Corn Sweat

by Toby Babcock

139 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 12, 2026

Reviews

[Abigail L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unsentimental and strikingly intimate, Corn Sweat looks past the familiar image of America’s heartland to reveal the private lives unfolding among its farms, bars, gravel roads, workplaces, river bottoms, and endless fields. Short stories and ten interwoven pieces explore marriages quietly coming apart, friendships tested by what remains unspoken, childhood wounds carried into adulthood, changing agricultural communities, and working people accustomed to enduring far more than they reveal. Humor frequently arrives beside sorrow, while darker turns remind readers that isolation can exist even in places where everyone knows your name. Throughout the collection, the Iowa landscape remains an enduring presence, beautiful, demanding, and indifferent to human trouble. Corn Sweat is a clear-eyed portrait of contemporary rural life and the people who have mastered the art of carrying on without ever saying exactly what they carry.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the intimacy of these loosely connected, vastly different short stories that explore the interior lives of rural residents in the Iowa plains. One character says, “It’s a nice place to live. But you can’t be here all the time. Nothing happens.” Yet, in farms and towns without much action, Babcock transports readers into the mess and muck of his characters’ inner lives. Using language as spare as the Iowa landscapes where they live, Babcock explores themes of substance use, infidelity, small-town gossip, religion, suicide, and local lore. The collection, which includes intercalary poems and prose, isn’t perfect, but offers an alternative narrative to Midwest nice and proves even simple-sounding places have beautiful and complex characters.

Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley