Books Issue Archives - Chicago Reader

Book by block

by Charli Renken September 15, 2023September 15, 2023

When I think of summer reading I think of book challenges from my local library. I’d sign up as a kid and track my reading habits for the chance of winning something fun like tickets to Six Flags or—more likely—a special bookmark or T-shirt. I never got the Six Flags tickets, but I always had […]

covers shows a color illustration of a torso wearing a white t-shirt and red flannel shirt. the t-shirt contains the title in black type.

Arts & Culture

Finding poetry in flyover country

by Kerry Cardoza September 8, 2023September 8, 2023

“A writer of nonfiction discovers their own authority by telling. The good essays tell. They pronounce. They manifesto. They ask and wonder and feint and layer.” So proclaims author Sonya Huber, in a few-years-old article for LitHub, about unlearning long-accepted rules of writing. Huber puts these proclamations into action in her forthcoming essay collection, Love […]

publication cover shows a young man gazing at the camera through an opening in a roof. He prefers to spit. The title is at the top in white font.

Arts & Culture

A new home for experimental literature

by Maxwell Rabb September 8, 2023September 7, 2023

“We are identifying ‘micro-movements’ and allowing others to explain them to us,” says Jourdain Barton, a cofounder of Chicago’s TEMPER Press. Born to foster experimental writing, TEMPER emerged from such a micro-movement: a bond shared by Barton and her grad school classmates Geoffrey Billetter and Nat Holtzmann. To them, micro-movements are smaller, unidentified capsules of […]

The cover is bright blue with black type with a yellow drop shadow. In the center is a large organ triangle, with a man and woman standing at the center, their backs to us, and their arms around each other.

Arts & Culture

The couple at the center of Wellness are in love with an illusion

by Atavia Reed September 7, 2023September 7, 2023

On a bone-chilling night in 1993, Elizabeth Augustine stands in a cramped Ukrainian Village venue sipping cheap beer, counting down the seconds until her date with a boy she has a razor-thin connection with can finally end. As the aforementioned man, with middle-parted hair and John Lennon glasses drones on—because she may like music, but […]

The purplish grey cover shows a circular gold portal opening into an emerald city, showing the Sears Tower at the center. the title is in green text and the author name is In yellow.

Arts & Culture

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times follows its road home

by Reema Saleh September 7, 2023September 4, 2023

With vivid imagery and a staggering wit, Taylor Byas paints portraits of her childhood on the south side and the city in warm hues. I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times leads her quest for self-discovery with grief, longing, and the late-night monologuing of a seasoned writer. With poems modeled after the likes of Patricia […]

In this black and white photo, a Black man stands center stage aboard a ship, a captain's wheel is to his left. He is surrounded by women bearing a stick, white men with guns, and other players.

Arts & Culture

‘Because we are black, we are making black music’

by Hannah Edgar September 6, 2023September 4, 2023

Out of their place. Out of their depth. Out of their minds. Composer and researcher George Lewis has lost track of the times he’s heard those tropes lobbed, implicitly or explicitly, at Black composers of classical music. These artists, he argues, too often slip through the cracks in academic and cultural discourse: They’re shunted to […]

Cover is half white, half red with black type. It shows two silhouetted figures with long shadows, one standing in the white and the other in the red.

Arts & Culture

‘Parole presupposes that change—a correction—is possible’

by Shawn Mulcahy September 6, 2023September 27, 2023

Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, opened its doors in 1829. Often considered the world’s first true penitentiary, its hallmark six-spoked, wheel-shaped design radiates outward from a central tower, where guards could keep watch over some 500 prisoners. The prison’s creators believed that, through penitence and solitude (now widely considered a form of torture), people would […]

Arts & Culture

Anne K. Yoder on the artist-centered approach of Meekling Press

by Coco Picard September 5, 2023September 5, 2023

Editor’s note: Coco Picard spoke with Chicago writer and publisher Anne K. Yoder about corunning Meekling Press and the importance of independent publishing. Edited text from the comic is transcribed here to ease readability. Anne K. Yoder worked as a part-time unionized pharmacist for years. The experience inspired The Enhancers (Meekling Press, 2022)—a hyperreal novel […]

Book cover is bright pink with white and yellow text. There are doodles around the cover and on the right there is a handful of colorful gel pens held together with a scrunchie.

Books Issue

For all the 90s church kids

by Emily McClanathan September 5, 2023September 1, 2023

I didn’t expect a book with chapter titles like “Nothing’s Funnier Than Naked” and “Welcome to Ass Planet” to make me tear up on public transit, but Lillian Stone’s Everybody’s Favorite: Tales From the World’s Worst Perfectionist accomplished this feat. Amid the bodily humor, cringey anecdotes, and irreverent one-liners, the Chicago-based comedy author and reporter […]

Arts & Culture

The Chicago Independent Bookstore Map

by Salem Collo-Julin and Amber Huff July 24, 2020August 18, 2021

Chicago has been frequently touted as a writer’s town; a place where writers can work on their craft and thrive. Of course writers are nothing without an audience to read them, and the bevy of bookstores in Chicagoland is one indication that we’re also a reader’s town—not just a place where people make books, but […]

Arts & Culture

Chicago theater on the page

by Kerry Reid July 22, 2020August 18, 2021

A very incomplete guide on what to read (or listen to) now from Chicago’s theater scene.

Arts & Culture

The Beauty of Your Face isn’t afraid to get ugly

by Deanna Isaacs July 22, 2020August 18, 2021

In Sahar Mustafah’s debut novel, The Beauty of Your Face, a terrorist attack opens a window on the story of a Palestinian American family in Chicago.