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“Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” is the first memoir by Jeanette Winterson, even though her books generally contain elements of autobiography. The memoir is a response to her first work of fiction, “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” which, when she wrote it more than twenty-five years ago, launched her into literary fame and eventually became a BBC mini-series.

Winterson, who revisits the themes of experience, biography, fiction and feminism, explains that her first book was partly a challenge to the perception that women are writers of experiential—and thus less masterful—fiction. Winterson’s goal was to express both “experience and experiment.” It’s with something like horror that any devotee of “Oranges” will read, “I told my version—faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time. I told myself as a hero like any shipwreck story… And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is ‘Oranges,’ is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Read the rest of this entry »

With a title like “A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends,” Stacy Bierlein’s short story collection comes off as a fizzy beach read. And on the surface, the stories seem to be just that—stories tied together by sex, relationships and travel. But there is more in this collection—loss, in its various stages and breeds, the value of good, strong friendship and an underlying, impermeable anxiety of growing older and lonelier. For all the men they sleep with and the countries they travel, the women in these stories are all in search of something, be that compassion, intimacy or a place to belong.

In “Linguistics,” a young woman travels to Prague to mourn her father’s death alone, and instead falls in love with a Croatian man who helps her heal—despite the fact that they can hardly share a conversation. In “Men’s Furnishings,” Cheryl resents her husband’s over-indulgent shopping sprees and suspects he’s into recreational drug use in the months following the birth of their first child. And “Two Girls” is about two women enjoying nearly-perfect lives–successful careers, happy marriages, passionate affairs—who then witness an unspeakable crime that sends them reeling. Read the rest of this entry »

The release of Jack Kerouac’s “The Sea Is My Brother” is one of those signal publishing events: publication of a lost novel by a famous author whose corpus has by now been well established. As is happens, long before Kerouac reported from “On the Road,” he was on the high seas and at the tender age of twenty-one penned a novel based on his experiences in the midst of World War II.

And while this novel, appearing for the first time in its unedited entirety, will not motivate any fundamental re-evaluation of its author’s work, it provides a captivating preview into the author—and his works—to be. If it is flawed—naïve in certain respects, overwritten here and there, too simple in its plotting—“The Sea Is My Brother” is also a complete story, romantic, energetic, exuberant and even brash, qualities Kerouac never outgrew. Read the rest of this entry »

We pick up fiction written by doctors—Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams,  Abraham Verghese—hoping to find a sharp and illuminating perspective on the brevity and intensity of life and a frank but compassionate portrait of humanity, including that which is frail, festering or beyond hope. And great writing about being a doctor (most notably Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone”) lets the reader into the doctor’s mind. Just enough so that we begin to understand the details, so that we feel—but don’t become frustrated by—the complexities that are out of reach. All the while, we must never lose that same sense that we feel in any other great novel, while delving into the mind or soul of a character: That the inside of the body, just like the inside of the mind or soul, is unique, unendingly complex and capable of illuminating not only an individual character but our own perception of the world. Read the rest of this entry »

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It is not often that the word “entrancing” can be applied to a historical novel, but there is no other way to describe Chicago author Melanie Benjamin’s latest, “The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb.”

Benjamin has taken known facts of a real-life celebrity from nineteenth-century America and crafted for her not only a credible inner life but, more important, a real human heart reaching across decades to touch us in the twenty-first century.

Readers of period history are a demanding lot, notorious sticklers for historical accuracy. But novels that meet that fundamental requirement but do not successfully remind us that people are still people, in any age—their own hearts accessible to us—are nothing more than costume dramas. There is no such problem with Benjamin’s thoroughly researched work. Read the rest of this entry »

The ink of President Barack Obama’s pen was barely dry on the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act before the $787 billion stimulus package was already a political football. For many Democrats and economists like Paul Krugman, it was too little and nearly too late, but it was too much for Republicans who wanted to put the brakes on “big-government” spending, and who ever since have habitually inserted the words “job-killing” before any Democratic spending initiative. Thus the battle lines remain drawn.

Given the excessive rhetoric surrounding most discussions of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the plan that was supposed to restore the American economy and plummeting employment, ProPublica reporter Michael Grabell’s evaluation in “Money Well Spent?” is as accessible and even-handed as we’re likely to see. Read the rest of this entry »

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It is only natural for historians—and today, even political scientists—to speculate from time to time on the greater forces that have caused civilizations and nations to rise and fall.

But Britain’s Norman Davies, one of the very rare contemporary historians writing in the grand tradition, suggests in his thorough, richly textured “Vanished Kingdoms” that most such speculations begin in the wrong place. They derive from accounts of fallen nations wrought from the existing remnants, such as Greece and Italy, which survive as nations but once anchored empires. Or, the narratives are written from the point of view of victors.

Modern historians seek “the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards,” he warns. And the prospects for getting the broader enterprise right are not getting any better, as larger proportions of college students flee the discipline and it becomes dominated by scholars increasingly specialized and mired in “arcane, academic jargon.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Institutions of higher education are again under public attack, urged to justify and reform themselves, but this crisis is neither extraordinary nor new, writes historian and former University of Chicago president (1978-1993) Hanna Holborn Gray in “Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories.”

From time to time, higher education requires a re-examination and restatement of first principles, and Gray bravely provides this in a way that is largely successful. “Searching for Utopia” is at once a contemplative “pep talk” urging colleges and universities to rediscover a sense of both mission and individuality and a ringing endorsement of protecting the academic freedom to explore truth. Read the rest of this entry »

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Paris is a city of passion. Passion for art. Passion for love. Passion for trouble. Often all three are wound together, and never tighter than in the Belle Epoque. It’s passion that leads Lucien Lessard to pursue painting instead of following in the family business of breadmaking, and it’s passion in the guise of a mysterious man and his femme fatale associate that seems to be killing painters left and right. Lucien might be next to fall, but thankfully he’s got his studio-mate and friend Henri Toulouse-Lautrec working to help him—whether he likes it or not. Read the rest of this entry »

By Kelly Forsythe

This is quite possibly the last interview I will ever do. Having spent an afternoon with two-time National Book Critic Circle winner, renowned poet and all-around great guy Albert Goldbarth, I am beside myself with perspective. Yes, perspective. The kind one can only gain after lunching with a man who describes himself as “impractical,” yet has a type of knowledge many young poets and writers actively seek across the nation.

Goldbarth, who has been teaching at Wichita State University in Kansas for nearly twenty years, was visiting Chicago to give a reading at Roosevelt University. Having spent many years living in Chicago and attending the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, Goldbarth was instantly familiar, welcoming, generous and, above all, terrifically funny. His warm nature and approachable demeanor made it easy to forget that he is also a Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s 2008 Mark Twain Award for Humorous Poetry, a prestigious $25,000 prize given to poets who contribute to humor in contemporary American poetry. Read the rest of this entry »