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Finally! We lady folk get to see men without any clothes on, metaphorically. Naked and exposed, with all their weaknesses, desires, fears and insecurities finally out in the open. Reading “Men Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience,” a compilation of short stories by women about men and their sexuality, you realize that men are just as complex and screwed up as us, but even more so because they try so hard to hide it. With a foreword by Steve Almond and edited by Stacy Bierlein, Gina Frangello, Cris Mazza and Kat Meads, this juicy volume is an eye-opener. As Mazza notes in her introductory essay, “Literature should allow us to imagine people who are unlike ourselves—to slip into their lives, their minds, their perspectives, not for the sake of parodying alleged deficiencies, but to discover both our innate similarities and our enigmatic differences, and thereby appreciate them more.” Read the rest of this entry »

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In 2009, after Martha Bayne’s attempt to write a book about an experiment in sustainable agriculture and its effect on a tiny island community didn’t work out as planned, she returned to Chicago from Wisconsin. Lucky for Chicago, Bayne returned to her food roots. She wasn’t returning to her previous work, however, penning restaurant critiques for the Chicago Reader; instead, she wanted to create a thriving soup community, from the bottom up. It was winter, and Bayne was bored and lonely while tending bar at the Hideout. To combat the cold, isolation and even desperation, she started inviting folks from the food community to “Soup and Bread” nights on Wednesdays. The Hideout soon became the epicenter of potluck and mixed talents, as DJs, actors, writers, families, a Michelin chef and other personalities gathered to break bread and dine on various pots of donated soup.

Thanks to Bayne’s networks and socializing skills, for three winters running, the Hideout has hosted a weekly Soup & Bread feast, gathering an eclectic assortment of artists and parents, writers, professional and amateur cooks, all of whom donate homemade soup to crowds of one hundred or more. And the “Soup and Bread” cookbook is just as cozy and comforting as the soup gatherings that inspired it. Compact and red, and packed with recipes from local food writers like Mike Sula (Kimchi Chigae) and Chuck Sudo (Gumbo—Bridgeport Style), “Soup and Bread” is packed with no-frills, hearty, DIY flavor. Just like Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

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A recent college grad decides to change her life and live by the four “core values” in “Treasure Island”: Boldness, Resolution, Independence and Horn-blowing. Sara Levine, a Chicagoan, has written a brilliantly funny novel about a lost young woman who is obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson’s book. This clever novel, whose title includes no less than three exclamation points, does more than examine the post-collegiate angst of the middle class (a subject into which Levine, an instructor at the School of the Art Institute, surely has some insight): It’s an ironic examination of the classic American family structure. The main character moves in with her parents after burning through her job at the Pet Library and a short stint at her boyfriend’s house. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Warr, Luis Rodriguez and Patricia Smith in Paris for readings at the Sorbonne and Shakespeare & Co. in the mid-nineties.

By Marla Seidell

Back together for the first time since they shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg in New Jersey in 1997, Guild Literary Complex founders Michael Warr, Patricia Smith and Luis Rodriguez will gather at Jak’s Tap on March 1 for a special reading to commemorate their extensive contribution to the poetry performance movement that swept the Windy City and the country in the eighties and nineties.

Coinciding with the reading are the writers’ recently published books: Smith’s book of performance poetry, “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah,” (Coffee House Press, 2012, $16), Rodriguez’s memoir, “It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions and Healing,” (Touchstone Books, 2011, $25) and Warr’s latest volume of poetry, “The Armageddon of Funk,” (Tia Chucha Press, 2011, $16), which won the “Honor Books For Poetry” Award from The Black Caucus of the American Library Association. With the Guild founders reading from present and past works, the event recalls the writers’ early days in late-eighties Chicago, when they gathered for readings at the Red Lion Pub (now closed) on Lincoln Avenue. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you ever saw Walter Payton run, you’ve never forgotten it—not just his elusive speed, but the power that routinely broke tackles. Then there was that exuberant kick with which he finished runs—often gaining additional yards—and which in the fourth quarter made defenders look like slackers who had run out of steam.

For years before the arrival of Chicago Bears head coach Mike Ditka, Payton gained yardage behind offensive lines that were mediocre at best, his margin not just talent but a toughness fostered by his own grueling work ethic: He ran up hills and stadium stands in season and off, and sprinted after each practice play.

He wasn’t the fastest or biggest running back, but Chicago fans learned he was the best all-around runner, blocker and receiver, and probably the best player, pound for pound, in the history of professional football. He was further endeared to fans by his reported penchant for pranks and a publicly self-effacing attitude, underlined by a calm voice more evocative of Michael Jackson than Dick Butkus.

We loved him, but alas, Walter, we hardly knew ye, as Jeff Pearlman’s detailed, thoroughly researched yet also thoroughly readable biography “Sweetness” makes eminently clear. Perfect athletes are perfect people only in adolescent biographies, but after reading this “warts-and-all” book, the reader may be forgivably sad about how lost and misguided Payton often was away from the game he loved, and be deeply wistful at his untimely wasting away from cancer. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »