Prairie Lights

Prairie Lights is the kind of independent bookstore that gives a town its identity. Founded in 1978 and now operating out of a three-storey building on Dubuque Street, it stocks the wide and deep selection a UNESCO City of Literature deserves, plus a busy reading series that brings two or three authors a week — many of them Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni passing back through town.

The upstairs café is one of the better workspots in central Iowa City: large windows over the Ped Mall, decent coffee, and the kind of background quiet only a bookstore can produce.

things to do shopping sight
A story
The upstairs reading room sits in the same space where, in the 1930s, a local literary club called the Times Club hosted readings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and e.e. cummings. The club faded; the building eventually became a bookstore in 1978; the reading tradition came back with it.