Top 5 Literary Series
Reading Under the Influence
Neutron Bomb
Write Club
Quickies
P. Fanatics
—John Wawrzaszek

Top 5 Nonfiction Books
“Rin Tin Tin” by Susan Orlean
“Plastic: A Toxic Love Story” by Susan Freinkel
“Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer
“The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School” by Alexandra Robbins
“Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History” by Ben Mezrich
—Kelly Roark 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 »

Max Barry/Photo: Lauren Thomas

By Casey Brazeal

Australian author Max Barry recently published the science fiction thriller/dark comedy “Machine Man.” The novel is the second incarnation of a story he originally published online as a serial, one page at a time. Rather than a reprint of the online content, the novel “Machine Man,” is a distillation of Barry’s original idea: a future in which corporations turn people’s bodies into a product, a weapon or worse. The movie rights for the book have already been purchased, with Darren Aronofsky signed on to direct it. Max Barry recently talked to us about writing a serial, his Skype tour and the changing landscape of publishing. Read the rest of this entry »

By Brian Hieggelke

If we’re living in the most creative and fertile period in the history of comics, Daniel Clowes and Seth are two of a handful of cartoonists largely responsible for it. Clowes, born and raised in Chicago before relocating to California, is best known for his long-running “Eightball” comic, which spawned several graphic novels (and a couple movies), including “Ghost World” and “Ice Haven,” as well as last-year’s “Wilson.” The Canadian Seth came to fame with his long-running comic “Palookaville,” as well as the recent graphic novels “George Sprott” and “Wimbledon Green.”

This month, publisher Drawn and Quarterly is releasing Clowes’ “The Death-Ray” and Seth’s “The G.N.B. Double C: The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists” and, in the tradition of the old superhero team-ups, is sending them on tour together, with a stop this week at Oak Park’s Unity Temple. In that spirit, we conducted a three-way interview in advance of their visit. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Eden Laurin

Avid skateboarder, David Foster Wallace devotee, and native Midwesterner, the SAIC grad-turned-Roosevelt prof made indie-lit waves with his 2009 coming-of-age debut, “The Slide.”

Where are you based?
I’m in Logan Square along with, it seems, every single student I’ve ever taught.

Your novel, “The Slide,” came out in 2009. What have you been up to since? What are you working on these days?
Well that depends on what you mean by “working.” I’ve been finishing essays that appeared in a few anthologies, plus several smaller fiction things for journals. Read the rest of this entry »

By Hugh Iglarsh

To enter Bob Katzman’s Magazine Museum (“Where Print Still Lives”) is to leave the aggressively ordinary surroundings of downtown Skokie and find oneself in the weird and disorienting universe of Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian librarian whose fantastical tales and essays wrestle with the concepts of chaos and order within a print-defined world.

Katzman’s collection of 140,000 vintage magazines (as well as mounds of posters and flags and banners of every nation) is an overwhelming textual, cultural and historical sprawl, stacked in loose groupings and postings from toe level to ceiling tile. At first glance, it looks like a miniature version of Borges’ infinite Library of Babel, which contains all possible books, including one written in a “Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with inflections from classical Arabic”—but alas, no discoverable card catalog. Read the rest of this entry »

The Loyola prof’s most recent publications have focused on teaching writing (his latest, “Revision,” tackles the art of editing), but that doesn’t mean the “Skating in the Dark” author isn’t cooking up some new fiction of his own.

Where are you based?
In the West Walker area, near Old Irving Park, but I teach fiction writing at Loyola University Chicago.

Your last book was a non-fiction writing guide, “Revision: A Creative Approach to Writing and Rewriting Fiction;” before that, you published a novel, “Skating in the Dark,” and a book of short stories, “Comfort.” What have you been up to since? What are you working on these days?
Since then, I’ve published short stories serially in magazines such as TriQuarterly, DoubleTake, StoryQuarterly, and Five Corners Quarterly, and had some in anthologies such as “The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.” I also won the Nelson Algren Short Story Award in 1999, and was a runner-up in 2005. I have just finished a novel, “Luna Park,” which I’ve been working on for quite a while, to the short shrifting, alas, of short fiction. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing about 9/11 once felt so much stranger. The image of the Twin Towers falling is so indelibly marked in the American consciousness that initially it may have seemed commenting on it was excessive or incompatible. Yet, with the passing of ten years, an image once unilaterally perceived in the West—“we are all Americans now,” as the French newspaper Le Monde famously printed—has become burdened with the history that sprouted from it.

Given the event’s transforming meaning, Granta’s “Ten Years Later” essentially skirts the issue of what exactly occurred ten years ago. While the New Yorker chose the bizarrely nostalgic route of scrapping together what amounts to an e-book time capsule of its coverage immediately following the attacks, per their M.O. Granta has chosen a considerably riskier approach. Out of its sixteen essays, only one addresses September 11 directly. The rest cover, according to the blurb, the “complexity and sorrow of life since 11 September 2001.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: John Reilly

Novelist (also: journalist, critic, professor, painter) Carol Anshaw has been capturing the complexities of women’s relationships—and relationships in general—since her 1992 debut, “Aquamarine.”

Where are you based?
Andersonville

Your last novel, “Lucky in the Corner,” came out in 2002. What have you been up to since? What are you working on these days?
I have a new novel coming out early next year from Simon & Schuster, “Carry the One.” I worked hard for a long time on this book; it’s more complex than anything I’ve done before. I also have a deeply Chicago story coming out in the next issue of New Ohio Review [NOR]. What I’m working on now is the beginnings of a novel, “The Map of Allowed Wandering.” Read the rest of this entry »

Marc Smith

By Mike Gillis

If slam poetry is still the religion it once was, then the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge is its cathedral. Of course, like the best of lounges, the Green Mill is the opposite of a church. Rather than natural light and sanctity, it conjures sea grottos, manmade dimness, embellished curves.

On a recent Saturday in Wrigleyville, the rock club Metro served as a surrogate to slam poetry founder Marc Smith’s traditional pulpit. It served quite well. If a little less cavernous, the Metro was no less ornate and grotesquely organic than the Green Mill. Should the low-key ambiance have suggested slam has lost its edge, though, the pantheon assembled for the twenty-fifth anniversary of slam poetry immediately extinguished such doubts. Read the rest of this entry »