By Tom Lynch

Early Sunday evening and Logan Square’s hipster hotspot The Whistler is sprinkled with patrons, some sipping the bar’s unique summertime cocktails, others just a PBR, please. The Orange Alert Reading Series takes place here roughly every third Sunday of the month and tonight’s lineup consists of “How to Hold a Woman” author Billy Lombardo, plus Andrew Farkas, Tim Hall and West Virginian Scott McClanahan. Founder and emcee Jason Behrends takes to the stage and thanks the modest crowd for coming. “I know it’s hard to come out to a bar at six on a Sunday,” he admits into the microphone. A handful of uninterested drinkers respectfully head out to the patio as to not disrupt the reading with their conversation. For the next hour, the only sounds you can hear are the author’s expressive voices and the air conditioner kicking on and off. Even the bartenders mix the drinks quietly.

“I’m definitely optimistic about the landscape in general,” Behrends says of the current place of literary events in Chicago, a day later over the phone. Behrends began his Orange Alert venture in 2006 with a Web site, orangealert.net, featuring interviews with writers, musicians and artists, then launched Orange Alert Press in March of 2008. The reading series began last November. “There are a lot of reading series in town,” he says, “but even though there are ten or twelve that I know of, I felt that there still could be one more.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Tom Lynch

The Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, was a series of elaborate covert and sometimes illegal operations managed by the FBI to disrupt and fracture dissident political organizations. Formally, the projects took place between 1956 and 1971; common methods included dirty tricks such as using forged correspondence, legal harassment and even vandalism and violent assault. COINTELPRO targeted groups as wide-ranging as communist and socialist organizations, the Black Panther Party, those associated with the women’s rights movement and the Ku Klux Klan.

Chicago author Barry Schechter met a man many years ago who claimed he was a target of the COINTELPRO; the conversation stuck with Schechter and planted the seed for “The Blindfold Test,” his first novel. Jeffrey Parker, his protagonist, attends an antiwar rally in the 1960s, and following that one brief afternoon, his life is a cascading nightmare. He can’t keep a job. Women frequently split. It’s not just bad luck, it’s the worst luck. It doesn’t occur to him that his misfortune might actually be a government plot, until it does, and Schechter’s part-comedy, part-thriller takes shape. “The Blindfold Test” is blanketed with paranoia, quite Kafkaesque in its dark, sometimes mean humor, as Parker attempts to sort out his mess of a life. It’s also set in Chicago and the surrounding areas, and the authenticity adds to the suspense in surprising ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it wrong to feel optimistic? You couldn’t be blamed if you didn’t. Yet while the country’s economy crumbles around us and less and less funds are available for the producers of the printed word, those in the literary world are finding new and inventive ways to stay afloat. We will not go down without a fight, and progress, of course, is key. So is awareness—in order to get the word out more efficiently (and, likely, to untether itself from the uncertain future of the paper form), Printers Row Book Fair changed its name from “Book Fair” to “Lit Fest” to have a title that better fully represents the weekend’s events, in time for its twenty-fifth anniversary edition. As is our custom, we time our annual Lit 50 list to the weekend’s events; this year’s list of local behind-the-scenes literati—no straight-up authors or poets this time—covers a large spectrum of Chicago’s world of words. As with past years we sought out those behind the smaller presses as well as the monumental figures. Some new names have emerged and many staples appear again, but all tirelessly labor to bring this ancient art to the community at large. Read the rest of this entry »

Seth and Adrian Tomine, two top-shelf Drawn & Quarterly artists, are in town this week. Tomine’s got the paperback of his fine, bracing “Shortcomings” and a reproduction “box set” of his earliest Optic Nerve comics, as well as the mammoth, daunting “A Drifting Life,” Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s eleven-years-in-the-making graphic memoir, the 850 pages of which he edited and lettered. Seth’s published “George Sprott: 1894-1975,” a large-formatted life of an apocryphal Canadian TV nature host. Memory and pangs of regret permeate each of the books.

Tomine tells me Tatsumi does his work without assistants, unlike a lot of Japanese cartoonists. “I found it very inspiring, not only in terms of its scope and ambition, but also in that it confirmed my long-held belief that it’s the small, quotidian details drawn from an artist’s real experience that will always bring a narrative to life. I think ‘A Drifting Life’ is a great depiction of the cartoonist’s struggle, and a great resource in terms of the history of Japanese cartooning. I think it will be read for a long time, especially as the American interest in manga continues to grow.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A worthy night of readings before the madness and mayhem of this weekend’s Printers Row Lit Fest, this event features author Jean Thompson, whose thrilling work with 2007 collection “Throw Like a Girl” and novel “City Boy” makes the upcoming release of “Do Not Deny Me” all the more exciting. (Her 1999 book of short stories, “Who Do You Love,” was a National Book Award finalist.) It’s difficult not to compare Thompson’s work to that of Alice Munro, to give you a better idea of what to expect, if you’re unfamiliar. Also reading tonight is local scribe Lindsay Hunter, co-founder of the charming Quickies! reading series and author of the forthcoming novel “My Brother,” plus author J. Adams Oaks, whose first novel, “Why I Fight,” was released last month via Simon and Schuster. (Tom Lynch)

June 5 at Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, (773)293-2665, at 7:30pm. Free.

The Book Cellar is packed, with room only left to stand, for comedian Eugene Mirman’s first-ever book reading. His book, “The Will to Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life,” is something that spawned from an advice column that he has had on his Web site for the past six years. “I made little books out of that [advice column]. I printed little books and took them on tour. I would sell lots of them,” says Mirman. “I sort of pitched it as answering questions, but then it turned into really what this is, which is sort of ephemeral self-helpish.”

Just after 7pm he rushes in, grabs a beer and quickly sets up. He begins with a PowerPoint presentation. The video, similar to those simple Web-cam videos that have made Mirman something of an Internet sensation, shows his advice on how to get a husband, with one possible suggestion to conduct the ceremony while the man is still in bed half asleep and will agree to anything. Read the rest of this entry »

The Seminary Co-op Bookstore sits at the bottom of a set of gray stairs, polished to sheen from years of wear, in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary across the street from the main quadrangles of the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. It unfolds in a series of differently shaped passageways, the ceiling crisscrossed with pipes and ducts and the concrete floor sounding with the muffled footsteps of sneaker-clad patrons. Sitting on the wooden shelves, like artifacts in the wall recesses of a catacomb, is the largest collection of academic titles in the United States. “I don’t think there’s a question [that we carry the most academic titles in the country]. We’re the largest single customer for a lot of university presses,” explains Jack Cella, the closest thing to a general manager for the consumer-owned Co-op and its sister store 57th Street Books, in another basement three blocks away from the seminary. Read the rest of this entry »

Once on State Street and now in Bronzeville sixteen years later, the Afrocentric Bookstore has earned its rank as one of the city’s independent staples via product, persistence and dedication. “We’re seasoned,” professes owner Desiree Sanders. “There aren’t many bookstores on the South Side like this one.”

With its friendly apron-donning staff, vast selection, statuettes and décor, it’s no wonder best-selling authors like Yolanda Joe—”My Fine Lady”—frequent the scene. “She stops by … we have several books by her here,” Sanders says. Read the rest of this entry »

Handwritten recommendations are taped to shelves and stuffed between pages, Dixie Chicks’ newest release plays in the background and neon hot-pink signs hang throughout the store, “lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, queer books this-a-way,” pointing customers to a section that takes up nearly half the space. Opening in 1979, in Lincoln Park on West Armitage Avenue, Women and Children First had maybe a shelf of lesbian literature, says Linda Bubon, co-owner of the store. Business grew every year for the first fourteen years, allowing them to expand and move twice since 1990, until it reached its present location in Andersonville. Read the rest of this entry »