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Like the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz,” we modern human beings can all use a little courage. In fact, Judith A. and Richard B. Schwartz argue in “The Wounds That Heal” that the need for heroic role models “is so strong that the media will manufacture pseudo-heroes in order to meet it.

“The hero exemplifies traits and demonstrates capabilities… (that) we value,” they write. “He or she extends our conceptions of the possible and helps us to focus on that which is essential rather than peripheral.”

Unfortunately, when we lack true models, we may mistake celebrity for heroism and as humans aspire to notoriety rather than real virtue and character. “The Wounds That Heal” offers guidance out of this particularly modern mess. Read the rest of this entry »

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Patti Smith has garnered plenty of critical acclaim over the past year for “Just Kids,” a memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, but she also quietly published another slender remembrance—”Woolgathering.”

At less than one-hundred pages, with Smith’s own photographs interspersed like religious relics, “Woolgathering” reads like a path through a dream, or the remembrances of a priestess. But Smith claims, in a charming introduction, that it’s truth, not fairy tale. She also endearingly writes that she hopes the book will impose a “vague and curious joy” on the reader, which is a fairly accurate way to describe how the book is absorbed. 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 »

By Martin Northway

Intermittently fiction tries to reinvigorate itself with new forms. Now we have “flash fiction,” like what we have long called short, short fiction but imbued somehow with greater urgency, nurtured in the hothouse of the Internet blogosphere. Its products are like watermelons stolen by their writers from odd moments in the workaday world or the humdrum of life.

Tobias Bengelsdorf, in his introduction to a compendium of short works that is the newest print project of Chicago’s Green Lantern Press, makes no apology for his own transgressions against employers, for “Every office I’ve worked in was a den of wasted time and preposterous directives.”

And as with stolen watermelons, flash fiction can be very sweet, including some of these selections gleaned from Fiction At Work’s blog (fictionatwork.com) since its inception in 2007. At their best, they yield unexpected glimpses into other lives. Read the rest of this entry »

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Robert Crumb might have the public persona of a cranky, creepy curmudgeon, but when it comes to music, he enthuses without reservation. That is, of course, as long as it’s his kind of music, which skews toward nearly forgotten blues and jazz artists of the first half of the twentieth century. His cover for Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Co.’s “Cheap Thrills” is iconic, and no doubt he could have illustrated the pick of the rock ‘n’ roll litter over the subsequent years had he wanted to. But with the exception of a few things for the likes of the Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa, he’s wallowed in intentional obscurity, which makes this collection all the more valuable. Read the rest of this entry »

When you think of the photographer Terry Richardson, you think of, what, perversion and controversy? Of a photographer often more famous than his subjects? Of an artist whose personality is larger than life, a phenomenon entirely of his own manufacture? The matchup of Richardson and Lady Gaga—he traveled with her for ten months of unrestricted access to her life on and off stage—seems to promise either spectacular success or colossal failure. Could it really fall in between? Apparently. The handsomely designed book is devoid of text or captions, save a very short intro from Gaga. The net effect tends to preserve the otherworldly artifice of the Lady Gaga creation—even when she’s eating pasta, or brushing her teeth, it’s stylized. Read the rest of this entry »

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By Martin Northway

In his eloquent, expansive homage to American figures central to our western growth, “Lions of the West,” novelist-turned-historian Robert Morgan notes the irony that a godfather of republicanism and limited government, President Thomas Jefferson, engineered the greatest increase of U.S. territory.

Jefferson envisioned an “Empire of Liberty.” “In retrospect we can see the contradiction that Jefferson and his contemporaries could not: Morgan calls it “the oxymoron of imperial power promoting the spread of ‘liberty.’” Two decades after Washington’s warning against foreign entanglements, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase put America on a possible collision course with both Britain and Spain—and later Mexico.

One can track our democratic rationale for expansion from Jefferson’s “empire” through the Manifest Destiny of the Mexican War period to today’s “American exceptionalism” under-girding global defense of the American way (including a capitalism not necessarily coextensive with free enterprise) and adventures like the Iraq War, seeking not physical territory but expanded power and influence. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

RECOMMENDED

It was a comic about mice, and if it hadn’t been, would anyone have noticed?

When Art Spiegelman began to draw a comic-book serial about his father, a survivor of Auschwitz, he couldn’t have imagined that it would change the face of visual literature. With its deceptively simple symbolism of the Jews drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats, “Maus” became a complex and acclaimed work, helping to usher in the idea of graphic novels and becoming the first comic to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. Twenty-five years after the publication of the first half of the two-volume memoir, Spiegelman sat down with University of Chicago professor Hillary Chute for a book-length interview to explain how, and perhaps more important, why he did it. Read the rest of this entry »

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It takes a nineteenth-century Ukrainian author like Nikolai Gogol (author of the novels “Taras Bulba” and “Dead Souls” and stories “The Overcoat” and “The Nose”) to put a Slavic turn on the title “The Night Before Christmas,” which conjures merry yuletide memories for Americans.

Here, instead of St. Nicholas, it is the devil who appears on Christmas Eve: “It was only from the goat-beard under his chin, from the little horns sticking upon his forehead, and from his being no whiter than a chimney-sweep, that one could tell that he was not a German or a district attorney, but simply the devil, who had one last night left him to wander about the world and teach good folk to sin.” Read the rest of this entry »