He had been warned. At a recent house concert in Printers Row, Pat Byrne, a soulful Irish troubadour based in Texas, bravely took a swig of the yellow liquid, scrunched […]

The key moment in John William Nelson’s important, original, and eye-opening history of the place that became the city of Chicago—Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of […]

By Guest Writer Holly Smith A Cosplayer Welcome As I sat down in the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture to see a live interview with comedian Kate McKinnon about […]

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson inaugurated the Chicago Humanities Festival’s autumn 2024 season in front of a packed, enthusiastic crowd at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. In […]

As a child, going to the library with my mother was a beloved weekly event. I vividly remember browsing through the hard-copy card catalog and wandering the stacks searching for […]

Conducted by Binx Perino I learned of Daniel Borzutzky’s work after reading Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). I had just moved to Chicago and was interested in the […]

Avid book lovers can be a solitary bunch—after all, it’s hard to lug our stacks (and stacks) of books around a party. But that is exactly what’s about to go […]

This month’s column explores another reason Chicago’s literary scene is “lit”: the wide variety of live literature events held in neighborhoods across the city. From conversations with award-winning authors to […]

Chicago-born Mary Fleming’s Civilisation Francaise is a novel of layers. Layers slowly peeled away for the reader to learn the stories of the book’s two central characters, Madame Quinon, an […]

Chicago’s literary scene is, in a word, “lit”: from the Midwest’s largest free outdoor literary festival to pop-up typewritten poetry encounters to the nation’s only museum devoted to American writers, […]

Iliana Regan is a Michelin-starred chef and owner of Milkweed Inn deep in the Hiawatha Forest. Regan’s memoir, Fieldwork, recently celebrated its paperback release. It couldn’t have come at a […]

Ananda Lima’s fiction debut, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, launches at Women and Children First this Friday, June 21. Filled with double meanings, a very meta perspective, rebellions […]