Lingering Inland
A Literary Tour of the Midwest
Vignettes by writers engaging with prominent and obscure Midwestern locales
Paper – $24.95
978-0-252-08897-1
eBook – $14.95
978-0-252-04841-8
Publication Date
Paperback: 12/23/2025
About the Book
How do the stories we tell about Midwestern places influence or reflect our experiences? How is the literature of a place or a region relevant to the people who live there?In this expansive anthology, Andy Oler collects 72 original short essays by a diverse array of contemporary writers. Each explores locales in Midwestern literature relevant to the life and work of literary figures and canonical authors such as Toni Morrison and Willa Cather. Lingering in these places in both body and mind, the contributors contemplate the resonances and desires nurtured by their chosen location. Together, the essays take readers on an odyssey that maps our inner longing to connect across vast landscapes.
A singular collection of creative nonfiction, Lingering Inland plumbs the personal and collective essence that binds Midwesterners together through words and places.
About the Author
Andy Oler is chair of the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and coeditor of Michigan Salvage: Approaches to the Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell and Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature.Reviews
“Lingering Inland explores the richness and diversity of the Midwest as no other book has managed to do, through the celebration of the region’s many and divers writers and the places they’ve been. What a marvel of landmarks, these birthplaces, museums, houses, burial sites, and roadside attractions! What a tapestry of American prairies, rivers, marshes, caves, deserts, dumps, and empty lots! These are the places that mattered to America’s fictionists, poets, playwrights, abolitionist newspapermen, and speech writers, and they matter to the authors of these remarkably intimate essays. In these pages, we explore the edges of the Midwest, where it rubs up against the south (in Twain’s Hannibal, MO) and the west (in L’Amour’s North Dakota), and to the north (via the Ambassador bridge to Canada). The essays stand as a magnificent protest against the erasure of monuments and voices, continually under threat by what passes for progress. Read this book to find out about the past and present of this vast and remarkable region, its natural features, its architecture (its cornbelt cubes, shacks, cabins, camps, and ruins), and, of course, its literature. I have never been so enthralled by my own part of the world, my Midwest.”—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of The Waters: A Novel
“This is an absolutely charming book, utterly original and appealing in all ways. Whether you are from the Midwest or not, you will find yourself drawn to these very personal and illuminating profiles of writers in their Midwestern home places—it’s a book to give to everyone you love in the entire region and elsewhere. As a child, my class was bussed up to Mark Twain’s home in Hannibal and to poet Eugene Field’s home in south St. Louis. I recall weeping both times, feeling stirred to my roots by tales of children who departed and left their toys behind or daughters who died in a bathtub, with grieving fathers who could also continue being humorists. To feel writers as our neighbors on all sides, honoring love and loss, was a gift to a young reader. This book is a huge gift to everyone, and I hope the entire Midwest rejoices.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Fuel: Poems
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