mission freak!

It’s darn cold outside so we’ve been inside putting together Mission Creek Festival 2009. There is still A LOT of work to do but we thought we’d share some of our early confirmed musical acts:
GZA/GENIUS (of WU-TANG CLAN) performing LIQUID SWORDS
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
JOHN VANDERSLICE
FRUIT BATS
BOWERBIRDS
THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH
HEADLIGHTS
SIMON JOYNER
GOLDEN BIRDS
ROOMMATE
EL PASO HOT BUTTON
PIETA BROWN
CALEB ENGSTROM
THE WESTERN FRONT
ESCAPE [...]

Jonathan Ames is one of the greatest underground writers of our time. Despite an Ivy League education and a fine taste for blazers, Ames is far from pretentious. He breathes in the air of our soul’s gutters. He looks at the “other” within himself, within all of us and tears it right out of the darkness, [...]

Those Pitchfork people have been making a fuss about their new book which hits stores this Tuesday, Nov. 11th. But to be fair, you can go to Prairie Lights in Iowa City and get the book now: it’s already on the stacks, shelved in the nonfiction aisle. The book is a chronological analysis of the [...]

Another weekend, another few dollars to spend. We’re gonna take a little detour this weekend. Instead of hitting you hard with music music music dance dance dance, we’re going to give you a bunch of different events to satisfy that renaissance man in the depths of your soul.
Thursday
Dinner at the Motley Cow
It’s been a minute [...]

More Halloween fun: Oh, you wanna be scared out of your fucking mind? Check out this reading of the War of the Worlds courtesy of one of America’s great auteurs, Orson Welles. [Click Here] He read this on October 30th, 1938 and while I wasn’t there to witness it I’m sure it scared people shitless. [...]

Iowa City bleeds literature. This town is packed with poets, novelists, and essayists out of its ears. Walk downtown, bump into three people and at least one of them is a writer. Go into the Foxhead and all of them are writers. And it’s not just the writers living here: several authors come into Iowa [...]

RUN: Ponytail’s in town.
Thursday
Deb Olin Unferth (Reading) / Gerber Lounge in EPB / 530PM / FREE
As we mentioned earlier, you’d better get your literary rocks off with McSweeney’s Press superstar Deb Olin Unferth who reads on campus later this afternoon. If you’re into slightly experimental and entirely humorous fiction then be there for sure. A [...]

Holy McSweeeney’s Party! Deb Olin Unferth, author of the short-short stories collection Minor Robberies and the brand new novel Vacation, rolls into Iowa City Thursday afternoon to give a reading. Unferth’s experimental and humorous fiction is a fresh descent into the well-worn topics of navigating failing relationships and looking for meaning in life. The fabulist [...]

I am utterly shocked and devastated to arrive home from work this evening to learn that David Foster Wallace, American author and professor at Pomona College in California took his own life late Friday at his home in Claremont. Mr. Foster Wallace, who was just 46, was a prominent and influential contemporary American author whose [...]

Though at least one member of our staff maintains an obstinately cynical opinion on him, we’d be extremely foolish to miss out on this week’s appearance by author Chuck Klosterman, who will be appearing at the Englert Theatre on Wednesday night. Klosterman will be appearing as part of a free lecture series presented by the [...]