It’s the early 20th century in the small Midwestern city of Freeport. Dr. Deane Franklin is a member of its upper crust, but strong-minded enough to occasionally go against the […]
In the interest of transparency, I want to disclose I met the author Taylor Thornburg at an open mic and wrote this review after speaking with him. Later I attended […]
General readers, beware! Tom Comitta’s new book Patchwork isn’t for you. Patchwork isn’t for someone who wants a novel that tells a story and has characters and settings and scenes. […]
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 […]
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 […]
No-fault divorces are currently legal in every US state, making it relatively easy to end an unhappy marriage. It may be hard to imagine how recently “irreconcilable differences” were not […]
A strikingly drawn and boldly colored map, attributed to the Jesuit priest and explorer Jean de Brebeuf, is the image used on the cover of Mirela Altic’s Encounters in the […]
Chicago is best known for its transplants. Our biggest celebrities come to a pocketful of names—most from elsewhere, but now synonymous with the Windy City. Much like Oprah, Michael, Ditka, […]
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 […]
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 […]