Books, poetry, comics and the literary world of Chicago
Hugo Award-winning sci-fi novelist John Scalzi’s latest effort, “Starter Villain,” mixes pulp pleasure with social commentary, burning the effigy of wealth mistakenly labeled as genius.
Mona Awad’s novels always leave the reader with a marvelously disorienting feeling of “What did I just read?” If you enjoy your fiction a little off the beaten path, funny and brimming with intelligence, “Rouge” might be a perfect pick for you.
Set in an imaginary small town in northern Illinois, strange stories unfold to show a multi-faceted humanity. Deal in this collection of short stories handles fine grades of emotion with humor and wistfulness, and with a surgeon’s delicate touch.
Zadie Smith sets her pen in her latest novel on a little-remembered Victorian writer, William Harrison Ainsworth, and the Tichbourne case that captivated the British public in the 1860s and 1870s.
“From Dust to Stardust” is both an impressive work of imagination, based on the life and adventures of Jazz Age film star Colleen Moore, whose fictional incarnation Doreen O’Dare is the novel’s protagonist, and a carefully researched story about early Hollywood and the Fairy Castle housed in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.
It’s time for Printers Row Lit Fest, plus author events all over town.
Exhibitions steeped in artifacts and events based on celebrity promise an eclectic fall in the literary land.
During the past many summers, I’ve explored the relationship between walking and writing. As Kathleen Rooney, our flâneuse laureate of Chicago, wrote “A walk is almost never the fastest way to get somewhere. But both walks and poems can afford a more textured and deep experience of space and time.”
Ecologist Curtis H. Freese describes the recent destruction of the Great Plains ecosystem due to Euro-American hunting, farming and cattle grazing, and convinces us that every living creature that was once part of the whole is required in the restoration of this biodiverse ecosystem.
The latest release of Drawn and Quarterly’s ongoing effort to publish the works of the Japanese gekiga comics movement, “Offshore Lightning” not only provides us with examples of comics we don’t associate with manga, it provides us a rare perspective.
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