Nancy S. Bishop
Nelson Algren Biography Explores the Writer’s Struggles with Life and Craft
Nelson Algren was a star in Chicago’s bright literary firmament, but his light dimmed in the years after he won the 1950 National Book Award for ...
An Appetite for Food, Drink and Restaurant Realities
Paula Farmer
Stephanie Dandler’s debut novel, "Sweetbitter," is a raw and gutsy romp through a year in the life of a young woman’s launch into a restaurant career in the food capital of the world. The 22-year-old heroine, Tess, has gladly ...
Paula Farmer
At the young age of 36, Dr. Paul Kalanithi did more in two years than some do in a lifetime. His motivation was life AND death. In 2013 when Dr. Paul Kalanithi was close to wrapping up a stellar ...
To Be a Young, Black Man in the Era of Obama (and Trayvon Martin)
Paula Farmer
Paula Farmer
July 2016
With hardly a week going by in between news of another black man being killed by a white man or police officers, there could not be a more timely and topical book then this. ...
Literature's equivalent to the cult section at the video store
Andrew Osborne
It was sometime after the man in the mushroom cap sang a song about earwigs yet well before Werner Herzog's nihilistic re-imagining of "The Wizard of Oz" that I realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore.
Instead, I was sequestered ...
Toba Singer
Susan Neiman offers a materialist analysis of the contemporary catechism of child rearing and the glorification of childhood. Bring a child into the world, and you have given birth not just to a human ...
Toba Singer
“Skylight,” by José Saramago, one of his first works, written in 1953 (and rejected) when the author was in his early thirties, was published posthumously last year, and has consequently become something of a curio. One can rush ...
Lewis Whittington
In his New York Times op-eds, Charles Blow sometimes single-mindedly elevates discourse of volatile topics to sane discussion. He punctures long held cultural narratives about race, religion, politics, poverty, class, gender, sexuality. Now, in his first book "Fire ...
Nancy S. BishopChicago,
Lahr and Martha Lavey, "Steppenwolf" artistic director, were seated on a stage dressed for the cluttered Irish bachelor-hoarder’s apartment for the current Steppenwolf production, Conor McPherson’s "The Night Alive." Lavey was prepared with her own advance copy of the book ...
Michael Wade Simpson
Richard Haddaway’s 30 years in the newspaper business might have prepared him for some kind of hard-boiled post-career nonfiction writing—some kind of book hardened by the cynicism that is the stock in trade of daily journalism. Instead, his new novel, ...
