“Don’t self-censor,” Criminal Class Press editor-in-chief Kevin Whiteley warns. Appropriate, considering the fearless Jim Goad will be headlining the Criminal Class Press reading at Quimby’s this Friday. C.C.P. will be supporting its fourth issue, which features such writers as Goad, Stephen Elliott and Chicago’s own Bryan Murphy. Goad, author of “Shit Magnet” and “Red Neck Manifesto,” aligns right in with the motives of C.C.P. as they champion the forgotten and the underclass over the glossy and timid voices they hear in other journals. “It’s a way to echo the voices from our upbringing, and the voices of Oi! punk and the noir scene,” says Whiteley. “For any writers in the audience,” says Whiteley, “we want to inspire them to bleed onto the page.” The reading will be hosted by Whiteley and will feature, aside from Goad, C.C.P staff writer and Windy City Story Slam founder Bill Hillmann. (Peter Cavanaugh)

The Second Annual Windy City Story Slam All-City Championships, which will be held at Double Door on February 26, features guests as wide-ranging as Bonnie Jo Campbell, John Schultz, Ben Evans and Alexis Thomas, plus one special appearance by John Patrick Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s writer grandson. “This one will be hard to believe,” says Windy City Story Slam’s Bill Hillman, when asked how he became involved with Hemingway. “I was in Pamplona during Fiesta when my sort-of-guru out there, a Scotsman named Greame Galloway, woke me up in the middle of the night and said he needed me to back him and his friends up because a drunk was being abusive to them. So I go out there—luckily the drunk is gone—and I’m in the beautiful main square in Pamplona, and I sit down next to a Hemingway look-alike. They were having a contest. Sitting on the other side of me is John Hemingway, a very nice, intelligent guy who enjoys talking about his grandfather. He even has incredibly thick skin about it because Graeme has an cruel Scottish sense of humor and was constantly cracking jokes about cross-dressing and suicide and John took in stride and had fun with it.” Um, the Windy City Story Slam just got really interesting, no? (Tom Lynch)

Is it wrong to feel optimistic? You couldn’t be blamed if you didn’t. Yet while the country’s economy crumbles around us and less and less funds are available for the producers of the printed word, those in the literary world are finding new and inventive ways to stay afloat. We will not go down without a fight, and progress, of course, is key. So is awareness—in order to get the word out more efficiently (and, likely, to untether itself from the uncertain future of the paper form), Printers Row Book Fair changed its name from “Book Fair” to “Lit Fest” to have a title that better fully represents the weekend’s events, in time for its twenty-fifth anniversary edition. As is our custom, we time our annual Lit 50 list to the weekend’s events; this year’s list of local behind-the-scenes literati—no straight-up authors or poets this time—covers a large spectrum of Chicago’s world of words. As with past years we sought out those behind the smaller presses as well as the monumental figures. Some new names have emerged and many staples appear again, but all tirelessly labor to bring this ancient art to the community at large. Read the rest of this entry »

By Selena Fragassi

“I think a lot of people are storytellers but they just don’t know it,” says Bill Hillmann, founder of the Windy City Story Slam. The only event of its kind in Chicago, the Slam operates under the assumption that “everybody’s got a story” by hosting monthly competitions where four-to-six participants take the stage to share their unique narratives and one walks away, by audience approval, with the night’s honors and a $50 door prize.

This weekend, the event reunites the past eleven winners for a one-year anniversary event at Metro that will award a heavyweight belt to the all-city champ.

Hillmann, a former boxer and Columbia College graduate student, first got the idea for the event after leaving a Green Mill Poetry Slam in late 2007. “I wondered why there wasn’t a similar venue for storytelling and prose writing,” he says, recalling the lack of support he received in his own writing ventures from a city that turned him towards boxing at the age of 15 before he took up the love of paper and pen.

 ”I’d always been considered a bad kid. In my Edgewater neighborhood, it wasn’t too cool to get good grades or read books. I was 20 years old when I first read a novel completely,” says Hillmann, now working on a book-in-progress called “The Last White Hood.” “I didn’t realize people wrote about stuff like that, sex and violence and adventure, and that it could be considered real art, real literature.” Read the rest of this entry »

Top 5 Books
“Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape,” Raja Shehadeh (Scribner)
“Netherland: A Novel,” Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon)
“Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization,” Nicholson Baker (Simon & Schuster)
“Sleeping it Off in Rapid City: Poems, New & Selected,” August Kleinzahler (FSG)
“A Better Angel: Stories,” Chris Adrian (FSG)
—John Freeman

Top 5 Books
“The Lazarus Project,” Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead Books)
“Indignation,” Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin)
“Lush Life,” Richard Price (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux)
“When You are Engulfed in Flames,” David Sedaris (Little Brown and Company)
“Crime,” Irvine Welsh (WW Norton & Company)
—Tom Lynch

Top 5 Cookbooks Featuring Chicago Chefs
“From Our Hearts to Your Table: Favorite Recipes From a Greek American Family,” Dorothy Bezemes (N/A)
“Cooking with Les Dames d’ Escoffier: At Home with the Women Who Shape the Way We Eat and Drink,” Les Dames d’ Escoffier (Sasquatch Books)
“The Parthenon Cookbook: Great Mediterranean Recipes from the Heart of Chicago,” Camille Stagg (Agate Surrey)
“Alinea,” Grant Achatz (Ten Speed Press)
“Market-Fresh Mixology: Cocktails for Every Season,” Bridget Albert with Mary Barranco (Agate Surrey)
—Veronica Hinke

Top 5 New Recurring Reading Series
Windy City Story Slam, windycitystoryslam.com
Quickies, quickieschicago.blogspot.com
The Parlor Reads, theparlorreads.com
Sappho’s Salon, womenandchildrenfirst.com
Lovable Losers Literary Revue, lovablelosersliteraryrevue.com/blog
—Robert Duffer