Not many priests get death threats. But, then again, not many priests are so often at the center of public controversy as Chicago’s Father Michael Pfleger. He’s defaced billboards, protested against Jerry Springer and Howard Stern, paid prostitutes for their time so that he could minister to them, and fought openly with Chicago Cardinal Francis George. Pfleger made national headlines during the 2008 election, when he openly derided Hillary Clinton from his pulpit, accusing her of feeling “entitled” to the Democratic nomination because she was white. He’s often accused of blurring the line between social activism and being openly political, and he’s the subject of a new book, “Radical Disciple: Father Pfleger, St. Sabina Church, and the Fight For Social Justice” by Chicago author Robert McClory.

McClory seems uniquely qualified to author the book; beyond being a former reporter for the Chicago Reader who profiled Pfleger back in 1989, McClory himself was a former priest at Pfleger’s St. Sabina’s. He was leaving the parish right around the same time that Pfleger was coming on in the late sixties, as the demographics for the neighborhood switched from predominantly white to predominantly black, and church membership shrunk almost nine-tenths. He remembers firsthand the effect Pfleger had on the congregation. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ella Christoph

Janet Zenke Edwards’ historical account of a brilliant, independent woman who escaped Chicago for what she hoped would be the peace, freedom and beauty of the Indiana dunes is titled “Diana of the Dunes: The True Story of Alice Gray.” But ultimately, Edwards’ book isn’t about the mythical Diana, who lives on in ghost tales and in newspaper archives, where sensational accounts of fierce Diana of the Dunes and her wild lover Paul live on. Edwards’ book is here to set the record straight, to give witness to Alice Gray, the woman behind the fantasy.

The historically accurate Alice Gray cuts a strong figure in her own right. By unknown means (her family wasn’t well off), Alice attended and graduated from the University of Chicago, earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics and studying at the graduate level for four years. She worked for the U.S. Naval Observatory and studied in Germany. Even before she left for the dunes, Alice stood out as exceptional for her intelligence and self-reliance. Read the rest of this entry »

Sam Weller, Ray Bradbury, Black Francis (who wrote the new book's intro) in LA at the end of June 2010/Photo: Nathan Kirkman

The premiere episode of “Q&A” on the Newcity Video Network

By Brian Hieggelke

On the cover of a new collection of interviews with Ray Bradbury, the legendary author proclaims “Sam Weller knows more about my life than I do!” It’s probably not far from the truth, since Weller can claim to have gotten his start even before he was born: Weller’s father read Ray Bradbury to him in the womb.

Ray Bradbury was born and raised in his early years in Waukegan Illinois, just forty miles north of downtown Chicago. His family moved west to Los Angeles during the Great Depression, and Bradbury went on to be one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated writers, crafting such classics as “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man,” “Fahrenheit 451″ and hundreds of stories, screenplays and television scripts. His career has taken him far from his idyllic youth in Waukegan, but not too far:  those formative years in the Midwest were forever captured in his most celebrated stories.

Chicagoan Sam Weller has spent the better part of a decade on the Bradbury beat: first in crafting the definitive biography of the author, “The Bradbury Chronicles” and now, on the eve of Bradbury’s ninetieth birthday, he’s assembled “Listen to the Echoes, The Ray Bradbury Interviews.” Needless to say, he’s developed a special relationship with the author. Read the rest of this entry »

You might be tempted to congratulate retired Tribune columnist Bill Barnhart and his research associate/co-author, Gene Schlickman,  on their prescience in releasing the first-ever biography of Chicago native and second-longest-ever-serving Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, just as Stevens announced his retirement. But Stevens is 90 years old, after all, so the odds were a little bit stacked in their favor. Nevertheless, interest in the career of the Court’s great coalition builder and dissent writer has never been higher. (Perhaps his greatest line, in his Bush v. Gore dissent: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as the impartial guardian of the rule of law.”) It is this independence of thought, this freedom from ideology—Stevens was appointed as a Republican but now often sides with the Court’s Liberal wing—that distinguishes him, in Barnhart’s mind. And perhaps in order to retain his sense of impersonal perspective in his work, Stevens took an interesting position on this book, Read the rest of this entry »

By Rachel Sugar

On the heels of the unexpected ascent of “Infinite Jest” to the New York Times best seller list upon its publication, Rolling Stone sent David Lipsky to accompany novelist David Foster Wallace on the last leg of his book tour. The piece never ran. (Always publicity-ambivalent, Wallace was apparently less than heartbroken.) Fourteen years later, and two years after Wallace’s suicide, we have the results of the five-day, cross-country interview in the form of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace,” a lightly edited transcript of Lipsky’s epic 1996 interview. In his introduction, Lipsky writes that what’s to follow “has the feel of a highway conversation. Late at night, the only car in the world, yelling at other drivers. It has the rhythms of the road: grouchiness, indefensible meals, and the sudden front-seat connections.” It is also in turns a fiction workshop, a buddy movie, a lecture series, a romance and a joke book.

For the acolyte, five days of David Foster Wallace is a dream come true, and even for the uninitiated, Wallace proves a pretty ideal traveling companion. Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Eno’s famous quote on The Velvet Underground—”Only five thousand people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every single one of them started a band”—may be the greatest compliment one could bestow upon an artist, and still seems appropriate in music today, as the band’s influence carries on steadily in independent music. The band, formed by Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker—and championed/managed by Andy Warhol—was at the forefront of underground music in the 1960s, balancing a profound gentleness with ravaging experimental noise. The Velvet Underground had four records with Lou Reed in charge—five if you count the later-released “lost album” “VU”—and all are incredible for different reasons. Whenever someone says he thinks The Velvet Underground was the best band of all time it’s met with skepticism, because that’s the cool answer to give, and that’s too bad, because The Velvet Underground was most likely the best band of all time.

” The Velvet Underground: A Walk on the Wild Side,” an illustrated history of the band written by Jim DeRogatis and several other contributors, features a balance between text and bundles of photos, flyers, lyric sheets, album covers and VU memorabilia, and attempts to tell the tale of the fabled group, with mixed results. The Velvet Underground members—young punks in art black—looked cool, so it makes sense to feature lots of photos of the band doing just that. Read the rest of this entry »

Dalkey is publishing "Brecht at Night," an Estonian novel by Mati Unt this month

In an effort to get its titles into more outlets, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s nonprofit press Dalkey Archive Press has signed on with W.W. Norton, which will take over sales and distribution. “We’ve been working on some more high-profile types of projects that we felt Norton, with its great international sales force, could do a better job with than we could on our own,” Martin Riker, Dalkey’s associate director, says. “We will continue to operate as an autonomous entity in terms of editorial, marketing, publicity and anything else. Norton will be an important extension of what we already do, but it won’t have any effect on the mission of Dalkey Archive Press. As a nonprofit press, we have a mission—to make the best works of modern and contemporary literature from all over the world available to English-language readers. Norton will help with that.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It is somehow continually surprising to discover how many of America’s essential writers were eccentrics, outsiders: in exile, even at home. Herman Melville was forgotten in his lifetime. Richard Wright found refuge from the rage of his youth in existentialism.

Even John Cheever, whom so many readers encountered in the gentile visage emblazoned on the back of his Pulitzer Prize-winning collected stories, was a lonely, equivocal visitor in the suburban world to which his name has since become synonymous.

The 1991 publication of Cheever’s ribald, deeply sad and erotically bisexual journals punched open a new personal dimension to this persona. Now we have an even wider, clearer window into Cheever’s life: this fabulous, enormously enjoyable biography by Blake Bailey, the author of a previous book about another troubled, hard-drinking mythologizer of suburbia, Richard Yates. Read the rest of this entry »

You can’t take the New Yorker out of Society of Midland Authors’ recent award-winning biographer and St. Charles resident Judith Testa, and you certainly can’t wash out the dirty mouths of trash-talking baseball players. “Fucking cocksucker this and fucking asshole that—that’s the kind of language that baseball players actually use,” proclaims Testa, who remembers, at age 7, watching Dodgers’ feared pitcher of the 1940s and 1950s and subject of her latest book, Sal Maglie, commonly known as “Sal the Barber.” Testa, a retired NIU art history teacher and author of “Rome Is Love Spelled Backward,” has clearly strayed away from her expertise to delve into her favorite childhood pastime and focused on “the one sport she always truly understood or cared about.” She says of Maglie, “He was really scary—not just to batters but to his audience, even watching him on television,” she says. “He was very sinister, he just conveyed an atmosphere of menace.”