I’ve had the pleasure of meeting the author of this slim volume, and she really fit the bill. That is to say, Carol Fisher Saller looks and carries herself like a grammarian, like a copy editor who takes her job seriously, like a professional woman with a wry wit who enjoys tactful, subtle humor.

The Subersive Copy Editor is a handbook for copy editors. In it, Saller dispenses advice for handling clients, dealing with co-workers, making difficult grammatical decisions, and generally anything that might be related to working as a copy-editor.

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lright, Publish Chicago readers, I’ve been caught. I freaking LOVE self-help books, and diet books are no exception to the rule. Skinny Bitch has long been on my list of diet books to devour, and honestly, it didn’t really live up to the hype.

What I did love? The two authors’ bitchy, catty, in-your-face attitude. This book is a great source of motivation. They really make you feel like you should despise eating shitty food, that you can lose weight, that the skinny bitch life is attainable and awesome. I ate that shit up. As a self-help lover, I love being both told what to do and encouraged to think for myself and become who I can be.

Erm. Anyway.

But no, what I didn’t like so much about this book is that it’s basically thinly veiled propaganda for veganism. I say propaganda because they’re preaching dogma, not facts. Take this from someone who spent seven years of their life willingly abstaining from meat and reading all about the vegetarian and vegan lifestyle (this is me I’m talking about, right here): their facts are not sound.

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ain peals out of the sky over central California, gently shrouding Palo Alto in a wet blanket, and two sisters make their way to dinner.  Thus opens Allegra Goodman’s latest novel The Cookbook Collector. Emily and Jess are five years of age apart and complete opposites.  Emily, the elder, is straight-laced and pin-striped.  An MBA graduate, she has spent all of her time getting her business start-up off the ground, and she has succeeded.  Her power-suited, cropped haired, thin-bespectacled form stands in complete opposition to her younger sister Jess’.  Jess is a free spirit; a book lover; a corduroy, cafe-going bohemian who can’t even remember the last time she cut her hair.  She’s works in a rare and used bookshop as a side job while she pursues her PhD in philosophy.

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tarvation lake,  is the not-very-becoming name of a little out-of-the-way tourist town in Northwestern Michigan. A town with a preoccupation with hockey. And murder. Dun dun DUN!

Okay, it’s definitely a mystery, but it’s not quite like that. Written by Chicago north-sider Bryan Gruley and a finalist for the 2009 Great Lakes Book Award, this book makes for decent read.  It’s fun to get to know Gus Carpenter, your narrator. He’s a newspaper man with a history in Detroit that follows him home to the small town where he goes right back to playing goalie with his childhood friends, and a few not-so-friends as well. While he’s at it, however, he digs up a bit of a murder mystery–or should I say the mystery washes up for him.

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he thread of Beth Raymer’s latest book has as short an attention span as its narrator. In this quick-paced memoir, Raymer bounces from job to job and guy to guy, taking us along for the ride. And it’s a fun ride, bouncing to and fro among different sports betting outfits–this book certainly doesn’t qualify as an exposé on the scene, but you’ll definitely see it through her eyes. It may be a bit vapid, but it’s an entertaining read, especially if you’re mildly interested in betting… or blowing any which way with the wind.

The Awful Possibilities is the car accident that you can’t tear your eyes from as you drive by it on the free way. It’s the horror movie you started watching and now, damn it, you have to finish. It’s the unsettling chunk of story you overhear on the train that fills the rest of your day with wondering about what in the hell those few, truncated utterances could have meant.

It’s bizarre, weighty, and abstract–at times, even grotesque.

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oetry–sadly the bastard child of the publishing industry these days–has a place close to my heart. As a longtime poet (since 2nd grade!) and an MA degree holder in English literature with a specialization in poetry, I feel qualified to adjudicate a book on the study and appreciation of the art. In addition to reading lots of poetry (most recently in the form of Poetry Magazine), I’ve also read quite a few books on the study of poetry and poetry scholarship–and usually, they’re all pretty terrible.

Normally, when I read a book about poetry, rather than a book of poems, it’s bad. It’s always way too teachy, too middle-school-humanities class, too–dare I say it–boring. I’ve always loved poetry, but I’ve rarely even liked reading books about poetry. Thankfully, Chicago publisher Rose Metal Press’ new book Field Guide to Prose Poetry is unlike most other books in this vein in that it’s good, very good.

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ragic and inspiring, the story of fifteen-year-old Hadiya living and blogging in Mosul, Iraq is presented in print form by Haymarket Books, Chicago’s own progressive and nonprofit book publisher.  IraqiGirl is a series of edited—for grammar—blog posts from Hadiya as she attempts to make sense of what is happening in native country.   As an American reader, I was intrigued to read the details of her and her family’s lives as they attempted to live in a war torn country.

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found a copy of The Shortpants Observer, issue number one, on the free table at Quimby’s (glorious) Free Comic Book Day table.  I devoured the whole issue that day and loved it.  Published by Short Pants Press, an independent Chicago publisher focused on comics and graphic work of all kinds, this journal is a small compilation of the work of several Chicago comic artists.

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’ve never owned a car, and I can happily say that being carless in Chicago has been a much easier experience than anywhere else I’ve lived.  For this reason, I was delighted to find a copy of Carless in Chicago by Jason Rothstein, published by Chicago publisher Lake Claremont Press, on my doorstep.  If you’re currently carless or thinking about giving up your car for good, this book will prove to be an invaluable resource for getting around in Chicago.

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Chicago author Colleen Taylor Sen’s Curry: A Global History is a wonderful examination of curry throughout the ages. Full of pictures, the book details the history of curry as it spread throughout the world. The book also features several curry recipes, both old and new. Intrigued, I set off to recreate the book’s recipe for Malaysian Nonya-style Chicken Curry. The result was quite a success. More pictures from my culinary adventure after the jump.

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ancy Friday’s Beyond My Control is a follow-up to her groundbreaking 1973 book My Secret Garden, which detailed real women’s sexual fantasies that they had shared with the author through letters and video-recorded interviews. My Secret Garden was a groundbreaking book at the time, though today you might find an average issue of Cosmopolitan to be more risqué. Its depictions of female sexual fantasies, which included rape, lesbian sex, and extremely explicit and specific desires, served to prove both that women have fantasies, and that their fantasies are just as colorful, intricate, and transgressive as male sexual fantasies. As mundane as this idea may appear today, it was both liberating and eye-opening at the time of its debut. Thirty years after its publication, Beyond My Control picks up where it left off.

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verything about this book gets it right. Salmon in the Trees is a beautifully produced book of award-winning nature photography by native Chicagoan Amy Gulick that depicts life in the Tongass Rain Forest in Alaska. As a coffee table book, an act of conservation, and a work of art, this book hits the mark every time. In addition, last night I was lucky enough to attend an event at the Betty Notebeart Nature Museum promoting the book. Gulick gave a talk about her experience in the rain forest and shared many of her photos in large format. She was also joined by the Alaska Wilderness League, who, along with Gulick, pushed for conservation of the Tongass Rain Forest.

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ou know, I really should mention the fact that Poetry Magazine is the bee’s fucking knees more often on this site.  Every month it reminds me why I love to read poetry, and makes me feel guilty for not spending more of my time writing it.

This month’s issue is particularly good, featuring the work of D.H. Tracy–his poem “You can tell by the way he slices the cantaloupe” is hilarious and hauntingly truthful–Hester Knibbe, and this year’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner Eleanor Ross Taylor.  I hadn’t read her work before poring through this issue, and it is quite, quite good.  It’s like Wallace Stevens mixed with Kay Ryan–moving, focused on the undercurrents of living, precise.  Free of excess.

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, if you’re curious, is awarded annually to an American poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition.  That extraordinary recognition comes with a $100,000 cash prize.  I told my boyfriend this prize amount and he responded “well why don’t you win it, then?”  My response: “Oh yeah.  I’ll get right on that.”

ear Ms. Lisa Riebe,

I hate to do this.  You were so nice when I met you at the Chicago Artist’s Expo a few months ago. I do appreciate that you gave me a signed copy of your new children’s book, Pond Punkies, for review. However, I read the first chapter of your book and found that it contained ten glaring grammatical errors in the same number of pages, and this, coupled with the many research errors I also found in the first ten pages, compelled me to stop reading your book.

I’m afraid I will not recommend that anyone read it. I am a reviewer, not a copy editor, and I simply cannot recommend that children read a book that might leave them thinking that “all to familiar” is grammatically correct or that there is no difference between past and past perfect tense. Perhaps I’m being picky, and perhaps this is because of the sheer number of proofreaders I know who can’t find work, but I think that using proper grammar is a cornerstone in the foundation of good writing. You can’t write the next Phantom Tollbooth if you can’t integrate a subject into a sentence properly.

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Radiohead and Philosophy is part of the “Pop Culture and Philosophy” series by local publisher Open Court Books. This series sets up two conditions within which one reads the book. First, the book is a collection of academic-style essays on a range of topics that connect philosophical study with the music, production, and themes of the band. Second, like other titles in this series, the book seems to be either a scheme to cash-in on a captive niche or a vehicle to introduce philosophy to a tightly focused segment that may be plied by a familiar passion. How one is able to reconcile the consequences of these conditions will determine how the book is received.
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recently caught wind of a rumor floating around the Chicago literary community that Granta 108: Chicago was the British literary journal’s highest selling issue of all time. I spoke with Patrick Ryan of Granta to confirm this fact. “I don’t have the numbers,” he said, “but, yes, it was our highest selling issue ever. We’re very happy about it, as you can imagine.”

The Chicago literary community is very happy about it too. The extremely high sales of this issue of Granta, focusing specifically on Chicago authors and essays about Chicago, signifies both that our writers are well renowned and respected in the literary community, and that the literary community in Chicago is booming.

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hen I was a kid, we had these yellow plates that my dad loved.  They had a small, inner circle of white containing two crossed wheat stalks at their centers, but other than that, the plates were this solid, worn-looking pale yellow hue.  They might have been relics from an old garage sale, or maybe they were the survivors from a Kmart set he bought in undergrad; there were only two or three of them in all.

One night when washing dishes my brother dropped one of these plates and chipped a fingernail-sized crescent of ceramic (or whatever they were made of) off of the plate’s edge.  It was aesthetically ruined, if still functional.  We couldn’t use it when company came over.  In fact, no one really used it at all after that except my dad, who–due to the its worn, warm, good-find-at-a-salvation-army quality–couldn’t bear to throw it out.

It’s the memory of washing that dish–beloved, broken–and running my fingers over the chip that haunted me while I read Chicago author Gillian Flynn’s Great Lakes Book Award nominated novel Dark Places.
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