Chicago

While discussing matters of style

March 6, 2006
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While discussing matters of style

Okay, we admit to occasionally reading the blog of Mimi Smartypants. She works in Chicago, for one thing, and so we are just trying to stay hip to the blogging scene in Chicago. It’s more than that though. As noted by Rebecca J. Roberts in the JournalStar of Lincoln, NE—a town whose hipness is vastly underrated—Ms. Smartypants is “unashamedly articulate and intelligent, with a twisted bent—someone you want to drink yourself silly with on dollar beers while discussing The Chicago Manual of Style and obsessive-compulsive disorder and oral sex, possibly all at the same time.” And you know how we like to talk about The Chicago Manual of Style. . . .

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Wayne Booth Memorial Service

February 28, 2006
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Wayne Booth Memorial Service

On March 9, the University of Chicago will host a memorial service honoring the memory of Wayne Booth (1921-2005). The service will take place at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel (1156 E. 59th Street), from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM. Wayne Booth wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our time, most notably the 1961 classic The Rhetoric of Fiction, a book that transformed literary criticism and became the standard reference point for advanced discussions of how fiction works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers re-create texts. This May, the University of Chicago Press will publish The Essential Wayne Booth. Read an excerpt from For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals. . . .

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Happy Birthday, Ben Hecht!

February 28, 2006
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Happy Birthday, Ben Hecht!

On February 28, 1894 Ben Hecht was born in New York City. Though he would find fame as a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, Hecht was at heart a news reporter. His columns for the Chicago Daily News were collected in the 1922 book, A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, a timeless classic of journalism. In 1925 Hecht went to Hollywood to try his hand at screenwriting. He wrote more than seventy screenplays, including Underworld (1927), for which he won an Oscar. He returned to his newspaper roots when he collaborated with Charles MacArthur on The Front Page, a play based on his adventures as a newsman, which became an enduring hit. . . .

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Stuart Dybek’s "Long Thoughts"

February 17, 2006
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Stuart Dybek’s "Long Thoughts"

Today Zulkey.com features an interview with Stuart Dybek, author of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. In the interview, Dybek talks about one of the stories from the book, titled "The Long Thoughts": Have any of the characters in your stories had impact on your real life relationships? Meaning that, if somebody recognizes themselves in one of your stories, how has that impacted his relationship with you? Despite the fact that I’m writing fiction and have taken the liberties that fiction allows for, people have at different times recognized themselves in some of the characters. Mostly the reaction has been favorable. I had one old friend who appeared in a story called "The Long Thoughts," who would give the book that story appeared in to people as gifts so that they could read about him. There was an instance however when a dear friend who saw himself in one of my stories—a version of a story that he told to me—was offended not by his portrayal but that I would use a story he’d told to me in private. I should add that the story he told to me was fantastical and I changed it further and made still more fantastical. Still, . . .

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Author Event: Ronne Hartfield

February 17, 2006
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Author Event: Ronne Hartfield

On February 21, Ronne Hartfield will discuss and sign Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family as part of Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s Black History Month celebrations. The event is free and open to the public. Spanning most of the twentieth century, Another Way Home celebrates the special circumstance of being born and reared in a household where being a woman of mixed race could be a fundamental source of strength, vitality, and courage. Read an excerpt from the book. Visit our black studies catalog. . . .

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Review: Louise W. Knight, Citizen

January 31, 2006
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Review: Louise W. Knight, Citizen

Alan Wolfe recently reviewed Louise W. Knight’s Citizen in the New York Times: "Knight’s book is what the Germans call a bildung, an account of how a person’s character is formed. As it happens, Knight’s decision to focus on Addam’s early years is a stroke of genius. We know a great deal about Jane Addams the public figure. We know relatively little about how she made the transition from the 19th century to the 20th. In Knight’s book, Jane Addams comes to life.… Knight’s book is filled with fascinating detail about everyday life at Hull House, from the way residents were selected, to the fundraising difficulties that emerged as Addams exhausted her personal wealth, to an absorbing account of Addam’s life as a Chicago garbage inspector. Knight’s extensive research and straightforward narrative allow readers to watch Addams gain self-confidence, survive a breakup with Starr and the formation of a new relationship with Mary Rozet Smith, wrestle with her desire to help immigrants even as she disdains much about their way of life, and try to establish democracy at Hull House while remaining reluctant to cede control of its destiny.… Knight, an independent scholar, has something in common with . . .

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The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate

January 16, 2006
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The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate

Hanukkah may be over but Purim is right around the corner, so the time is still ripe for the intellectual and gastronomic delights of The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate, a collection of the best of nearly sixty years of brilliant University of Chicago oratory deployed on behalf of latkes and hamantashen. Our online feature for the book includes the text and audio of Ted Cohen’s “Consolations of the Latke” as well as recipes. . . .

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