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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 »

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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 »

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 »

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Bonnie Nadzam’s “Lamb” is that rarest of literature: a debut novel whose spare, eloquent imagery entices, whose facile dialogue rings absolutely true, whose ideas and emotions endure when we turn the last page.

David Lamb is a middle-aged man whose life is coming off the rails and is desperate to find a better version of himself. He fantasizes that he can achieve this by benevolently anointing an anonymous, less-than-ordinary, eleven-going-on-twelve year-old seemingly lost girl, to share his journey for just a little while so that she can learn from him how to imagine and realize a better future for herself.

What are the facts? David does not abduct “Tommie,” but out of her deep need for paternal love and guidance, makes her a co-conspirator in a trip to his secret sanctuary in the Rocky Mountains. Out of her imagination and unknown life experiences, the author perfectly verbalizes a molester’s or abusive killer’s rationalizations while persuading both child and reader of his own good intentions. Read the rest of this entry »

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If the great American narrative is success, why are so many of the great American novelists obsessed with failure? J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Junot Diaz, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen. Here are poets of unraveling. The short answer is Yanks need them. In a country drubbed constantly by the visuals of triumphal plenitude, they remind Americans you are not alone when you catch a bad break.

In his debut novel, “The Art of Fielding,” Chad Harbach places himself firmly in this camp of Americana. Unlike so many young writers, who herald the loser as a kind of everyman, this is a book full of winners. Who are losing. Baseball stars, sought-after academics, beautiful young women and talented students all fall flat on their face across this novel. And bless him, Harbach doesn’t indulge an ounce of schadenfreude. Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Gillis

The stories in Patricia Ann McNair’s debut collection “The Temple of Air” are steeped in a particular brand of hospitality and violence. They are definitively Midwestern, navigating deftly between the everyday and the disturbing, the prosaic and the poetic. Perhaps part of this is inspired by McNair’s biography. Though currently a creative writing professor at Columbia College, she has spent much of her life steeped in Midwestern small towns, soaking in the meter and rhythm of daily life there. The author talked with us about faith, taking inspiration from past jobs and how the Midwestern locales she features differ from Faulkner’s Mississippi.

Your author’s blurb portrays you as a jack-of-all-trades, to some extent, going from bartending to working on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Was writing always something you were developing during this time? Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Gillis

By now, it’s past passé to note that we live in a literary era of pastiche and homage. But when questioned on the staying power of this melding of the literary and the pulp, Chicago author Adam McOmber becomes impassioned, his voice rising just slightly:

“I think that these type of stories—stories of the fantastic—reach back to mythology. Because that’s what myths are,” he says over a phone call from a sweltering vacation spot in Cape Cod. “If you read Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ or something like that, what you’ve got are fantastic stories. There’s even a werewolf in that.”

If any part of his writings resembles the mythological, it is the overtly inexplicable spectacles at their heart. At times, reading a short story from McOmber’s new collection, “This New & Poisonous Air,” is like peeling back the shade of a curiosity shop. Questions gravitate around his dense prose as he weaves alternatively horrific and spectacular tales of the fantastic. Read the rest of this entry »

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Kate Allison is a recent college graduate when she meets her husband-to-be Colin. Kate and her roommate Darcy, young women with a shared penchant for trendy Manhattan bars, designer clothing and boutique grocers, have planned a dinner party: an ambitious attempt at playing “grown up.” On the menu is Creamy Polenta with Mascarpone, Red Oak Salad with Gruyere, Mashed Turnips with Frizzled Leeks, Stuffed Chicken Breast and Herbed Goat Cheese. The dinner is doomed to fail and, indeed, does.

Then Colin enters the kitchen. He clears the clogged kitchen sink drain, then helps Kate in putting Darcy into bed, cleaning up the kitchen, and sending home the rowdy guests, who’d only wanted to get drunk anyway. Kate shows him her room and then her bed. We don’t know it yet, but their first meeting is a telling metaphor of their marriage to come. Their relationship forms, fueled by sex, intimate conversation and Kate’s intuition that she could have him, all of him, if she wanted. Read the rest of this entry »

By Tom Lynch

The title, of course, is lifted from Sleater-Kinney.

“I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” the debut novel from local author Stephanie Kuehnert, is a punk-rock novel of heavy awareness. Everyone wants to be a rock star. Kuehnert’s protagonist and narrator, Emily Black, is no different. Living in a tiny town in Wisconsin, left alone with her father as an infant when her mother hit the road following her own rock-star dreams, Emily’s now your favorite teenager, much cooler than you were when you were there, the dark hair, the red lipstick and the witty asides and retorts all part of the angst-ridden fireball.
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