by Mary Wisniewski | July 9, 2026Chicago Native Jake La Botz Brings His Blues to the Page The musician's new Algren-inspired collection features melodic stories about wanting to belong, in places like Maxwell Street or a Lutheran church basement.
by Theodore Anderson | April 20, 2026Inside “The Memory Museum” M Lin’s debut story collection is delicate, human and engrossing, only loosely tethered to time.
by Elizabeth Niarchos Neukirch | April 2, 2026The Great Lakes Feel Intimate and Expansive in New “On an Inland Sea” Collection In the new collection edited by Michael Welch, thirty-three writers give voice to “the vastness of the lakes and the vastness of experience living alongside them.”
by Ruby Rosenthal | February 23, 2026Camille Bordas on “One Sun Only” and the Art of Deleting The Chicago-based writer discusses the pleasures of editing, writing in English versus French and the narrative power of anxiety.
by Eric Vanderwall | November 20, 2025John Cheever’s Daughter Explores the Many Lives of the Mythic Suburban Storyteller Susan Cheever’s new book is at once a memoir, a study of her father’s work, a biography of her father and, in the last third, a collection of a handful of his stories.
by Amanda Norton | November 10, 2025“Most Stories Lie”: Barry Pearce’s Vivid Snapshots of Chicago Neighborhoods In “The Plan of Chicago," Chicago neighborhoods including South Shore, Rogers Park and Uptown appear as vividly drawn backdrops for human dramas, large and small.
by Theodore Anderson | October 20, 2025“Crawl,” Set in 2010s Seattle, Is Almost as Funny as It Is Horny The central character in Max Delsohn’s debut collection of short stories is a scene centered in Cal Anderson Park.
by Giovanni Olla | May 22, 2025Grief Work and the Rituals We Invent: A Review of “To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone” by Kathryn Kruse
by Brendan Tynan Buck | December 2, 2024Let’s Not Flee from Grief: A Review of “The Dying Sun and Other Stories” by Syed Afzal Haider
