"Phil Christman is a beautiful writer with a sharp analytical mind. Both are on display in Midwest Futures, a book about culture, identity, space, and place in the American Midwest. 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. 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

A Commonweal notable book of 2020.

"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

"A combination of history, memoir, reportage, and lit-crit that taught me a lot about a region I've reported on....Check it out." --James Fallows, The Atlantic

"As the country stumbles through ever-growing crises, Christman's book taps into a broader conversation about the future of the country--of how it's shaped and who is shaping it--and in doing so, offers an extraordinarily insightful, potential path forward for the Midwest."--José Pablo Fernández García, Midstory

"Equal parts lyrical journalism, historical reckoning, and vision statement, Midwest Futures is slight in size yet sprawling in scope. Writing from the inside out, Christman documents a people accustomed to looking up at wide-screen horizons, then down in modesty at their shuffling feet. Confessing the region's contradictory nature early and often--"Which is it: middle, or western?" he writes--allows Christman to till and tend the heartland on behalf of a people who often abdicate their right to define themselves. ... Drawing from a reservoir of hope, Christman stakes claim to his corner of a growing New Midwestern canon, alongside the likes of Sarah Smarsh's Heartland and Hanif Abdurraqib's poetry as documentary."--Aarik Danielsen, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"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

"Christman's text is pointed and often very funny as he ponders a subject that has been hiding in plain sight. ... 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

"Brisk and thought-provoking. ... Reading Christman's book is like a road trip through time and sentiment and culture of the Midwest." --Martha Stuit, Pulp: Arts Around Ann Arbor

"Christman excels at pointing out the doublethink powering American endeavors and slathering deodorant on its collective soul."--Dan Kelly, Third Coast Review

"This is a fantastic book by one of the most underappreciated writers of my generation on a topic that isn't easy to write about. It's such a joy that I zipped through it in a single day." --Scott Beauchamp, The Washington Examiner

"To write about the Midwest is to risk joining a succession of truisms that tread and retread the same ground. In Midwest Futures, Christman sidesteps this fate. Rather than try to pin the region to a single argument or narrative, he makes a mosaic out of its multiplicity." --Megan Marz, The Washington Post