Note: The event is sold out, but Ernest Hemingway’s Birthplace Museum continues to present tours and weekly events all year round. As the quintessential literary man’s man, it’s easy to […]
The seven stories in Ana Castillo’s sparkling and new, yet gritty and compassionate collection Dona Cleanwell Leaves Home, share several common themes. Ghosts, for one, including a beautiful naked woman […]
Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th) thinks the little free libraries along many Chicago sidewalks are bad—very bad. They are “unregulated”! And they’re “popular”! And many of them are planted in city soil! (Collective […]
At one point in Kathleen Rooney’s bewitching new novel From Dust to Stardust, the iconic Hollywood flapper Doreen O’Dare says to an interviewer, “What I’ve figured out is that the […]
Fiction is a “medium that must always allow itself…the possibility of expressing intimate and inconvenient truths,” acclaimed London-born author Zadie Smith once said. She recently stopped by Lincoln Park’s Francis […]
Chicago author Kathleen Rooney writes in many genres—fiction, non-fiction, essays, poetry—even Poems While You Wait. She has written several historical fiction novels in her own distinctive style. Heavily researched, novelized, written in […]
I first encountered Chicago author Kathleen Rooney years ago at The Neo-Futurists’ funky New Year’s Eve bash, where her collective Poems While You Wait was delightfully typing up custom poetry […]
It’s something of a surprise to be reminded that Oscar Wilde—the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and the subject of a scandalous 1895 trial over consensual homosexual acts—wrote […]
Vividly set amongst the winding cobblestone streets and shadowy canals of 18th century Venice, Chicago writer Julia Fine’s Maddalena and the Dark is a wonderfully moody, gothic fairy tale about […]
Most readers are familiar with the more prestigious annual book prizes out there, among them the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the PEN America Literary Awards. A new […]
When the world is literally on fire, who can think about writing? The present writer was reminded of Chicago author Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 Electric Literature essay on the topic (“The […]
When was the last time you told a story to a stranger at a bar? Not an anecdote about your day at work, or that funny internet meme that’s going […]