James Orbesen is a writer and professor living in Chicago. His first book on the comics of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is forthcoming from Sequart. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Guernica, Salon, Jacobin, Chicago Review of Books, PopMatters, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.
Title 13, the debut novel of Michael A. Ferro, has all the trappings of an engaging conspiracy thriller. There are secret internal documents regarding the personal information of US citizens, gathered facetiously […]
Much has been made of the importance of the body as a site of social, cultural, and economic forces. From books like Judy Norsigian’s Our Bodies, Ourselves and Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the […]
Ron Faiola is no stranger to supper clubs, especially those scattered throughout our neighbor state to the north. Wisconsin Supper Clubs: Another Round is his second glossy coffee-table book focusing on these out […]
Movies are a global business. This is something close to an axiom given how Hollywood iconography has swaddled the globe. Audiences from Berlin to (formerly) Bombay became acquainted with silver screen legends […]
Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been confined to the imagination of science fiction or to the nightmares of popular culture. The concept of a fully formed AI, often incorrectly conflated with robotics, […]
Chicago icon and national treasure Studs Terkel made a career out of chronicling the stories of others. A new art exhibit, opening September 14th at the Harold Washington Library, is very much […]
Author, former columnist, and story editor for the exceptional (and long running) animated series Adventure Time, Jack Pendarvis, has a gift for blunt, ironic, and forceful language. This is on full display […]
Among the many treasures one could stumble across at this past weekend’s Printer’s Row Lit Fest, one of the finest, and most polyphonic, comes from 826CHI, a literacy and education nonprofit that […]
Jessa Crispin, world traveler and occasional Chicago resident recently shuttered her website Bookslut, a review and interview publication that’s been running hot since 2002 (full disclosure: I wrote for Bookslut over the […]
With the election season finally heading into an actual election after months and months of primary contests, director J.W. Basilo and head writer Shelley Elaine Geiszler’s hybrid production put on by Chicago […]
In Matt Pelfrey’s adaptation of the famous John Ball novel, In the Heat of the Night, starring Manny Buckley and Joseph Wiens as the antagonists, and directed by Louis Contey, appearances and depths collide, […]