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In the spring of 1880, in a railroad town in Dakota Territory, a girl in her 15th year bends over her sewing to help support her family. This might be [...]

''Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other,'' the author's new collection, ranges from a playful one-act drama set in a lake to short fiction rife with apocalyptic anxiety. PRAIRIE, DRESSES, ART, OTHER, by [...]

PRAIRIE FEVER British Aristocrats in the American West, 1830-1890 By Peter Pagnamenta Illustrated. 338 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95. It is in names like Victoria, Rugby and Runnymede [...]

THIS BLESSED EARTH A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm By Ted Genoways Illustrated. 226 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95. Farmers are fatalists. Rick Hammond, the [...]

SUMMERLONG By Dean Bakopoulos 354 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99. Sex. In fiction, as in life, it is a great catalyst, setting knickers and plots atwist. Also as in life, the [...]

BOUND By Antonya Nelson 231 pp. Bloomsbury. $25 If you take an exit off a Midwestern highway and drive through a square-gridded prairie town, you might think there's nothing much [...]

WICHITA By Thad Ziolkowski 253 pp. Europa Editions. Paper, $16. Near the end of ''Wichita,'' Thad /Ziolkowski's first novel, the protagonist recalls a line from Rilke: ''You are not surprised [...]

A COMPLICATED KINDNESS By Miriam Toews. 246 pp. Counterpoint. $23. EVERY teenager is weird, or thinks he (or she) is. But some are weirder than others, and many of these [...]

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT By Ada Louise Huxtable. Illustrated. 251 pp. A Lipper/Viking Book. $19.95. THEY are all here, those eye-popping events that make the life of Frank Lloyd Wright so [...]

DAKOTA A Spiritual Geography. By Kathleen Norris. 224 pp. New York: Ticknor & Fields. $19.95. IN 'Dakota: A Spiritual Geography,' her remarkable new work of nonfiction, the poet Kathleen Norris [...]

REDISCOVERING THE GREAT PLAINS Journeys by Dog, Canoe, and Horse. Norman Henderson Illustrated by Robert Cook. 214 pp. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. $29.95. IF you consider the prairie [...]

LEAD: CHEYENNES AND HORSE SOLDIERS The 1857 Expedition and the Battle of Solomon's Fork. By William Y. Chalfant. Illustrated by Roy Grinnell. 415 pp. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. $24.95. [...]

LEAD: GREAT PLAINS By Ian Frazier. Illustrated. 290 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $17.95. GREAT PLAINS By Ian Frazier. Illustrated. 290 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. [...]

FROM HOMICIDE TO SLAVERY Studies in American Culture. By David Brion Davis. 305 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $29.95. ACADEMIC historians are probably the only group of scholars who [...]

PRAIRIE FIRES: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser. (Picador, $22.) This excellent biography explores Ingalls's childhood and rise to prominence, and refreshes our understanding of American [...]

PRAIRIE FIRES The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder By Caroline Fraser Illustrated. 625 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt. $35. Stretched past its capacity by the tumultuous migrations and movements of [...]

THE ART OF VANISHING A Memoir of Wanderlust By Laura Smith 261 pp. Viking. $25. Smith's book is hybrid in its form: part memoir, part biography of the writer Barbara [...]

FICTION AUTUMN By Ali Smith Pantheon Books. $24.95. The extraordinary friendship of an elderly songwriter and the precocious child of his single-parent neighbor is at the heart of this novel [...]

PRAIRIE TRAIN By Marsha Wilson Chall. Illustrated by John Thompson. Unpaged. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. $15.99. (Ages 4 to 8) I DREAM OF TRAINS By Angela Johnson. Illustrated by Loren [...]

AMERICA THE PHILOSOPHICAL, by Carlin Romano. (Knopf, $35.) This enlightening encyclopedic survey by a literary critic and philosophy professor both illustrates and argues for the liveliness of /American intellectual life. [...]

YELLOW BIRDOil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian CountryBy Sierra Crane Murdoch The Fort Berthold Reservation covers nearly a million acres of rolling hills and prairie in [...]

Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play Music In The New York Times Book Review, Patricia Nelson Limerick reviews Caroline Fraser's ''Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.'' Limerick writes: [...]

The host of ''A Prairie Home Companion'' and the author, most recently, of ''The Keillor Reader'' collects hymnals, phrase books and tales of heroic collies. And ''I'm a connoisseur of [...]

As each semester begins at Grinnell College, a small liberal arts school nestled in the Iowa prairie, I get numerous e-mails from students pleading for a spot in my fiction [...]

To the Editor: In Liesl Schillinger's review of Antonya Nelson's novel ''Bound'' (''Prairie Fires,'' Oct. 3), Schillinger begins: ''If you take an exit off a Midwestern highway and drive through [...]

PRAIRIE REUNION By Barbara J. Scot. Riverhead, $12. The author chronicles her midlife journey to her childhood home, Scotch Grove, Iowa. Her purpose is to understand her father's desertion and [...]

February 14, 1926: 'Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years' by Carl Sandburg Anew experience awaits the reader of Carl Sandburg's book on Lincoln. There has never been biography quite like this [...]

BRENDAN PRAIRIE By Dan O'Brien. Scribner, $22. When the developer of Mountain Air Estates is run over by a sabotaged front-end loader, suspicion centers on Bill Malone, the protagonist of [...]

THE AMERICAN WEST By Dee Brown. Scribners, $25. Dee Brown's kaleidoscopic narrative 'The American West' opens in 1838, with prairie schooners beginning their trek across the plains; it closes at [...]

MY CHICAGO By Jane Byrne. Illustrated. 384 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. FIRE ON THE PRAIRIE Chicago's Harold Washington and the Politics of Race. By Gary Rivlin. [...]

ALL BUT THE WALTZ Essays on a Montana Family. By Mary Clearman Blew. Illustrated. 223 pp. New York: Viking. $19.95. A cold, sharp prairie wind blows through 'All but the [...]

To the Editor: Angela Carter's review of John Vernon's novel 'Peter Doyle' misses the prairie schooner by failing to mention that the eponymous Peter Doyle is a characterization of the [...]

PRAIRIE SONGS By Pam Conrad. Illustrated by Darryl S. Zudeck. 167 pp. New York: Harper & Row. $11.50. (Ages 10 and up) DAKOTA DUGOUT By Ann Turner. Illustrated by Ronald [...]

PRAIRIE WOMEN Images in American and Canadian Fiction. By Carol Fairbanks. Illustrated. 300 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $22. PLAINS WOMAN The Diary of Martha Farnsworth, 1882-1922. Edited by [...]

GENTLEMEN ON THE PRAIRIE By Curtis Harnack. Illustrated. 254 pp. Ames: Iowa State University Press. $19.95. ''YESTERDAY a wilderness, today an empire,'' a Le Mars, Iowa, newspaperman wrote of his [...]

FROSTBITE: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, by Nicola Twilley Consider the improbable fact of the supermarket banana. In ''Frostbite,'' an exploration of the vast system known [...]

What books are on your night stand? A bit of a brag, but I just got the Annie Ernaux box set from Seven Stories. I'm teaching all 13 books for [...]

Driving Down Memory Lane To the Editor: What an absolute delight to come across Peter Behrens's nostalgic review of the venerable children's classic ''Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things [...]

The second novel by the author of ''The Nix'' follows a young Chicago couple's trajectory from pre-internet optimism to 21st-century ennui. WELLNESS, by Nathan Hill Nathan Hill's novels are, among [...]

In ''Sparks,'' the journalist Ian Johnson chronicles the methods and motivations of the activists trying to preserve a record of the atrocities of the past. SPARKS: China's Underground Historians and [...]

NECESSARY TROUBLE: Growing Up at Midcentury, by Drew Gilpin Faust UP HOME: One Girl's Journey, by Ruth J. Simmons Two baby boomers, both women -- one born in 1945, one [...]

In ''Playing God,'' the journalist Mary Jo McConahay argues that an alliance of extremely conservative bishops and Catholic activists is exerting a profound impact on our national politics. PLAYING GOD: [...]

In 1959, the picture-book nuptials of a black rabbit and a white rabbit caused intense debate across the nation. In May 1959, the former Alabama schoolteacher Dora Haynes Parker mused [...]

From the Arctic to the Amazon, Cheuk Kwan traces a diaspora through Chinese restaurants owned and operated by immigrant families. HAVE YOU EATEN YET?: Stories From Chinese Restaurants Around the [...]

The first 25 times I read ''Goodnight Moon,'' I cried. Not in a dainty, tear-dabbing way; I'm talking Niagara waterworks, heaving sobs and a red nose. My firstborn daughter was [...]

The morning after police officers shot and killed a man in her Philadelphia neighborhood, Anna Badkhen traveled to the ocean to think about birds. According to the Greeks, she tells [...]

What books are on your night stand? Two of Cesar Chavez's favorites: ''Loaves and Fishes,'' by Dorothy Day, and ''Faith and Violence,'' by Thomas Merton. Paul Chavez recently recommended them [...]

''The Ruin of All Witches,'' by Malcolm Gaskill, is a riveting history of life in a 17th-century New England frontier town, where the stress of isolation, foul weather, disease and [...]

Some crime novels I adore or loathe instantly; others provoke more tepid reactions. Few, however, cause me to turn each page in a state of utter bewilderment, wondering why I [...]

In his new novel-in-verse, ''The Door of No Return,'' the Newbery Medal-winning author works hard to show that white people weren't the only ones perpetuating an unjust system. THE DOOR [...]