Scott Kenemore is a horror writer from the Midwest who has lived in the Chicago area since 2004. Best known for his zombie trilogy Zombie Ohio, Zombie, Illinois, and Zombie, Indiana—“which […]

Richard Thomas is a Mundelein-based author of, as he describes it, “maximalist speculative fiction—mostly fantasy, science fiction, and horror.” With more than 175 published stories to his credit, he’s been […]

Short stories exist in the literary world somewhere between the novel and the dirty joke. Their readers want the accouterments of a novel delivered in the most expedient, gut-punchy way […]

By Guest Writer Holly Smith A Cosplayer Welcome As I sat down in the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture to see a live interview with comedian Kate McKinnon about […]

As a child, going to the library with my mother was a beloved weekly event. I vividly remember browsing through the hard-copy card catalog and wandering the stacks searching for […]

Avid book lovers can be a solitary bunch—after all, it’s hard to lug our stacks (and stacks) of books around a party. But that is exactly what’s about to go […]

Chicago-born Mary Fleming’s Civilisation Francaise is a novel of layers. Layers slowly peeled away for the reader to learn the stories of the book’s two central characters, Madame Quinon, an […]

Chicago’s literary scene is, in a word, “lit”: from the Midwest’s largest free outdoor literary festival to pop-up typewritten poetry encounters to the nation’s only museum devoted to American writers, […]

Ananda Lima’s fiction debut, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, launches at Women and Children First this Friday, June 21. Filled with double meanings, a very meta perspective, rebellions […]

The characters in The Body Farm span across generations, backgrounds, lifestyles, and conflicts, but they all seem to share one thing: they’re trapped.  This is Abby Geni’s second short story […]

Laura Chow Reeve’s debut short story collection A Small Apocalypse is, like any good collection these days, thematically rich. It is mostly about young queer characters in the present day, […]

Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and avoided assassination? What if I had taken a […]