Review: Making Friends With a Poet, The Poet’s House, by Jean Thompson
Carla Sawyer is a tall, smart-alecky 21-year-old who’s working for a landscaping company until she figures out what to do with her life. She’s on a job in one of […]
Patrick T. Reardon is a Chicago historian, essayist, poet and writer who was a Chicago Tribune reporter for 32 years. He is the author of nine books including The Loop: The ‘L’ Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago (SIU Press).
Review: Wildly Contorted and Reimagined: Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, by Tim Jones-Yelvington
In his story collection Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, Chicagoan Tim Jones-Yelvington zestfully recasts gay men and boys in the central roles of a surprisingly wide array […]
Essay: How Many Books Can $30 Buy at the Newberry Book Fair?
When I visited the Newberry Library Book Fair on Friday, I knew I had to come up with a strategy. It’s a locally famous sale, featuring tens of thousands of […]
Review: Poetry Jagged and Anguished, A Boy in the City, by S. Yarberry
The pain that S. Yarberry suffers as a transgender person is strikingly described in their new book of jagged, anguished poetry A Boy in the City. It is pain set […]
Review: Myriad Chicagos, Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, edited by Donald G. Evans and Robin Metz
Summer mornings, in my West Side childhood, I would go out on our rickety second-story back porch, and, across the alley, on the worn, gray asphalt of the parking lot/school […]
Book Review: A Kind of Poetry, The Fact of Memory, by Aaron Angello
The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and FabricationsBy Aaron AngelloRose Metal Press In a piece titled “Think,” Aaron Angello tells of two conversations about what makes a poem a poem. In […]
Review: A Glimpse into a Very Different Culture, Rig Veda Americanus, edited by Daniel G. Brinton
Rig Veda Americanus: Sacred Songs of the Ancient Mexicans Edited with a paraphrase, notes and vocabulary by Daniel G. Brinton Amika Press If you pick up a copy of Daniel […]
Review: Anti-Racist and More, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, by Felicia Rose Chavez
The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez Haymarket Books, 216 pages, $14.97 Chicago’s Haymarket Books promotes The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize […]
Review: The Mean Streets of the Near North Side, The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown
The Fabulous Clipjoint By Fredric Brown Penzler Fredric Brown’s murder mystery, The Fabulous Clipjoint, first published in 1947, and reissued last December by Penzler Publishers, was good enough to win an […]
Review: Just Add Water, The Fountain, by David Scott Hay
The Fountain By David Scott Hay Whiskey Tit Jasper P. Duckworth is a critic in an alternate universe Chicago for Chicago Shoulders, a New City-like (or, if you will, Third […]
Review: An Untold Story from Ulysses, The Curious Odyssey of Rudolph Bloom, By Richard Reeder
The Curious Odyssey of Rudolph Bloom by Richard Reeder Propertius Press The Curious Odyssey of Rudolph Bloom by Chicago writer Richard Reeder is a curious book, and not just because […]
Retrospective: A History That Leaves a Lot Unsaid, City of the Century By Donald L. Miller
City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America By Donald L. Miller Simon & Shuster For a quarter of a century, I’ve used Donald L. […]