Romance is difficult enough in real life, but it’s damn-near impossible on the stage. Balancing the fictive chemicals of genuine-seeming attraction is a science to challenge our best artists. Success […]
Ask a few actors about their childhoods and you start to notice patterns. “My siblings and I made costumes and put on silly plays for our parents,” is a common […]
American Psycho as originally conceived by author Bret Easton Ellis has a great elevator pitch. “A novel about an investment banker in the Reagan eighties who at night becomes a […]
In her new book Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook Sonya Huber offers a collection of effective essays mostly about her Midwest identity. A longtime essayist and Fairfield University professor, […]
Improv comedy is the performative art closest in energy to a sporting event. No one—not the audience, not the performers—knows the outcome at the beginning, and both can expect successes […]
Although Semyon, played by Daniel Shtivelberg, the main character of Moira Buffini’s play Dying For It, lives in post-revolutionary Russia, his struggles are pointedly timeless and engender a theatergoer’s sympathy. […]
Anyone who’s joined a beginners’ writers workshop knows the difficulty of reviewing prose that is nowhere near polished. It’s awkward, stressful even, trying to devise cogent thoughts about art that […]
Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings by Keenan Norris may be the perfect book for the Halloween season. And not because its stories of racial discrimination and poverty are […]
When Timothy Samuelson stood in the center of his windowless, crowded studio, surrounded by gorgeous artifacts of the past, I thought he might break into song. “Nothing in here doesn’t […]
Louis Sullivan’s Idea, a biography of the 19th century Chicago architect, by Chicago’s first cultural historian Timothy Samuelson, is, in the most literal sense of the word, a beautiful book. […]
Flight of the Rondone: High School Dropout vs. Big Pharma: The Fight To Save My Son’s Life (the memoir so meandering they named it thrice), by Patrick Girondi, poses several […]
My Amy: The Life We Shared by Tyler James Chicago Review Press Authors who write about their lives with dead celebrities must sincerely and comprehensively answer a question that fantasy […]