnaire, I usually pick Watership Down; it’s one of the most brilliant books I’ve ever read, and one that rewards repeated rereads.
This collection does a great job of expanding the world of that novel, giving side characters more to do and expanding the mythology that permeates the novel, while the stories are memorable in their own right.
Tales from Watership Down is the enchanting sequel to Richard Adams's bestselling classic Watership Down, which won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Award.
Adams returns to the vivid and distinctive world he created in that enduring work, reacquainting readers with the characters we know and love, including Fiver, Hazel, Bigwig, Dandelion and the legendary rabbit hero El-ahrairah. These compelling tales include all-new adventures, with the younger generation of rabbits eager to find out about the heroic age that existed before they were born.
Enchanting us once again with stories of courage and survival, the millions of readers…
I grew up in rural Iowa in the 1950s and 60s, a place far removed from most of the world. Our town had no movie theater, no library, no anything except for a truly excellent baseball field. So we played – day, night, with full teams or three brothers or all by yourself. We also were tasked by our father with caring for the diamond, which was the home park for the local semi-pro team, the Cascade Reds. When I left town – fled would be a better description – I took my love of baseball with me. I played baseball in Vietnam, watched games in Hiroshima, Japan, Seoul, Korea, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Kansas City, and St. Louis. I could go on like this for a long time, but I think you get the picture.
This novel is less well-known, and much more accomplished, than the movie based on it – Field of Dreams. Where the movie is sappy, the book is lyrical and warmly nostalgic for a time and place – rural Iowa in the 1970s. There is a clear magical realism vibe to the whole thing. The plot structure of the novel is a very shaggy dog involving a baseball field in a corn field, the kidnapping of a famous novelist and numerous dead people coming back to life. The book is big-hearted and much of the writing is luminous.
The inspiration for the beloved film Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella is the story about the beauty and history of baseball, and the power and endurance of a dream.
“A moonlit novel about baseball, dreams, family, the land, and literature."—Sports Illustrated
“If you build it, he will come.” These mysterious words, spoken by an Iowa baseball announcer, inspire Ray Kinsella to carve a baseball diamond in his cornfield in honor of his hero, the baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson. What follows is both a rich, nostalgic look at one of our most cherished national pastimes and…
I believe that we betray the past when we treat it as the past, and we abandon our ancestors, actual and spiritual, when we dehumanize them as denizens of history, as fundamentally different from us in terms of their lusts and appetites and political nuances and strange senses of humor and nose picking and dance moves and love. Novels, I think, are a powerful mode for understanding and perhaps even undoing the cultural patterns that would have us believe that history is behind us and that the past is not part of the forever dance of the present.
This novel is haunting, poetic, dense, and exquisite. It is centered around a small town in New England and wends and weaves through the strange and terrible things that happen there. Allio's writing is exquisite and melodic, and while this book nominally takes place a century ago, in so many ways, it frighteningly and fluently depicts today's world.
"An elegant, luminous, moving work of lyric prose. Every page shimmers."-Carole Maso
"Fiercely imagined, alive with incandescent imagery, Kirstin Allio's Garner is a memorable debut."-John Burnham Schwartz
Landlocked, sail-shaped Garner, New Hampshire, is a town delineated by its Puritan ethics and its "Live Free or Die" mentality. Like the forbidding landscape of Wharton's Ethan Frome, this New England outpost keeps its secrets and shapes its inhabitants. Frances Giddens, a spirited, elusive girl born at the dawn of the twentieth century and now approaching womanhood, moves through the forests and rivers that mark Garner's borders as easily as she befriends its…
Arizona Territory, 1871. Valeria Obregón and her ambitious husband, Raúl, arrive in the raw frontier town of Tucson hoping to find prosperity. Changing Woman, an Apache spirit who represents the natural order of the world and its cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, welcomes Nest Feather, a twelve-year-old Apache girl,…
My author friend, Mary, brought her great, great, great + grandfather’s journal to our writers' group and shared excerpts from the pages written in the 1800s. When her grandfather was window shopping in downtown London, he peered into the bookstore window. He yearned to own the books on display, but he couldn’t afford them on a minister’s income. Only the rich could purchase books. The journal excerpts brought the 1800s to life. I decided then to begin recording my life experiences to make our lives today real for the generations of tomorrow. I share my enthusiasm for telling life stories by presenting workshops on how to write life stories.
My husband, Ted, is a gardening fanatic, so we listened to The Growing Season audiobook together to find out more about vegetable gardening. Instead, we happily discovered the story was about Sarah Frey’s business growing commercial crops rather than a backyard garden. She grew up in Illinois helping her mother deliver cantaloupe to local grocery stores. At 15 years old, when her mother could no longer make the deliveries, Sarah took on the route. I cheered her on as she lived her life with determination and purpose to grow that business for her family. The small route developed into a well-respected family-owned multi-state produce business.
“A gutsy success story” (The New York Times Book Review) about one tenacious woman’s journey to escape rural poverty and create a billion-dollar farming business—without ever leaving the land she loves
The youngest of her parents’ combined twenty-one children, Sarah Frey grew up on a struggling farm in southern Illinois, often having to grow, catch, or hunt her own dinner alongside her brothers. She spent much of her early childhood dreaming of running away to the big city—or really anywhere with central heating. At fifteen, she moved out of her family home and started her own fresh produce delivery business…
I’ve always liked to imagine how things might have been. In my thinking, a good historical novel is a story set inside the larger world of the time, like a nesting doll with a story inside a story. I look for accurate research, well-developed characters, a unique storyline, and dialogue that comes alive on the page. I expect the history to be a backdrop for a story of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. This is what I like to read and how I have written my novels set during the Civil War, Great Sioux Uprising of 1862, and the home front of World War 2.
I love well written historical fiction set in many different time periods. Death of a Rainmaker is a historical mystery set in 1930s Oklahoma during the height of the Dust Bowl days.
It includes fascinating information about rainmaking scams, the Civilian Conservation Corps, severe climate changes, Depression politics, Government programs to aid citizens, and rural life during the 1930s. The main character is a small-town sheriff trying to do the right thing with limited resources. Supporting characters are diverse and well developed.
The mystery unfolds with delicious precision. Death of a Rainmaker meets my criteria for a great read.
Finalist for the 2019 Oklahoma Book Awards, Fiction
"The murder investigation allows Loewenstein to probe into the lives of proud people who would never expose their troubles to strangers. People like John Hodge, the town's most respected lawyer, who knocks his wife around, and kindhearted Etha Jennings, who surreptitiously delivers home-cooked meals to the hobo camp outside town because one of the young Civilian Conservation Corps workers reminds her of her dead son. Loewenstein's sensitive treatment of these dark days in the Dust Bowl era offers little humor but a whole lot of compassion." --New York Times Book Review
I’m a historical novelist originally from Ohio. In Civil War lessons at school, we learned about battles and generals and read The Red Badge of Courage and other books centering on men’s experiences. With the exception of Florence Nightingale, women were largely absent from the discussions. I want to know about the women. As an adult, I lived in Roswell, Georgia, where I learned of the mill workers, mostly women and children, who, in 1864, were arrested and sent north by Federal forces for making Confederate cloth. Their fates largely remain a mystery, and I wrote my book in order to imagine what we may never know.
I love stories about ordinary women living through extraordinary times. In this story, the protagonist, Joetta, a North Carolina yeoman farmer who does not share the Confederacy’s view on slavery, attempts to stay neutral during the Civil War despite the ever-growing costs.
I admired the way Everhart deals with the relationship between Joetta and her teenage sons, boys old enough to assert their independence and choose their own way, no matter how much she may wish they chose differently.
From the author of The Saints of Swallow Hill, an evocative, morally complex novel set in rural 19th century North Carolina, as one woman fights to keep her family united, her farm running, and her convictions whole during the most devastating and divisive period in American history, perfect for readers of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles.
Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. She and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry, and…
Arizona Territory, 1871. Valeria Obregón and her ambitious husband, Raúl, arrive in the raw frontier town of Tucson hoping to find prosperity. Changing Woman, an Apache spirit who represents the natural order of the world and its cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, welcomes Nest Feather, a twelve-year-old Apache girl,…
As both a writer and a reader, I love romance novels set in the late 1800s because many of the problems people faced back then are similar to the problems encountered today. For example, we worry about losing jobs to AI. Back then, workers worried about mechanization. Also, while researching a book, I was fascinated to learn that meetings, dating sites, games, and “text” messages were just as prevalent then as they are today, thanks to the Victorian Internet (aka the telegraph). Another reason I’m fascinated with the Old West is because it caused women to challenge traditional roles and enter into professions previously dominated by males.
I have a particular fondness for stories involving mail-order brides, and this one stood out for me due to its unique twist. A well-intentioned neighbor takes it upon himself to order a mail-order bride for the protagonist without his knowledge. To complicate matters further, Evelyn arrives in town completely unaware that the hero has not been informed of her arrival or her reason for coming. Despite this rocky start, they enter into a marriage of convenience.
I found their humorous exchanges delightful as they navigated their emotional challenges while trying to make their marriage work. However, what truly captivated me was how friends and family play pivotal roles in guiding the couple onto their path toward love.
"Melissa Jagears is a stand-out talent! Her fresh new voice is strong, stylish, and makes A Bride for Keeps a page-turner for anyone who fancies a stirring love story." -Rosslyn Elliot, author of Fairer Than Morning and Sweeter Than Birdsong
"A Bride for Keeps treats readers to an engaging, prairie romance...delivering a heartwarming, satisfying read." -Maggie Brendan, CBA bestselling author of The Heart of the West and The Blue Willow Brides series.
"Melissa Jagears has penned a tender tale of a mail-order bride who takes both the groom--and herself--by surprise when love comes softly...quietly... to heal their broken hearts." -Julie…
