Chicago has long been a town associated with writers. Look on Wikipedia under “Writers from Chicago,” and there are more than a thousand entries. Some are a bit surprising, like John Cusack. I think most of us think first of Wright, Brooks, Terkel, Algren, Mamet, Sandburg, Dos Passos, Dreiser, Bellow,…
Aurelie Sheehan’s new book, Once into the Night, is a collection of 57 brief stories, in the form of “a fictional autobiography made of assumed identities and what-ifs.” It won FC2’s 2018 Catherine L. Doctorow Prize…
Food is a basic human need that can be filled fairly basically—some starch, a nugget of protein, a squeeze of lime to stave off scurvy. But notions about our food get heaped on it, like mangled bacon and garbanzos at a salad bar. Consider food as a test (Eden); food…
You will remember the scene, near the end of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, when Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) admits to himself, as much as to Nova Corpsman Dey (John C. Reilly), that he is the leader of his gang. “They’ll be fine, Dey,” he says. “I’m gonna…
Johnny was a mess—snide, sneering, insubordinate, a liar—and impossibly old, maybe even 24 or 25. None of us really believed him when he said his previous job was carrying nuclear bombs around on his back. We should have. After Vietnam, the US Army was a mess in general. Johnny was…
Remember Thomas Kinkade, “Painter of Light™”? He ripped off the term from JMW Turner and trademarked it, but was more often called “that mall artist.” His achievements, for a decade or more, were impressive—starting with getting “art” into malls for purchase by ordinary folk, who bought it in unprecedented numbers.
You always read about it: the plumber with the twelve children who wins the Irish Sweepstakes. From toilets to riches. That story. —“Cinderella,” Anne Sexton Who does not have the feeling, now and then, that the pot of gold is out there, sitting around, waiting for…
The meme is going around again: You are an egg in your mother’s ovaries, and she is a fetus curled in your grandmother’s uterus. The drawing is based on a longstanding scientific belief that human females were born with all the egg cells they would ever have,…
Welcome to the year Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunts down replicants in the film Blade Runner, which was released in 1982. It is fun to compare a futurist vision to reality, once we get there and look back. Remember the Voight-Kampff test in the film, which identifies…
Where the hell is a semiotician when you need one? The self-appointed critics of late-stage capitalism? My family received the gift of axe-throwing at Christmas, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee it was satisfying. But what does it mean? Throwing axes…
It was New Year’s Eve and not everyone wanted to play a board game. Not that the inevitable unpleasantness was the same every time we played. Things had evolved over the years, taken the shape of current relationships and power struggles within the immediate family. In the early days I…
A state highway in the south, two hours before dawn, the children asleep. Our headlights side-eye the ghostly-ghastly trees. There is the danger of deer. Making lists, to stay awake: The 400 names for types of forests. This one, which crowds the road through logging country, is called The Survivors…