Chicago Reader | Books | Author Profiles & Interviews | AAN.org

Audrey Niffenegger Gets Ready to Plug Her Second Booknew

Niffenegger was an unfamous visual artist and maker of art books when she wrote The Time Traveler's Wife, which has sold about 2.5 million copies since 2003. Her new book, Her Fearful Symmetry, is due out September 29 from Scribner.

Chicago Reader | Ed M. Koziarski | 08-10-2009 | Author Profiles & Interviews

Tags: Her Fearful Symmetry, movie adaptations, fiction, The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger, visual arts

Lennard Davis Argues that Obsession is Largely in the Eye of the Beholdernew

Obsession: A History is the UIC professor's study of the rise and bifurcated path of obsessive behavior as both an illness and an ideal in the modern world.

Chicago Reader | Deanna Isaacs | 11-24-2008 | Author Profiles & Interviews

Tags: mental health, OCD, psychology, nonfiction, Lennard J. Davis, Obsession: A History, productivity

'Dr. Vino' Talks 'Wine Politics'new

Wine Politics compares the byzantine, quasi-self-governing appellation system of Bordeaux's wine growers with that of the more government-regulated Napa Valley producers and shows how those individual systems, along with other factors, determine which wines end up in stores, how much they cost, and what they taste like.

Chicago Reader | Mike Sula | 09-22-2008 | Author Profiles & Interviews

Tags: wine, Tyler Colman, Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink

Count Dante Recounts His Seven Years in an Incredibly Strange Fight Clubnew

In his new memoir Beer, Blood, and Cornmeal, Bob Calhoun describes a moment where wrestling grappled with surrealism, and surrealism won out with a suplex powerslam.

Chicago Reader | Dan Kelly | 09-08-2008 | Author Profiles & Interviews

Tags: San Francisco, wrestling, 1990s, Beer, Blood, and Cornmeal, Bob Calhoun, Count Dante, Incredibly Strange Wrestling, The Black Dragon Fighting Society

A Vienna Beef Veep Publishes a Tribute to the People Who Sell the Productnew

Bob Schwartz's soon-to-be-released book, Never Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog, is a nostalgic tribute to Chicago's hot dog stands.

Chicago Reader | Mike Sula | 09-02-2008 | Author Profiles & Interviews

Tags: food, Chicago, hot dogs, Bob Schwartz, Never Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog, Vienna Beef

Libby Fischer Hellmann Explores the Secrets of the Suburbsnew

She sets her whodunits in the land of never-ending lawns.

Chicago Reader | Patrick Daily | 06-02-2008 | Author Profiles & Interviews

Tags: Easy Innocence, Libby Fischer Hellmann

After the Kids Go to Bed, Steven Sidor Lets the Darkness Innew

His first two books -- Bone Factory and Skin River -- oozed with evil. His latest, The Mirror's Edge, tops them both. It's about two kidnapped boys, likely -- or perhaps not? -- the victims of a spooky children's book illustrator, the son of a practitioner of the black arts.

Chicago Reader | Jonathan Black | 06-02-2008 | Author Profiles & Interviews

Tags: Steven Sidor, The Mirror's Edge

Achy Obejas Uses the Noir Form to Explore Her Cuban Rootsnew

The 18 stories collected in the anthology Havana Noir are nothing if not messy. The Havana reflected in its pages is coldly violent and explosively loving. It's vibrant, brutal, amoral, sordid, romantic, idealistic, pragmatic, and gleefully ambiguous.

Chicago Reader | Martha Bayne | 06-02-2008 | Author Profiles & Interviews

Tags: Cuba, Achy Obejas, ed., Havana Noir, Achy Obejas

'Power Stronger Than Itself': Great Black Music in Printnew

After ten years, George Lewis' monumental history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a black collective that formed on the south side of Chicago in 1965, is finally finished.

Chicago Reader | Peter Margasak | 04-14-2008 | Author Profiles & Interviews

Tags: A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, George Lewis