The notion that “the medium is the message” is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but the folks at Rose Metal Press seek to marry the media to the message with their individually designed, beautifully custom-printed editions of what they describe as “hybrid genres.” The result is books that could seem pricey and precious were it not for the fact that that they offer a perfect match to the right readers. The Brookline, Massachusetts-based (with a strong Chicago presence due to its co-founder’s local residence) publisher’s books aren’t for everyone, and that’s the point: they don’t need to be, considering each so gloriously fits its own highly personal niche.

Consider the appropriately retro fifties packaging of Tiff Holland’s linked short-short stories, at the center of which is a judgmental, far-from-perfect working-class mom dubbed Betty Superman, whose chief “super” virtue may be honesty to the point of bluntness. 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 »

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 »

By Eric Lutz

Steve Stone is one of those odd public figures, in sports or elsewhere, who can be simultaneously one of his field’s best minds and also one of its most pompous blowhards.

He’s like that hipster friend who knows more about music than you could ever hope to learn, but—god damn, can you stop talking about the time you yelled “Secret Santa Cruz” at a Lifter Puller show and they played it two songs later? The Bob Nanna version is ten times better anyway.

Stone is equal parts baseball-brilliant and Olympic-caliber name-dropper in his new book, “Said in Stone: Your Game, My Way”—a work sure to bore ninety-two percent of the US population and turn off another seven percent with its semi-self-indulgence.

But for the one percent whose appreciation of America’s pastime goes beyond the Old Style on breezy June afternoons but whose knowledge of the game doesn’t go beyond an intermediate level, Stone’s book will be a good read, stuffed with entertaining anecdotes and comprehensive baseball theory. Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Gillis

Out in the suburb of River Forest—in an apartment complex housing the last remaining literary journal dedicated to light verse—is a living metaphor. Like the flickering form of light verse itself, the office of Light Quarterly is filled with both relics and curiosities: A cylinder of enchanted “Indian House Blessing.” Shelves of books torn in half by age. A cardboard box crammed with rubber-band-bound notecards on which founder John Mella wrote a novel during his thirty-two years working for the Postal Service.

Even more interesting are hundreds of letters to celebrities, stacked in plastic mail crates. Solicitation letters, to be exact, going out to the likes of the Dalai Lama and Conan O’Brien.

When asked if Light Quarterly has ever received a response, Mella, at sixty-nine years, smiles, his face suddenly illuminated. Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Gillis

Ostensibly a Chicago bluesman steeped in the southern traditions of Jefferson County, Arkansas, William “Big Bill” Broonzy’s recordings stretch genres—from folk music to hokum, ragtime to country. His life and legacy are equally wide-reaching. He toured Europe, fell in love with a Dutch woman, and masterminded recordings that would inspire The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and the 2009 inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama. In the intervening years, Broonzy also became a master crowd pleaser, whose compassion and appeal to white and black audiences functioned as a heart to the Chicago music scene. In 1955, he compiled an autobiography that recounted his inspirations—an uncle named Jerry, a dubiously friendly white man—his childhood with twenty-one siblings, and his time serving in World War I. The only problem was, none of it was true.

In his recent biography “I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy,” Bob Riesman uncovers the reality behind the constructed life of the master showman. In an interview with Newcity, Riesman built a list of some of Broonzy’s most enduring works, and used them to talk about the bluesman’s legacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Since Stop Smiling transitioned from a periodical to a book publisher, the Second City has had a gaping hole in its journalistic output where long-form creative nonfiction is concerned. The Handshake, a new publication helmed by editor-in-chief Daniel Duffy, seeks to change this.

Taking admitted inspiration from Stop Smiling (the first issue of The Handshake features an interview with its founding editor, J.C. Gabel), Duffy continues its legacy of long-form interviews. Yet he aims to deviate from that publication through inclusion of five structured, recurring sections.

“I think offering these five very distinct things, with only one of each in each issue, gives us enough focus to really keep putting out a good product every time,” Duffy says.

Each issue will include one long-form interview and one “conversation, where two authors, artists, comedians, meet to talk to each other about their lives and work,” Duffy says.

In addition, the magazine includes a single experimental essay (“in tribute to David Foster Wallace,” reads the website). New Journalism influenced Duffy in constructing this section, causing him to realize the allure of subjectivity in reporting. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, someone had the courage to write about the unsung privileged elite and the horrors they bear as they apply for the top universities in the world. Too long have they suffered in silence and born the agony of merely attending schools like Northwestern or the University of Chicago when they don’t get into the Ivy league.

John J. Binder, a Chicago author, writes of three high school students in a fictional western suburb, Oak Stream. Sarah, a middle child apparently incapable of making a decision, is the main character.  Her friends Rob and Carrie are her loyal, nerdy friends.  “There had been a few dates for Sarah and Carrie starting in the eighth grade, but the boys found them a bit overwhelming and largely stayed away. Rob’s off the wall sense of humor was the best girl repellent known to man and Sarah’s wit did nothing to help her with the boys either. Although the outside world did not always understand them, they understood each other and appreciated the bond they had forged.”

Sarah, crippled with indecision, applies to the 100 top schools in America, as well as her “safety,” the University of Illinois. Rob has a gimmick of his own and applies first as Rob Taylor and then legally changes his name to “Running Elk Taylor,” indicates his Native American heritage on his application, and applies to the same schools again. Carrie’s a legacy at MIT and her mother won’t hear of her going anywhere else. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

If Hugh Hefner were a leather daddy, he would be Chuck Renslow. Both men were born in Chicago in the 1920s, lived in mansions, cultivated harems and, importantly, each trail-blazed a sexual revolution on a massive scale. “Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow” is a new comprehensive biography by Tracy Baim and Owen Keehnen that invites the Hefner-Renslow analogy but doesn’t stress it, for Renslow’s contributions and pet projects have been so varied and so unique. “Leatherman” explains in detail how Renslow hand-forged a safe place for his brotherhood of BDSM practitioners to play and, along the way, legitimized and improved the conditions of this subculture within a subculture.

In 1958, the police raided Renslow’s photography studio, which produced and distributed physique studies of male bodybuilders, or beefcakes, an early form of soft-core erotica. “The porno king,” as Renslow was dubbed in the press, triumphed in court, as he would many more times in the decades ahead, opening dialogue (often by force) about the right for his community to practice their dark, kinky arts. Renslow’s ability to work with local politicians, policemen and gangsters—most Chicago gay bars were mob-owned during the last century—made him a natural leader and protector of the leather community—their “daddy.” Read the rest of this entry »