Review: Dark, Rough, Brutal, and Real: Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay
Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography of a Blues Legend By Jackie Kay Vintage Books Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, liked to spend money on herself and on her friends, […]
Feature: We Visit the Artist at Work, Retyping a Chicago Literary Masterpiece
I could hear the clickety-clack of his typewriter a block away. It was quiet around the Union Stock Yards Gate with only an occasional car or truck passing. And as […]
Review: Raising Issues Beyond Entertainment, In the Aftermath, by Jane Ward
In the Aftermath By Jane Ward She Writes Press Jane Ward’s In the Aftermath is an earnest, even affecting examination of the strong waves of guilt, sadness, and anger among […]
Review: The Adventures of an Urbex Photographer in Abandoned Chicagoland: Rust on the Prairies
Abandoned Chicagoland: Rust on the Prairies By Jerry Olejniczak Arcadia Publishing I’ve always been drawn to—and repelled by—demolition sites. Crumbling walls, shattered by a wrecking ball and revealing shards of […]
Review: Mellencamp Biography Reveals a Belligerent, Multi-Talented Artist
Mellencamp By Paul Rees Atria Books/Simon & Schuster Release date September 14, 2021 The first music he loved was Motown soul music that he listened to on AM radio stations […]
Review—Jane of Battery Park Escapes Evangelicalism and Finds Love
Jane of Battery Park By Jaye Viner Red Hen Press Jane, a nurse who escaped an ultra-conservative evangelical upbringing to live in hiding in LA, runs into her college crush […]
Interview: Sparrows, Hutches, and Growing into an Ending, Sandra Cisneros Discusses Her New Novella
Note: Sandra Cisneros will appear on Tuesday, September 7, at 7 p.m., in a virtual event sponsored by Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago and the suburbs. For information, visit their site. […]
Review: A Sparrow in a Dirt Bath, Martita, I Remember You, by Sandra Cisneros
Note: Sandra Cisneros will appear Tuesday, September 7, at 7 p.m., in a virtual event sponsored by Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago and the suburbs. For information, visit this site. […]
Review: Visualizing and Honoring Black America, the Story W.E.B. Du Bois Told at the 1900 Paris Exposition
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America—The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert Princeton Architectural Press Black Lives 1900: […]
Review: Why Chicago Is Chicago, A History of the Chicago Portage, by Benjamin Sells
A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America By Benjamin Sells Northwestern University Press Let me tell you: I’m a huge Chicago history […]
Interview: Willa, Ernest, William, and Scott—A Talk with Dr. Michelle Moore about Chicago and American Modernism
Dr. Michelle Moore is a professor of English at the College of DuPage whose most recent book is Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald […]
Review: Complex, Dynamic, and Unruly, Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect, edited by Romi Crawford
Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect Edited by Romi Crawford Green Lantern Press Performance artist Jefferson Pinder offers, as a fleeting monument to the long-gone Wall of Respect, a […]