“A writer of nonfiction discovers their own authority by telling. The good essays tell. They pronounce. They manifesto. They ask and wonder and feint and layer.” So proclaims author Sonya Huber, in a few-years-old article for LitHub, about unlearning long-accepted rules of writing. Huber puts these proclamations into action in her forthcoming essay collection, Love […]
Category: Book Review
The couple at the center of Wellness are in love with an illusion
On a bone-chilling night in 1993, Elizabeth Augustine stands in a cramped Ukrainian Village venue sipping cheap beer, counting down the seconds until her date with a boy she has a razor-thin connection with can finally end. As the aforementioned man, with middle-parted hair and John Lennon glasses drones on—because she may like music, but […]
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times follows its road home
With vivid imagery and a staggering wit, Taylor Byas paints portraits of her childhood on the south side and the city in warm hues. I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times leads her quest for self-discovery with grief, longing, and the late-night monologuing of a seasoned writer. With poems modeled after the likes of Patricia […]
‘Because we are black, we are making black music’
Out of their place. Out of their depth. Out of their minds. Composer and researcher George Lewis has lost track of the times he’s heard those tropes lobbed, implicitly or explicitly, at Black composers of classical music. These artists, he argues, too often slip through the cracks in academic and cultural discourse: They’re shunted to […]
‘Parole presupposes that change—a correction—is possible.’
Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, opened its doors in 1829. Often considered the world’s first true penitentiary, its hallmark six-spoked, wheel-shaped design radiates outward from a central tower, where guards could keep watch over some 500 prisoners. The prison’s creators believed that, through penitence and solitude (now widely considered a form of torture), people would […]
For all the 90s church kids
I didn’t expect a book with chapter titles like “Nothing’s Funnier Than Naked” and “Welcome to Ass Planet” to make me tear up on public transit, but Lillian Stone’s Everybody’s Favorite: Tales From the World’s Worst Perfectionist accomplished this feat. Amid the bodily humor, cringey anecdotes, and irreverent one-liners, the Chicago-based comedy author and reporter […]
Teatime with Lisa Low
On the warm summer night of Lisa Low’s recent chapbook release, I trekked on foot from Pilsen to Taylor Street’s Living Water Tea House, where many poets from Chicago and beyond came together to drink tea and celebrate the release of Crown for the Girl Inside. The Chicago-based writer’s poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, […]
In the belly of the beast
Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall, which comes out on August 8, is a scientifically accurate thriller about a teenage boy swallowed by a whale—an idea that originated on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago. In November 2020, Kraus and two friends met for a socially distanced hangout at the Jarvis Avenue beach, where they discussed a […]
The mother of a movement
It’s increasingly rare that a day goes by, at the bookstore where I work, without someone asking for books on trans culture and stories reflecting our lives. People are always searching for literature as a guide on their path to freedom. Talking with trans youth about their days at school, recommending books to loving family […]
Rediscovering Frank London Brown
This Is Life: Rediscovered Short Fiction by Frank London Brown collects the forgotten writing of a Chicago Renaissance writer at his height, showcasing vivid vignettes of Black life in the city 60 years ago. Published this June by From Beyond Press, This Is Life compiles Brown’s flash fiction written for the Chicago Daily Defender in […]
Wendell Smith’s legacy
For the first time in more than 50 years, Chicago’s avid sports fandom can refamiliarize themselves with the insightful and generous writings of Wendell Smith, a pioneering sports journalist who served as the first Black president of the Chicago Press Club, in The Wendell Smith Reader, edited by Michael Scott Pifer. Smith is most known […]
The limits of solidarity
I’ve often described my advocacy and communications work as “translation,” learning a person’s story and molding it into a form—a news article, an op-ed, an action toolkit, or an application—in an attempt to fulfill needs by way of words. Translation can build connections and prompt material change, but it can also exclude and yield toward […]
Family secrets with a touch of the supernatural
In Doña Cleanwell Leaves Home, a new collection of seven short stories by Ana Castillo, family secrets inspire several characters to travel to Mexico and retrace their relatives’ footsteps. Sometimes the answers they find feel like “flying sacks loaded with surprises that hit you right in the chest and [leave] you gasping for air.” Others […]
Born inside a vulnerable brutalism
Like a brutalist architect, Toby Altman is working with unrefined materials. In Discipline Park, his second full-length poetry collection, Altman choreographs a dynamic dance between sentimentality and brutalism by documenting the wounds of architecture—fixating on his birthplace: Chicago’s demolished Prentice Women’s Hospital. “Wagering that concrete or plywood might serve as the entrails of the world,” […]
Samantha Irby is midwest fancy
Samantha Irby, the midwest’s most lovable misanthrope, triumphantly returns with her fourth collection of personal essays, Quietly Hostile. Spoiler alert: just like the other three, it is both reliably and painfully funny. The prolific author has churned out four hilarious books in ten years in addition to amassing a growing number of television writing credits […]