Review: Trapped in Abby Geni’s The Body Farm
The characters in The Body Farm span across generations, backgrounds, lifestyles, and conflicts, but they all seem to share one thing: they’re trapped. This is Abby Geni’s second short story […]
Review: The Body Keeps Score in A Small Apocalypse by Laura Chow Reeve
Laura Chow Reeve’s debut short story collection A Small Apocalypse is, like any good collection these days, thematically rich. It is mostly about young queer characters in the present day, […]
Review: Putting on the Glitz—Driehaus Museum’s Jewelry Exhibit and Ellie Thompson’s Designing American Jewelry Book
As we navigate the current Gilded Age, it’s helpful to reflect on the last one. The Driehaus Museum at 40 East Erie is showcasing 200 pieces of dazzling past and […]
Review: 44 Posters, Weeds Tavern, by Dave Hoekstra and Sergio Mayora
Weeds Tavern is a bar biography, but something more, and slightly less. More or less an artist’s monograph, SunTimes writer and critic Dave Hoekstra covers the titular Chicago tavern’s background […]
Dialogs: Reggie Watts Celebrates Glorious Black Nerds at the Old Town School
Reggie Watts is far more than James Corden’s bandleader on the former The Late Late Show. He’s an innovative musician (keyboard, looping machine, beatboxer), dry comedian, wearer of cool geometric […]
Dialogs: Feminist Punk Kathleen Hanna at the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Illinois Tech Day
Kathleen Hanna, founding Riot Grrrl, Bikini Kill frontwoman and the person who told Kurt Cobain that he smelled like teen spirit, is currently on tour to promote her memoir Rebel […]
Interview: S. Fey, Author of Decompose
Interview by Binx Perino. In preparation for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2024 Annual Conference, I organized a poetry reading to benefit Kansas City based mutual aid groups […]
Review: The Terror of Love and Grief—Elsewhere: An Elegy, by Faisal Mohyuddin
In his poem “The Hourglass. The Pebble. The Throne of God,” Faisal Mohyuddin ponders “the lightless language of elegy.” His father is dead, and he is grieving. And he wonders if he […]
Dialogs: Chicago Humanities Festival Explores Hip-Hop History and Black Punk Now
Chicago musicians Chance the Rapper, Jennifer Hudson, plus legendary producer Quincy Jones, recently opened the renovated Ramova Theatre. The interior’s quaint cityscape-inside-a-building balconies and windows have been restored to usher […]
Review: Watching the Writer’s Mind Work, Write Cut Rewrite: The Cutting Room Floor of Modern Literature, by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon
Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and avoided assassination? What if I had taken a […]
Review: A Dazzling Debut—The Divorcées, by Rowan Beaird
No-fault divorces are currently legal in every US state, making it relatively easy to end an unhappy marriage. It may be hard to imagine how recently “irreconcilable differences” were not […]
Review: In Evil Eyes Sea, Two Women Uncover a Mystery at the Heart of Turkish Culture: by Özge Samancı
Evil Eyes Sea is preoccupied with objects: how they become imbued with their owners’ lives and remain after those people are gone. In her autobiographically-inspired graphic novel, Özge Samancı skillfully […]