Last Call Chicago is not a narrative book. Rather it is an extensive listing with brief descriptions of 1,001 LGBTQ and LGBTQ-friendly bars and such. But it is also a […]

Some jobs don’t sound like work. A perfect example: Jeffrey Breslow’s decades-long career as a designer, developer, and partner at one of the most successful toy- and game-making companies of […]

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 […]

Chicago is so much more than its buildings…still they’re hard to miss. Ever since Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable built his home on the Chicago River’s banks, structures have risen […]

When Timothy Samuelson stood in the center of his windowless, crowded studio, surrounded by gorgeous artifacts of the past, I thought he might break into song.  “Nothing in here doesn’t […]

Hopeful Hearts in Highland Park is author Maggie Duplace Schmieder’s attempt to make sense out of something senseless. She and her family attended the Highland Park Independence Day parade this […]

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. […]

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 […]

Since its early days, Chicago has had a deep connection to drinking. As author June Skinner Sawyers (a regular contributor to Third Coast Review) shares, “Drinking in the Windy City […]