Essay: True West
One Sunday afternoon a number of years ago I found a finger puppet lying outside Maclean House, the former dormitory (now apartments) named in honor of the late Norman Maclean, […]
Review: Flashes of Wry: Fast Funny Women, edited by Gina Barreca
Note: Gina Barreca, the editor of Fast Funny Women, and Chicagoan Nicole Hollander will read from the collection of 75 essays of flash nonfiction in a Zoom event at 7 […]
Interview: Bringing Background Characters to the Fore: A Talk with Author David Lazar
Sidekicks, comic foils, and other stock and background characters: cinephile and essayist David Lazar loves watching old movie character actors more than the leads. In his latest book, Celeste Holm […]
Kill Yr Idols—A Chicago History of Statue Desecration, Part 2
Part 1 of this article can be found here. The original inspiration for this article came from a reference in the WPA Guide to Illinois, created by the Federal Writers’ Project. One […]
Kill Yr Idols—A Chicago History of Statue Desecration, Part 1
Note: As a pleasant side effect of the BLM protests, several statues of slavers, traitors, and genocidal invaders have been defaced, toppled, or removed from public view worldwide. Thus far, […]
Essay/Book Review: Founding American Towns on Paper, Cities of the American West, Part 2
Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning By John W. Reps Princeton University Press, 827 pages, out of print, available on the internet starting at $40 […]
Essay/Book Review: The Vast Chicago Street Grid, Cities of the American West, Part 1
Cities of the American West A History of Frontier Urban Planning By John W. Reps Princeton University Press, 827 pages, available on the internet starting at $40 Part One of […]
Long Reads Are Lonnnnnnnnnnnnng—Extra-Long Books for the Serious Social Isolationist
Third Coast Review writer Patrick T. Reardon recently published a fine piece in praise of tackling extra-long reads during the social isolation era. For those who’ve completed all the popular […]
The 10 Best Books about Chicago—and One Clunker
Many very good and even great books have been written about Chicago, and, based on my half century of writing about the city, here are the 10 that, at the […]
What to Read Now: Three Books About Plagues
It’s the year of the big virus. We’ve had two weeks of #StayTheFHome or sheltering in place, depending on where you live. And in some states, you’re not doing that. […]
An Ongoing Graveyard Shift: Selling Books in Chicago in a Plague Year
Even in the best of times, bookstores have it rough. Just last year the American Booksellers Association reported American bookstore sales were down by 7.6 percent from 2018, sales sliding […]
Six Chicago Books by Non-Chicago Authors
When you’re looking for a good novel about Chicago, you’re most likely to turn to those writers identified as Chicago writers, such as Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March), […]