Review: Flashes of Wry: Fast Funny Women, edited by Gina Barreca
Note: Gina Barreca, the editor of Fast Funny Women, and Chicagoan Nicole Hollander will read from the collection of 75 essays of flash nonfiction in a Zoom event at 7 […]
Poem for Winter
An homage to Lou Rawls and to the St. Louis poet who became a Brit. February is the cruelest month. Where did T.S. Eliot get that April business? […]
Review: Native Americans Having Their Own Say, City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934
City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893–1934 by Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck University of Nebraska Press Between Chicago’s two World’s Fairs in 1893 and 1933–34, […]
Review: CityFiles Press Photography Books Bring History into Focus
CityFiles Press is a small publishing company based in Chicago that has been producing books filled with stunning photography along with compelling text. Since its inception in 2003, co-publishers Michael […]
Read Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural Poem, “The Hill We Climb”
Eight years ago, I wrote a post about Richard Blanco’s poem, “One Today,” presented by the poet at Barack Obama’s second inaugural. I was so moved by Amanda Gorman’s poem […]
Interview: Julia Fine on Modernism, Motherhood, & Margaret Wise Brown
In her newest novel, The Upstairs House, Julia Fine delivers a chilling depiction of postpartum depression interlaced with the story of modernist women creators who lived a century before. When Megan […]
Book Review: Push Butt, Receive Bacon, Hand Dryers, by Samuel Ryde
Hand Dryers By Samuel Ryde Unicorn Publishing Group Distributed by the University of Chicago Press Books In the appropriately senseless year of 2020, Hand Dryers, by Samuel Ryde, was published. […]
The Sefaria App Has the Whole Megillah (and More)
From the Torah to the Talmud to a plenitude of rabbinic commentary on theology, scripture, and law, Judaism is built on words—hundreds upon thousands upon millions of words. Despite such […]
Review: Modernist Homes in Midcentury Chicago, Modern in the Middle, by Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino
Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929–75 By Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino with a foreword by Pauline Saliga The Monacelli Press Pauline Saliga, executive director of the Society of […]
Review: Decent People Facing Strangeness, Dark Black, by Sam Weller
Dark Black by Sam Weller Hat & Beard Press One of the opening paragraphs of Sam Weller’s short story “All the Summer Before Us” is this: “We were eighteen, me […]
Noteworthy Art Books of 2020 for Adults and Kids
While the art scene in Chicago and other major cities closed its doors for most of 2020, numerous art books continued to be published. Here’s a list of 10 must-see […]
Thus Spake Utah
Towards the end of the plague year we learned that someone somehow transported a ten-foot high silvery metal object to a remote canyon in the Utah desert drilling […]