Eleven Works of Midwestern Fiction for the Trump Era
No one book is going to explain what happened in the Midwest to help turn the last presidential election to Donald Trump. No stack of books is going to do it, fiction or nonfiction.
The View from Chicago’s Favorite Suburb
When I moved to Phoenix three years ago I expected to feel disconnected from my Midwestern roots. But it turned out a lot of Chicago had made its way here.
Roger Ebert And The Multicultural Passkey Of The Midwest
Shortly after he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964, Roger Ebert left his native Urbana for a yearlong postgrad fellowship in Cape Town, South Africa.
David Foster Wallace, Religion, And The Midwest
At the end of the film The End of the Tour, journalist David Lipsky (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and novelist David Foster Wallace (played by Jason Segel) return to where they first met, in Wallace’s bland house in Bloomington, Illinois.
Writing from the Borderlands
Clickbait is easy: just ask people to weigh in on stuff they have strong opinions about but will never agree on. Politics: clickbait gold. Red-carpet sartorial choices: those too.
The Jungle Is A Terrible Novel – So Why Does It Still Work?
Some time back, two friends gave my wife and I a housewarming present: a copy of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle. Not the sunniest way to help a couple settle into a new house, but it’s a thoughtful gift if you know us.
An Honest Pitch: Stoner by John Williams
The novelist John Williams (1922-1994) wasn’t much of a pitchman for his work. In the late 50s he wrote a letter to his agent, Marie Rodell, to discuss one of the books he was working on...
Belt Publishing Announces Expansion With Two New Books
Belt Publishing is thrilled to announce a new imprint, to be launched later 2016. The imprint will feature mid-career and emerging authors writing "novella" length non-fiction.
From Greece To Negroland: Ethnicity In Literature
Like many Greek-Americans in the Chicago suburbs in the 60s and 70s, my family had a bookshelf full of titles by Harry Mark Petrakis.
Collective Anxieties: Money, Worry, and the Midwestern Novel
Dyson, Ohio, the central character in Patrick Wensink’s new comic novel, Fake Fruit Factory, is a little town in big trouble. It has a $10 million budget gap to close after years of industrial collapse and civic lassitude.
The Dark, Violent, Grotesque, Drug-Induced Whatever
I’m a Patrick Michael Finn fan. This, unfortunately, is a lonely thing to be. His output is modest: One novella, A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovitch, and a story collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, both from small presses.
Reading The Midwest: Gillian Flynn
I abandoned Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl shortly after it came out in 2012. Around 50 pages in, I started wondering: What were people seeing in it?