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“This Will Be Difficult to Explain” is a collection of loosely related short stories by Johanna Skibsrud. Her pitch-perfect writing style compensates for any confusion about the direction or relation of the stories, but what emerges by the end is a carefully crafted exploration of memory. The stories vacillate between young women out of their element in foreign locales and second languages and a rural America populated with pickup trucks and loaded guns. In one story, a youngster is taken on a dubious trip through the woods to shoot a neighbor’s escaped bull; in another, an ingenue misunderstands her elderly French companion’s tale of woe, laughing inappropriately at her son’s suicide. Memory, the common theme of Skibsrud’s stories, is nostalgic or painful—some events are too difficult to process faithfully. The titular story, for example, centers around a drunken man who horrifies his family with a rambling, untrustworthy episode from his childhood during the war. Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t have to have read much of Jonathan Franzen (though you should) to know the basics, because in recent years he’s reached a level of cultural saturation that’s generally not the province of middle-aged literary writers with contrarian tendencies. “Farther Away,” Franzen’s latest essay collection, written over the past five years and mostly first published in The New Yorker, seems to be a product of that fame: the Franzen here is the authorial equivalent of the celebrity guest star who shows up playing a heightened version of himself. He’s out-Franzened Franzen.

His primary obsessions—books, the perils of modern technology, loneliness, his late friend and fellow novelist David Foster Wallace and birds–are well documented, both by him and by everyone who writes about him, and the pieces collected in “Farther Away” pair and re-pair Franzen’s fixations with comic consistency. Technology, birds. Books, technology. David Foster Wallace, birds. David Foster Wallace, books. Read the rest of this entry »

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Chicago is a relative whippersnapper among the great cities of the world, but its persisting roll-up-the-sleeves attitude toward life and work may be why it has produced so many high achievers in all fields of human endeavor, including politics and crime (in which many have proved ambidextrous).

So it was no small mission June Skinner Sawyers set for herself in winnowing that list to about 300 and creating trenchant but sufficiently thorough biographies of each. The result has been spectacularly successful. In her “Chicago Portraits” she has crafted an indispensable resource for anyone who loves Chicago history. The grace of her writing also makes it a pure pleasure for browsing; her volume will make you smarter just by being in your home.

In his foreword, Rick Kogan—whose father, the late journalist, historian and author Herman is justifiably among those included here—is right on the money in applying to Chicago the Southerner William Faulkner’s observation, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Read the rest of this entry »

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“If music be the food of love, play on.” So the lovesick Duke Orsino declaims at the top of Twelfth Night. He is speaking of his unrequited feelings for Olivia. But he could as easily have been speaking about opera. For opera is packed with lovers, both on stage,  and off.

Onstage the lovers suffer a thousand slings and arrows, before they suffer and die singing at the top of their lungs. Even those who die of tuberculosis, like Verdi’s Violetta, in “La Traviata,” sing like sopranos in their prime as they cough and cough, and fade away.

Offstage, opera lovers endure the torment of unrequited love, pining for brief glimpses of their love and spending their time away brooding on their memories and reviewing the myriad bits of information they collect about their love objects. Count professor and political writer Garry Wills among this number. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the classic TV series “The Honeymooners,” sewer worker Norton (Art Carney) has taken up bird watching and, with binoculars around his neck, shares a park bench with his friend, the bus driver Kramden (Jackie Gleason). Kramden wants to know why anyone would take up bird watching.

“Why shouldn’t we watch birds?” Norton responds. “They watch us, don’t they?”

Norton spots—“by Jove!”—a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, and remarks they’ve never been seen in New York. He starts making a note for the birding society. Kramden asks sneeringly, What makes you think they’re going to believe you?

Hmmm. Norton writes and recites: “Bird seen: Yellow-bellied Sapsucker,” then with a wink, “Place seen:..” (pause) “Albuquerque, New Mexico”! Read the rest of this entry »

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“Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” is the first memoir by Jeanette Winterson, even though her books generally contain elements of autobiography. The memoir is a response to her first work of fiction, “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” which, when she wrote it more than twenty-five years ago, launched her into literary fame and eventually became a BBC mini-series.

Winterson, who revisits the themes of experience, biography, fiction and feminism, explains that her first book was partly a challenge to the perception that women are writers of experiential—and thus less masterful—fiction. Winterson’s goal was to express both “experience and experiment.” It’s with something like horror that any devotee of “Oranges” will read, “I told my version—faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time. I told myself as a hero like any shipwreck story… And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is ‘Oranges,’ is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Read the rest of this entry »

With a title like “A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends,” Stacy Bierlein’s short story collection comes off as a fizzy beach read. And on the surface, the stories seem to be just that—stories tied together by sex, relationships and travel. But there is more in this collection—loss, in its various stages and breeds, the value of good, strong friendship and an underlying, impermeable anxiety of growing older and lonelier. For all the men they sleep with and the countries they travel, the women in these stories are all in search of something, be that compassion, intimacy or a place to belong.

In “Linguistics,” a young woman travels to Prague to mourn her father’s death alone, and instead falls in love with a Croatian man who helps her heal—despite the fact that they can hardly share a conversation. In “Men’s Furnishings,” Cheryl resents her husband’s over-indulgent shopping sprees and suspects he’s into recreational drug use in the months following the birth of their first child. And “Two Girls” is about two women enjoying nearly-perfect lives–successful careers, happy marriages, passionate affairs—who then witness an unspeakable crime that sends them reeling. Read the rest of this entry »

The release of Jack Kerouac’s “The Sea Is My Brother” is one of those signal publishing events: publication of a lost novel by a famous author whose corpus has by now been well established. As is happens, long before Kerouac reported from “On the Road,” he was on the high seas and at the tender age of twenty-one penned a novel based on his experiences in the midst of World War II.

And while this novel, appearing for the first time in its unedited entirety, will not motivate any fundamental re-evaluation of its author’s work, it provides a captivating preview into the author—and his works—to be. If it is flawed—naïve in certain respects, overwritten here and there, too simple in its plotting—“The Sea Is My Brother” is also a complete story, romantic, energetic, exuberant and even brash, qualities Kerouac never outgrew. Read the rest of this entry »

We pick up fiction written by doctors—Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams,  Abraham Verghese—hoping to find a sharp and illuminating perspective on the brevity and intensity of life and a frank but compassionate portrait of humanity, including that which is frail, festering or beyond hope. And great writing about being a doctor (most notably Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone”) lets the reader into the doctor’s mind. Just enough so that we begin to understand the details, so that we feel—but don’t become frustrated by—the complexities that are out of reach. All the while, we must never lose that same sense that we feel in any other great novel, while delving into the mind or soul of a character: That the inside of the body, just like the inside of the mind or soul, is unique, unendingly complex and capable of illuminating not only an individual character but our own perception of the world. Read the rest of this entry »

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It is not often that the word “entrancing” can be applied to a historical novel, but there is no other way to describe Chicago author Melanie Benjamin’s latest, “The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb.”

Benjamin has taken known facts of a real-life celebrity from nineteenth-century America and crafted for her not only a credible inner life but, more important, a real human heart reaching across decades to touch us in the twenty-first century.

Readers of period history are a demanding lot, notorious sticklers for historical accuracy. But novels that meet that fundamental requirement but do not successfully remind us that people are still people, in any age—their own hearts accessible to us—are nothing more than costume dramas. There is no such problem with Benjamin’s thoroughly researched work. Read the rest of this entry »