Photo: Colleeen Durkin/colleendurkin.com

By Michael Volpe

When Kevin Coval and I attended Glenbrook North in the early 1990s, two cars were exceedingly popular among students: the Chevy Blazer SUV and the Toyota Celica. In fact, a license plate on one of those shiny red Celicas back then summed up life at high school in Northbrook pretty well: “THNKUDAD.” Though alumni of Glenbrook North include late filmmaker John Hughes, former Cub Scott Sanderson and former WFLD reporter Lilia Chacon, most graduates wind up in a boardroom or courtroom or on a trading floor.

Nobody expected Kevin Coval to end up on stage, especially as a hip-hop artist. After all, hip-hop was born and bred in the inner city, where violence, poverty and misery created a tempestuous story line for many of its most successful artists. The closest thing to violence in Northbrook usually happened on the straightaway from that infamous scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” when Matthew Broderick, pretending to be his girlfriend Sloane’s dad, picks her up in his friend Cameron’s dad’s car. At GBN, as the natives call it, all the light poles are on the right side of the street except one. As the straightaway turns into a curve, though, there’s one pole on the left. Those slick Blazers and Celicas that got going too fast on the straightaway used to crash into the pole as they cruised around the curve, back when it was on the right side of the street. If things really got crazy in Northbrook, teenagers might find a fake ID, get some beer, and head to Gilson Beach to cause havoc. Not exactly thug life. In Northbrook, there aren’t many drive-bys—only drive-thrus. Coval says he was first inspired by hip-hop in the early 1980s. I like to think there was some inspiration from the Business Administration class we all had to take to graduate from GBN. After all, that’s where we learned the value of cornering a niche. Being a white Jewish kid from the uber-wealthy North Shore of Chicago obsessed with hip-hop is a niche of one.
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Names are important to the 16-year-old narrator of Australian journalist and playwright Craig Sherborne’s second memoir, “Muck.” The narrator refers to his mother as “Feet” because he used to call her “Heels” for her shoe-of-choice while the family lived in metropolitan Sydney. Now that they’ve moved to rural New Zealand to start a farm (the naming of which is debated over until they settle upon “Tudor Park”), she must scrub floors while barefoot, and there’s a noticeable lack of places which require fashionable footwear. The narrator’s father is “The Duke,” because he’s the owner of the farm, and the neighbor’s wife who doesn’t wear makeup is “Face-ache.” While the narrator takes great care to invent various nicknames for the people he meets, he’s never given a name of his own.

Like a lot of coming-of-age stories, this one embodies a Holden-Caulfield-copy who’s a pretentious twerp with a knack for talking above other people with buckets of sarcasm and arrogant wit. But these traits, while endearing in J.D. Salinger’s classic novel, are annoying and tedious in this nameless narrator. And as if we hadn’t caught onto their similarities, the narrator is actually cast as Holden Caulfield in his prep-school’s adaptation of “Catcher in the Rye,” because the staff suggested he’d be “perfect.” Read the rest of this entry »

Susan Frischer’s husband knew they would need to think of something that would stick in people’s minds. Independent bookstores are typically the place to find rarities, relics and expensive antique bindings. But Market Fresh Books in Evanston has a different idea of what an independent bookstore should be.

“We joked it was how you would buy salami,” Frischer says. Market Fresh sells books by the pound, rather than pricing them separately. The store began online, through outlets like Amazon.com, but decided to open a brick-and-mortar outpost last Halloween. The idea has apparently caught on, because a second location has popped up, just a few blocks away.

While their main focus is books, you can also find DVDs, CDs and records, also sold by the pound. The store focuses on books that people could find in Barnes and Noble, more recent titles. But they do occasionally get more unique finds. Read the rest of this entry »

Reading “Theater Geek,” an institutional biography documenting “the real life drama of a summer at Stagedoor Manor, the famous performing arts camp,” you wish you could go back in time and give author Mickey Rapkin his own summer of Sondheim-infused bliss. Say what you will about the merits of the book, one thing’s for sure: the man loves the place. Investigating “the broad question about what talent is—what defines it, who identifies it, how it is cultivated in this age of reality TV,” Rapkin spent three weeks in the summer of 2009 living and breathing Stagedoor, ostensibly to “piece together changing attitudes about the arts, about ambition, about sexuality.” He comes away from the experience a convert—the most fervent evangelists are always the converts—and the resulting book is less cultural analysis than unabashed love letter.

I understand the temptation—I, too, am an alumna of a top theater camp, though not Stagedoor. (Actually, we looked down at Stagedoor because we had to audition, and because we wore strictly enforced uniforms and because, I’m pretty sure, our food was worse.) I have never been as happy as I was that first summer. I’m not a joiner. I’ve never been swept away by the collective roar of a football game. I don’t wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, and although I liked college very much, I don’t own a single article of clothing emblazoned with my alma mater. Camp was the one time in my life I’ve been enveloped by a group identity: I drank the Kool-Aid. I wore the sweatshirt. At opening and closing ceremonies, always orchestrated for maximum emotional punch, I happily cried on cue. When Rapkin waxes trite and poetic on the magic of campers finding themselves “at home” and “among my people” for the first time at Stagedoor, I get it. It’s true. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Hilary Thayer Hamann self-published “Anthropology of an American Girl” in 2003 and gained a cult following. It’s easy to see why—the novel’s protragonist, Eveline Auerbach, mixes romance, feminism and pretension in a 600-page dreamlike reverie. Occupying the mind of a young woman struggling to make sense of her own thoughts for so many pages can be exhausting, but it’s part of what makes the novel so appealingly realistic.

Few summer novels with pink covers about women and their lovers have writing that’s even vaguely palatable, and this is where “Anthropology” excels. Even when she strains metaphors and gets tiringly descriptive, Hamann is serious about writing well, and it shows. Eveline sits in the passenger seat of the car and the door flings open. “Tentacles of air pulled at my chest, suctioning, summoning me,” Hamann writes. “I felt wind on my face, and my knees pulling right as if inside there were pieces of metal and outside there were magnets.”

Unlike most heroines of chick-lit, Eveline is a real feminist. This is the 1970s, pre-post-feminism, and Hamann’s ability to talk about what most chick-lit leaves out will make this novel a favorite of precocious young women. Oftentimes the tangents on gender (or class, or adulthood) feel didactic, like a sophomoric essay rather than the inner mind of Eveline, but that’s all the more realistic. What self-assured seventeen-year-old doesn’t convince herself that she finally knows all the answers, and how to say them? “I felt an acuteness of being, a lonely fury of connectedness,” she says. It’s pretty and philosophical and doesn’t really mean much, like the lyrics of an angst-ridden teen’s favorite song. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

With his first novel—novella, really—Chilean poet and critic Alejandro Zambra assumed his place at the forefront of Latin American letters. “Bonsai,” which tracked the coming together and falling apart of a collegiate couple, won a prize for best novel of 2007; the same month, Zambra was named among the “Bogota 39,” a pantheon of Latin American literary talent under forty. “Bonsai” is named for the male half of the couple’s interest in cultivating those tiny, perfect trees. Zambra’s latest work, “The Private Lives of Trees,” which hits Anglophone shelves this month, thanks to Megan McDowell’s elegant translation, also features a cameo from a bonsai. It should come as no surprise. Zambra is a master of the literary miniature: like the trees themselves, his fiction is tiny, fastidious, artfully shaped.

“The Private Lives of Trees” follows Julián, a young writer/professor, as he tells his stepdaughter Daniela a bedtime story and nervously waits for his wife to come home from drawing class. “Trees” is a quiet novel, small both in length—less than one hundred pages—and in scope—the course of a single evening. It is the whole world painted on the head of a pin: the plot is everything that has happened before now, and everything that will happen after. In the present, there is nothing but waiting; the action of the book is the waffling of uncertainty. When Verónica returns, Zambra warns, “the novel will end. But as long as she is not back, the book will continue. The book continues until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she won’t return.” In the interim, we get the story of his courtship with Verónica, and of the relationship before that. As the night wears on without Verónica, an increasingly anxious Julián imagines Daniela as a motherless young woman, his fantasies of her future—at twenty, at twenty-five, at thirty—projected with the same certainty as his memories of the past. Read the rest of this entry »

Stephanie Berger/Photo: Erkan Said

On a steamy July evening, the air in the House of Blues Foundation Room is buzzing softly with the clink of stemware and quiet conversation. Then you spot her: the woman with whom you’ve been trying to steal a private moment alone all evening. You capture her gaze, and she smiles demurely, her eyes shining bright beneath fake feathery lashes. You cross the length of the bar in only a few steps, not even pausing at the tarot card reading table, not even pausing to speak to the mysterious man with the eyepatch, who earlier introduced himself as Tennessee Pink. Your ears want only her.

In the center of the room, she offers her hand. “I’m Madame,” she says, her voice soft and slightly husky. You follow her out of the room and through a set of heavy wooden doors. The room on the other side is small, and you take a seat on a plush leather couch. As Madame pulls the doors closed, you notice the walls are covered with silk fabrics pocked with sequins, which wink at you in the candlelight. Madame settles herself into the seat across from yours, close enough that her silk dress brushes your knees. With another smile, she offers you her wares: poetry, read from the pages of the small book in her hands. You accept, and she begins to read to you, her voice so low you must lean forward to hear. It’s an intimate transaction, albeit unconventional, this secret sharing of words whispered for your ears only. But intimacy is exactly what Madame, Tennesee Pink and the other members of The Poetry Brothel want you to feel. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In this collection of thirteen stories, David Means transforms tragedies, some typical, some outrageous (there’s a hidden middle-age affair and a botched small-town bank heist, but also a spontaneous human combustion and a crucifixion of a high-school misfit) into tales of surprising emotional complexity. The stories remind the reader that it’s never tragedies themselves that shape us, but how we respond—how we cover them up and run from them, or how we face them head on—that speaks loudest about us.

In “The Blade,” the travel-weary tramp who hesitates to contribute his knife story to those already slung around the campfire decides to allow his silence to disclose the murder he cannot believe he committed. “A River in Egypt” chronicles a father’s failed attempts at entertaining his toddler son long enough for nurses to collect enough of his sweat to fill a testing device that will indicate whether or not he has cystic fibrosis. At just over two pages long, “All Wondering,” the collection’s shortest story, manages to explain two brothers’ decision to bury their father fifteen-feet deep beneath an East Coast beach. In the title story, “The Spot” is a pucker in the surface of a lake, marking the source of Cleveland’s water supply. “Right there,” says a man named Shank, who has seven other nicknames, to the young woman he’ll murder a few days later. “If you were to dump enough poison on that spot you’d kill the entire city in one sweep.” Read the rest of this entry »

Sam Weller, Ray Bradbury, Black Francis (who wrote the new book's intro) in LA at the end of June 2010/Photo: Nathan Kirkman

The premiere episode of “Q&A” on the Newcity Video Network

By Brian Hieggelke

On the cover of a new collection of interviews with Ray Bradbury, the legendary author proclaims “Sam Weller knows more about my life than I do!” It’s probably not far from the truth, since Weller can claim to have gotten his start even before he was born: Weller’s father read Ray Bradbury to him in the womb.

Ray Bradbury was born and raised in his early years in Waukegan Illinois, just forty miles north of downtown Chicago. His family moved west to Los Angeles during the Great Depression, and Bradbury went on to be one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated writers, crafting such classics as “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man,” “Fahrenheit 451″ and hundreds of stories, screenplays and television scripts. His career has taken him far from his idyllic youth in Waukegan, but not too far:  those formative years in the Midwest were forever captured in his most celebrated stories.

Chicagoan Sam Weller has spent the better part of a decade on the Bradbury beat: first in crafting the definitive biography of the author, “The Bradbury Chronicles” and now, on the eve of Bradbury’s ninetieth birthday, he’s assembled “Listen to the Echoes, The Ray Bradbury Interviews.” Needless to say, he’s developed a special relationship with the author. Read the rest of this entry »

Allegra Goodman’s latest novel—according to the book jacket, it’s one of her “astute social comedies,” though incisive satire it is not—may be a domestic saga, but it has all the trappings of a fairy tale circa Y2K: A pair of motherless sisters, opposites in every way except for their shared beauty, a grand romance with a man who’d be so wrong if he weren’t so right, a mysterious cookbook collection containing so much more than recipes, a spiritual homecoming delivered with a dose of Jewish mysticism.

There’s Jess, the Berkeley grad student and tree-hugger (we know she’s a free spirit because—dead giveaway!—of “her hair…who knew when she’d cut it last?”), and her sister Emily, the Ann Taylor-cut tech-startup CEO, an MIT alum with an MBA, an ambitious, all-American fiancé, and short hair. It’s 1999. Dot-coms are booming and stocks are up. Emily’s poised for unthinkable success, and Jess seems to be whimsically drifting away from academia.

Set against those pre-9/11 Silicon Valley halcyon days, “The Cookbook Collector” is part of a generation of novels attempting to capture the American climate just before The Fall. While Goodman gratingly milks the nostalgia for innocence lost (“they didn’t know it was September 11, but no one else did either”), the issues of the novel—the struggle to build and balance a career and a relationship, the subtle difference between being in love and being consumed, the difficulty of reconciling a belief system with real life—are perennially rich, and Goodman charts their course in smooth, self-assured prose. Read the rest of this entry »