Alex Kotlowitz

Urbana, Ohio, is a small city of 11,000, where nearly three out of four voters went for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The journalist Beth Macy, who in her previous books chronicled the widening fissures in American society by examining the opioid crisis and the aftereffects of globalization, grew up there. In Paper Girl, she returns to Urbana—a place beset by economic decline, dwindling public resources, failing schools, and the disappearance of local journalism.

When Upton Sinclair published his novel The Jungle, the reaction was different from what he’d imagined. He had hoped to expose the deplorable working conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, but most readers, instead of championing the workers, came away flinching at the depictions of all the unsanitary ways meat was produced. Of his readers’ response, Upton famously said, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.