Avid book lovers can be a solitary bunch—after all, it’s hard to lug our stacks (and stacks) of books around a party. But that is exactly what’s about to go […]

Chicago-born Mary Fleming’s Civilisation Francaise is a novel of layers. Layers slowly peeled away for the reader to learn the stories of the book’s two central characters, Madame Quinon, an […]

Chicago’s literary scene is, in a word, “lit”: from the Midwest’s largest free outdoor literary festival to pop-up typewritten poetry encounters to the nation’s only museum devoted to American writers, […]

Ananda Lima’s fiction debut, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, launches at Women and Children First this Friday, June 21. Filled with double meanings, a very meta perspective, rebellions […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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.

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 […]