It makes a lot of sense to establish June 19 — Juneteenth, the celebration of the emancipation of the final group of black slaves in 1865 — as a national holiday. Maybe the most important reason is that it commemorates an event in...
The first interview about my upcoming book — The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago (SIU Press, November) — will be Sunday at 1:15 pm with Playtime book show hosts Bill Turck and Kerri Kendall. You can tune in online on Facebook...
In the closing pages of Catherine Adel West’s Saving Ruby King, two men and two women can hear police sirens approaching, drawn by reports of a gunshot in the house where they stand. Usually, in a novel like this — a book about family dysfunction...
I’ve started to think of it as The After. I mean that time when it will be safe for me and the rest of the world to do all the stuff we used to do before Covid-19 showed up and ruined the party. The time after we’ve lived through...
The advertisement in the Vienna newspaper on February 2, 1771, was the sort of plea that has been repeated in one medium or another since earliest human times. Three days before, “a Bolognese puppy, a white male all over and having blue...
Alleluia steeples By Patrick T. Reardon Give me two mule-loads of mud flooded with the Lord God, the water in which I washed, plunged seven times, gagged, splashed, amok, spluttered, my flesh like the flesh of a child...
David Slavitt’s novel The Hussar is the story of Lieutenant Stefan F———, a young Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer in 1866, new to his regiment and to military life, who, in his bungling callowness, falls into a situation in which he is...
The top of the homepage at my website — patricktreardon.com — now has a link to pre-order my upcoming book The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago from Amazon.com. Of course, you can just click here. Or go to my...
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple is a richly researched, engagingly told and brutally direct indictment of the British stock company that systematically raped the...
If you want to know Chicago, you gotta know the grid. If I tell you I live at 6220 North Paulina Street, you know that my two-flat is 62 blocks north of Madison Street, or just under eight miles, the rule of thumb being eight blocks to a...
A conversation with a writer is, almost always, interesting and insightful. During a long career as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, I was paid to talk with many, including Robert Caro, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Russo, Haki Madhubuti...
In his more than four dozen novels, Terry Pratchett was often silly, witty, wacky and goofy. But he was also, always, serious. Pratchett’s delightfully humorous and endlessly readable books weren’t only aimed at getting a laugh. He employed...
Dorothy Day — that radical of 20th century radicals, that voice of conscience in the face of a self-centered, self-indulgent, greedy American culture, that embracer of the neediest, weakest, most damaged of the poor — is identified...
Behind the mask By Patrick T. Reardon (mask) Behind the museum glass, a polished marble scream, frozen, with large round eye openings, pale stone, gray as smoke, worn in ritual by one with sharp edge, honed for soft flesh...
Go By Patrick T. Reardon In remembrance of Maggie Roche, Ben Scheinkopf, George Kresovich and David Reardon Right onto Cermak from Harlem to go west, listening to the dead singer’s song from when she was young, from when I...
The lost tribes, part 3 By Patrick T. Reardon The lost tribes found me alone as she and he stared into each other’s eyes. They found me with drool chafing my chin, a clump of flesh that nervoused her, carried by him like a bag of...
Word By Patrick T. Reardon Declaw the lion King to a plaster saint. Declaw Lincoln to a penny. Declaw Francis to a birdbath. Declaw the man with nails in his wrists. Pull claws from humbly proffered hands. Pull teeth. Pull the skin...
Saw you at the hop By Patrick T. Reardon I was nine when I saw you through open eighth grade door — before you went to Army, to Europe, to Normandy Beach a week after D-Day, and hernia, and British nurse Betsie, and Germany, the camp...
In November, 1904, Fannie Barrier Williams, activist, iconoclast, orator and writer, led an attack on racism with a tea cup. She and other members of Chicago’s interracial Frederick Douglass Center held a reception at which the women, black and...
Goddess Dementia By Patrick T. Reardon Goddess Dementia, come, waltz with me down gray floors, along sour green walls, through Muzak air. Undress me in my doorless room. One button at a time, unfasten my pajama top, unbutton...
Patrick T Reardon © 2020. All rights reserved.
