Toya Wolfe’s debut novel Last Summer on State Street is a harrowing, poignant, and visceral evocation of life and death in the Robert Taylor public housing development in its final […]
Who We Lost: A Portable COVID Memorial, edited by Martha Greenwald and published by Belt Publishing, started out on Greenwald’s website WhoWeLost.org, an online, crowd-sourced memorial to those who perished […]
When the world is literally on fire, who can think about writing? The present writer was reminded of Chicago author Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 Electric Literature essay on the topic (“The […]
It’s appropriate that True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work and Times by Robert Greenfield ends with the 2019 Broadway staging of True West, Shepard’s iconic play about the American West, manhood and brotherhood. […]
According to the foreword of Kill a Punk for Rock and Roll, music photographer Marty Perez is a very likable guy. The fact that providing a bio in the book […]
In a year or so, the 2024 Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago, marking the 27th time the city has played host to one or both of the major […]
Nobody knows anything about Homer except what’s in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, even there, it gets dicey, as James I. Porter details in his challenging and provocative Homer: […]
In the handful of years after the Civil War, Illinoisans went crazy for baseball, a game that was then spelled as two words “base ball.” By 1868, however, an editor of […]
Tonight, Quimby’s will host an off-site book party for Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA, 1975–1983, at GMan Tavern (3740 N. Clark St.), Thursday, April 27, at 7:30 […]
Naa Oyo A. Kwate, the author of White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation, will be in conversation with Stacey Sutton on Thursday, April 27, at […]
Author Clément Petitjean asserts early on in his new book, Occupation: Organizer, that the role of a “community organizer” is multifaceted and warrants a comprehensive reassessment. While the general public […]
Dick Simpson is one of those rare political scientists who has also been a politician. He knows how the sausage is made, even if there is much he doesn’t like about […]