Review: Quiet Obsession and Control—Tender by Beth Hetland
There’s something wrong with Carolanne. Beth Hetland’s graphic novel Tender tells the story of a woman with #goals: Carolanne lives in a cozy apartment in Chicago, takes the train to […]
Interview: Diego Báez Debuts New Poetry Collection, Yaguarete White
Interview conducted by Binx River Perino. Chicago-based writer Diego Báez is an educator at the City Colleges and a fellow at CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator […]
Review: Celebrating Well-Made Books—The Book by Design: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Greatest Invention, edited by P.J.M. Marks and Stephen Parkin
For more than 18 centuries, paper was made with rags—old clothes, sails, and ropes—the same way it had first been fashioned in China. But, by the 19th century, the process of […]
Review: “A Repugnant Purity”: Al Capone, by Pierre-Francois Radice and Swann Meralli
Chicago is best known for its transplants. Our biggest celebrities come to a pocketful of names—most from elsewhere, but now synonymous with the Windy City. Much like Oprah, Michael, Ditka, […]
Dozens of Published Books, One Writing Nonprofit: StoryStudio Chicago
This week StoryStudio Chicago kicked off its third annual Pub Crawl, a month-long online publishing intensive, or program, of classes and panels demystifying the publishing world.
Review: The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been, by Jake Berman
From Atlanta to Washington, DC, Boston to Vancouver, Los Angeles to Miami, Montreal to Toronto, cartographer and writer Jake Berman explores the failures and successes of North American transport through […]
Review: Washington, Daley, and Three Other Mayors, Chicago’s Modern Mayors, edited by Dick Simpson and Betty O’Shaughnessy
Chicago’s Modern Mayors, edited by Dick Simpson and Betty O’Shaughnessy, covers a 40-year period during which Chicago, its people, and its region went through great changes under a succession of […]
Interview: Stormy Weather—Christopher Hawkins Releases New (and Award-Winning) Horror Novel, Downpour
For horror novelist Christopher Hawkins, the dark and drenching clouds described in his latest novel, Downpour, have led to brighter, sunnier skies. Recently winning the Booklife Prize in Fiction, Downpour […]
Interview: Columnist Georgia Garvey on Her Greek Heritage and New Book, Everything Is Going to Be Okay (Until It’s Not)
The phrase “it’s all Greek to me” is often used to refer to complicated things people cannot understand. Yet for award-winning columnist and former Chicago Tribune editor Georgia Garvey, her […]
Review: Searching for Meaning in the Absurd World of Rajkamal Chaudhary’s Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories
The late Indian writer Rajkamal Chaudhary (1929–1967) came to prominence in the first two decades of independent India in the 1950s and ’60s, producing a prolific number of works in […]
Review: An Artist/Photographer Analyzes the Wanderlust of Stray Shopping Carts
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification By Julian Montague Second edition, 2023, University of Chicago Press Julian Montague published his first edition of The […]
Review: Mother Goose for English Majors, The Lamb Cycle: What the Great English Poets Would Have Written about Mary and Her Lamb, by David R. Ewbank, with illustrations by Kate Feiffer
If Shakespeare, instead of Mother Goose, had written “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” perhaps he would have penned a sonnet to take the young girl to task for abandoning “Thy […]