Review: Don’t Stay Where You’re Not Wanted, Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma
Don’t stay where you’re not wanted. In Ling Ma’s short story collection Bliss Montage, her characters learn this the hard way. Or at least, some of them do. These eight […]
Review: Making Friends With a Poet, The Poet’s House, by Jean Thompson
Carla Sawyer is a tall, smart-alecky 21-year-old who’s working for a landscaping company until she figures out what to do with her life. She’s on a job in one of […]
Review: Wildly Contorted and Reimagined: Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, by Tim Jones-Yelvington
In his story collection Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, Chicagoan Tim Jones-Yelvington zestfully recasts gay men and boys in the central roles of a surprisingly wide array […]
Review: Just Add Water, The Fountain, by David Scott Hay
The Fountain By David Scott Hay Whiskey Tit Jasper P. Duckworth is a critic in an alternate universe Chicago for Chicago Shoulders, a New City-like (or, if you will, Third […]
Interview: Dystopia in Utopia: Brian Pinkerton, Author of The Nirvana Effect
Author Brian Pinkerton is a lifelong resident of the Chicago area, growing up on, as he puts it, “Bozo’s Circus and Ray Rayner…Creature Features and Cubs baseball.” With 12 […]
Interview: Not Afraid of the Dark: A Talk with Writer Richard Thomas
Numerically speaking, 2/22/22 (today), has a special resonance for Chicago area writer, editor, and teacher Richard Thomas. His latest book, Spontaneous Human Combustion (Keylight), a collection of short stories, was […]
Son of Featured Creatures: Chicago Horror Writers and Artists Share Their Favorite Chicago Horror Creators
Unless you’re an easily frightened tourist, Chicago is rarely considered a hotbed of horror. But as Third Coast Review has pointed out before, our town has a distinguished pedigree in […]
Review: Raising Issues Beyond Entertainment, In the Aftermath, by Jane Ward
In the Aftermath By Jane Ward She Writes Press Jane Ward’s In the Aftermath is an earnest, even affecting examination of the strong waves of guilt, sadness, and anger among […]
Interview: Willa, Ernest, William, and Scott—A Talk with Dr. Michelle Moore about Chicago and American Modernism
Dr. Michelle Moore is a professor of English at the College of DuPage whose most recent book is Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald […]
Review: Small-Town Ghosts, Spoon River America, by Jason Stacy
Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town By Jason Stacy University of Illinois Press It’s ironic that Spoon River Anthology—perhaps the most famous […]
The Illustrative Man: New Exhibit on Local Speculative Fiction Writer Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s work and reputation have aged like fine dandelion wine. Unlike many of his fellow 20th century science-fiction and fantasy writers, he’s entered the current millennium fairly woke […]
Interview: Gloria Chao on Love and Romance in the Asian Diaspora
In Gloria Chao’s third YA novel Rent A Boyfriend, University of Chicago freshman Chloe Wang suddenly has to worry about more than grades when her parents start pressuring her to […]