Chicago Books!

The contributions of the Midwest and, specifically, Chicago to LGBTQ literature have been invaluable yet largely uncelebrated over the last century. This anthology charts a map of queer Chicago and showcases its thriving urban arts community, which boasts a unique history, legacy, and sensibility deeply rooted in the urban Midwest.
Here is a first-rate collection of queer voices from Chicago's literary landscape. Celebrated writers Edmund White, Achy Obejas, Sharon Bridgforth, Brian Bouldrey, E. Patrick Johnson, Carol Anshaw, David Trinidad, and Mark Zubro are joined by emerging voices from the queer literary scene. These pieces span all literary genres, from fiction and poetry to memoir and essays, and portray a full gamut of gay Chicago lives from the everyday to the quirky, from public spectacles to quiet intimacies, from family life to nightlife, from dating to marriage, from loving to mourning. The writing that comprises this volume, which seeks to claim a queer space on the literary continuum, is surprising, smart, hilarious, and heart wrenching.

The mayor of Chicago is found in his office late at night, murdered, facedown in a pizza. As police race to find the killer, the interim mayor, Sundaran "Sunny" Roopini, tries to juggle his responsibilities as a recently widowed father of two teenage daughters while herding his forty-nine fellow city aldermen toward choosing a new mayor. Over the course of four days, this raft of colorful characters-heroes, rascals, and pinky-ringed pols of all creeds, colors, and proclivities-will clash, as Sunny, a flawed but decent man, tries to hold together his family and his city.

There are sneaking,
creeping, crumpling
noises coming from
inside the walls.

Lucy is sure there are wolves living in the walls of their house -- and, as everybody says, if the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over. Her family doesn't believe her. Then one day, the wolves come out.

In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood--a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting--or avoiding--each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened--stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents' deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there.

Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.

Juliette is one of Chicago's forgotten founders. Early Chicago is often presented as "a man's city," but women like Juliette worked to create an urban and urbane world, often within their own parlors. With The World of Juliette Kinzie, we finally get to experience the rise of Chicago from the view of one of its most important founding mothers.

Ann Durkin Keating, one of the foremost experts on nineteenth-century Chicago, offers a moving portrait of a trailblazing and complicated woman. Keating takes us to the corner of Cass and Michigan (now Wabash and Hubbard), Juliette's home base. Through Juliette's eyes, our understanding of early Chicago expands from a city of boosters and speculators to include the world that women created in and between households. We see the development of Chicago society, first inspired by cities in the East and later coming into its own midwestern ways. We also see the city become a community, as it developed its intertwined religious, social, educational, and cultural institutions. Keating draws on a wealth of sources, including hundreds of Juliette's personal letters, allowing Juliette to tell much of her story in her own words.

Juliette's death in 1870, just a year before the infamous fire, seemed almost prescient. She left her beloved Chicago right before the physical city as she knew it vanished in flames. But now her history lives on. The World of Juliette Kinzie offers a new perspective on Chicago's past and is a fitting tribute to one of the first women historians in the United States.

The World's Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to America, was held from April to October in 1893. The monumental event welcomed twenty-eight million visitors, covered six hundred acres of land, boasted dozens of architectural wonders, and was home to some sixty-five thousand exhibits from all over the world. From far and wide, people came to experience the splendors of the fair, to witness the magic sparkle of electric lights or ride the world's first Ferris wheel, known as the Eiffel Tower of Chicago.

Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing have assembled a dazzling photographic history of the fair. Here are panoramic views of the concourse--replete with waterways and gondolas, the amazing moving sidewalk, masterful landscaping and horticultural splendors--and reproductions of ads, flyers, souvenirs, and keepsakes. Here too are the grand structures erected solely for the fair, from the golden doorway of the Transportation Building to the aquariums and ponds of the Fisheries Building, as well as details such as menu prices, the cost to rent a Kodak camera, and injury and arrest reports from the Columbian Guard.

This unique volume tells the story of the World's Columbian Exposition from its conception and construction to the scientific, architectural, and cultural legacies it left behind, inviting readers to imagine what it would have been like to spend a week at the fair.

One Hundred stories from the last century that salute the legacy of Wrigley Field and its beloved Cubs.

Charge through the turnstiles of this collection of personal stories about baseball's greatest ballpark and the sacred space it occupies in the hearts of Cubs fans and the soul of Wrigleyville. With contributors like Bob Costas, Rick Sutcliffe and Steve Stone, these 100 stories reflect the variety of millions of Cubs fans around the world, from those whose relationship with the Friendly Confines has lasted a lifetime to those who are taking their seats up close to the ivy for the very first time.