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Nonfiction Review: “Sincerity” by R. Jay Magill, Jr.
RECOMMENDED After Wikipedia and its endless garden of forking hyperlinked paths, through which we can create our own DIY knowledge webs, why bother reading longform nonfiction at all? The usual answer is for the narrative itself—turning a database of information into a story created by one curatorial mind. That narrative “humanizes” the world of fact, [...]
Nonfiction Review: “The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism”
The first clue that something is off in “The Quotable Hitchens: from Alcohol to Zionism” is the fact that the book of quotations, which is arranged alphabetically (more on that soon) does not, in fact, range from alcohol to Zionism, but rather from abortion to Zionism. Hitchens, in all of his ever-contrarian, oppositional and sometimes [...]
Fiction Review: “On Booze” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
What to say about the incredibly scant, obviously derivative collection of fragments written by Fitzgerald, sometimes only vaguely related to alcohol, collected in New Directions’ new book “On Booze”? It’s easy to write the book off as a quick scheme to trade on Fitzgerald’s reputation (there’s no way this meager, haphazard book would ever have [...]
Nonfiction Review: “Where to Bike Chicago: Best Biking in City and Suburbs” by Greg Borzo
Chicago is easily one of the most bike-friendly cities in the United States, and those of us who bike recreationally or to commute are familiar with the excellent free maps from the City of Chicago, which have the best streets for travel highlighted and take the guesswork out of how to get around town. For [...]
Nonfiction Review: “100 Hot Sex Positions” by Tracey Cox
Tracey Cox (this is apparently her real name) is a sex expert for iVillage, regular guest on the “Today Show,” and author of half a dozen books on how to have a hot sex life. Her latest book focusing on sex positions offers a few new moves, a lot of old news, confusing organization, and [...]
Vividly Pale: How David Foster Wallace Made Me A Better Person
By Monica Westin F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them [...]
Sober Reflections: Brenda Wilhelmson recounts her journey in “Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife”
By Monica Westin Chicago journalist Brenda Wilhelmson is a onetime high-functioning alcoholic who seemed to have it all as a wife and mother with a hip social life in a wealthy suburb and now author of a deceptively straightforward diary documenting her first years getting sober. What distinguishes “Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife” from the [...]
The Space Between the Words: Looking for the life of Elizabeth Bishop in her letters
By Monica Westin Elizabeth Bishop’s correspondence with the editors at The New Yorker who published the majority of her poems, lasting from 1934 until the poet’s death in the fall of 1979, are a provocative gesture at revealing the woman behind the writing, but they leave the reader wanting much more—in a way that’s entirely [...]
Anthology Review: “The Vintage Book of American Women Writers”
Last year Elaine Showalter published the remarkably substantive literary history of American women writers, “A Jury of Her Peers.” Her subsequent anthology of American women’s writing that follows is clearly the result of the intensive research that informed Showalter’s history. “The Vintage Book of American Women Writers” contains many of the usual suspects, from Anne [...]
The Paranoid Generation: Now comes the apocalypse?
I teach freshman writing and composition classes at a private university in Chicago filled with extremely bright, driven students. My spring course is a research-based writing course, in which students produce a long academic paper that, as I put it on my syllabus, “intervenes with current scholarship and expert opinion on a current theoretical problem.” [...]
