The Poorcraft Cookbook By Nero Villagallos O’Reilly Iron Circus Comics If there’s one thing old people know it’s that young people are dumb. Selective amnesia makes each generation’s youth-haters forget they were likewise labeled as ignoramuses in their day. Yet…
Author Brian Pinkerton is a lifelong resident of the Chicago area, growing up on, as he puts it, “Bozo’s Circus and Ray Rayner…Creature Features and Cubs baseball.” With 12 novels under his belt, his work has extended to the…
Frank Lloyd Wright’s $10,000 Home: History, Design, and Restoration of the Bach House Robert J. Hartnett Master Wings Publishing Despite any fame suggested by the hideous portmanteau starchitect, few architects have ever been household names. For most people, buildings simply…
Numerically speaking, 2/22/22 (today), has a special resonance for Chicago area writer, editor, and teacher Richard Thomas. His latest book, Spontaneous Human Combustion (Keylight), a collection of short stories, was just released. Born in St. Louis, Thomas made the Chicago…
Mother Chicago: Truant Dreams and Specters Over the Gilded Age By Martin Billheimer Feral House Chicago is a dark place. All cities are. The more humans you pack into a space and the fewer resources they’re given, the darker things…
Guide to Chicago’s Twenty-First-Century Architecture Chicago Architecture Center and John Hill University of Illinois Press As packed with tacky tourist traps as any city, Chicago has one irreproachable draw: its architecture. After torching itself in 1871, the city snapped back…
Unless you’re an easily frightened tourist, Chicago is rarely considered a hotbed of horror. But as Third Coast Review has pointed out before, our town has a distinguished pedigree in horror fiction and art, and a bright future besides. Once…
David Anthony Witter was born in Miller, Indiana—“across the lagoon from Nelson Algren’s summer home,” as he puts it—but has spent most of his life in Chicago. Growing up in 1970s Lincoln Park, before it switched from being an enclave…
Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland Jonathan Wright and Dawson Barrett University of Illinois Press I told a friend I was reviewing a book called Punks in Peoria. Born in nearby Canton, Illinois, and affiliated with…
Dr. Michelle Moore is a professor of English at the College of DuPage whose most recent book is Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald in Conflict (Bloomsbury Academic) In it she addresses the titular…
Is Wisconsin the furthest state from the Mississippi Delta? Culturally, perhaps. Yet the land of butter burgers and cheese curds played a big role in preserving the blues. While 78 rpm records offer an aural time tunnel to the 1920s…
Exploring the Land of Lincoln: The Essential Guide to Illinois Historic Sites By Charles Titus 3 Fields Books I asked my non-Illinoisan Twitter followers to tell me three things they knew about my home state. Two subjects always came up:…
Ray Bradbury’s work and reputation have aged like fine dandelion wine. Unlike many of his fellow 20th century science-fiction and fantasy writers, he’s entered the current millennium fairly woke and relatively unscathed, his stories addressing censorship, racism, and a…
The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America By Lisa Z Sigel Reaktion Books Masturbation is the only sex act that’s both universal and forbidden. Universal in that everyone does it—unless they exercise peculiar restraint or are lying—but…
Even via Zoom, Don Evans is passionate about Chicago’s relationship with the written word. A writer, editor, and teacher, Evans is also the executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame (CLHOF). Founded in 2010, the CLHOF presents educational…
Hand Dryers By Samuel Ryde Unicorn Publishing Group Distributed by the University of Chicago Press Books In the appropriately senseless year of 2020, Hand Dryers, by Samuel Ryde, was published. With that, every possible book had at last been printed,…
From the Torah to the Talmud to a plenitude of rabbinic commentary on theology, scripture, and law, Judaism is built on words—hundreds upon thousands upon millions of words. Despite such textual abundance, and in part because of it, much of…
Patrick T. Reardon, a regular contributor to Third Coast Review, recently released his new book, The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago (SIU Press). More than a history of the elevated tracks surrounding the downtown area, The…
Chicago and horror may not seem synonymous, but the city and surrounding area have produced a bevy of creators of chilling art and hair-raising tales. Author Ray Bradbury hailed from Waukegan, for instance, while Fritz Leiber, Charles Beaumont, Robert Bloch,…
Tell us a bit about yourself and your writing career. It’s hard for me to believe my writing “career” has been going on now for more than three decades. My first two novels, Obsessed and Penance, were published in Dell’s…
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