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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Best of the Rust Belt
The best personal essays from a contested region, from Belt Publishing's ten years as a press.
Everyone has an opinion on the Rust Belt--whether it's the "real America" or a place that no longer exists called by a name that has long outlived its usefulness, as our own president has said. But undeniably, there's something that connects the post-industrial cities. Maybe the question isn't what defines that connection, but who.
Over the past ten years, Belt Publishing has been putting out books that prioritize the voices of the many people who live here. We've collected our favorite writing from across our collections, from Pittsburgh to Detroit, Chicago to St. Louis, Milwaukee to Cleveland, and more. Here, writers document growing up in segregated St. Louis and elucidate the coded Islamophobia of southern Michigan. Writers include Megan Stielstra, 2022 Missouri Author of the Year Vivian Gibson, Aaron Foley, Kathleen Rooney, Sarah Kendzior, and more.
Book Details
- Publisher: Belt Publishing
- Publish Date: Jul 2nd, 2024
- Pages: 208
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.90in - 0.60in - 0.70lb
- EAN: 9781953368706
- Categories: • Essays• United States - State & Local - Midwest(IA,IL,IN,KS,MI,MN,MO• Memoirs
About the Author
Anne Trubek is the founder and publisher of Belt Publishing and Belt Magazine. She is the editor of Voices From The Rust Belt (Picador, 2018), the author of The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting (Bloomsbury, 2016) and A Skeptic's Guide To Writers' Houses (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications. Prior to founding Belt she was Associate Professor of English at Oberlin College.
Anna Clark is a ProPublica journalist who lives in Detroit. She is the author of The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy. Anna's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Elle, the New Republic, Politico, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Boston Review, Next City, and other publications. She edited A Detroit Anthology, a Michigan Notable Book.
Praise for this book
"I am not from the Rust Belt, but this wonderful collection makes me feel as if I am -- or should want to be. The power of America is in its places, and these Rust Belt writers have made the culture, the personalities, and the vividness of a place memorable to readers from any point on the globe."
--James Fallows, co-author of national bestseller Our Towns
A little more than a decade ago in Cleveland, editor Anne Trubek founded Belt Publishing with the aim of spotlighting authors from the Midwestern Rust Belt, where the loss of industries like steelmaking and automobile manufacturing during the second half of the twentieth century ravaged once thriving economies. For writers in the region, that meant further marginalization in a literary ecosystem that has long centered coastal hubs like New York City. But in a series of critically acclaimed anthologies and other books featuring voices from Cleveland; Gary, Indiana; Saint Louis; and beyond, Belt Publishing made a case for the Rust Belt as a hotbed of urgent storytelling. Standout essays from more than a dozen of those volumes can now be read together in Best of the Rust Belt (Belt Publishing, July 2024), in which readers will find selections about a historic gay bar in Detroit, mass transit in Pittsburgh, the "ghosts" of a labor-march-turned-massacre in late nineteenth century Milwaukee, and coming of age as a writer in 1990s Chicago--among dozens of other dispatches. In her introduction, Anna Clark, who edited Belt Publishing's 2014 A Detroit Anthology, cautions against reading Best of the Rust Belt, edited by Trubek, as "a glib sort of regional boosterism." Rather, it offers an "aptly democratic" sense of place through multiple perspectives, temperaments, and tastes. "The [anthology] form suits the purpose of interrogating our lives as they are lived alongside others," Clark writes. "Notice where you find the electric shock of recognition: the feeling of seeing and being seen, sometimes when you least expect it. In all the prickly and precious ways, this book feels like home."
"Best of the Rust Belt" provides intimate views into an underappreciated region, from writers who are paying the proper attention. - Rebecca Spiess, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette