Ruben Ubiera, shirtless on a humid night in early September, runs back and forth across Front Avenue under US-131 in Grand Rapids, shaking a can of spray paint.
Matt Bell’s new novel Scrapper, out this month from Soho Press, begins with a sweeping history of Detroit told from the Packard Plant floor. “See the body of the plant,” the novel directs us, as if sung by a ghostly chorus.
No state’s cities are more decrepit than Michigan’s. Detroit has become a showcase for urban blight, an international symbol of decay that attracts art photographers and ruin pornographers from all over the world.
Dyson, Ohio, the central character in Patrick Wensink’s new comic novel, Fake Fruit Factory, is a little town in big trouble. It has a $10 million budget gap to close after years of industrial collapse and civic lassitude.
Don’t call it a renaissance. Or a revival. Also out: Revitalization. Do not, do not, bring up Brooklyn when you’re talking about Detroit, not unless you’re ready to have that conversation with Gary Wasserman.
In 1968, the students returning to my suburban Detroit Catholic high school, Bishop Gallagher, had a surprise waiting for them: For the back-to-school dance that September, someone had booked the MC5
Belt is proud to host the world premiere of the video for Chicago marching band/mobile orchestra Mucca Pazza's "The Sit Down Waltz."
You may already know the Dawn Powell line “All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.” If you’re like me, you might both smile and wince as you read it.
I am a bespectacled 23-year-old with a deep affinity for Oxford shirts, Levi’s skinny jeans, and overpriced beer and coffee, and I, like so many of my kombucha-sipping contemporaries...
I’m a Patrick Michael Finn fan. This, unfortunately, is a lonely thing to be. His output is modest: One novella, A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovitch, and a story collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, both from small presses.
The Facades is about the best and the worst of the Midwest. Eric Lundgren’s 2013 novel takes place in a fictional Trude, a hard-boiled, moth-bitten metropolis bounded by interstates and a high-modern retirement home.
“I work with the material that shaped the industrial Midwest: steel. I create elegant and refined works using [...]