Review: Trapped in Abby Geni’s The Body Farm
The characters in The Body Farm span across generations, backgrounds, lifestyles, and conflicts, but they all seem to share one thing: they’re trapped. This is Abby Geni’s second short story […]
Review: The Body Keeps Score in A Small Apocalypse by Laura Chow Reeve
Laura Chow Reeve’s debut short story collection A Small Apocalypse is, like any good collection these days, thematically rich. It is mostly about young queer characters in the present day, […]
Review: Watching the Writer’s Mind Work, Write Cut Rewrite: The Cutting Room Floor of Modern Literature, by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon
Everyone, I suppose, has a sense of the what-if of history. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to Ford’s Theater that night and avoided assassination? What if I had taken a […]
Review: In Evil Eyes Sea, Two Women Uncover a Mystery at the Heart of Turkish Culture: by Özge Samancı
Evil Eyes Sea is preoccupied with objects: how they become imbued with their owners’ lives and remain after those people are gone. In her autobiographically-inspired graphic novel, Özge Samancı skillfully […]
Review: Quiet Obsession and Control—Tender by Beth Hetland
There’s something wrong with Carolanne. Beth Hetland’s graphic novel Tender tells the story of a woman with #goals: Carolanne lives in a cozy apartment in Chicago, takes the train to […]
Interview: Diego Báez Debuts New Poetry Collection, Yaguarete White
Interview conducted by Binx River Perino. Chicago-based writer Diego Báez is an educator at the City Colleges and a fellow at CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator […]
Dozens of Published Books, One Writing Nonprofit: StoryStudio Chicago
This week StoryStudio Chicago kicked off its third annual Pub Crawl, a month-long online publishing intensive, or program, of classes and panels demystifying the publishing world.
Interview: Stormy Weather—Christopher Hawkins Releases New (and Award-Winning) Horror Novel, Downpour
For horror novelist Christopher Hawkins, the dark and drenching clouds described in his latest novel, Downpour, have led to brighter, sunnier skies. Recently winning the Booklife Prize in Fiction, Downpour […]
Review: Searching for Meaning in the Absurd World of Rajkamal Chaudhary’s Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories
The late Indian writer Rajkamal Chaudhary (1929–1967) came to prominence in the first two decades of independent India in the 1950s and ’60s, producing a prolific number of works in […]
Review: Mother Goose for English Majors, The Lamb Cycle: What the Great English Poets Would Have Written about Mary and Her Lamb, by David R. Ewbank, with illustrations by Kate Feiffer
If Shakespeare, instead of Mother Goose, had written “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” perhaps he would have penned a sonnet to take the young girl to task for abandoning “Thy […]
Review: Cravings: An Inventory of Human Life, by Garnett Kilberg Cohen
Reviewed by Guest Author Arieon Whittsey Cravings, by Chicago author Garnett Kilberg Cohen, offers an exploration of life and the moments that define it through an unlikely group of characters […]
Return of the Revenge of the Featured Creatures Massacre IV: Chicago Area Horror Writers Share Horror Recommendations
Once again, it’s time for me to slip out of my TCR Lit Editor role and into my Crypt-Keeper robe. In celebration of Samhain, I contacted several Chicago-area horror writers […]