Review: Don’t Stay Where You’re Not Wanted, Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma
Don’t stay where you’re not wanted. In Ling Ma’s short story collection Bliss Montage, her characters learn this the hard way. Or at least, some of them do. These eight […]
Review: Natkin: The Moment of Truth Is a Gorgeous Tribute to the Music Photographer’s Four-Decade Career
Paul Natkin learned the moment of truth before he began photographing musicians. Working along with his father, Robert Natkin, a photojournalist and one of the first photographers for the Chicago […]
Interview: Feeling Beatific—Jerry Cimino of the Beat Museum/Beatmobile
Jerry and Estelle Cimino are on the road, spreading the Beat Gospel to the world. As founders of the Beat Museum in San Francisco, they’ve made a mission of keeping […]
Interview: Tim Samuelson and the Intangible of History
When Timothy Samuelson stood in the center of his windowless, crowded studio, surrounded by gorgeous artifacts of the past, I thought he might break into song. “Nothing in here doesn’t […]
Interview: Hearts Beat Still—Maggie Schmieder, Author of Hopeful Hearts in Highland Park
Hopeful Hearts in Highland Park is author Maggie Duplace Schmieder’s attempt to make sense out of something senseless. She and her family attended the Highland Park Independence Day parade this […]
Interview: Wild Cards—Artist David Wilson and the Great Lakes Tarot Deck
Fortune favors the bold. Ohio artist David Wilson’s life journey has seen a typical array of ups, downs, and divergent paths, but it all led (more or less) to his […]
Review: Lynn Sloan’s Midstream Carries Readers on a Cinematic Tour de Force
Unlike the turbulent 1970s she lives in, Polly Wainwright is determined to be calm, competent, and professional. She’s got a boyfriend making a name for himself as a war correspondent […]
Review: Kathleen Rooney’s Where Are the Snows Meets the Present with Wry Humor and Hope
The title of Where Are the Snows, Kathleen Rooney’s new, award-winning collection of poetry, serves as both question and commentary to start off the book. Where are the snows, anyway? […]
Essay: Walking Graceland Cemetery with—and Without—Adam Selzer’s New Book
Near the end of my hourlong walk around Graceland Cemetery the other day, I went past a stone obelisk, maybe 30 feet tall, and noticed this on the side: SANDRA […]
Review: Making Friends With a Poet, The Poet’s House, by Jean Thompson
Carla Sawyer is a tall, smart-alecky 21-year-old who’s working for a landscaping company until she figures out what to do with her life. She’s on a job in one of […]
Review: The Seed-Germ King: Louis Sullivan’s Idea, by Tim Samuelson and Chris Ware
Louis Sullivan’s Idea, a biography of the 19th century Chicago architect, by Chicago’s first cultural historian Timothy Samuelson, is, in the most literal sense of the word, a beautiful book. […]
Review: All Those People, All Those Lives, Where Are They Now?, Graceland Cemetery, by Adam Selzer
Chicago is young. Compared with the large cities of Africa, Asia, and Europe—hell, compared with the Native American metropolis that occupied the Cahokia Mounds—Chicago is a mere toddler of 189 […]