Anti-Vietnam War activism is the backdrop for Rita Dragonette’s debut novel “The Fourteenth of September.” Nineteen-year-old Judy jeopardizes her college scholarship and her Army career when she has a crisis of conscience about the war. Dragonette appears on October 14 at the Second Sunday Book Club meeting and has a book signing and reading on October 24 at Women and Children First Bookstore.
“Ghosts in the Schoolyard” by Eve L. Ewing
Writer, poet and professor Eve L. Ewing’s latest work, “Ghosts in the Schoolyard” looks at the closure of fifty Chicago public schools in 2013. Weaving together the stories of students, parents and community members protesting the closures, Ewing examines systematic racism, bad faith and distrust embedded in the city’s school system. The book launch is at the Chicago Teachers Union on October 18, and she appears at the Chicago Humanities Festival on October 28.
“Shell Game” by Sara Paretsky
In the latest Sara Paretsky thriller, it gets personal for V.I Warshawski. Her oldest friend’s nephew is framed for the murder of a man found dead in a forest near Chicago and her own niece has vanished without a trace. Thriller fans can catch Sara Paretsky on October 15 at the American Writers Museum.
“Monument” by Natasha Trethewey
Pulitzer Prize winner, two-time U.S. Poet Laureate, 2017 Heinz award recipient and currently board of trustees professor of English at Northwestern University, Natasha Trethewey publishes her first retrospective collection. “Monument” draws on Trethewey’s four acclaimed poetry collections, highlighting relationships between Trethewey’s oeuvre as well as debuting new poems. She appears at the Chicago Humanities Festival on November 10.
Toni Nealie is the Literary Editor of Newcity and the author of the essay collection “The Miles Between Me.” A Pushcart Prize nominee, her essays have appeared in Guernica Magazine, Rust Belt: Chicago, The Rumpus, The Offing, Essay Daily, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hobart, Entropy and elsewhere. She worked in magazine journalism, politics and PR in her native New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Singapore and now edits, writes and teaches in Chicago. Find her at toninealie.com and on Twitter @tnealie. She can be reached at toni@newcity.com.
An International Crossroads: Bill Savage Discusses "Chicago: A Literary History" The Chicago literary tradition is really central to how European American studies programs look at the United States. So scholars in Europe, Asia and the UK and around the world read the Chicago literary tradition in a way that a lot of Americans don’t.
