At one point in Kathleen Rooney’s bewitching new novel From Dust to Stardust, the iconic Hollywood flapper Doreen O’Dare says to an interviewer, “What I’ve figured out is that the […]
Metal, as a genre, is an amusing blend of arrogance and earnestness. Look past the leather and chains, wind-milling manes, and tight animal print pants with padded baskets…ignore the kayfabe […]
Vividly set amongst the winding cobblestone streets and shadowy canals of 18th century Venice, Chicago writer Julia Fine’s Maddalena and the Dark is a wonderfully moody, gothic fairy tale about […]
How can someone be so famous and yet so misunderstood? It’s easy if your name is Hillary Clinton. Gary Scott Smith, author of Do All the Good You Can, contends […]
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 […]
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 […]
Brevity is both the soul of wit and the spirit of horror. A horror novel carries its own pleasures, but shorter tales of terror often punch well above their weight. […]
If ever a trigger warning was needed, it’s the one for David Scott Hay’s new novel [NSFW], which cautions the reader that the novel includes “sex, drug use, witchcraft, profanity, […]
If you’re at all familiar with DePaul University’s Lincoln Park campus, you’ve almost certainly been impressed by the nine-foot-tall statue of Monsignor Jack Egan at the eastern entrance of the […]
It is important that there is a book such as Art T. Burton’s Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshall Bass Reeves to ensure the memory […]
We rarely see the bright side of horror. Mostly connected with darkness and gloom, the genre reluctantly explores color and light. Not always. In the hands of a few auteurs, […]
Chicago doesn’t play much of a role in Rob Wilkins’s biography of his boss, Terry Pratchett, the British mega-selling author of the fantasy-science fiction Discworld series whose life was cut […]