Gospodine they call our narrator. “Master” or “sir” in Bulgarian, it’s a designation of authority from the students he teaches literature to at a high school in Sofia. What it […]

Saving Ruby King by Catherine Adel West Park Row Books, 312 pages, $27.99 In the closing pages of Catherine Adel West’s Saving Ruby King, two men and two women can […]

Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning By John W. Reps Princeton University Press, 827 pages, out of print, available on the internet starting at $40 […]

Rodham: A Novel By Curtis Sittenfield Random House We think we should all know her by now. After decades in the limelight, Hillary Rodham Clinton remains, for many, an enigma. […]

Cities of the American West A History of Frontier Urban Planning By John W. Reps Princeton University Press, 827 pages, available on the internet starting at $40 Part One of […]

Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century By John Loughery and Blythe Randolph Simon and Schuster Dorothy Day—that radical of 20th century radicals, that voice of conscience in the face of a […]

Banned Book Club By Kim Hyun Sook, Ko Hyun-Ju, and Ryan Estrada Iron Circus Comics Alongside guns, flags, and cats, few things spark people’s passions more than books. And why […]

Stateway’s Garden By Jasmon Drain Penguin Random House There are many reasons to read Stateway’s Garden, Jasmon Drain’s debut story collection, but perhaps the most unexpected is the case it […]

Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists and Intellectuals 1893–1930 Edited by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed University of Illinois Press, 296 pages, $28 In […]

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, adapted and illustrated by Kristina Gehrmann, translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger Ten Speed Press, 384 pages, $24.99 Kristina Gehrmann’s graphic novel version of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 […]

Many very good and even great books have been written about Chicago, and, based on my half century of writing about the city, here are the 10 that, at the […]

Note: Deborah Kanter will speak about Chicago Catolico at 2 p.m. on Saturday, February 8, at the National Museum of Mexican Art, (1852 W. 19th St., Chicago). Chicago Catolico: Making […]