For Gaza’s Children is a scream of protest against the oppression of Palestinians by those who have suffered oppression themselves. It is a cry from the heart against the destruction, […]
Peter Ackroyd’s The English Soul: Faith of a Nation, is a rich and odd book. Rich because of the author’s storytelling skill and odd because it doesn’t tell the story […]
The 1897 image on pages 110 through11 of Jeremy Black’s A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps is a striking bird’s-eye view of Chicago, looking across downtown to the […]
Chicago author Tod Lending’s debut novel The Umbrella Maker’s Son is a cinematic page-turner of a book. Set against the Nazi rise to power before World War II, this heartfelt […]
“I grew up in a nest feathered with words, texts, and books,” Naomi Cohn writes in the first essay of her lyrical debut memoir, The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on […]
Before a full house at the Fine Arts Building’s Studebaker Theater, singer-songwriter Neko Case appeared on stage in conversation with Lior Phillips, a Chicago-based South African music journalist. Case received […]
Welcome (back) to Book Smarts, a semi-regular series profiling Chicago’s bookstores and their owners. We began the series way back in 2020…then the pandemic happened. As bookstores closed, the series […]
Authors are frequently asked, “When is your book coming out?” I heard this question when I finished the first draft of my novel, and while I was editing the sixth […]
The 1902 plan to revamp and expand the National Mall in Washington, DC, was the product of a commission of prominent Americans. Three of them worked closely together to produce […]
Born in Detroit, writer Peter O’Keefe now lives in one of Chicago’s neighbors to the north, Racine. Through the years he’s written for everything from “word processing temp jobs” to […]
By: Holly Smith Many adult readers remember, with a good dose of nostalgia, the excitement and awe they felt at the annual Scholastic Book Fair. Books were trundled into the […]
Brushes with fame create anecdotes; brushes with infamy leave a scar. Such is the case with author Courtney Lund O’Neil’s mother Kimberly Byers-Lund, and by extension O’Neil herself. In her […]