Chicago

Issue of Chicago Reporter magazine focusing mainly on police and the courts, particularly responses to police abuse and hardships endured by ex-offenders (e.g. employment discrimination, Illinois tough-on-crime measures).

Amid the neoliberal transformation of Chicago--which extends capitalist market domination into every sphere, and substitutes competition and consumption for solidarity and social justice--the editors felt an urgent need to reclaim, rebuild, and redefine public space. The publication documents a period of cultural activism in Chicago stretching from 2000 to 2005, and covers various projects and organizations that responded to neoliberal restructuring. Topics include collective infrastructures, protest experiments, gentrification, public housing, and urban planning. (Adapted from introduction.)

"Discover the Windy City that has attracted and nurtured writers, editors, publishers, and book lovers for more than a century. Trace the steps of literary figures who called Chicago home, incorporated cityscapes into their writing, and put a uniquely Chicago stamp on their work."

H. Melt curates this collection of essays (mostly originally online), documenting a critical queer, nonfiction literary voice that is strongly rooted in Chicago. Themes include the need to talk more openly about race, class, and privilege, the power of community support, and the experience of living in Chicago. Builds on the work of Chicago-based queer publications like Chicago IRL, In Our Words, and others. (Adapted from Melt's introduction to the collection.)

This is Cholo magazine, an amalgamation of the people and projects in this city that are so cool, we think you should be cholos with them. (And by cholos, we mean pals.) Gracing the pages of this rag are the mugs of moonshine-makers, guerrilla tour guides, community orgnizers, vertical farmers and punk filmmakers. It's basically DIY porn.

From the back cover: "Over the decades, Catholics in Chicago have earned a reputation for 'prayerful heterodoxy.' That means they pray deeply about their faith and feel empowered and compelled to say what they believe, while respecting and celebrating the unity and diversity that both defines and challenges them. In this slim volume of stories, essays, poems, and passionate personal pleas, more than thirty Chicago Catholics reveal their hopes for the church they love--sometimes ardently, sometimes painfully, but always faithfully....Taken together, their experiences paint a portrait of the Catholicism being lived at this moment in this unique American city." The concept behind the book, written on the eve of Francis Cardinal George's retirement, was to take "snapshots" of the local church for the benefit of the next archbishop (and whoever else might be interested).

Chapbook of poems by H. Melt, documenting their personal experience of surviving Chicago (the "City of Cold Shoulders") as a member of the transqueer community.

The common assumption, at the time this book was written, was that the Chicago Public Library system had been founded in a distinct moment after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, with help from the British. Author Gwladys Spencer argues that by 1871, the founding of CPL was already underway. The book presents a history of CPL up to 1872, and sets it in the greater context of the library movement in Illinois and around the country. (Adapted from introduction.)

From back cover: "...Studs Lonigan has established itself as a classic of the American social novel. Its setting is the South Side of Chicago during the moral chaos of the Prohibition era. Its protagonist, Studs Lonigan, is a young man seeking a destiny he cannot find, leaving behind him only lost ideals and unanswered questions to mark his swift passage from youth to early death. In his frustrated ambitions, his gradual brutalization, and his final failure, Studs emerges as a prototype of the lost and self-alienated American, both product and victim of urban society. The trilogy is, in the words of Philip Allan Friedman, 'a monumental work in the tradition of American literary naturalism...' Alfred Kazin has called Studs Lonigan 'one of the most honest and important works of our time.'"

Color street photography taken in Chicago's Ukrainian Village