Book review: “My Favourite Manson Girl” by Alison Umminger
Okay, Alison Umminger had me at the title. I’d read her witty little essay in Fast Funny Women, a book of witty little essays, edited by Gina Barreca. I liked [...]
Book review: “The Pearl” by John Steinbeck
On the very first page of The Pearl, John Steinbeck signals that this short, tense novel is a parable. In the context of the story, he explains that it is [...]
Interview: Sparrows, Hutches and Growing into an Ending, Sandra Cisneros Discusses Her New Novella
As Sandra Cisneros’s new gem-like novella Martita, I Remember You opens, Corina is using a scraper and a blowtorch to strip generations of varnish off a dining room hutch in [...]
Book review: “Martita, I Remember You” by Sandra Cisneros
Corina is eating her sandwich in the sculpture garden of the Art Institute across the street from the gas company office where she works. A sparrow flits down near her [...]
Book Review: Visualizing and Honoring Black America: Two books about the Story W. E. B. Du Bois told at the 1900 Paris Exposition with Data Portraits
W. E. B. Du Bois, the brilliant Black scholar and one of the most consequential Americans of the 20th century, operated on an international stage where many people had a [...]
Book review: “A Month in the Country” by J. L. Carr
Near the very end of J. L. Carr’s exquisite short novel A Month in the Country, Moon finds the missing 400-year-old grave where, all along, he knew it would be. [...]
Book review: “A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America” by Benjamin Sells
Let me tell you: I’m a huge Chicago history nerd, and I just gobbled up Benjamin Sells’s new book A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago [...]
Book review: “Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect,” edited by Romi Crawford
Performance artist Jefferson Pinder offers, as a fleeting monument to the long-gone Wall of Respect, a piece called “Bronzeville Etude” that anyone can do — taking a run up and [...]
Book review: “Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago” by Brian McCammack
For African Americans who took part in the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century, the North was a Land of Hope that often disappointed. Some important [...]
Book review: “The Bell” by Iris Murdoch
The Bell by Iris Murdoch, published in 1958, is something of a time capsule. It is difficult to imagine a novel like this being written today. Murdoch’s subject is holiness [...]