Startups in the teeth of a recession are risky, and new publishing ventures especially so; hence, the premiere of the ambitious, earnest semiannual literary journal “Curbside Splendor” should be applauded. Originating online but based in Logan Square, it is a “city” magazine edited by Victor David Giron that casts a wider net, with stories ranging out into suburban and even exurban interests.

Karolina “Koko” Faber’s design creates an urban and urbane showcase for the stories and poems set beside striking, complementary photography by Garett Holden, Faber and others. It is a journal likewise proud of its writers and poets, placing brief bios in front of their works instead of relegating them to the back of the book.

Issue 1 includes winners from Curbside’s Winter 2010 short-story contest. Brandon Jennings’ first-place flash-fiction piece “Doc the Fifth” draws its power from the immediacy of its description of the Iraq War. Stories in both issues vary from generally straightforward narrative to the near surreal, like James Greer’s “Second-Hand Blue” in Issue 1, which demands and rewards close reading. Read the rest of this entry »

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Three estranged siblings gather at a funeral parlor in fictional Stone Claw Grove, Michigan, to mourn the grandmother who seemed to find a solace in the hometown that the siblings could not. A man struggles to live outside his father’s shadow after he inherits a nightclub from the old man. A teenage runaway comes to grips with her life as a noir cliché. A preteen copes with puberty in the dilapidated apartment of his guardian.

At its core, Tim Kinsella’s “The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense” is a pretty straightforward Small Town Lives novel: a lot of characters facing obstacles, both internal and external, with the town itself seemingly the biggest among them. You’ve seen this sort of thing before. It’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” It’s Willa Cather. Heck, it’s “Garden State.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ella Christoph

Any woman could tell you how much easier it is to pick up guys—well, usually, let them pick you up—than it is to befriend a girl. Obviously, bars aren’t a good spot for searching out new best buds. But—maybe more than women wish to admit, or guys might believe—even places that seem almost overflowing with potential besties can end up feeling like friend deserts.

Childhood friends who lived on your street now live halfway around the country; college roommates stayed and you moved, or vice versa. Work, bars and the gym aren’t breeding grounds for best-friendships the same way recess, camp and drunken walks home from frat parties were earlier in life. But few women talk about the challenges of making friends in the adult world, worried they’ll be seen as losers, or unappreciative of the friends or significant other they already have. Never mind that it’s fine to talk incessantly about the lengths you’re going to in order to hunt down The One. Read the rest of this entry »

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What if?  “Soo-Ja hoped that upon seeing him again, she’d simply feel the expected warmth and surprise you feel when reunited with an old friend—for that’s what he was in the eyes of the world, a distant friend, the kind you run into at weddings and funerals, once every decade or so. But instead, she felt a piercing sensation in her heart, and her breathing became shallow. Soo-Ja could not run to him—if she couldn’t do that before, why did she think she could do that now?”

At the core of Samuel Park’s remarkable debut novel “This Burns My Heart” is his version of an old story, that of the road not taken and its impact on a human life. But young, bright, ambitious Soo-Ja has to make a choice critical to her future within the patriarchal culture of 1950s and 1960s South Korea, wherein it is almost impossible for a young woman to backtrack and take another turn. Read the rest of this entry »

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By Martin Northway

Ever since the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago when historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the closing of the American frontier, people have been trying to find that frontier once again.

At about the same time in 2008, nearly coinciding with the Wall Street meltdown, two writers plying their trade almost half a continent apart began fulfilling their own separate “back to the land” dreams. In Chicago, editor Wendy McClure (author of “I’m Not the New Me”) began a tour of the Midwest settings of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” frontier books that had been so formative in her youth.

Meanwhile, Boston newspaperman Lou Ureneck (author of award-winning “Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska”) was burrowing into New England’s own version of the “West”—upland Maine—to build a cabin and thereby reclaim his version of the American homesteading dream.

Each was responding in part to personal tragedy in their lives—in McClure’s case the death of her mother, and in Ureneck’s a decade’s worth of setbacks in marriage and career as well as the death of his own mother. Read the rest of this entry »

Bob Boone might be Chicago’s most famous teacher. Since the 1960s he’s been educating youth of Chicago and its suburbs, as well as those in New York and Germany. In 1991, he founded the terrific Young Chicago Authors program, a forum for creative writing and performance among teens, earning him an invite to the White House by Michelle Obama, and a “Chicagoan of the Year” nod by Chicago magazine in 2002.

While continuing to teach, Mr. Boone has also found time to pen a few textbooks, a teaching memoir and now “Forest High”—a “Winesburg, Ohio”-esque cycle of nine loosely related short stories centering on the eponymous fictional high school.They are not flashy stories, nor are they without flaws. But Mr. Boone knows how to spin a yarn, and each one in this–his first book of fiction–is a yarn worth spinning. Read the rest of this entry »

To avoid any possible confusion, “in all fairness” (see chapter 13), “Write More Good” is NOT a sequel to David Sedaris’ “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Instead it is intended by the Twitter coterie at @FakeAPStylebook as a tongue-in-cheek antidote to the transgressive practices of our 24/7 media that is so galling to both the public and to those journalists who are in fact part of the problem but would like us to think that they can’t really do anything about it.

Their effort gets a mixed review but passing grade. (Who am I but a solo byline, against a committee of more than a dozen wiseasses ready and willing to use their bullying Twitter pulpit?)

As a print journalist with the usual prejudices against both broadcast reporters and the whippersnappers unable to diagram sentences or consult dictionaries, I was perhaps lulled into false expectations by Roger Ebert’s collegial foreword that the authors might join me in Strunking-and-Whiting such miscreants. Read the rest of this entry »

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You don’t have to be a history buff to love David Witter’s “Oldest Chicago.” You don’t even have to love Chicago, but surely you will after reading the author’s exultant but informative paean and guide to the city’s most enduring places.

By his own account, Witter, an occasional freelance writer for Newcity, began his romance with Chicago history as a child, playing cops and robbers in  the shadow of where John Dillinger was killed–the Biograph Theater. This volume is filled with stories of many such familiar haunts, but there are also less-known places, like the Oldest Camera Store (Central Camera Company, 1899), Auto Repair and Body Shop (Erie-LaSalle Body Shop, 1934) and Tamale Shop (La Guadalupana, 1945).

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You may not be able to tell a book by its cover, but the sexually charged art by Nick Endres that opens Paul McComas’ collection “Unforgettable” homes in on prospective readers like a heat-seeking missile. Evocative of “Conan”’s Frank Frazetta or of Boris Vallejo, but with a cyber twist, the cover depicts a bold, nearly nude beauty kneeling before a godlike robot and offering him (it?) an electronically generated serpent.

Who is tempter and who is master or mistress? Such questions and wit animate this multimedia collection’s sly update to now-classic gothic stuff and science fiction ranging back to the 1930s and 1940s. Much of this volume’s pleasure derives from satirical takes on the popular culture that is our common currency, but the author also makes no bones about manifesting a “dystopian” vision of prospects for the future that challenges the optimistic naïveté of the “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” generations. Read the rest of this entry »

By Kelly Roark

Former Chicagoan (and Newcity senior editor) Kate Zambreno’s first novel, “O Fallen Angel,” won Chiasmus Press’ “Undoing the Novel” contest. Her latest novel, “Green Girl,” is an existential portrait of twentysomething Ruth, vacuously flitting around London in search of shoes, men and makeup. Hailed as “The Bell Jar” of the twenty-first century, Zambreno’s novel captures the development of a young woman’s subjectivity amidst a world of debauchery and distractions.

What is a green girl?
A green girl comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Polonius says to Ophelia, “You speak like a green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstance.” So, I think of a green girl as an ingenue, who’s kind of unformed, in some way. Read the rest of this entry »