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 women caught […]
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 award; and […]
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 among supernatural […]
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 connotes—distinction, domination, […]
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. Now author […]
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 novel The […]
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 age as […]
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 great big […]
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 moment, I […]
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 from 2018’s […]
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), Sara Paretsky […]
Until recently, Pilsen Community Books was operated by owners Mary Gibbons and Aaron Lippelt. Current part-owner Katharine Solheim shares what’s changing and what will stay the same at the shop. Pilsen Community […]
