RECOMMENDED

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 »

With “The Time Traveler’s Wife” (2003), Audrey Niffenegger went from hand-bound chapbooks to the best seller list. Since then, Evanston’s favorite writer/painter/graphic novelist has been taking the (multi)media world by storm.

You published your second novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” in 2009, and your serialized graphic novel, “The Night Bookmobile,” came out this past fall. What are you working on these days?
A ballet (I am making the story, costume and set designs and a friend is choreographing), a screenplay (based on “Her Fearful Symmetry”) and a new novel (“The Chinchilla Girl in Exile”). I am also in the early stages of a retrospective of my artists books and artwork, planned for 2013 in Washington DC.

You’re on the faculty at Columbia. What’s your approach to teaching writing? If your students walk away from your classes with one thing, what do you want that thing to be? Read the rest of this entry »

Martin Northway and Tom Asch, fall 1993/Photo: David B. Sutton

By Martin Northway

Roll the tape back to September 1990. The first George Bush is president; the Gulf War is simmering on a desert horizon; Bill Clinton’s presidency is two years distant and an uncertain millennium a decade away. In Chicago, Richard M. Daley is still a fresh face in the mayor’s office.

Visual, verbal and dramatic arts are surging throughout the city, paced by the explosion of performance poetry, itself drawing from the energies of rock and punk music. Not coincidentally, independent coffeehouses are sprouting throughout the region such as has not occurred since the tumultuous sixties.

A scrappy newsprint tabloid, 20,000 copies monthly, launches itself into this caffeinated wave along the lakeshore: Strong Coffee, a free lit-rag of the coffeehouses, by the coffeehouses and for the coffeehouses. In its severe vertical columns, fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction stand in tight type beside often-striking art and satirical cartoons.

Now fast-forward just three years; a night at Lincoln Park’s pioneering internet café, Discover, across from the Biograph. Surrounding me are creative colleagues who are the caffeinated heartbeat of Strong Coffee.

As often occurs at our Wednesday night open sessions, small square tables are shoved up against one another to accommodate fresh arrivals. In his poem “Ode to a Starman at Discover Café,” George Drury describes the “Pacific spread of evening after a muggy day…/ the café sign creaks… / Shreds of paper twist in a wind blowing south down Lincoln…”

Three or four conversations are percolating. From this free exchange, elements of the next issue take shape. Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration: Pamela Wishbow

A strange and unpleasant wind blows through the literary land. Our obsession with technocultural toys, whether iPhones, iPads or Kindles, makes the foundation of thought almost since thought was recorded, that is ink on paper, seem increasingly destined to be twittered into obsolescence. And it’s not just mere media frenzy, either. Massive upheaval among major publishers these last few years has left some of Chicago’s finest writers stranded in a strange land: that is, the work is finished, but no one is around to put it out. Who knows, maybe in two years when this version of Lit 50 returns, some, if not all, of our authors will be publishing mostly, if not entirely, in the digital realm. If that’s the case, let’s enjoy an old-fashioned book or two while we can. Read the rest of this entry »

Top 5 Books
“Chronic City,” Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday)
“War Dances,” Sherman Alexie (Grove Press)
“Generosity: An Enhancement,” Richard Powers (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux)
“Ruins,” Achy Obejas (Akashic Books)
“Inherent Vice,” Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press)
—Tom Lynch

Top 5 Local Books
“Ruins,” Achy Obejas (Akashic Books)
“Her Fearful Symmetry,” Audrey Niffenegger (Scribner)
“How to Hold a Woman,” Billy Lombardo (OV Books)
“The Way Through Doors,” Jesse Ball (Vintage)
“The Adventures of Cancer Bitch,” S.L. Wisenberg (University of Iowa Press)
—Tom Lynch Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Mark Bazer’s monthly Interview Show at Hideout continues to feature first-class guests, and this installment is no different. James McManus, author of the 2003 bestselling poker book “Positively Fifth Street,” returns with yet another book about the storied game, titled “Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker.” McManus ambitiously attempts to tell the full story of poker, its importance throughout history as both a social activity and a game of uniquely equal competition. He argues that, from the Wild West to today, poker is truly America’s pastime. (It should come as no surprise, McManus being a poker fiend himself.) Having only read excerpts myself, I can’t speak for the entire work, but I can say that having spoken with McManus on a couple of occasions, he’s a hell of a storyteller. As a bonus for this event, Audrey Niffenegger discusses her new, and best, novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry.” Rhymefest and Stephanie Izard also appear. (Tom Lynch)

The Interview Show takes place December 4 at Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, (773)227-4433, at 6:30pm. $5.

By Katie Fanuko

Photo: Kat Fitzgerald

The third floor of The Breakers at Edgewater Beach is bustling with energy during Women and Children First’s 30th Anniversary Celebration & Benefit. Store owners Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen chat with the many women (and men) who have supported the bookstore over the past three decades as they dine and await speeches from keynote speakers Alison Bechdel and Dorothy Allison. Yet even though the party goes off without a hitch, their work isn’t even close to being finished. “I’m more sure than ever that we are in the middle of things, thirty years is nothing. It’s just a start on all of the work that needs to be done… there are a lot of the same issues that we’ve been working on for thirty, forty, fifty years and they are still with us,” says Bubon.

When walking into the feminist bookstore located in Andersonville, it’s understandable how a place like this could last thirty years, because there isn’t anything else quite like it in Chicago, with an inviting atmosphere that’s both welcoming to first-timers and keeps regulars coming back. This is exactly the kind of place that Bubon and Christophersen were hoping to create back in November 1979. Read the rest of this entry »

By Tom Lynch

The runaway success of Audrey Niffenegger’s “The Time Traveler’s Wife” was as much a surprise to the author as it was to everyone else. Her first novel, Niffenegger’s story of a relationship between a man who suffers from a disorder that frequently transports him through time and the woman he so often leaves behind, mixes science fiction and romance without necessarily adopting either. A quirky piece of literary fiction, it’s not the type of novel that sells two million copies in its first week, as Dan Brown’s newest work did just last month.

However, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” which was published by the relatively small press MacAdam/Cage, opened in the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list, and local author and attorney Scott Turow appeared on “The Today Show” and recommended the book, prompting the first run to sell out completely. Various book-club selections followed and Niffenegger’s little engine became something of a sensation and catapulted the Chicago author out of relative obscurity into a position of publishing powerhouse.

“It was very strange indeed,” Niffenegger says of the experience as we sit at Lincoln Square’s Café Selmarie. “I imagined my audience as a fairly small group, people about my age, in their mid-forties, who remember punk. I imagined this kind of small book with MacAdam/Cage, a tiny press, and we just didn’t expect anything like this. Of course the big thing that changed it was ‘The Today Show,’ when Scott Turow had chosen it, and I was just like, ‘OK, this is really a different experience than anything I imagined.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Granta, the literary magazine founded by Cambridge University students in 1889, has a long and storied history of publishing political material as well as the work of several writers. It was relaunched in 1979 as a platform for new writers, and reworked again in 2007 with new editor Jason Cowley. Alex Clark, the magazine’s first female editor, took over for Cowley after he left, and when Smith stepped down, the magazine’s American editor, John Freeman, a frequent Newcity contributor, took her position.

Granta’s fall issue, number 108, is Chicago-themed, and the marvelous collection features entries from Aleksandar Hemon, Alex Kotlowitz, Neil Steinberg, Richard Powers, Sandra Cisneros, Stuart Dybek and more. Don DeLillo offers a brief introductory essay to a Nelson Algren piece, and Chris Ware did the issue’s cover. A photo essay by Camilo Jose Vergara is included and provides an intermission to the text. This collection serves as a packaged insight into what Chicago means—how it feels to live here, be from here, exist within a city sometimes difficult to love yet impossible to resist. I chatted with Freeman over email to get some of his thoughts on the upcoming issue. Read the rest of this entry »

By Tom Lynch

Early Sunday evening and Logan Square’s hipster hotspot The Whistler is sprinkled with patrons, some sipping the bar’s unique summertime cocktails, others just a PBR, please. The Orange Alert Reading Series takes place here roughly every third Sunday of the month and tonight’s lineup consists of “How to Hold a Woman” author Billy Lombardo, plus Andrew Farkas, Tim Hall and West Virginian Scott McClanahan. Founder and emcee Jason Behrends takes to the stage and thanks the modest crowd for coming. “I know it’s hard to come out to a bar at six on a Sunday,” he admits into the microphone. A handful of uninterested drinkers respectfully head out to the patio as to not disrupt the reading with their conversation. For the next hour, the only sounds you can hear are the author’s expressive voices and the air conditioner kicking on and off. Even the bartenders mix the drinks quietly.

“I’m definitely optimistic about the landscape in general,” Behrends says of the current place of literary events in Chicago, a day later over the phone. Behrends began his Orange Alert venture in 2006 with a Web site, orangealert.net, featuring interviews with writers, musicians and artists, then launched Orange Alert Press in March of 2008. The reading series began last November. “There are a lot of reading series in town,” he says, “but even though there are ten or twelve that I know of, I felt that there still could be one more.” Read the rest of this entry »