Just a Kid from Columbus They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us Hanif Abdurraqib 280 pages, Two Dollar Radio, $16.99, November 14, 2017 I’ve had They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us in my backpack for about a month. Its pages are…
Flying to New Zealand Thirty hours in the air to spend forty on the ground. The flight attendants feed us every ten minutes to try to make us forget that our knees are setting off our ears like scare quotes, that we are hurtling…
Yesterday’s Noise On a winter day in the early part of the twentieth century, my great-grandfather Casey walked carefully and quietly through the Pennsylvania woods. An avid hunter his entire life, on this day his quarry was deer. Not long into his hunt he…
Sick: A Memoir Porochista Khakpour 276 pages, paperback, $10.90 Harper Perennial June, 2018 In Sick, Porochista Khakpour explores the entanglements of immigration and illness, addiction and ability, in a memoir that spans her early childhood to the near present. Only a toddler when she…
The Chicago Writers’ Association Book of the Year for 2018 was awarded to Nadine Kenney Johnstone for her book Of This Much I’m Sure. In this memoir, Kenney Johnstone reflects on her Chicago upbringing, the first years of her marriage, and the challenges she…
Live Music The white rose is for remembrance, the death of a child. Lilies, chrysanthemums for sorrow. It could be a bouquet, a basket, an altar covered in flowers. But I can’t see it from here. The surprise of the lie blanketing. I thought…
Asked by David Trinidad What is your first memory? I have some co-first memories. I don’t know how real they are. But first is being dropped; falling. My mother was carrying me from the living room into our “play room.” There is a step…