As Nelson Algren taught us, since its founding Chicago has been a city of hustlers and squares. Such a straightforward dichotomy between inhabitants makes the generation of narrative easy: conflict is inevitable while shades of gray are few. As a reader of books on Chicago history, you know for whom to root. If you happen to be both a reader and a Chicagoan, then you also know that the person you’re rooting for—usually the square if you’re a moral sort—is going to lose. The tango between the hustler and the square has provided a structure for two of the more recent and popular books dealing with the city’s past—Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City” and Karen Abbott’s “Sin in the Second City”–and it turns up again in Gary Krist’s “City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster that Gave Birth to Modern Chicago.” Read the rest of this entry »

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It was the publishing event of 1980: the release of the only known novel by a brilliant but unknown, previously unpublished New Orleans writer, dead by his own hand more than a decade earlier.

John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” finally saw the light of day as the result of the indefatigable efforts of his devoted mother and her successful enlistment of the great Louisiana author Walker Percy as a critical ally.

Centered on one of the great eccentric characters of American literature, the geeky medievalist New Orleans hotdog vendor Ignatius Reilly, the novel was described by Kirkus Reviews as “a masterpiece of character comedy,” “almost stroboscopic: brilliant, relentless, delicious, perhaps even classic.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Maybe this is one of those silly, self-centered illusions of life. Like the one about being the hero of our own life story. Or the one about the universe coming to an end when we die. But it sure seems from where I sit (in my classroom, in Chicago, just east of the corner of Division and Milwaukee, down the street from Young Chicago Authors and Nelson Algren’s old haunt) that Chicago is one of the centers of America’s literary universe. Maybe not as big-titted, tummy tucked, ass-lifted sexy as LA, or as swagger, swagger, yadda, yadda important as NYC—but what is?

At least it seems that an awful lot of poetry has been written about this city over the years. Not just by the big guns, like Carl Sandburg who, in one long, frequently reprinted poem named after our town, tried to do for Chicago what Walt Whitman did for Manhattan. But plenty of lesser-known poets, not to mention slam champs and runners-up and high-school poets hoping to be louder than a bomb, have tried to leap on and pin down some wild aspect of our untameable city. Ryan G. Van Cleave found enough contemporary poetry about this big, loud, crass, graceful, amazing city to fill a 174-page anthology. And the University of Iowa Press thought it was important enough, and interesting enough, to publish it. Read the rest of this entry »

By Greg Baldino

Alison Bechdel’s career as a cartoonist began in a series of short strips published in gay and lesbian newspapers in the early eighties under the title “Dykes to Watch Out For.” As her work grew both in refinement and scope, so too did her audience, and in 2006 she published her first graphic memoir, “Fun Home,” a critically acclaimed best-seller. Following up on that book’s exploration of her relationship with her late father, Bechdel’s new book, “Are You My Mother?” examines her ongoing relationship with her mother, her early lesbian relationships and her experiences with and interest in psychoanalysis.

First off, congratulations on your Guggenheim Fellowship. Could you talk a bit about how that came about? Read the rest of this entry »

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“This Will Be Difficult to Explain” is a collection of loosely related short stories by Johanna Skibsrud. Her pitch-perfect writing style compensates for any confusion about the direction or relation of the stories, but what emerges by the end is a carefully crafted exploration of memory. The stories vacillate between young women out of their element in foreign locales and second languages and a rural America populated with pickup trucks and loaded guns. In one story, a youngster is taken on a dubious trip through the woods to shoot a neighbor’s escaped bull; in another, an ingenue misunderstands her elderly French companion’s tale of woe, laughing inappropriately at her son’s suicide. Memory, the common theme of Skibsrud’s stories, is nostalgic or painful—some events are too difficult to process faithfully. The titular story, for example, centers around a drunken man who horrifies his family with a rambling, untrustworthy episode from his childhood during the war. Read the rest of this entry »

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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 »

You don’t have to have read much of Jonathan Franzen (though you should) to know the basics, because in recent years he’s reached a level of cultural saturation that’s generally not the province of middle-aged literary writers with contrarian tendencies. “Farther Away,” Franzen’s latest essay collection, written over the past five years and mostly first published in The New Yorker, seems to be a product of that fame: the Franzen here is the authorial equivalent of the celebrity guest star who shows up playing a heightened version of himself. He’s out-Franzened Franzen.

His primary obsessions—books, the perils of modern technology, loneliness, his late friend and fellow novelist David Foster Wallace and birds–are well documented, both by him and by everyone who writes about him, and the pieces collected in “Farther Away” pair and re-pair Franzen’s fixations with comic consistency. Technology, birds. Books, technology. David Foster Wallace, birds. David Foster Wallace, books. Read the rest of this entry »

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Chicago is a relative whippersnapper among the great cities of the world, but its persisting roll-up-the-sleeves attitude toward life and work may be why it has produced so many high achievers in all fields of human endeavor, including politics and crime (in which many have proved ambidextrous).

So it was no small mission June Skinner Sawyers set for herself in winnowing that list to about 300 and creating trenchant but sufficiently thorough biographies of each. The result has been spectacularly successful. In her “Chicago Portraits” she has crafted an indispensable resource for anyone who loves Chicago history. The grace of her writing also makes it a pure pleasure for browsing; her volume will make you smarter just by being in your home.

In his foreword, Rick Kogan—whose father, the late journalist, historian and author Herman is justifiably among those included here—is right on the money in applying to Chicago the Southerner William Faulkner’s observation, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Read the rest of this entry »

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“If music be the food of love, play on.” So the lovesick Duke Orsino declaims at the top of Twelfth Night. He is speaking of his unrequited feelings for Olivia. But he could as easily have been speaking about opera. For opera is packed with lovers, both on stage,  and off.

Onstage the lovers suffer a thousand slings and arrows, before they suffer and die singing at the top of their lungs. Even those who die of tuberculosis, like Verdi’s Violetta, in “La Traviata,” sing like sopranos in their prime as they cough and cough, and fade away.

Offstage, opera lovers endure the torment of unrequited love, pining for brief glimpses of their love and spending their time away brooding on their memories and reviewing the myriad bits of information they collect about their love objects. Count professor and political writer Garry Wills among this number. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the classic TV series “The Honeymooners,” sewer worker Norton (Art Carney) has taken up bird watching and, with binoculars around his neck, shares a park bench with his friend, the bus driver Kramden (Jackie Gleason). Kramden wants to know why anyone would take up bird watching.

“Why shouldn’t we watch birds?” Norton responds. “They watch us, don’t they?”

Norton spots—“by Jove!”—a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, and remarks they’ve never been seen in New York. He starts making a note for the birding society. Kramden asks sneeringly, What makes you think they’re going to believe you?

Hmmm. Norton writes and recites: “Bird seen: Yellow-bellied Sapsucker,” then with a wink, “Place seen:..” (pause) “Albuquerque, New Mexico”! Read the rest of this entry »