RECOMMENDED

“The Uninvited” begins with a six-year old child in pajamas murdering her grandmother. Liz Jensen has a way of grabbing the reader by the throat with uncomfortable juxtapositions of children and violence. Although her latest book has the elements of mystery, thriller and even sci-fi, like her other work, it defies easy categorization.

Carefully plotted, ”The Uninvited” thoughtfully imagines the repercussions of a world where children turn on their elders. The main character is Hesketh Lock, an anthropologist who solves corporate mysteries for a PR firm. As a “behavioural pattern expert,” Hesketh is investigating a series of sabotages followed by suicide. He suspects a connection between the children’s murders and the acts of sabotage well before anyone else. Hesketh approaches most of his work with emotional detachment; his ex-girlfriend called him a “robot made of meat”—a phrase that he periodically revisits and rebuffs. Hesketh has Asperger’s syndrome and has various obsessions that help him create order: origami, which he builds, sometimes just in his head to calm himself; languages, which allow him to easily travel around the world; Venn diagrams. Reading from Hesketh’s unique perspective is a fascinating adventure. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Joshua Young’s second book, published as part of Mud Luscious Press’ Nephew imprint series, is a screenplay-in-verse. Young is no stranger to blending poetry, prose and playwriting; his first book was “When the Wolves Quit: A Play-in-Verse” (Gold Wake Press, 2012). Divided into three acts, “To the Chapel of Light,” is obsessed with storytelling and portrays a surrealistic, almost dystopian version of the southern United States. Nephew specializes in “linguistically jagged, pocket-sized titles that redefine language” and boy, this book delivers outstandingly on that principle. Read the rest of this entry »

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Even if “Stella!” is all you know about Tennessee Williams’ plays, a new edition of “The Glass Menagerie” coinciding with the late Mississippian’s hundredth birthday should persuade you that something monumental was occurring in theater in Chicago on December 26, 1944.

That evening—while on the other side of the world German combat divisions were hurling themselves at the battered and beleaguered U.S. 101st Airborne at Bastogne—the Civic Theatre was mounting the premiere of Williams’ pre-war-set, very interior drama “The Glass Menagerie.”

Just as the face of the world would be changed by the ensuing rollback of the Nazis’ last desperate military offensive, “Menagerie” marked a quieter but nonetheless dramatic shift in theater. Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”) reports that not only was “Menagerie” Williams’ first great success, but argues indisputably that it raised expectations for Williams’ work and for American drama. Read the rest of this entry »

By John Freeman

A glance at the “E” section of your local bookstore would probably not give the impression that Louise Erdrich is a woman willing to wait. Since 1984, the year she debuted with not one, but two books, the Minnesota-born novelist has published more than twenty volumes of poetry, prose, fiction and children’s literature. She also raised four daughters and started an independent bookstore in Minneapolis. This spring, however, Erdrich unveiled proof that she has patience—when she must.

“The Plague of Doves,” her twelfth novel for adults, has landed to rave reviews. “Her most deeply affecting work yet,” wrote New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani. The book has been with Erdrich since the early 1980s, though, whispering to the author while she worked on other books.

“I knew this particular incident was going to be part of it,” says the 53-year-old novelist. “I just didn’t know how I was going to approach it.”

The incident Erdrich refers to was a brutal one. On November 13, 1897, a mob of forty men broke into a North Dakota jail and lynched three American Indians—two young boys (one of whom was named Paul Holy Track) and a grown man—who were among a group being tried for the murders of six members of a white family.

In “The Plague of Doves,” she brilliantly re-imagines this event, bringing to life an entire fictional North Dakota community and tracking how the crime filters down through subsequent generations. The quest for justice is diluted as families involved in the hanging intermarry and mingle. The tribal members keep the story alive through folklore, the whites try to pretend it never happened.

“In the beginning, the whites had all the power,” Erdrich says, by way of explaining the difference in how the crime is dealt with, “but as one reviewer put it: the Indians have the history.”

Although she is often compared to William Faulkner, whose own fictional Yoknapatawpha County is the closest comparison to the world Ms. Erdrich has conjured in North Dakota, her books are not nearly so blood-soaked.

Erdrich says part of this comes from her upbringing. “I lived a very sheltered childhood, a very sweet childhood,” she says, referring to the years she grew up one of seven kids in rural North Dakota.

“It’s against my nature to believe how evil people can be—I didn’t see cruelty a lot, so I didn’t understand it. When it became apparent that the world was different, that the world was different from what I had known as a child, it took me a long time to understand it.”

Her father, who is German, and her mother, who is Ojibwe, were both school teachers and encouraged her to memorize poetry. “I was lucky to have grandparents around, too,” she says—she listened to their stories, and asked questions, something she continues to do. “I still feel like I listen more than I tell.”

Clearly, it’s an inspiration. Like all of Erdrich’s novels, from her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning debut “Love Medicine” to the recent “Four Souls,” this book is full of dozens of memorable characters, whom Erdrich conjures in just a few deft strokes each. Most of Erdrich’s novels take place in a fictional town called Argus on the edge of an Indian reservation. Characters appear and reappear throughout. “The Plague of Doves,” however, ventures slightly outside this terrain and features an all-new cast. So the voices of the main characters—a recent college graduate, a judge, a grandfather and a doctor—came to her over time, at odd moments, their stories in shards.

“I can’t quite know I’m making a book,” Erdrich says. “If I really knew I had to put this all in beginning, when the voices came with such resonance, I really don’t know where they come from… I just feel like I get to take down what they’re telling me.”

Raw, high-contrast black-and-white photography adorns the pristine walls at Stop Smiling Studio on Milwaukee Avenue. Just a few blocks from the Six Corners, trendy Wicker Park women in pashminas mingle with men in cable-knit sweaters and mussy-haired, hip college boys. “I’m a huge fan,” says Zohra Sakwall as she takes her seat. “He writes about the immigrant experience with humor and sincerity.”

Sakwall has arrived at the launch party for Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel, “The Lazarus Project.” Hemon, the local author who won praise for his previous works, “A Question for Bruno” and “Nowhere Man,” collaborated with his good friend of twenty-three years, Velibor Bozovic, on the novel.

Bozovic traveled through Poland, Ukraine and Bosnia with Hemon while researching the new book; twelve of his photographs from the trip appear in its pages. “I have always secretly been a photographer,” Bozovic explains, lighting up a cigarette just outside the studio. “When I was in high school, during the siege…I took pictures. Then one year ago I quit my job [as an aerospace engineer], left the corporate world and became a photographer officially.”

Hemon’s voice carries lingering traces of Eastern Europe, an almost inaudible monotone. “The Lazarus Project” pictures two large, graphic eyes on both covers, and when Hemon reads, it is as if the book itself is ogling the audience. “Our President once said, ‘Books are great because they sometimes have fantastic pictures in them,’” Hemon laughs. “So I felt I had to put pictures in ‘The Lazarus Project.’ Maybe now the President will read it!” (Laura Hawbaker)

Local treasure Aleksandar Hemon, already deemed a “genius” by the MacArthur Foundation, broke through eight years ago with his debut “The Question of Bruno,” a staggering accomplishment from the Sarajevo-born writer for whom English was an acquired language. “Nowhere Man” followed, which proved Hemon was not a one-hit fluke. His newest novel, his best, is titled “The Lazarus Project,” a jarring and provocative piece of work that links together a hundred years of Chicago history. The plot? In March 1908, an Eastern European immigrant named Lazarus Averbuch is unjustly shot to death by the city’s chief of police, leaving his sister alone in the unknown city. Flash forward a century, and a young writer, also Eastern European and living in Chicago, becomes obsessed with the boy’s story and sets out to learn as much as he can about his life. The characters’ stories link, as does the city’s streets, beaten and built again during these hundred years of life. The imaginative plot is only surface pleasure. Like with the best novelists, the rewards from Hemon’s prose come from a much deeper place. (Tom Lynch)

Aleksandar Hemon reads from “The Lazarus Project” as part of the “Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman” series May 18 at the Lookingglass Theater, 821 North Michigan, (312)337-0665, at 11:45am. Free.

The gloomy tales that fill New York City author Richard Price’s catalogue have never let up, punishing the reader as they investigate crime and urban drama with rigorous dialogue and provocative themes. “Clockers,” “Freedomland” and his most recent, 2003’s “Samaritan,” did this with remarkable fluidity. Price’s newest, “Lush Life,” works much in the same way, a mystery of sorts that introduces Eric Cash, a Lower East Side bartender who still clings to dreams of being an actor or a writer. On the street with a co-worker, they are both put at gunpoint—what really happens is anyone’s guess, as how Cash tells the story it becomes more and more hazy. Price’s crime writing—which he has recently sharpened scripting for HBO’s “The Wire”—has never been as terse, nor as unmerciful. He discusses “Lush Life” this afternoon as part of the “Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman” series, which only has a couple more installments left before the stage goes dark. (Tom Lynch)

Richard Price discusses “Lush Life” March 9 at Lookingglass Theater, 821 North Michigan, (312)337-0665, at 11:45am.

By John Freeman

What is more damaging to a storyteller’s accuracy—time or torture? Here is the heart of Elias Khoury’s mesmerizing new novel, “Yalo,” in which a young man is arrested at the end of the Lebanese Civil War and charged with rape, robbery and collaboration. The charges against Yalo are serious in a country seeking to avenge its one-time avengers. If Yalo cannot get his story straight, he faces life in prison or worse.

Parsing fact from fantasy is not going to be an easy task, for Khoury’s troubled, shell-shocked ex-solider is a man caught between worlds and languages. He also inherits a legacy of forgetting. Yalo’s Kurdish grandfather grew up in Syria, speaking the dead Aramaic language of Syriac, but emigrated to Lebanon and became a Christian priest. Yalo’s mother was abandoned by his father and spent her life obsessed with a lover who refused to divorce his wife.
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RECOMMENDED
Massachusetts—by way of Australia—author Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006 for “March,” an intelligent and moving epic about the March girls’ father (yes, from Alcott’s “Little Women”) and his experience during the Civil War. Brooks got her start working as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal—the story for her newest novel, “People of the Book,” came when she was covering the Bosnian war and learned of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a book that features the traditional text of the Passover Haggadah and has survived, incredibly, since the fifteenth century.  Through the eyes of a rare book expert (must be a fun job) who’s hired to analyze a precious text that’s recently survived a bombing in Sarajevo, Brooks documents, with enviable passion, the piece’s travels and the hands that over time protected it, cherished it and kept it from harm. Mysterious and ambitious, “People of the Book” is a winner. (Tom Lynch)

Geraldine Brooks discusses “People of the Book” January 23 at Newberry Library, 60 West Walton, (312)943-9090, at 6pm. Free.

It’s difficult to think of an American writer with a story more inspiring than Ha Jin’s. Born in China, he came to the United States in 1986 on a student visa to finish a dissertation on Auden, Eliot, Pound and Yeats at Brandeis University. Jin and his wife had planned to return, but after the Tiananmen Square massacre, they cut their ties to China.

During the next decade, Jin turned himself into one of America’s most important writers. Between 1990 and 1999, he published two books of poetry, two collections of short stories and two novels, one of which, “Waiting,” won the National Book Award. In his acceptance speech, he gave his heartiest thanks to the English language, “which is embracive and vibrant, and has provided me a niche where I can do meaningful work.”
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