I first encountered Chicago author Kathleen Rooney years ago at The Neo-Futurists’ funky New Year’s Eve bash, where her collective Poems While You Wait was delightfully typing up custom poetry […]
It’s something of a surprise to be reminded that Oscar Wilde—the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and the subject of a scandalous 1895 trial over consensual homosexual acts—wrote […]
Vividly set amongst the winding cobblestone streets and shadowy canals of 18th century Venice, Chicago writer Julia Fine’s Maddalena and the Dark is a wonderfully moody, gothic fairy tale about […]
Most readers are familiar with the more prestigious annual book prizes out there, among them the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the PEN America Literary Awards. A new […]
When the world is literally on fire, who can think about writing? The present writer was reminded of Chicago author Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 Electric Literature essay on the topic (“The […]
When was the last time you told a story to a stranger at a bar? Not an anecdote about your day at work, or that funny internet meme that’s going […]
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 […]
Brevity is both the soul of wit and the spirit of horror. A horror novel carries its own pleasures, but shorter tales of terror often punch well above their weight. […]
If ever a trigger warning was needed, it’s the one for David Scott Hay’s new novel [NSFW], which cautions the reader that the novel includes “sex, drug use, witchcraft, profanity, […]
Anyone who’s joined a beginners’ writers workshop knows the difficulty of reviewing prose that is nowhere near polished. It’s awkward, stressful even, trying to devise cogent thoughts about art that […]
Chicago doesn’t play much of a role in Rob Wilkins’s biography of his boss, Terry Pratchett, the British mega-selling author of the fantasy-science fiction Discworld series whose life was cut […]
What was 2022 like in the world of Chicago, Illinois, and Midwest letters? I’ve asked the Lit section writers to share their favorite reviews and stories of the past year. […]