New Lawrence, Kansas Books

Fall 2020 is a great season for brand-new books with a connection to our beloved Lawrence, Kansas. These make great gifts for the #LFK lover in your life!

$24.99
SKU: LADYBIRDCOLLECTED

Meg Heriford of Lawrence's legendary Ladybird Diner has compiled her essays into a book, as we've all been begging her to do for ages, and now that book is here: Ladybird, Collected.

This item will be released in early October, 2020

100% of the proceeds from Raven sales of Ladybird, Collected will go to funding Ladybird Diner's community meal program. Each book purchase funds four meals. 

Ladybird, Collected: Collected essays on the evolution of a tiny diner in the middle of the country. These are stories of love and adaptation at the broad intersection of commerce and community, and of how a pandemic changed everything and also nothing about us. Ladybird, Collected is a book you might want to preorder if you are into:

  • Sense of place
  • Small business culture
  • Adaptation amid uncertainty
  • Confessed parental shortfalls
  • Metaphors
  • Pie
  • Work/home life balance
  • Nods to rocks
  • Community interdependence
  • Doing the next right thing
  • Food security as a measure of justice


$13.00
SKU: 9781734638103

The first book by Boog! BOOGORAMA is a collection of articles, speeches, screeds, and letters by Dennis "Boog" Highberger from 1983-2018.

"Welcome to Boog's World: a place of thoughtfulness, humor, the tenacious pursuit of justice and a deep love for the little patch of Kansas he calls home. 'The Lawrence I love,' he writes, 'is in the details, the nooks and crannies, the fine print.' This is also the place where we find Boog in all his brilliance, illuminating the nooks and crannies, igniting the fine print." -Simran Sethi

"Everything in here is delicious and carnal and wise -- reminds me I wasn't always on Zoom, face squished between glass plates like a lab sample...the dada mayor wrote frot he Time of the Plague, when we should eat his book with music" - Andrei Codrescu

Dennis "Boog" Highberger was born and raised in Garnett, Kansas and lives in Lawrence. He was the 1992 winner in the graduate division of the Helen F. Snyder Book Collecting Contest at the University of Kansas. He currently represents District 46 in the Kansas House of Representatives. 


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She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs By Sarah Smarsh Cover Image
$22.00
This book is hard-to-find or out of print and we may not be able to get it. Email for more details.
ISBN: 9781982157289
Published: Scribner - October 13th, 2020

Nominated for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award

The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Heartland focuses her laser-sharp insights on a working-class icon and one of the most unifying figures in American culture: Dolly Parton.

Growing up amid Kansas wheat fields and airplane factories, Sarah Smarsh witnessed fir


How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems By Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Cover Image
$22.00
ISBN: 9781734247725
Availability: In stock at our distributor’s warehouse; will be at the Raven in 3-10 bus. days! More at ravenbookstore.com/ordering-faqs
This book cannot be returned. Make sure what you're ordering is exactly what you want.
Published: Meadowlark - October 12th, 2020

How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems brings together over 30 years of Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg's poetry on what it means to be human in a particular place, time, body, history, and story. "She is our teacher speaking from the sky, from the field, from the heartland," writes Oregon Poet Laureate Kim Stafford.


$17.00
SKU: 9781952989018

Poetry by Nikki Mayeux

Art by Briana Ladwig

Ordinary Time is a reverent observation of the finite, and of queerness, parenthood, and humanity in a culture saturated by religion and its contradictions. 

The title alludes to the period in orthodox Christianity’s liturgical calendar outside of the major holiday seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. The collection celebrates the poet’s and illustrator’s own “ordinary time,” exploring the sacredness of the temporal, the tangible, and the mundane, as well as reckoning with the Biblical stories and religious dogma they both left behind.