It takes some hubris to rewrite the Christian gospels, but maybe not that much. A lot of people have done it. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John seem pretty straight-forward inasmuch as they’re telling stories that the authors...
I’m having a difficult time deciding what, dear reader, to tell you first. Let’s put it this way: The streets of Paris, London, Vienna and Berlin in the 1700s and 1800s were very different from the streets you move along here in Chicago. ...
After By Patrick T. Reardon . After clangor parade, after wailing trombones, teletype drums, clockwork drum majors and majorettes, after cymbal clamor of arena-full horde, pent-up for release, for rebound off rafters — where he watches — after...
Back in the ‘80s, during a holiday get-together, one of the family elders, who was known for sweeping declarations, made a sweeping declaration: “You can’t be a Republican,” she said, “and be a good Catholic.” From couch to couch, we looked at...
It was nearly 40 years ago that I first read James Agee’s autobiographical novel A Death in the Family. Since then, I have experienced a similarly sudden violent death in my own family. What had been, in my early 30s, an achingly...
There’s much that’s audacious about Roddy Doyle’s new novel Love. There’s the title, first of all. It seems fitting for some sort of Romeo and Juliet story, with or without the tragedy, a tale filled with yearning ache, hot romance and easy...
One of my favorite poems in Haki R. Madhubuti’s new, career-spanning collection Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language is “Big Momma,” originally published in 1970. Back a half century ago, Madhubuti was still known as Don L. Lee, and, at...
Publication of my new book The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago is set for Thanksgiving Day. But you can get an early glimpse of what the book has to say by joining an online event, hosted by City Lit Bookstore, on Thursday...
Midway through Terry Pratchett’s 1997 novel Jingo, a conversation takes place between Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson and Corporal Delphine Angua von Überwald. He is a 6’6” dwarf (by adoption) who’s the second-in-command of the Ankh-Morpork...
Marriage Song Patrick T. Reardon . We exult at the joining of young lives. We dance the dance of joy. . This is a time of merriment. This is a time of wonder. Who will argue at a time like this? Who will find fault? . Fear is exiled. ...
The shoot-out that ends Elmore Leonard’s 1977 novel The Hunted is just like those in the westerns he was still writing back in those days. Three heavily armed bad guys, getting ready to kill an upright guy who is protecting a young woman and an...
After nearly 60 years, Gislebertus: Sculptor of Autun by Denis Grivot and George Zarnecki remains the best book on the astonishingly vivid, highly original art of the medieval French master. The large-scale Grivot-Zarnecki work, published in 1961...
Publication of my new book The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago is set for Thanksgiving Day. If you’d like to preorder the book, you can do so through many independent bookstores. Here are a few: City Lit, where I will be...
As the title of his 2011 book indicates, Laurence Bergreen has a tight focus to his storytelling in Columbus: The Four Voyages. He provides very little about the first 41 years of the Genoese explorer’s life, those decades that formed him and...
Two poems about McDonald’s at 56th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan By Patrick T. Reardon Three hundred and sixteen days later The man is preaching to a table of Bible study men and women in the McDonald’s on 56th Street at...
It’s the mid-1970s, central London, and four people in their 60s, two men and two men, have been working together for two or three years in a small office doing a clerkish job of some sort. Their building which also houses the organization for...
In the dark night and under the icy water, Cordelia Gray, lungs bursting, is swimming for her life. She knows that the sea is death if she cannot find the surface somewhere out from where she is and up above her. And, then,…she saw the...
Haven Kimmel’s 2001 memoir A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana is a rollickingly funny entertainment about the childhood of a strange child in a strange family in the strangely tiny hamlet — 300 people — of Mooreland. To...
If Emily Dickinson had had a sense of humor, she might have written “A Girl Named Zippy.” And if she’d been born in 1965 in Indiana. That’s when and where Haven Kimmel arrived on the planet and spent her childhood in the...
The lost tribes, part 4 By Patrick T. Reardon . We are lost in Viagra’d beds, in sticky, spilled orange sidewalk pop, in black sidewalk gum, in sidewalk blood, in blood cough, in closing time at McDonald’s. We are lost under the weight of...
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