Ask a Book Question: The 63rd in a Series (Chicago Stories)

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June 25, 2008 | 11 books mentioned 12 3 min read

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Rob writes in with this question:

I’m a seventeen year old who is going to be spending five weeks this summer in Chicago (to be specific – Evanston, since I’ll be part of Northwestern’s summer high school music institute). I’m a life-long New Jerseyan, and have never been in the city of broad shoulders for longer than three days.

So, since I like reading books about the place I’m visiting, I was wondering if you could recommend anything that captured the essence of Chicago – I’m looking for works that encapsulate Chicago in the same way Kavalier & Clay encapsulates New York.

I was thinking about The Lazarus Project and Carl Sandburg’s work. Do you have any other ideas?

coverChicago has inspired some of America’s greatest fiction and continues to be a fruitful setting for contemporary writers. I’ve just completed The Lazarus Project (review hopefully forthcoming), and its twinned stories – set in Chicago 1908 and present day Eastern Europe – mine Chicago’s multicultural past and ignominious history. The book, based on the true story of the mysterious death of immigrant Lazarus Averbuch reminded me a lot of The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson’s non-fiction account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the serial killer who lurked in its shadows (my review here). Both Devil and Lazarus vividly evoke the chaos of Chicago, a turn of the century boomtown of slaughterhouses, nascent industry, and the first “skyscrapers” that was quickly aligning itself as the country’s center after only decades earlier being its frontier.

An interest in this era in Chicago will inevitably lead one to Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel The Jungle is a muckraking, contemporary account of the slaughterhouse workers who drove Chicago’s economic engine. The novel is a landmark among American social novels.

coverJumping forward in time, Chicago produced one of America’s greatest novelists, Saul Bellow, who haunted the hauls of Northwestern in the 1930s. Garth writes that “the greatest Chicago novel ever is The Adventures of Augie March, which is highly recommended for someone who liked Kavalier & Clay.” This contention is hard to dispute.

covercoverPatrick points us to another, more contemporary literary lodestar for Chicago: “The poet laureate of Chicago is Stuart Dybek (I mean, I don’t think he actually is, I just think he should be). The Coast of Chicago and I Sailed With Magellan are both absolute must reads. They both entirely take place in Chicago (mostly the South Side, but not exclusively). He’s one of my favorite authors, and somebody who should have a much larger audience.”

Patrick also throws a more recent selection into the mix: “Also, it’s not like a totally Chicago Chicago book, but I think [Joshua Ferris’s] Then We Came to the End is about Chicago in a really interesting way, as it encapsulates life in the Loop, full of business people commuting from all the suburbs, folks who live in Lincoln Park, people who drive up from the South Side. Plus it’s really fun.”

To these I would also add Adam Langer’s well received duo of books set in West Rogers Park, a neighborhood at the northern edge of the city not far from where I used to live: Crossing California and The Washington Story. Finally, anyone interested in Chicago fiction should consider Chris Ware’s landmark graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. It’s another twinned story, with threads taking place in the near present and during 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, for so many the moment of Chicago’s emergence. Ware’s pathos is haunting and his spare, eccentric drawings are mesmerizing. Along with Devil in the White City, it is a favorite of contemporary Chicagoans.

We’ve undoubtedly skipped over much worthy Chicago literature, so please enlighten us with further suggestions in the comments. Rob, thanks for a great question!

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

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Ask a Book Question: The Twenty-third in a Series (Bringing a Book to Hollywood)

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August 17, 2004 | 11 books mentioned 2 min read
Rick writes in wanting to know how he can lay the groundwork for a big-screen version of a bestselling novel.Does anybody know if (or how to find out if) someone has the motion picture rights to Leon Uris' novel Trinity? Any help would be appreciated. ThanksI can't tell you all how pleased I was to see this question in my inbox. I was beginning to worry that the year I spent getting coffee and wearing a jaunty headset at a Hollywood agency had gone to waste. Luckily in between my important duties as a glorified (and grossly under-compensated) secretary, I was able to glean some actual knowledge about the entertainment industry. Even more luckily, I will most likely never work in said industry again. As I was saying, though, there are ways to find out if anyone owns the film rights to a particular book, and if so, who. It basically involves persistent phone calls in which each person you talk to tells you to call another person, who tells you to call another person, and so on. And while I am not, at the moment, inclined to do the leg work, (although Trinity would make a great movie), I can at least tell you who to call first. Begin with the Writers Guild, also known as the WGA. Typically you can call them with the name of a writer, and they can tell you which agent represents that writer (bear in mind, however, that if you give them more than one name they are liable to get very snotty very quickly.) You can then call the agent and begin fishing for the pertinent names and numbers, though it may take a week or two to get past his or her assistant. They are, as I once was, tenacious buggers. If this route fails, try calling the publisher, in this case Bantam or whichever conglomerate currently owns that imprint. Once you get someone on the phone who sounds helpful (and they will typically be more helpful than the Hollywood types), try to get the digits of whichever literary agent or lawyer handles Mr. Uris' estate. Which brings me to another point, since Mr. Uris passed away last year, you will be dealing with his estate, which may make things more complicated. Finally, be aware that figuring out who owns which rights to which book at what price can often be a laborious and Byzantine process, especially in the case of a book like Trinity, the rights to which, as a decades old bestseller, have probably changed hands a number of times. It's because of these complexities that many of the bigger Hollywood agencies have a full-time employee whose responsibility is sorting out these rights issues. Still, if you have a dream, a vision, and a little bit of dough, none of these impediments should hinder you. Good luck, and feel free to let us know how things turn out.
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Ask a Book Question: The 30th in a Series (Lists of Books)

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October 21, 2004 | 11 books mentioned 2 min read
Jason writes in with this question:Is there a single site just listing new releases from a wide range of publishers?Oh, how I wish there were. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why no one seems to keep lists like this. There are scads of places you can find new music releases, but websites that do this for books are basically non-existent. After I started working at the book store I realized why, 99.9 percent of new books do not have a "hard" release date. That is, publishers do not tell everyone in advance that a book will be out on a certain date. Instead, they just ship them out when they're ready. Usually the best information you can get is that a book will be out some time during a certain month. Sometimes you can go to Amazon and see this in action. They might list a release date a couple of weeks from now, but you will see that the book is already in stock. This is because Amazon.com sets the release date towards the end of the expected release window so that customers will not be disappointed by a book that is past its release date and still unavailable. At the brick and mortar stores, you will sometimes find that one store has gotten a given book in before another store because the publisher takes its time getting the shipments out. There are, of course, exceptions to all of this. Any major book, say something by a bestselling author or an ex-President or maybe the next Oprah book, will have a "street date" dictated by the publisher. Bookstores often receive the books prior to the street date, but they can get in trouble for selling them too early. The big books are released on a specific day so that publishers can get the most out of the highly concentrated media blitz that they orchestrate for them. Because of these irregularities it's impossible to put together a weekly list and very difficult to put together a monthly list. When you consider that 175,000 books were released in 2003 (according to Bowker), the possibility of any sort of comprehensive list is daunting. Having said all that, there is one website that manages to produce a decent list, which I use from time to time. You'll find that it only lists the most prominent couple of hundred fiction books in a given year. But it gives you a good idea of what's on tap. It's called Overbooked.org. If anyone has come across a better site please enlighten us. Thanks for the question, Jason!
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Ask A Book Question: The Seventh in a Series (Calling All Readers of Hesse)

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September 9, 2003 | 11 books mentioned 1
C. Ryan Edwards wrote in hoping to jumpstart a discussion on one of his favorite authors, Hermann Hesse:I was hoping to start some discussion of one of my favorite books by mentioning hesses's the glass bead game or magister ludi whichever one wishes to call it. Have you read it? It did gain hesse the 1946 nobel prize.The only Hesse I have ever read is, predictably, Siddhartha, which I considered to be very good, if only because it kept me interested in subject matter that I don't typically care for. I have heard more than once that as far as Hesse goes Siddhartha should be considered a lesser work, since his other writing typically surpasses it. I invite anyone out there with thoughts on The Glass Bead Game/Magister Ludi to speak up via the "comments" link. I meanwhile will add it to my list of things to read.
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12 comments:

  2. If you're up for something a bit odd, I'd heartily recommend Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective. It's the detective novel as creeping nightmare, with Chicago playing the role of a disturbingly familiar hell. The detective of the title slowly disintegrates as he wanders all over Chicago, seeming to hit every conceivable neighborhood, each of which is carefully and memorably rendered. It's a chilling, unforgettable book.

    Oh, and if I may be allowed to recommend a couple of books from my employer, the University of Chicago Press, how about Ben Hecht'sA Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago and Mike Royko's One More Time and For the Love of Mike, all collections of great columns from giants in the history of Chicago newspapers. And Royko's book about the first mayor Daley and his machine, Boss, which I only wish my employer published.

  3. I would recommend my own company's Looped, by Andrew Winston, which unlike most Chicago novels does not focus on a particular neighborhood, but rather takes on a much greater breadth of the city through its large, diverse, Altman-esque cast of characters.

  4. The Lazarus Project was a great book, but Chicago was mostly a footnote there to Eastern Europe. But ditto on the Upton Sinclair and Stuart Dybek titles you mentioned – all three are must-reads, along with absolutely anything by Mike Royko (including Boss, his Daley bio). I'd also strongly recommend Nelson Algren's novel The Man With the Golden Arm and story collection The Neon Wilderness (and though his nonfiction Chicago: City on the Make is one of my alltime favorites, its obscure references make it better for a more seasoned Chicagoan than a neophyte), Richard Wright's Native Son, Ward Just's An Unfinished Season and Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned. And those are just for starters.

  5. Thanks everyone, these are awesome. I'll definitely be making multiple trips to the Northwestern bookstore. :-)

    I'd also love to hear anymore suggestions people have, so I'll keep watching the comments.

  6. Richard Wright's Native Son should be on this list. Set in Chicago in the 1930's it chronicles the decline and fall of a young black man named Bigger Thomas–not light summer reading (race, class, the absence of social justice, an unlikeable hero)–but one of the great American novels, I think.

  7. Try Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks. It's a novella set in Chicago's African American neighborhoods during the 1940's, and tells the story of the title character in 34 vignettes. It is Brooks' only work of adult fiction–she was primarily a poet–but she should have written more because I think this book is tremendous. Maud Martha's story is nothing special–no high drama or headline material–the real attraction to this story is in the language Brooks uses to sketch out the arc of a human life, and in the character that Brooks has created in Maud Martha.

  8. Scott Simon of NPR Weekend Edition just published a novel about Chicago, Windy City. I haven't read it yet, but it's in the stack. It's a murder mystery (the mayor is killed), but it's mostly about Chicago politics, from what I've read. If you like detective stories, I would also recommend the early Sara Paretsky detective books featuring V.I Warshawsky. The later books don't have as much Chicago color (I don't know about the most recent books in the series–I stopped reading them about three novels ago). But I lived in Chicago when the earlier books came out, and my friends and I tried to find the bar where V.I. hung out. The descriptions were based on real neighborhoods, but given fictional names.

  10. Sorry I didn't see this topic sooner as I believe that James T. Farrel definitely rates a mention.

  11. One of the few mystery writers I read is Sara Paretsky whose feisty and very socially aware and active PI is based in Chicago. This is where I have learned about the actual people and neighborhoods of Chicago.

  12. Michael Harvey has written two great detective novels that take place in Chicago: The Chicago Way and The Fifth Floor.

    Sean Cherchover's Big City, Bad Blood is also worth a read.

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Ask a Book Question: The 41st in a Series (Inflating print runs)

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August 2, 2005 | 11 books mentioned 2 min read
Laurie noticed that she sometimes sees two different print numbers for the same book and wrote in with this question: How do you find out how many copies are being printed of a new book? Is there a single website that lists this? I've only occasionally seen the number printed in a first run, sometimes at Amazon, sometimes other sites.Unfortunately, publishers don't publish that info regularly. You'll see it sometimes in the publishers' catalogs, and Kirkus or PW will sometimes have it in their pre-pub reviews, to illustrate to book buyers if a book is going to be really big... but it's well-known in the industry that these numbers aren't always accurate. For example, a publisher may say that the initial print run of a book is 50,000 when, in actuality, it's much less. They cite the big number in order to generate some hype around the book, though since everyone does it, it's not terribly useful. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of PW recently addressed this issue. The article isn't available online, but I've excerpted it below. She starts out by saying that Scholastic's enormous print run for the new Harry Potter (10.8 million) is important both because of its size and because it is accurate: The fact that Scholastic's number is a real one is interesting to the because it suggests that publishing ways are changing a bit. It used to be that the routine inflation of first-printing figures was one of the only ways a publisher could signal enthusiasm to booksellers and the press. "We really, really like this book," a first printing announcement of 100,000 would say. "We have high hopes for it." Never mind that the "real" first printing was probably closer to 20,000; we all nudge-nudged and wink-winked and hoped that the buzz would inspire retailers and consumers to pay more attention. Maybe the publisher would eventually print and sell that 100,000--and if not, at least they weren't going to be left with 80,000 returns.But with a book like a Harry Potter, you don't have to do that wishful-thinking kind of promotion: the marketplace (and, to some extent, the story-hungry press that begins tracking a big book like this months in advance) has already done it for you. You don't have to tap-dance, you don't have to inflate, you don't have to fudge the numbers.With smaller books, of course, publishers still do a fair amount of fibbing--and they continue to do so even though they know that nobody--except, sometimes, the naive first-time author--believes them. That darling, brilliant, moving debut novel you're going to love supposedly shipped 50,000? Get real: everybody knows it was probably closer to 15,000.
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Ask a Book Question: The 54th in a Series (Hunting for Short Stories)

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May 23, 2007 | 11 books mentioned 1 2 min read
"Troubled in Tacoma" writes in with this plea:I find myself becoming increasingly upset about the fact that I can't figure out where someone is publishing their new short stories. For example, just today I came across George Saunders' new story, "Puppy" in the New Yorker. I was happy that I was able to come across it, but I was also upset by the fact that I came across it by sheer luck. I would love to know where and when writers are publishing. The best I do now is check out the latest issues of the literary journals and magazines that publish short stories. I also try to find writers' websites to see if they post when they are publishing. I have also emailed writers a few times and asked them directly (I emailed Tom Kealey at one point to ask when his short story "Coyote Thieves" was coming out. He responded to me quickly and graciously.) I am all out of other ideas. I was hoping you might have some more advice. Maybe you know some websites that track when and where writers publish? I know you had a similar question about five months ago concerning book tours. I really wish there was something called IWDB (Internet Writers Database). I would join immediately. I would buy a lifetime subscription.I would, too. Unfortunately, as with many other aspects of the literary world, the ecosystem of literary magazines is hopelessly decentralized. Making matters worse, literary magazines tend to have very short lifespans. Beyond the bigger name magazines, it's hard to even know what's out there. To the best of my knowledge, there are various library indexes that track stories and reference sites, like The Locus Index to Science Fiction, devoted to genre stories, but as far as I know, none of these would afford a reader a forward-looking view of what is coming out from various writers. (If there are librarians or readers out there who are better informed on the topic, please share your advice in the comments.)Beyond that, your makeshift efforts are probably the best bet. What I would do if I were you is identify the magazines and writers I'd like to track. Many will have mailing lists that will notify members of upcoming publications, others might have regularly updated sites with RSS feeds that you might subscribe to (here's how). In this way, you should be able to impose a little order on the helter skelter world of short stories to learn about new stories via email and RSS.Anybody else have ideas?
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Ask a Book Question: The Fifteenth in a Series (The Screenwriter as Main Character)

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March 29, 2004 | 11 books mentioned 2 min read
Sara wrote in looking for a specific Hollywood-related novel:I found a link to your site about books relating to Hollywood. I need to buy a gift and can't remember the title of a recently published fiction book about screenwriting and Hollywood... wondered if you could steer me in the right direction. Interesting site; glad to have found it through google.Glad you found The Millions, Sara. After I received Sara's question, I immediately thought of a new novel by David Freeman called It's All True (an exchange of emails confirmed that this was correct) because the book store where I work had just hosted a signing of his new book. Freeman is a "reformed screenwriter," and his novel about an aging world-weary scribe has been better received than most novels that use Hollywood as a backdrop. The question made me wonder if there are any other notable novels with screenwriter protagonists. I feel like I'm probably missing some notable titles, but I was able to find a couple that sound interesting. Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood. Here's the description: "Originally published in 1945, Prater Violet is a stingingly satirical novel about the film industry. It centers around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features the vivid portraits of imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter -- the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood." The other one that caught my eye is a later work by Ray Bradbury called Death Is a Lonely Business. It is an interesting foray into noir with a supernatural twist. I also, in thinking about this question, couldn't help but recall one of my all time favorite movies, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard about a struggling screenwriter who becomes the kept man of an aging, and increasingly delusional, Hollywood starlet.
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