Printers Row Lit Fest/Photo: Robert Kusel
Find more fall event recommendations in our Lit Top 5 for September.
Printers Row Lit Fest at Forty
September 6-7
Over four decades the literary festival has grown up with both the neighborhood, where its founding year saw the industrial printing houses still being turned over into residential lofts, and this very publication, which was started as a South Loop community newspaper a year after the festival’s debut. After a tumultuous period—the festival returned to original ownership by the Tribune just one year before the onset of the pandemic—the festival has found its footing and entered a new era, celebrating this milestone year with essential Chicago writer Sandra Cisneros, who’s also receiving the Harold Washington Literary Award.
Thomas Pynchon’s “Shadow Ticket”
The Season of Pynchon
September 26, October 7
America’s most reclusive literary giant finds himself at the center of two cultural moments in the autumn of his eighty-eighth year. On September 26, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” will be released in theaters—based on Pynchon’s 1990 novel, “Vineland,” it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, with a reported budget ranging anywhere from $140-$175 million, depending on the source. Just eleven days later, the author releases his ninth novel, “Shadow Ticket.” This being Pynchon, details are scarce, but the setting is Milwaukee in 1932, and the story begins with a private eye who sets out “locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering.”
American Writers Museum’s “American Prophets” exhibition rendering/Photo: Amaze Design
“American Prophets” at American Writers Museum
Opens November 21
The American Writers Museum’s series of author events exploring the connection between spirituality and craft leads into the opening of a new exhibition this November, which will examine “the profound ways literature reflects and influences our understanding of religion.” The exhibition will gather artifacts from the worlds of American literature, film and music to show “the ever-evolving relationship between religion and American culture.”
Published in the print edition of the September 2025 issue, with the headline “Can’t-Miss Literary Events (Fall Arts Preview 2025).”
