Open Will Quam’s Fire and Clay and start to read, and you’ll find your Chicago (and suburbs) transformed. Suddenly, you’ll notice all the brick buildings and walls and individual rectangles [...]
Mud Patrick T. Reardon The little book of God is written in mud on the sidewalk outside the supermercado on Cermak beside the neon jazz club of prophets and [...]
Mary Casanova offers “a pine bough swaying lullaby” and “a frog croak-croaking lullaby” and “two swans born today” and “snowshoe hare, eyes so wide.” Jordan Sundberg offers deep vibrant colors [...]
There is much to dislike in Andre Norton’s 1969 novel Postmarked the Stars, the fourth of her novels about the interstellar tramp freighter Solar Queen, featuring assistant cargo master Dane [...]
Tree Patrick T. Reardon There is not now standing at 18th Street, west of Prairie Avenue, the large cottonwood tree that, a sapling, witnessed the war of [...]
Daniel Kay Hertz’s 2018 book The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago is important because it provides the first, in-depth case study of the transformation of [...]
With the opening of Robert Weinberg’s poem—“On North Broadway/Middle aged women roll their pushcarts into Rexalls”—you know you’re not in Kansas anymore. Instead, you’re back nearly forty years to a [...]
Hitching Ecclesiastes Patrick T. Reardon I saw David hitching out on Ecclesiastes Road four years after the gun. He was on the shoulder of the northbound lanes. [...]
Ed McBain makes the point in his 1962 book The Empty Hours: The Cases of the 87th Precinct that there are no mysteries in police work. Which is to say [...]
Johannes Vermeer was called the Sphinx of Delft by Théophile Thoré, the man who rediscovered the Dutch painter’s art nearly two centuries after his death in 1675. And Vermeer has [...]
