Local News and Views
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Books
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Tuesday, 03 November 2009 04:52 |
 By Janet Potter
The Heartland Cafe was filled past capacity Thursday, October 22 to hear four Chicago authors read from their work and discuss Chicago as a writers’ city.
The event, titled “An October Sort of City,” was part of the Chicago Book Festival, and was co-hosted by Chicago Public Radio’s “Chicago Amplified” series and “Stop Smiling,” an independent publisher based in Wicker Park. JC Gabel, editor-in-chief of “Stop Smiling” magazine, said that the reading was conceived as being “as unconventional as possible,” and indeed it was a unique night.
Eschewing the reverence of a traditional book reading in a bookstore or auditorium, the four authors took to the stage together, and read from their work in the dining room of the Heartland Cafe, where the attendees were packed together at tables and the overwhelmed but always hospitable staff rushed around filling drink and dinner orders.
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Friday, 16 October 2009 20:09 |
 By Janet Potter
“Plenty of fiction writers have reality pretty much covered,” Chicago writer Audrey Niffenegger explained recently at a reading for her new novel. A member of the crowd had asked her why her two novels – the first about time travel, the second about ghosts – always veered into the supernatural.
Anybody can write about a boy riding a bike down the street, she answered, “fiction has the potential to do so much more.”
Niffenegger’s newest novel, Her Fearful Symmetry (Scribner, $26.99), is a modern ghost story set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London. Elspeth Noblin, a volunteer guide at Highgate, lives in a building that shares its back garden wall with the cemetery.
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Friday, 04 September 2009 18:07 |
 By Danny Postel
“Daddy, why did Jesus invent butterflies if they die after two weeks?”
I just about hit the panic button when my six-year-old son Theo put this question to me not long ago. His mother, who is a Christian, had taught him that Jesus was God. When Jesus’s visage appears in a painting or on television, Theo sometimes exclaims, “That’s God!”
In his butterfly question he seemed to reason, syllogistically, that if Jesus was God, and God created the world and its life forms (butterflies being one of them), Jesus “invented” the winged creatures. Either that or God and Jesus are simply interchangeable in his mind.
“First, Theo, your question presumes that Jesus was God,” I responded. “Many people, like mommy, believe he was, but many others don’t. It also presumes that there is a God – we don’t know for sure that there is.”
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Saturday, 03 October 2009 00:31 |
 By Janet Potter
“Would anyone else, anywhere else in the world, sit around asking these questions? Or is it just Chicago?” This question was posed to novelists Audrey Niffenegger, Aleksandar Hemon, and memoirist Maria Venegas at the end of a panel on the literary tradition of Chicago.
They had spent an hour discussing Chicago as a home for artists and writers, and whether the great literature of Chicago had been written because or in spite of the city’s distance from literary meccas New York and London. The event, held at the Chicago Cultural Center, was part of a week-long program celebrating the release of Granta’s Autumn 2009 issue.
Granta, the quarterly journal of new writing, is a venerable trans-Atlantic literary institution that publishes a mix of fiction, memoir, poetry, non-fiction, and reportage. Granta is well known for frequently focusing an entire issue on one theme, such as the Titanic, fathers, jihad, London, and Chinese cricket fighting. The theme of the latest issue, released in late September, is Chicago.
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Friday, 21 August 2009 19:16 |
 By Nancy Backas
I have had some adventures. I used to cook for Sierra Club backpack trips. I traveled to Crete for a photography project. I once took a three-week driving trip by myself out East. But my adventures are nothing compared to those of Victoria Allman who has spent ten years working as a chef aboard luxury yachts.
Her book, “Sea Fare: A Chef’s Journey Across the Ocean” (Norlights Press, 2009), which includes 30 recipes gathered on her travels, chronicles the first eight years of her journeys. As a struggling chef, she dreamed of far off places, but didn’t have the means to feed her wanderlust.
Friends told her about the world of yachting where she could be paid to travel as crew. So, she quit her restaurant job and went to Fort Lauderdale where she was hired on the spot.
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