Chicago Tribune: Books

If you've ever wondered how childhood experiences impact a novelist's plots and characters, consider this. In December 1951, Judy Blume was in the eighth grade at Hamilton Junior High in Elizabeth, N.J., when a plane crashed in the city limits.

If you've ever wondered how childhood experiences impact a novelist's plots and characters, consider this. In December 1951, Judy Blume was in the eighth grade at Hamilton Junior High in Elizabeth, N.J., when a plane crashed in the city limits.

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (J.K.

Something a little strange, a lot exciting and certainly long overdue is happening in a slew of new mainstream comic books this summer.

"Novelist Discovered After 23 Books" read the headline on a 1983 New York Times feature on Elmore Leonard.

In an interview some years ago with Shenandoah magazine, the Chicago-area writer Rebecca Makkai was having trouble getting her mind around how a selection of her short stories - which range in tone and subject matter from dark and tragic to light and comic - might one day fit together into a cohesive...

Walking past a row of books in a library, 21-year-old aspiring poet Juan Felipe Herrera was stopped short by a title: "Snaps." The book was the debut collection by Victor Hernandez Cruz.

All parents are amateurs. So we turn to the "experts" to answer our questions about vaccinations and sleep schedules and developmental milestones, as well as the more cosmic queries we wrestle with: Will my child be happy?More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Wednesday Martin had a delicious idea: Treat her wealthy Park Avenue neighbors like the subjects of an anthropological expedition. She would learn the unusual folkways of this insular culture and reveal them to a curious world.

Saul Bellow Way is a one-block stretch of West Augusta Boulevard in Humboldt Park, running from Rockwell to Washtenaw, and named, of course, for the Chicago writer, who would have been 100 on June 10.