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 during COVID. It is one of the few places—indeed, perhaps…
Like the very best tangled and violent folklore passed down to us, Jasmine Sawers’s The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore, (Rose Metal Press), is eerie and beautiful. A strange, frightful, wondrous trip through the human condition. Sawers mixes…
Cora James lives in the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. She works in the Harlem Library, rubbing shoulders with the best and the brightest Black writers in New York City. She’s married to a bassist whose music helps form the…
Unlike the turbulent 1970s she lives in, Polly Wainwright is determined to be calm, competent, and professional. She’s got a boyfriend making a name for himself as a war correspondent in Vietnam, close friends, and a steady (albeit boring) job…
The title of Where Are the Snows, Kathleen Rooney’s new, award-winning collection of poetry, serves as both question and commentary to start off the book. Where are the snows, anyway? Climate change has taken them. Is it too late to…
My Book of the Dead By Ana Castillo University of New Mexico Press We are caught in a time of collective mourning, moving through yet another year of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic even as the violence of structural racism continues…
We all carry secrets, but not everyone has the courage to sit under stage lights, before an audience awash in shadows, and tell them to the world. But immigration attorney Qian Julie Wang, both in her Chicago Humanities Festival conversation…
Live Literature: The Experience and Cultural Value of Literary Performance Events from Salons to Festivals Ellen Wiles Palgrave Macmillan With music, open mics, and more—live performance is slowly coming back to Chicago. From the Symphony Center and the Lyric Opera…
The Social Graces By Renée Rosen Penguin Random House Chicago author Renée Rosen turns east in The Social Graces, a romp through Gilded Age New York’s High Society. From outspending each other to clawing one’s way up the exclusive social…
Salman Rushdie is sometimes asked why, in this age of lies, he chooses to write fiction, adding more untruths to this disjointed world. Rushdie and poet Srikanth Reddy’s Chicago Humanities Festival conversation is almost a polemic in response, a defense…
History doesn’t repeat, Mark Twain said: it rhymes. And, as poet and playwright Cornelius Eady and performer Joe Morton both noted during their conversation about Eady’s Brutal Imagination, it keeps on rhyming, often in all the worst ways—and will continue…
Both Leonnig and Mitchell cover Washington, or elements thereof, and they began the conversation by noting that the Secret Service is not, for the most part, its own beat. Since 2012, however, it has been Leonnig’s. She came to it…
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