Everything Matters! is the debut novel from Ron Currie, Jr., author of the ridiculously good collection of short stories, God is Dead. Everything Matters! (I love that exclamation point!) is a weird pastiche of Sam Lipsyte-ish prose stylings, Kurt Vonnegut-style sensibilities and Choose Your Own Adventure books. In other words it’s a super fun, very uncommon coming-of-age novel. That is set, in part, in Chicago:

Chicago is not the ideal place to go when you’ve recently lost your mind and plan to curl up in the bottom of a bottle and wait for the feeling of having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body to subside. There are at least half a dozen North American cities better suited to such a pursuit…

But you are in Chicago, because your rich and famous brother, who is oblivious to both his riches and his fame, lives in Chicago, and because your options are dramatically limited by finances and ambition.

Scale it back a notch, o’ reactionary ones. Michael Miner reports that the New Yorker is not going biweekly as was “tweeted” this morning. Rest assured that your hoarded stash of of I’m-totally-going-to-read-around-to-reading-that issues will still be arriving on a weekly basis. Whew!

Below, some photos of the Stop Smiling 20 Interviews release party last Thursday. Big thanks to photographer Justin Goh for shooting this event, held at Design Within Reach.

To paraphrase Whet Moser in The Reader last week, it’s dumb, buying a newspaper today. All you get is a logo, a URL and an IOU. Only thing dumber, maybe, is being a newspaper today. When not Twitterifying word counts or delegating the Final Say to Athens, GA (Creative Loafing is based there), many papers are flat-out disappearing.

This week, for example, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced its plans to go Internet-only and lay off staff, bringing the two-daily-paper city count down to … two? (Having grown up in Seattle, I will say that the Seattle Times totally has better comics. But that’s not the point.)

As Clay Shirky wrote on his blog, laser-nimbly per usual, the old publishing model is broken. And since it no longer needs to solve the problem it fixed in the first place – giving the public facile, affordable access to news – an entirely new system needs to be built.

So we should focus on doing that, argues Shirky smartly, instead of pissing and mewling over what’s lost (although Kachingle might not be such a bad way to prolong the death rattle). Today’s energy should go forwards and experimentally, as everything new is de facto scary, and nobody knows who Aldus Manutius Deux’s going to be. “Society doesn’t need newspapers,” Shirky writes firmly, if maybe a little wistfully. “What we need is journalism.” Right on, and notably so.

One thing: “journalism” doesn’t just mean snappy, savvy articles. It means you can write ‘em with at least a smidgin-chance at financial stability (it’s hard to critique and amplify when you’re cold and eating only Insta Mac-n-Chz … forever) and a mentor. And most importantly, it means you can read them without paying out the nose for dialup or waiting three hours for one of two library computers. Really, guys. Three hours. I’ve done it. If you can’t read it in the first place, doesn’t matter how good it is.

When: Thurs, March 19, 7-9pm
Location: Design Within Reach, North Ave Storefront, 1574 N. Kingsbury St.
What: Stop Smiling’s 20 Interviews Release Party

Stop Smiling has a new issue on the newsstands featuring interviews with such luminaries as Roberto Bolano, Paul Auster, Barbara Kopple, Alex Ross, Sophie Dahl, and more. DJs Ben Fasman and Logan Bay will be spinning the event and the mag is offering free admission and drinks, but to attend–and drunkenly ogle all the eye-candy furniture at DWR–you’ve gotta at rsvp@stopsmilingonline.com. Complimentary issues while supplies last.

A description of our fair city told from the perspective of Frank Lloyd Wright’s morphine-addicted mistress in T.C. Boyle’s The Women (which is just as great as all the reviews have said):

Outside, beyond the gray frame of the window, the weather was dreary, funeral clouds strung from the rooftops like laundry hung out to dry, and so cold even the ratlike dirty gray pigeons were huddled against it, dark  motionless lines of frozen feathers and arrested beaks blighting the eaves as far as she could see down both sides of the block. She hadn’t been out of the house in two days, hadn’t been out of her wrapper, because this cold was like some sort of cosmic joke, a cold beyond anything Paris had seen since the glaciers withdrew in some unfathomable prehistoric epoch when people still went round dwelling caves in Chicago. How could anyone possibly live here?

Happy Spring, everyone.

Finally, an email from the University of Chicago’s Humanities listserv that doesn’t concern the MAPH program director’s cats!  Hallie Gordon, co-founder and co-producer of the Edgewater-based Tuesday Funk Reading Series, is seeking poets and writers for events on April 7th, May 5th, June 2nd and July 7th:

On the first Tuesday of each month we invite three or four writers to share their work. We are interested in all kinds of writing from the traditional to the experimental. This could be a short story, a novel excerpt, an essay or article. Our main requirement is that it be an engaging and polished piece of work.

The kicker: free cupcakes to those who participate! A girl after my own heart. Contact Hallie at halliegordon [at] yahoo.com.

As you probably have heard, The House on Mango Street has been chosen as the new pick for One Book, One Chicago. In turn, Steppenwolf is providing the following: 

In partnership with the Chicago Public Library’s One Book, One Chicago initiative, a free staged reading featuring excerpts from The House on Mango Street will be held on Monday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. in the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.  Reservations can be made by calling Steppenwolf Audience Services at (312) 335-1650.

Thanks, Steppenwolf!

In a recent article, The New York Times describes programs like OBOC as “book clubs on steroids.” Ha ha! What an original comparison!

In the same article, the manager of the N.E.A. program that grants the endowments for these programs  is quoted as liking their populist streak: “One of the joys of this project has been exploding the idea of some great canon of American literature.” To which I say, “Um?” Just because Sandra Cisneros is a Latina woman doesn’t mean The House on Mango Street hasn’t been included in school curricula for at least the last decade — it even has its own SparkNotes. If that doesn’t make it part of the post-canon canon, I don’t know what does. To be fair, the program manager wasn’t talking about Cisneros, exactly, but other underground writers like Cynthia Ozick, John Steinbeck and Harper Lee.

In all seriousness, though, I think these programs are a great way to make reading a book into a community-wide event. And I’ve heard the Steppenwolf production is fantastic, so call to get a seat, already!

The Red Rover reading series explores themes of admission & disclosure during this Season of Repentance with Experiment #27: The Art of Confession. Featuring writers/video artists Doug Ischar & RM Vaughn, and guest curated by Canadian poet Nathalie Stephens, #27 also marks the series’ first reading at Orientation Center,  Logan Square’s community meeting space housed in the Congress Theater (and home to the Chicago Underground Library, by the way).

WHEN:
7pm Saturday, March 14

WHERE:
**Please note the new location**
the Orientation Center
2129 N. Rockwell — Chicago, IL
(corner of Milwaukee/Rockwell in the Congress Theater building)

When: Monday, March 9, 2009 at 7pm
Location: Book Cellar, 4736 N. Milaukee
What: Patrick Somerville, Book release for The Cradle

Local author Patrick Somerville’s new novel The Cradle is being released tomorrow at the Book Cellar. With a plotpoint centered around first-time parents Matt and Marissa Bishop seeking a lost cradle from Marissa’s childhood, the tome is so far getting lots of love. It’s Critic’s Choice in the Reader this week, and reviews are using terms like “effortless command” and “beautifully written, with lines of painstaking clarity.”

** Reading alongside the always-entertaining Somerville are Jonathan Messinger and Featherproof Books minibook author Colleen O’Brien.