A handsome volume by Columbia College (Chicago) mentor and Nelson Algren-award-winning writer Joe Meno (Hairstyles of the Damned), Demons in the Spring (Akashic Books) anthologizes 20 pieces of short fiction, some never previously published and each illustrated by artists, including Charles Burns, Ivan Brunetti, Archer Prewitt, Jay Ryan,
Whether it's political nonfiction, extraterrestrial erotica, or some combination thereof, we hold our genres dear. The TMN readers and writers reveal their favorite works from the back of the shelf.
Even before the grand finale of the 2008 election campaign, new books on the only other president elected from the great state of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, were much in evidence in reviews and bookstores. No surprise there, as somewhere in his forthcoming tome, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About
Poetry As Insurgent Art (New Directions), a slender (90 pages), pocket-sized, clothbound volume with the title embossed on the black coverboard is a work in progress (the earliest version transcribed from a KPFA radio broadcast in the late ‘50s) by octogenarian poet patriarch LawrenceFerlinghetti. Ferlinghetti has been amending and
As an expatriate Chicagoan living in benighted eastern Massachusetts, I can attest to the geographical affliction prevalent in these and other parts of the East Coast that are apparently blind and ignorant of the United States west of Philadelphia—this year being an exception given the importance of funny sounding
I was searching for video of one of my last visits to Chicago’s Grant Park; that trip took place in August 1968, when Sen. Eugene McCarthy walked across the street from the Conrad Hilton Hotel and addressed the gathered crowd as “the United States government-in-exile.” Though I
Though he is the author of more than 20 worthy tomes that range over a broad literary landscape—novels, essays, biographies, histories—eagle-eyed cinephile DavidThomson is likely best known for a number of editions of the incomparable and valuable A Biographical Dictionary of Film and recently The New Biographical
Given the titans residing in the pantheon of aphorists—Oscar Wilde, Karl Kraus, G.K. Chesterton, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce—it takes a writer of high self-regard or no sense of history to attempt a book of aphorisms. Or like poet, editor, musician, and Scotsman
The decision by the Christian Science Monitor to no longer print a hard-copy version got me to thinking about my reading habits vis-à-vis that great American news appliance, the daily newspaper—and I was pushed into a state of befuddlement, realizing I had not picked up a
In the end, it is difficult to view perennial Countdown “Worst Person in the World” candidate and Fox Network blabbermouth Bill O’Reilly as anything other than a blustering clown with a deep streak of the bully in him. Why then, you ask, have I engaged in the selfless service
