Essays, Lit, Nonfiction

Review: A Limited Concept and Beautiful Prose Make for Mixed Reading in Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook, by Sonya Huber

In her new book Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook Sonya Huber offers a collection of effective essays mostly about her Midwest identity. A longtime essayist and Fairfield University professor, […]

Adam Kaz /
Essays, Lit, Nonfiction, Reviews

Review: Who We Lost Meets the Loss and Sorrow of COVID with Grace and Fury

Who We Lost: A Portable COVID Memorial, edited by Martha Greenwald and published by Belt Publishing, started out on Greenwald’s website WhoWeLost.org, an online, crowd-sourced memorial to those who perished […]

Caitlin Archer-Helke /
Chicago history, Chicago history, Fiction, Lit

Review: An Old Novel to Captivate Modern Readers: The Girls by Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber’s The Girls, a novel about three independent-minded South Side women yearning for vibrant lives, was originally published more than a century ago, but it’s written with such verve […]

Patrick T. Reardon /
Design, Lit, Painting & sculpture

Interview: Wild Cards—Artist David Wilson and the Great Lakes Tarot Deck

Fortune favors the bold. Ohio artist David Wilson’s life journey has seen a typical array of ups, downs, and divergent paths, but it all led (more or less) to his […]

Dan Kelly /
Lit, Reviews

Review: The Very Near Future—Midwest Futures, by Phil Christman

Midwest Futures By Phil Christman Belt Publishing The Midwest is a deeply mysterious place to the coastal essayists, pundits, and politicians. Rarely visiting, save to write clunky closed factory and […]

Dan Kelly /
Lit, Reviews, Uncategorized

Book Review—In the Neighborhood of…—The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook

Picture of the author

The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook Edited by Martha Bayne Belt Publishing Chicago’s neighborhoods are one of its most distinct yet indefinable elements. Despite what those ubiquitous neighborhood maps in every other […]

Dan Kelly /
Events, Fiction, Interviews, Lit, Live lit events

Folk(tale) Hero: An Interview with Author Edward McClelland

  I wish I could describe Edward McClelland in legendary terms—it would be so damned apropos. I’d tell you he’s as tall as a redwood, as strong as a herd […]

Dan Kelly /
Lit, Reviews

The Cleveland Neighborhood Guidebook Will Make Even Non-Clevelanders Homesick

I’ve loved Cleveland since I went to the Westside Market during a road trip with my parents when I was in middle school. It was the first time I’d been […]

Emma Terhaar /