“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 […]

Some time ago, a priest drove a bunch of us teenagers somewhere. As we headed down the Dan Ryan just past the turnoff for the Stevenson, he said, “Look out […]

The Third Coast Review Lit section has continued to grow in its coverage of the city and region’s ongoing literary scene. Below, several of TCR’s Lit writers share their favorite […]

For eight months—September 1940 to May 1941—the German Luftwaffe conducted a ferocious bombing campaign over London and other British cities and towns. An estimated 40,000 civilians were killed and as […]

They come every year around this time, gathering at the long bar or huddling around the worn wooden tables. Many stand in the middle of the floor shoulder to shoulder […]