Midwest Futures

What does the future hold for the Midwest? A vast stretch of fertile farmland bordering one of the largest concentrations of fresh water in the world, the Midwestern US seems ideally situated for the coming challenges of climate change. But it also sits at the epicenter of a massive economic collapse that many of its citizens are still struggling to overcome. The question of what the Midwest is (and what it will become) is nothing new. As Phil Christman writes in this idiosyncratic new book, ambiguity might be the region's defining characteristic. Taking a cue from Jefferson’s grid, the famous rectangular survey of the Old Northwest Territory that turned everything from Ohio to Wisconsin into square-mile lots, Christman breaks his exploration of Midwestern identity, past and present, into 36 brief, interconnected essays. The result is a sometimes sardonic, often uproarious, and consistently thought-provoking look at a misunderstood place and the people who call it home.

"Everything you think you know about the Midwest is wrong. It isn't as flat as you think, nor as normal and nice. It isn't as white, or as boring, and it isn't as hopeless as its Rust Belt corrosion would seem to indicate..... Though much of the tone is dark and acerbic, the author finds glimmers of hope in the region as "a moral frontier," where Americans might best face the considerable challenges of capitalism and climate change. A provocative analysis. You'll never think of Peoria in the same way again.."-- Kirkus Reviews

“As our public discourse reckons with the categorical descriptions of a diverse, changing population, it is more important than ever to have more precise interpretations of which 'we, the people' are being leveraged and for what ends. Midwest Futures reveals the diversity of the region’s people, opinions, and experiences. Phil Christman’s writing, as always, is readable, engaging, and funny as hell, while also maintaining intellectual rigor. You don’t have to be a Midwesterner to feel connected to this book and its people.” —Tressie McMillan Cottom, National Book Award Finalist and author of Thick: And Other Essays

"Midwest Futures is a remarkably rich and clear-eyed meditation on the region. While the Midwest has long been bound up with the myth of national destiny, Christman reminds us that its history was neither fated nor inevitable, but chosen by human actors. What emerges is a place far more protean and variable than the caricatures that so often dominate the popular imagination. In thinking deeply and imaginatively about the region's history—its injustices and inequities, its social experiments and utopian visions—Christman uncovers a multiverse of possible futures, asking us to consider what might have been and what still may be." —Meghan O'Gieblyn, author of Interior States

“An affectionately critical exploration of a place wrung out of easy epiphanies. Phil Christman’s deeply funny and clear-eyed writing is the antidote to outsider appraisals and lets us see the Midwest as place, a template, a symbol, but most of all, as region where people live on the edge of possibility.”—Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

National media campaign.

Author events in Ann Arbor, Cleveland, Chicago, and New York City.