By Casey Brazeal

Born in Alabama but living in Kansas City, Jason Aaron is the writer and co-creator behind the gritty crime comic-book thriller “Scalped.” Earlier this year, he announced that “Scalped” would end its story and its run at issue #60. During its run of more than four years, this story of reservations, casinos and meth has been nominated for both the Eisner and Harvey, the two most prestigious awards in comics.

But Aaron will still have plenty on his plate—he also writes “Wolverine,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “Wolverine and the X-men” and “Punisher Max” for Marvel. Both “Hulk” and the new title, “Wolverine and the X-Men,” launched number-one issues November 2.

How’s the response been to the books that just came out?
I am really happy. Both books seem to be getting a great response, especially X-Men. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Barry/Photo: Lauren Thomas

By Casey Brazeal

Australian author Max Barry recently published the science fiction thriller/dark comedy “Machine Man.” The novel is the second incarnation of a story he originally published online as a serial, one page at a time. Rather than a reprint of the online content, the novel “Machine Man,” is a distillation of Barry’s original idea: a future in which corporations turn people’s bodies into a product, a weapon or worse. The movie rights for the book have already been purchased, with Darren Aronofsky signed on to direct it. Max Barry recently talked to us about writing a serial, his Skype tour and the changing landscape of publishing. Read the rest of this entry »

By Brian Hieggelke

If we’re living in the most creative and fertile period in the history of comics, Daniel Clowes and Seth are two of a handful of cartoonists largely responsible for it. Clowes, born and raised in Chicago before relocating to California, is best known for his long-running “Eightball” comic, which spawned several graphic novels (and a couple movies), including “Ghost World” and “Ice Haven,” as well as last-year’s “Wilson.” The Canadian Seth came to fame with his long-running comic “Palookaville,” as well as the recent graphic novels “George Sprott” and “Wimbledon Green.”

This month, publisher Drawn and Quarterly is releasing Clowes’ “The Death-Ray” and Seth’s “The G.N.B. Double C: The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists” and, in the tradition of the old superhero team-ups, is sending them on tour together, with a stop this week at Oak Park’s Unity Temple. In that spirit, we conducted a three-way interview in advance of their visit. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Eden Laurin

Avid skateboarder, David Foster Wallace devotee, and native Midwesterner, the SAIC grad-turned-Roosevelt prof made indie-lit waves with his 2009 coming-of-age debut, “The Slide.”

Where are you based?
I’m in Logan Square along with, it seems, every single student I’ve ever taught.

Your novel, “The Slide,” came out in 2009. What have you been up to since? What are you working on these days?
Well that depends on what you mean by “working.” I’ve been finishing essays that appeared in a few anthologies, plus several smaller fiction things for journals. Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Gillis

The stories in Patricia Ann McNair’s debut collection “The Temple of Air” are steeped in a particular brand of hospitality and violence. They are definitively Midwestern, navigating deftly between the everyday and the disturbing, the prosaic and the poetic. Perhaps part of this is inspired by McNair’s biography. Though currently a creative writing professor at Columbia College, she has spent much of her life steeped in Midwestern small towns, soaking in the meter and rhythm of daily life there. The author talked with us about faith, taking inspiration from past jobs and how the Midwestern locales she features differ from Faulkner’s Mississippi.

Your author’s blurb portrays you as a jack-of-all-trades, to some extent, going from bartending to working on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Was writing always something you were developing during this time? Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: John Reilly

Novelist (also: journalist, critic, professor, painter) Carol Anshaw has been capturing the complexities of women’s relationships—and relationships in general—since her 1992 debut, “Aquamarine.”

Where are you based?
Andersonville

Your last novel, “Lucky in the Corner,” came out in 2002. What have you been up to since? What are you working on these days?
I have a new novel coming out early next year from Simon & Schuster, “Carry the One.” I worked hard for a long time on this book; it’s more complex than anything I’ve done before. I also have a deeply Chicago story coming out in the next issue of New Ohio Review [NOR]. What I’m working on now is the beginnings of a novel, “The Map of Allowed Wandering.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Gillis

By now, it’s past passé to note that we live in a literary era of pastiche and homage. But when questioned on the staying power of this melding of the literary and the pulp, Chicago author Adam McOmber becomes impassioned, his voice rising just slightly:

“I think that these type of stories—stories of the fantastic—reach back to mythology. Because that’s what myths are,” he says over a phone call from a sweltering vacation spot in Cape Cod. “If you read Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ or something like that, what you’ve got are fantastic stories. There’s even a werewolf in that.”

If any part of his writings resembles the mythological, it is the overtly inexplicable spectacles at their heart. At times, reading a short story from McOmber’s new collection, “This New & Poisonous Air,” is like peeling back the shade of a curiosity shop. Questions gravitate around his dense prose as he weaves alternatively horrific and spectacular tales of the fantastic. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Marion Ettlinger

By Michael Gillis

Put the past topics of Rachel Shteir’s oeuvre together and you get a strange, burlesque image: Fashion, theater, stripteases and now—with “The Steal”—shoplifting. Touting itself as the first cultural history of the misunderstood crime, the work includes a panoply of perspectives from psychoanalysts to shoplifter confessions that are nonetheless unable to pin down a precise cause for the act. Yet it is precisely because of its enigmatic nature that shoplifting continues to evade popular understanding, producing gargantuan losses for retailers ($11.9 billion in 2009) and consumers (more than $400 per year for every American family), attracting the interest of the fashion industry through ad campaigns, and generating headlines for paparazzo through celebrities like Winona Ryder. Shteir talked with us about why shoplifting is a unique crime, the motivations behind shoplifting, and how the act itself resembles theater. Read the rest of this entry »

With “The Time Traveler’s Wife” (2003), Audrey Niffenegger went from hand-bound chapbooks to the best seller list. Since then, Evanston’s favorite writer/painter/graphic novelist has been taking the (multi)media world by storm.

You published your second novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” in 2009, and your serialized graphic novel, “The Night Bookmobile,” came out this past fall. What are you working on these days?
A ballet (I am making the story, costume and set designs and a friend is choreographing), a screenplay (based on “Her Fearful Symmetry”) and a new novel (“The Chinchilla Girl in Exile”). I am also in the early stages of a retrospective of my artists books and artwork, planned for 2013 in Washington DC.

You’re on the faculty at Columbia. What’s your approach to teaching writing? If your students walk away from your classes with one thing, what do you want that thing to be? Read the rest of this entry »

As the bard of the South Side, Bayo Ojikutu’s been writing Chicago since his debut novel, “47th Street Black.”

Where are you based?
The family and I live on the Hyde Park/Woodlawn border. Just south of the Midway; just north of 63rd Street. My son and I are sitting on the Midway right now—looking south. I suppose that we live right in the shadow of the U of C’s newest, sparkling glass, state-of-the-art high-rise dormitory.

You finished “Free Burning” in 2006, and then spent some time focusing on shorter fiction, including the Pushcart-noted “Yayi and Those Who Walk on Water: A Fable.” What are you up to these days? What are you working on?
I’m currently working on one short work and my third novel. Read the rest of this entry »