By the Iowa Sea

By the Iowa Sea

Author: Joe Blair

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1451636067

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Recounts the author's transformation from an idealistic, freedom-loving youth to a jaded and financially struggling father of four and how a catastrophic flood helped him to reconnect with the faith and courage of his childhood.


Beyond the Sea

Beyond the Sea

Author: Felan Parker

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2018-11-09

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0773555560

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The Bioshock series looms large in the industry and culture of video games for its ambitious incorporation of high-minded philosophical questions and retro-futuristic aesthetics into the ultraviolent first-person shooter genre. Beyond the Sea marks ten years since the release of the original game with an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Bioshock, Bioshock 2, and Bioshock Infinite. Simultaneously lauded as landmarks in the artistic growth of the medium and criticized for their compromised vision and politics, the Bioshock games have been the subject of significant scholarly and critical discussion. Moving past well-trodden debates, Beyond the Sea broadens the conversation by putting video games in dialogue with a diverse range of other disciplines and cultural forms, from parenting psychology to post-humanism, from Thomas Pynchon to German expressionist cinema. Offering bold new perspectives on a canonical series, Beyond the Sea is a timely contribution to our understanding of the aesthetics, the industry, and the culture of video games. Contributors include Daniel Ante-Contreras (Miracosta), Luke Arnott (Western Ontario), Betsy Brey (Waterloo), Patrick Brown (Iowa), Michael Fuchs (Graz), Jamie Henthorn (Catawba), Brendan Keogh (Queensland), Cameron Kunzelman (Georgia), Cody Mejeur (Michigan State), Matthew Thomas Payne (Notre Dame), Gareth Schott (Waikato), Karen Schrier (Marist), Sarah Stang (York/Ryerson), Sarah Thorne (Carleton), John Vanderhoef (California State, Dominguez Hills), Matthew Wysocki (Flagler), Jordan R. Youngblood (Eastern Connecticut State), and Sarah Zaidan (Emerson).


A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea

A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea

Author: Dina Nayeri

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-01-31

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 110160199X

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From the author of Refuge, a magical novel about a young Iranian woman lifted from grief by her powerful imagination and love of Western culture. Growing up in a small rice-farming village in 1980s Iran, eleven-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister, Mahtab, are captivated by America. They keep lists of English words and collect illegal Life magazines, television shows, and rock music. So when her mother and sister disappear, leaving Saba and her father alone in Iran, Saba is certain that they have moved to America without her. But her parents have taught her that “all fate is written in the blood,” and that twins will live the same life, even if separated by land and sea. As she grows up in the warmth and community of her local village, falls in and out of love, and struggles with the limited possibilities in post-revolutionary Iran, Saba envisions that there is another way for her story to unfold. Somewhere, it must be that her sister is living the Western version of this life. And where Saba’s world has all the grit and brutality of real life under the new Islamic regime, her sister’s experience gives her a freedom and control that Saba can only dream of. Filled with a colorful cast of characters and presented in a bewitching voice that mingles the rhythms of Eastern storytelling with modern Western prose, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is a tale about memory and the importance of controlling one’s own fate.


Two If by Sea

Two If by Sea

Author: Jacquelyn Mitchard

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1501115588

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Joining the volunteer rescue effort in Brisbane after the Christmas Eve tsunami, American expat Frank Mercy is transformed by his rescue of a telepathic little boy, who he illegally takes back with him to America and struggles to protect.


Beside a Burning Sea

Beside a Burning Sea

Author: John Shors

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2008-09-02

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780451224927

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From the author of Beneath a Marble Sky comes an inspiring new novel of a man and a woman from different worlds whose love is put to the ultimate test as they struggle to survive an extraordinary set of circumstances. View our feature on John Shors' Beside a Burning Sea. One moment, the World War II hospital ship Benevolence is patrolling the South Pacific on a mission of mercy—to save wounded American soldiers. The next, Benevolence is split in two by a torpedo, killing almost everyone on board. A small band of survivors, including an injured Japanese soldier and a young American nurse whom he saves from drowning, makes it to the deserted shore of a nearby island. Akira has suffered five years of bloodshed and horror fighting for the Japanese empire. Now, surrounded by enemies he is supposed to hate, he instead finds solace in their company—and rediscovers his love of poetry. While sharing the mystery and beauty of this passion with Annie, the captivating but tormented woman he rescued, Akira grapples with the pain of his past while helping Annie uncover the promise of her future. Meanwhile, the remaining castaways endure a world not of their making—a world as barbaric as it is beautiful, as hateful as it is loving. With the blend of epic storytelling and emotional intensity that distinguishes him as a unique talent, John Shors reveals a powerful story of redemption focusing on unlikely lovers, heroes and villains, and war-torn countries—all, in their own ways, fighting to survive.


Deep Nature

Deep Nature

Author: John Pearson

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2009-10

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 1587298813

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Photographers Linda and Robert Scarth have an incredible eye for that magic moment when small becomes beautiful. Matched with patience and skill, their eye for magic produces dazzling images of Iowa nature up close. Revealing the miniature beauties hidden among the patches of prairie, woodland, and wetland that remain in Iowa’s sadly overdeveloped landscape, the seventy-five color photographs in Deep Nature give us a breathtaking cross section of the state’s smallest inhabitants. The Scarths’ close-up images of showy orchis and northern monkshood, great spangled fritillary and painted lady, red-breasted nuthatch and eastern wood-pewee, ornate box turtle and gray treefrog, big bluestem and cotton-grass, and many other natural wonders look more like paintings than photographs. Beginning with an iridescent fly hovering over a neon-purple fringed gentian and ending with their iconic image of coneflowers refracted in dewdrops, they have created a sparkling jewelbox of images that will make us look at the small world around us with renewed appreciation. Attending to the small things in the fabric of nature is the Scarths’ source of artistic inspiration. Taking Walt Whitman’s “every leaf is a miracle” as their beginning, they celebrate not only each leaf but each feather, insect, dewdrop, flower, lichen, and intricate organism in the evolving web of life.


Outside Is the Ocean

Outside Is the Ocean

Author: Matthew Lansburgh

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2017-10-15

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1609385276

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Three days after her twentieth birthday, a young woman who grew up in Germany during World War II crosses the Atlantic to start a new life. Outside Is the Ocean traces Heike’s struggle to find love and happiness in America. After two marriages and a troubled relationship with her son, Heike adopts a disabled child from Russia, a strong-willed girl named Galina, who Heike hopes will give her the affection and companionship she craves. As Galina grows up, Heike’s grasp on reality frays, and she writes a series of letters to the son she thinks has abandoned her forever. It isn’t until Heike’s death that her son finds these letters and realizes how skewed his mother’s perceptions actually were.


Swords from the Sea

Swords from the Sea

Author: Harold Lamb

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2010-05-01

Total Pages: 568

ISBN-13: 0803228333

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Sail with John Paul Jones as he fights to save the crippled Russian fleet from the Turks, one eye always alert for the knives of his czarist rivals. Venture across the desert with a lone American on a desperate venture against the Barbary corsairs. Seek the Northeast Passage, beset by ice, storms, and traitors from within, at the side of explorer Ralph Thorne. Ride the whale road with the Vikings, plying their swords from Iceland to Byzantium. Introduced by best-selling author S. M. Stirling, this volume concludes with a rare behind-the-scenes look at Harold Lamb's writing secrets, penned by the editor who made him famous.


At Sea

At Sea

Author: Emma Fedor

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-03-07

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1982171545

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"When Cara and Brendan first meet, she's fresh out of college with a degree in the fine arts, recovering from the recent death of her mother and spending time on Martha's Vineyard while trying to figure out her next steps. She's swept away by Brendan's humor and charm and intoxicated by his thrilling, dangerous secret. He claims -- no, he insists -- that he he can breathe underwater. He shows Cara his gills. He dives beneath the waves and doesn't emerge for many minutes at a time. He offers her the most plausible of explanations: that he is a member of the United State's Army Special Forces and has undergone top-secret experimental surgery. And Cara, struck by the force of his devotion, by his unstoppable charisma, and most of all, by the casual truth of his claim, believes him. Their summer romance quickly turns serious. And then Cara gets pregnant. She and Brendan move into a house he buys for them, and when their son, Micah, is born, she is sure their happy ending is underway. Still, she is forced to contend with Brendan's dramatic moods, and struggles to overlook his unexplained disappearances and the weight of his dangerous secrets. She knows it must be PTSD. The trauma of war. The desperate, tragic memories that scar all soldiers. Cara is determined to stay strong for her young family, to heal Brendan's psychic wounds, to keep him safe. Until he and baby Micah seemingly vanish into thin air -- or deep water. Five years later, Cara is still struggling to move forward, married to another man and trying to rebuild her life, when a local fisherman announces he's spotted a man and small child treading water in Nantucket Sound. The news rekindles Cara's never-abandoned hope that her child may still be alive. As she fights to untangle delusion from reality, and revisits a past she's worked hard to reconcile, she's determined to learn the truth about her lost love and finally find her son"--


The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

Author: Denis Johnson

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2018-01-16

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0812988647

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Twenty-five years after Jesus’ Son, a haunting new collection of short stories on mortality and transcendence, from National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Dwight Garner, The New York Times • Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air • Chicago Tribune • Newsday • New York • AV Club • Publishers Weekly “Ranks with the best fiction published by any American writer during this short century.”—New York “A posthumous masterpiece.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The Boston Globe • New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Bloomberg The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson. Written in the luminous prose that made him one of the most beloved and important writers of his generation, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating the ghosts of the past and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves. Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come. Praise for The Largesse of the Sea Maiden “An instant classic.”—Newsday “Exceptional luminosity . . . hits a powerful vein.”—The New York Times Book Review “Grace and oblivion are inextricably yoked in these transcendent stories. . . . [Johnson’s] gift is to extract the beauty in all that brokenness.”—The Wall Street Journal “Nobody ever wrote like Denis Johnson. Nobody ever came close. . . . We’re just left with this miraculous book, these perfect stories, the last words from one of the world’s greatest writers.”—NPR