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 […]
Review: A Second Breezier History of Chicago’s Great Fire, The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul, by Scott W. Berg
As someone who writes books, I felt a pang of empathy for Scott W. Berg when I heard that he’d published in September a new book about the Great Chicago […]
Holiday Plans: Noteworthy Art Books Published in 2023
Looking for gift ideas for art lovers in your life? Or perhaps you want to treat yourself by buying a book that will not only inspire and educate you about […]
Dialogs: The Fire This Time with Roxane Gay at the Chicago Humanities Festival
The Chicago Humanities Festival hosted writer Roxane Gay, in conversation with writer Lindsay Hunter, at the University of Chicago’s Lab School. Like recent CHF speaker and fellow Black female author […]
Dialogs: Considering Contagion with Maddow and Schama at Chicago Humanities Festival Events
This autumn’s Chicago Humanities Festival is chock-a-block with notable writers. That focus is normal for one of the Windy City’s most diverse and comprehensive cultural institutions, but especially true this […]