Book Review: Banned Book Club—By Kim Hyun Sook, et alia
Banned Book Club By Kim Hyun Sook, Ko Hyun-Ju, and Ryan Estrada Iron Circus Comics Alongside guns, flags, and cats, few things spark people’s passions more than books. And why […]
Book Review: “The Best Color for Everything Anyway”—Stateway’s Garden by Jasmon Drain
Stateway’s Garden By Jasmon Drain Penguin Random House There are many reasons to read Stateway’s Garden, Jasmon Drain’s debut story collection, but perhaps the most unexpected is the case it […]
Book Review: Fighting Racism with a Teacup, Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance, edited by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed
Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists and Intellectuals 1893–1930 Edited by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed University of Illinois Press, 296 pages, $28 In […]
Poem for a Pandemic: Blessed
Blessed Blessed are the dead and the dying. Blessed, the mourn-filled good-byes to loves behind glass, behind walls. Blessed, neighborhoods of pain, grief communities, lightning-struck homes, annunciations […]
More Than a Golf Course—Author Susan L. Kelsey on Billy Caldwell/Chief Sauganash
Like many Chicagoans, Susan Kelsey was likely familiar with Caldwell Woods and the Billy Caldwell Golf Course on the northwest side, but her first introduction to the historical figure behind […]
Book Review: Gritty, Oppressive, but Not Ugly Enough, “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair Gets the Graphic Novel Treatment
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, adapted and illustrated by Kristina Gehrmann, translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger Ten Speed Press, 384 pages, $24.99 Kristina Gehrmann’s graphic novel version of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 […]
Beauty, Horror, and Waraq Dawali: Sahar Mustafah Reinvents the American Dream, Chicago-style, in Debut The Beauty of Your Face
After Afaf’s older sister disappears one night, their family is never the same. As her mother succumbs to mental illness and her father to alcoholism, Afaf struggles to come of […]
Long Reads Are Lonnnnnnnnnnnnng—Extra-Long Books for the Serious Social Isolationist
Third Coast Review writer Patrick T. Reardon recently published a fine piece in praise of tackling extra-long reads during the social isolation era. For those who’ve completed all the popular […]
Bored in Quarantine?: Eight Great Comics and the Local Comic Stores That Sell Them
As people across Chicago quarantine themselves to curb the spread of COVID-19, they realize there are only so many episodes of Tiger King to binge on. For those seeking other […]
The 10 Best Books about Chicago—and One Clunker
Many very good and even great books have been written about Chicago, and, based on my half century of writing about the city, here are the 10 that, at the […]
What to Read Now: Three Books About Plagues
It’s the year of the big virus. We’ve had two weeks of #StayTheFHome or sheltering in place, depending on where you live. And in some states, you’re not doing that. […]
An Ongoing Graveyard Shift: Selling Books in Chicago in a Plague Year
Even in the best of times, bookstores have it rough. Just last year the American Booksellers Association reported American bookstore sales were down by 7.6 percent from 2018, sales sliding […]