Wolfgang Amadeus Aleksandr “Aleks” Fa has a lot of baggage. The protagonist of Joe Meno’s new novel Book of Extraordinary Tragedies has that name, after all—which also serves as a clue about what burdens the young man. Born into a perfectionist but impoverished Bosnian/Croat/Polish family in Evergreen Park on the border with Chicago’s south side, […]
Tag: Eastern Europe
Posted inBlogs
Thursday was actually a bad day for Trump
Millions of voting Americans—including hundreds of thousands in Chicago—come from those Eastern European countries Trump might not bother to defend
Posted inArts & Culture
“There’s something in me that wants to steal the holiness”
Theatre Y prepares to open The Binding, inspired by Jewish apocryphal text, in a Logan Square church.
Posted inArts & Culture
Barbara Gaines goes all auteur on Henry VIII
Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Henry VIII is undone by overdoing.
Posted inBlogs
This Week’s Food and Drink Events
Beer tastings, Polish cuisine, a lobster boil, and more.
Posted inFilm
Almanac of Fall
In his first three films Bela Tarr–conceivably the most important Eastern European filmmaker currently working–betrays an impatience with cinematic style, focusing almost exclusively on content, but that tendency was radically overturned with this 1984 feature, whose taste and intelligence are specifically (and exquisitely) cinematic and revealed Tarr as a master stylist. Set entirely in an […]