Date: Thursday, January 31st, 2008
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Happy Ending (302 Broome St. in NYC)
Participants: A reading sponsored by ACM, Canarium Books, Danny’s Reading Series, featherproof books, MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine and Literago.org featuring John Beer, Arda Collins, Joel Craig, Michael Czyxniejewski, Steffi Drewes, Cathy Park Hong, Zach Plague, Nick Twemlow, Michael Zapata, Matthew Zapruder

If you happen to find yourself in New York for the AWP conference (or in town for a simple bowl of rice pudding), pop on over to Happy Ending for a reading featuring la creme de la creme of the Chicago literary community, take pictures, and send them to us.

I’ve been remiss in not posting about this handy little service sooner. Wowbrary allows you to sign up for free weekly email alerts about your library’s newest arrivals. Maybe you think that the library only has musty old boring books, but it isn’t so. Libraries are constantly adding new books, movies, and music to their collections to give the public what they want. This is far from a perfect site, pulling together a fairly random smattering of titles for their top choices, but still, it’s interesting to see what’s new at the library, if you’re into that sort of thing, which I am. Just this week I found out that the Chicago Public Library added World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Apollo’s Song, and 3:10 to Yuma. Hmm, maybe I can take that off my Netflix queue now.

Date: Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Women and Children First

I first heard about abortion doctor cum memoirist Susan Wicklund in this article on Salon.com (there are also pieces on Powell’s and in The New York Times). Wicklund has written a memoir, the aptly-titled This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor. The Salon piece explains some of the things she faced in her line of work:

She has donned disguises to get past the protesters who scream and wave signs outside both her home and her medical office. She’s worn a bulletproof vest and carried a gun. In some states, Wicklund is required to read abortion patients misleading, politician-penned scripts that refer to an embryo as an “unborn baby” and warn that the procedure can be fatal (with no mention of the fact that wisdom tooth removal is far riskier).

Argh! Anyway, this event will have a representative from the Chicago Abortion Fund, who will speak about making abortion feasible for low-income women, begging the question of what Chicago would do without Women and Children First? Probably the same thing America would do without legal abortion, minus the coat hangers.

I didn’t know that Morrison was the one who originally called Clinton “the first Black president.” But anyway, she is officially supporting Obama. And Salon’s got an article about literary celebs Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou endorsing politicians in an “overwrought” style. Question: is that word ever, EVER used to describe men? Just wondering.

You heard it here first, folks: Patrick Somerville has sold his first novel to Little, Brown. It’s called The Cradle, and it’s coming out in March of 2009. Way to make the rest of us 28 year-olds feel worthless! In all seriousness, though, it’s bound to be hella awesome, just like his collection.

For whom, exactly, has Publishers Weekly written this profile of Jessa Crispin? My mom knows who Jessa Crispin is, and I have little doubt that even the stodgiest, most isolated PW reader has a better understanding of Bookslut and online book reviews than the article presents.

The fluffy laziness of the profile makes me wonder just how uninformed the magazine thinks its audience is. The average independent bookseller is an encyclopedia of arcane publishing gossip, and seasoned industry professionals live and breathe this sort of thing. For this magazine to write such a story in 2008 is almost charmingly bizarre. It’s as if the Trib did a recent cover story on Steve Bartman.

If anything, the piece illustrates the disconnect between print and web-based publications. A quote from Crispin: “’All the critics whose jobs are in danger are turning on the Internet as if it were some invading force,’ she complains. ‘It’s just a different medium.’” Actually, Jessa, the Internet isn’t just a different medium, it’s in a different century.

It’s January, so everyone is hibernating at their computers, blogging, talking about blogging, writing about blogging. Here’s a recent Time Out Chicago feature about the preponderance of Chicago blogs and their influence. Chicago Magazine also has their say, listing 171 (where’d they get *that* number?) of the best Chi-town blogs. And if the article ever appears online in full, you’d see that ol’ Literago made the list.

Date: Thursday, January 24th, 2008
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Seminary Co-op Bookstore

Chicagoan Thomas Geoghegan sounds like someone we’d all like to have dinner with. He’s a superstar labor lawyer who writes screeds against the Right for everyone from In These Times to The New York Times (you can check out a really good article that appeared in the former here). He’s at the Co-op to read from his new book, See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation,” published by our nation’s very best non-fiction house, The New Press. Thank you, Mr. Geoghegan, for allowing us to blame litigiousness, yet another despicable characteristic of American culture, on the Republicans — I always suspected that lady who sued McDonald’s over the coffee was a card-carrying Reaganite.

Date: Thursday, January 24th, 2008
Time: 8:30 p.m. ($7 door, includes issue)
Location: Subterranean (2011 W. North Ave.)

The Bruiser Review, the newest Chicago-based literary journal on our radar, is celebrating the release of their first-ever issue with bands Them, Roaring Twenties (don’t be fooled by the comma, it’s one band) and Johnny and the Limelites. On a personal note, I really like it when release parties are parties and not readings.

Date: Thursday, January 24, 2008
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Fullerton Hall / The Art Institute of Chicago / 111 South Michigan Avenue
Participants: Francisco Aragón, Brenda Cárdenas, Blas Falconer, Gina Franco

This even is happening in conjunction with the Poetry Foundation’s participation with the “American Perspectives”program–a yearlong alliance among the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Poetry Foundation designed to explore how artists, composers and writers influenced one another to an unprecedented degree in 19th- 20th-century America. These well-known and University-established Latino poets all have books out (or forthcoming) and are from locales as far-flung as Ithaca (Cornell), Tennessee (Austin Peay State University), and Indiana (Notre Dame). Here’s an article that features several of them. Here’s a link to one of my favorites from Aragon (found in total at this url): “Think / for a moment / of something you love to do / and rarely do anymore. That / is how I often feel / whenever I’m away.”