This year’s Printers Row Lit Fest poster.

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h, Printers Row. Books. Authors. Booksellers. Readings. Signings. Shitty weather. It never fails.

Pull on your galoshes and don’t forget your umbrella. It’s time for Printers Row, the biggest outdoor book festival in Chicago. Even with the rain, you don’t want to miss it. Check out the full schedule of events at the Printers Row website.

Victoria Lautman seemed upbeat during the final broadcast of
her successful radio show Writers on Record, stating that it
was her choice to end the program so she could pursue new
ventures in her life.

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he popular literary radio program Writers on Record, hosted by Victoria Lautman and aired on 98.7WFMT, is coming to a close this Thursday evening, June 10th.  You can view the final broadcast at the Harold Washington Library Center’s Pritzker Auditorium at 6:00 pm.  The final broadcast will feature prominent Chicago writer and publisher Jonathan Messinger, owner of Featherproof Books and senior editor of Time Out Chicago’s book section.  Also featured will be Chicago Tribune book editor Elizabeth Taylor.  The evening will include a discussion of summer reading suggestions, big books for fall, and the future of publishing.  Audience participation will be encouraged.  Be sure to arrive early!

More about the book, including purchasing info, at the author’s site.

his last weekend I traveled from Chicago to Ann Arbor, Michigan to visit friends and family, and I spent a good deal of the trip messing around with the Poetry Foundation’s recently released iPhone app.  I really enjoyed it both because it contains a great selection of famous poetry, and because it has a really unique way of searching through the poems.  You can view this more clearly at their website, but they allow you to scroll through the poems using two different categories at the same time, such as Passion and Youth, or Enthusiasm and Nature.  It’s a great way to discover new poems and to find poems that suit your current mood.  And one of the best things about it is that it’s free.  You can download it at the link above or at Apple’s app store.

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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The inspiration for this shoot was Elizabeth Berg’s novel
The Last Time I Saw You. More photos after the jump!

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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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I loved the color palate of Chris Ware’s cover for
Granta 108: Chicago so much that I had to
design an outfit around it. Jump for more photos!

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PC: Can you tell us about the process of starting Zeus? What was your inspiration to start the publication, and how long did it take to make your idea a reality?

Roderic: Zeus was a five year process. I have always been an avid magazine reader. But I realized when I was in my mid 20’s that I had subscriptions to four or five magazines, and still wasn’t getting the information I needed or wanted. I wanted to know “how” and not what. I wanted to know “why” and not who. It was 2001 and I was 25. I was in law school in Pittsburgh. I knew my life wasn’t going always revolve around bars and baths. I had no idea [how] to put my life together as a young gay professional. I read Men’s Health for health issues, Out, Genre and Instinct for gay issues, GQ for fashion and Details for cutting edge intelligent articles. I said to myself, “there has to be a magazine with all this information for gay men.” There wasn’t. But I had accepted an offer to practice law at a large law firm in Chicago. During the last two years, I was up to six subscriptions and it was evident that the gay magazines were not doing it and the heterosexual magazines were missing the mark. I knew it was time for me start Zeus.

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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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t’s 1985 (the year I was born, in fact). This is Diondra, the 17-year-old from Gillian Flynn’s Great Lake’s Book Award nominated novel Dark Places. It’s a fantastic book. This is a fantastic character. She’s fierce through and through, and the 1980s look left me wanting to wear a side ponytail and leg warmers to work the next day. Diondra, I don’t like you, but I want to be you. Check it out (more photos after the jump).

Shoes: Target (several years old)
Socks: Target (Fall 2009)
Skirt: Charlotte Russe (Fall 2009)
Sweatshirt: Stolen from the PC Boyfriend, Gillian Flynn would be proud
Earrings: H&M (Spring 2010)
Lipstick: Wet & Wild, from Walgreens

Jump, Jump!  You know you want to!

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espite the fact that I’m somewhat conflicted about book trailers, I can’t help but love them.  The book should sell itself, right?  It’s all about the writing, right?  I guess I’m a product of the digital age, though, because a good book trailer hooks me every time.  Check out this trailer for Chicago author Scott Turrow’s new book Innocent.

couldn’t resist sharing this. Yesterday the shipment of antique furniture and art we bought at the Primitive warehouse sale was delivered, and among the things we bought was this beautiful bookshelf. It’s a Chinese antique from the 1700s.

Here’s a close-up. More pics after the jump.

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