Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know by Samira Ahmed Penguin Random House Reviewed by C.E. Archer-Helke I don’t often find a book that simultaneously transports me to the best parts […]

Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore Harper, 306 pages, $26.99 Elizabeth Wetmore’s Valentine, set in 1976 rural West Texas, is a novel of relentless and brutally raw outrage. A fury-filled howl of […]

Michael Zapata is a founding editor of the award-winning MAKE Literary Magazine. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction; the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program […]

Peace Talks By Jim Butcher Ace In the 16th installment of Chicago-based urban fantasy series The Dresden Files, wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden is tapped to work security for a treaty negotiation […]

Gospodine they call our narrator. “Master” or “sir” in Bulgarian, it’s a designation of authority from the students he teaches literature to at a high school in Sofia. What it […]

Rodham: A Novel By Curtis Sittenfield Random House We think we should all know her by now. After decades in the limelight, Hillary Rodham Clinton remains, for many, an enigma. […]

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, adapted and illustrated by Kristina Gehrmann, translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger Ten Speed Press, 384 pages, $24.99 Kristina Gehrmann’s graphic novel version of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 […]

After Afaf’s older sister disappears one night, their family is never the same. As her mother succumbs to mental illness and her father to alcoholism, Afaf struggles to come of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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), […]