Toya Wolfe’s debut novel Last Summer on State Street is a harrowing, poignant, and visceral evocation of life and death in the Robert Taylor public housing development in its final […]
In a year or so, the 2024 Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago, marking the 27th time the city has played host to one or both of the major […]
In the handful of years after the Civil War, Illinoisans went crazy for baseball, a game that was then spelled as two words “base ball.” By 1868, however, an editor of […]
Naa Oyo A. Kwate, the author of White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation, will be in conversation with Stacey Sutton on Thursday, April 27, at […]
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 […]
Helen Shiller—a longtime radical activist and the new alderman in Chicago’s 46th ward—turned 40 on November 24, 1987. Two days later, she went to City Hall for an 11am meeting with […]
In her new book of poetry Woman without Shame, Sandra Cisneros looks aging in the face and laughs. She laughs at the frenetic lusts and couplings of youth—at broken hearts and […]
As a title, An Angel in Sodom is evocative and a bit ambiguous. The subtitle of Jim Elledge’s book is much more direct: Henry Gerber and the Birth of the Gay […]
Last spring, the Chicago Humanities Festival offered a bus tour of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, and this September, offered a tour of the nearby South Shore neighborhood. South Shore is a mostly African […]
Near the end of my hourlong walk around Graceland Cemetery the other day, I went past a stone obelisk, maybe 30 feet tall, and noticed this on the side: SANDRA […]
Louis Sullivan’s Idea, a biography of the 19th century Chicago architect, by Chicago’s first cultural historian Timothy Samuelson, is, in the most literal sense of the word, a beautiful book. […]
Nature is healing. Summer is in full swing, and Lollapalooza is behind us. Fan Expo kicked off our summer convention circuit, and we, the nerds, will be returning to the […]