For “Lakeview Day 2025,” the Chicago Humanities Festival featured two tyranny experts, each for an hour-long interview followed by a brief Q&A, on April 27 at the Athenaeum Theatre. The […]
The title of Jake Johnson’s latest book—Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America—is more than a bit jarring. It’s that part about “Musicals and Mourning” that seems so odd. […]
Walk the goofy walk of the Galilee clown, laughing at denarii or spilling the coins in anger amid the pigeons and lambs, music of the heavens, lyrics by sacred hoboes […]
For regular readers of this column, Saturday’s Independent Bookstore Day is likely as highly anticipated as the Super Bowl (if not more so). If you haven’t made your game day […]
Capitalism abhors a creative gathering place—otherwise auto dealerships would put on poetry slams and hardware stores would host book clubs, wouldn’t they? While coffeehouses and restaurants often step up to […]
Some debut novels confidently announce a fresh, fully realized voice. Others are a little uneven and wear their amateurishness obviously. I’m afraid Greg Hewett’s debut No Names belongs to the […]
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 […]