Selected Reading
An archive of all that’s available online from The New Territory. Shop our back issues for more.
An Epic Poet’s “Fatal Row” with “Ezrapoundism”
Biography of Black Elk Speaks author is an underdog story unafraid to show stark realities.
The Hooten Hollers
“Maybe it’s more accurate to say that John’s vocal cords are the conduits by which the ghosts of John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf communicate.”
Bad Faith
“Wheeler’s characters bend and stretch their conceptions of self to fit these places and situations, dipping their feet in the often boiling waters of possibility.”
The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century
Couch’s book is a revitalization effort in itself. She writes to look forward, to focus on the good that’s coming for the region.
Two Roadmaps, One Planet
There are two diverging paths to handling environmental problems. Do we understand the solutions well enough to choose?
A Presidential Haunting
Chatty ghosts, departed sons make Saunders’ contribution to the Lincoln canon worth its words.
Authors to Themselves?
When the Ulrich Museum rolled out the (proverbial) shag carpet for a deep fake AI film and its making-of documentary
Non-believers Welcome
A Pilgrimage to Eternity gives words to doubt and wonder as Egan ponders what we lose when we distance ourselves from religion.
What a Concept: Hogs and History Abound on Wolf Hunter
Living folk heroes from southwest Missouri revive half-century-old tunes of their homeland
God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right
“Barrett-Fox allows a group so widely despised to emerge as human and complicated like the rest of us.”
Peter H. Clark – St. Louis, Missouri
Clark, a Black socialist who had been collaborating with German radicals in Cincinnati since the days of abolitionism, was well prepared for relationship-building.
R. A. Lafferty – Tulsa, Oklahoma
R. A. Lafferty 1724 S. Trenton Ave.Tulsa, Oklahoma By Michael Helsem “Everything, including dreams, is meteorological.” – R. A. Lafferty, ”Narrow Valley” A couple of years ago, my wife and I were visiting my young niece and her husband in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they...
Sojourner Truth – Battle Creek, Michigan
Harmonia was biracial, socially lively (it was rumored to be a bastion of free love!), and included a store, a blacksmith shop, and a seminary.
Jim Harrison – Osceola County, Michigan
He believed that wandering the woods, studying birds, fishing, and a general curiosity for the natural world could “lift you out of your self-sunken mudbath, the violent mixture of hormones, injuries, melancholy, and dreams of a future you not only couldn’t touch but could scarcely see.”
Louis L’Amour – Jamestown, North Dakota
The most famous writer to ever come out of North Dakota never wrote anything that takes place there.
Thomas Hart Benton – Shell Knob, Missouri
Thomas Hart Benton Mark Twain National Forest Shell Knob, Missouri By Aaron Hadlow There is a burled oak tree that stands on the knuckle of a ridge finger behind my parent’s house in Shell Knob, Missouri. Despite its disfigurement, the oak is otherwise straight and...
Bonnie Jo Campbell – Comstock, Michigan
Bonnie Jo Campbell H House Comstock, Michigan By Lisa DuRose The Kalamazoo River flows right through the center of Comstock, Michigan, behind the library and township hall and the 24-hour gas station. Past Merrill Park where people feed bread to ducks. It floods every...
Hunter S. Thompson – Louisville, Kentucky
Hunter S. Thompson Churchill Downs Louisville, Kentucky By Charlie Cy In the spring of 1970, thirty-two-year-old writer Hunter S. Thompson returned to his hometown of Louisville to cover the 96th running of the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s Monthly. Less than 72 hours...
Lisel Mueller – Forest Haven, Illinois
Lisel Mueller 27240 N. Longwood Dr. Forest Haven, Illinois By Jenny Mueller “Our trees are aspens, but people / mistake them for birches” — so begins Lisel Mueller’s “Another Version,” set in 1970s Midwestern suburbia. This proves to be a territory of error. After...
Tennessee Williams – St. Louis, Missouri
Tennessee Williams 4633 Westminster Place St. Louis, Missouri By Devin Thomas O’Shea Tennessee Williams called St. Louis “cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid and provincial,” in a 1947 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, playing the heel to his...
Kathleen Finneran – St. Louis, Missouri
Kathleen Finneran & North County, St. Louis—a kaleidoscopic view of how backyards hold the memories of lives lived through raging grief and easy joy.
Sherwood Anderson – Elyria, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson & The Old Topliff and Ely Plant—on literary myths, Roof-Fix, and an escape along the railroad tracks in Elyria, OH.
Rachel – Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin
In 1834, 20-year-old Rachel petitioned the St. Louis Circuit Court for her freedom, after she had been held in slavery in Ft. Snelling and Ft. Crawford, WI.
John Augustus Stone – Metamora, Indiana
John Augustus Stone & Metamora, IN—the story of a tourist town named after a play, and the details that most visitors today just don’t know.
Gordon Parks – Fort Scott, Kansas
Gordon Parks & the Marmaton River—walking the cracked bottom of the gulch, following the “documentarian of a watershed century.”
Lorine Niedecker – Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin
Lorine Niedecker’s River Cabin—America’s greatest unknown poet, writing in a riverside cabin that appears to shrug off the idea of annual flooding.
Hugo Martinez-Serros – Chicago, Illinois
Hugo Martinez-Serros & South Chicago City Dump—Depression-era salvage in a “a great raw sore on the landscape.”
Elijah Lovejoy – Alton, IL
The publisher of an abolitionist newspaper, killed by a mob in 1837 after calling for “hearty and zealous efforts” to end slavery.
Malcolm X – Omaha, Nebraska
3448 Pinkney Street—the site of Malcolm X’s first home offers a more complex portrait of Midwestern mythologies.
John Bartlow Martin – Herman, Michigan
Smith Lake Camp—a sanctuary in the Upper Peninsula, a place that “is not geared to make your visit painless.”
August Derleth – Sauk City, Wisconsin
August Derleth & Sauk City Rail Bridge—a local author’s erasure from the place that used to commemorate him with a bridge, a historical marker, a park, and a pie case.
Philip Levine – Waawiiyaatanong
Philip Levine & Belle Isle—“here, alone, I am smudged by the warming mist of snow as the spring sun finds its way in.”
Richard Wright – Chicago, Illinois
Richard Wright house—a modest brownstone among “great sweeping corridors of concrete and ingrained prejudice.”