Fantasy and science fiction readers are naturally open to the unexpected, and they like new takes on old stories. The trick is to bend expectations enough while keeping things believable. My in-house writing library helps me maintain authenticity while pushing the boundaries of my characters to make them fresh and interesting to contemporary audiences. ( […]
The first thing that strikes you about Mia Farrow in Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” now at the Booth, is her voice. Farrow is playing a naïve, rather unfulfilled empty nester named Sharon, who lives in a huge house in Iowa and spends her days dreamily phoning a faraway son. Speech tends to drift out of […]
Alta Nekrosius, 9, a fourth grader at Lincoln School, stands with her copy of the 2024 Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards chapbook during an awards ceremony Sept. 14 at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Alta’s poem, “Mount Eve,” was one of four by Oak Park students […]
Mike Mignola, whose diverse artworks are on display at Philippe Labaune Gallery starting Thursday. “Hell, Ink & Water: The Art of Mike Mignola,” an exhibition at the Philippe Labaune Gallery in Chelsea could be a game changer for Mignola, a comic book artist and writer. “It does open up my world,” he said in a […]
“The Girl Who Became a Rabbit” 2 In our backyard, there is a remembered and reliable fig tree. We watch as the macaques climb the branches like children pulling up their mother’s arms. The fig tree’s head is dark green and slant leafed. The macaques’ fur glows brown in the ease of the sun. The […]
In this intricate debut, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (Hub City Press), Emilie Menzel assembles a new poetics of prose , a modern mythology of moments intimate, haunting, and quotidian. Its twining rhizomatic sections document the history and toll of having a body, of surviving, of loss. Here the poet turned haruspex is equipped […]
