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’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, […]

As we navigate the current Gilded Age, it’s helpful to reflect on the last one. The Driehaus Museum at 40 East Erie is showcasing 200 pieces of dazzling past and […]

Weeds Tavern is a bar biography, but something more, and slightly less. More or less an artist’s monograph, SunTimes writer and critic Dave Hoekstra covers the titular Chicago tavern’s background […]

Reggie Watts is far more than James Corden’s bandleader on the former The Late Late Show. He’s an innovative musician (keyboard, looping machine, beatboxer), dry comedian, wearer of cool geometric […]

Kathleen Hanna, founding Riot Grrrl, Bikini Kill frontwoman and the person who told Kurt Cobain that he smelled like teen spirit, is currently on tour to promote her memoir Rebel […]

Chicago musicians Chance the Rapper, Jennifer Hudson, plus legendary producer Quincy Jones, recently opened the renovated Ramova Theatre. The interior’s quaint cityscape-inside-a-building balconies and windows have been restored to usher […]

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 […]

Everyone knows they’ll die, but few people believe it. For the sole species aware of its mortality, personal nonexistence is inconceivable. Many have come near death. A number of folks […]

One of the first questions a stranger usually asks to identify who you are is, what do you do? But our job is more than how we make money, it […]

Like many history books, Steven Conn’s The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America For What It Is—And Isn’t is a showcase of and argument for nuanced thinking. In his […]