Events, Interviews, Lit, Nonfiction

Interview: Columnist Georgia Garvey on Her Greek Heritage and New Book, Everything Is Going to Be Okay (Until It’s Not)

Cover of Everything Is Going to Be Okay (Until It's Not) by Georgia Garvey

The phrase “it’s all Greek to me” is often used to refer to complicated things people cannot understand. Yet for award-winning columnist and former Chicago Tribune editor Georgia Garvey, her […]

Elizabeth Niarchos Neukirch /
Fiction, Lit, Reviews

Review: Searching for Meaning in the Absurd World of Rajkamal Chaudhary’s Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories

The late Indian writer Rajkamal Chaudhary (1929–1967) came to prominence in the first two decades of independent India in the 1950s and ’60s, producing a prolific number of works in […]

Elizabeth Niarchos Neukirch /
Lit, Nonfiction, Suburbs and exurbs

Review: An Artist/Photographer Analyzes the Wanderlust of Stray Shopping Carts

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification By Julian Montague Second edition, 2023, University of Chicago Press Julian Montague published his first edition of The […]

Nancy S Bishop /
Children's books, Fiction, Lit, Poetry

Review: Mother Goose for English Majors, The Lamb Cycle: What the Great English Poets Would Have Written about Mary and Her Lamb, by David R. Ewbank, with illustrations by Kate Feiffer

If Shakespeare, instead of Mother Goose, had written “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” perhaps he would have penned a sonnet to take the young girl to task for abandoning “Thy […]

Patrick T. Reardon /
Chicago history, Chicago history, Lit, Nonfiction

Review: A Second Breezier History of Chicago’s Great Fire, The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul, by Scott W. Berg

As someone who writes books, I felt a pang of empathy for Scott W. Berg when I heard that he’d published in September a new book about the Great Chicago […]

Patrick T. Reardon /
Art & Museums, Lit

Holiday Plans: Noteworthy Art Books Published in 2023

art books 2023

Looking for gift ideas for art lovers in your life? Or perhaps you want to treat yourself by buying a book that will not only inspire and educate you about […]

Thomas Wawzenek /
Dialogs, Essays, Events, Interviews, Lit, Live Lit, Stages, Talk show

Dialogs: The Fire This Time with Roxane Gay at the Chicago Humanities Festival

The Chicago Humanities Festival hosted writer Roxane Gay, in conversation with writer Lindsay Hunter, at the University of Chicago’s Lab School. Like recent CHF speaker and fellow Black female author […]

Karin McKie /
Dialogs, Events, Interviews, Lit, Live lit events, Nonfiction, Stages, Talk show

Dialogs: Considering Contagion with Maddow and Schama at Chicago Humanities Festival Events

This autumn’s Chicago Humanities Festival is chock-a-block with notable writers. That focus is normal for one of the Windy City’s most diverse and comprehensive cultural institutions, but especially true this […]

Karin McKie /
Fiction, Lit, Reviews

Review: Cravings: An Inventory of Human Life, by Garnett Kilberg Cohen

Reviewed by Guest Author Arieon Whittsey Cravings, by Chicago author Garnett Kilberg Cohen, offers an exploration of life and the moments that define it through an unlikely group of characters […]

Guest Author /
Essays, Fiction, Lists, Lit

Return of the Revenge of the Featured Creatures Massacre IV: Chicago Area Horror Writers Share Horror Recommendations

Once again, it’s time for me to slip out of my TCR Lit Editor role and into my Crypt-Keeper robe. In celebration of Samhain, I contacted several Chicago-area horror writers […]

Dan Kelly /
Fiction, Interviews, Lit

Interview: Horror Writer John Everson Talks About “Creepy Little Tales”

John Everson will soon celebrate the 30th anniversary of his first published piece. Since then, he’s worked as a journalist and music magazine editor, spending his spare time, in his […]

Dan Kelly /
Fiction, Interviews, Lit

Interview: To Infinity, From Beyond—Michael W. Phillips and Independent Horror Publishing in Chicago

When Michael W. Phillips started From Beyond Press, he joined a long history of publishing horror fiction in the Chicago area, beginning, more or less, when Weird Tales set up […]

Dan Kelly /