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Author: Another Chicago Magazine
The stories in this collection are varied in narrative voices but uniform in the quality of the telling, review editor Patrick Parks writes.
As children under Nixon and teens under Reagan, first-wave Generation Xers like myself have spent our lives watching the rout of the political left from power. Progressive reforms from the New Deal and Great Society were dismantled piecemeal to enrich a profiteering few.
I want something in return for telling you my story. I want you to remember me. I want you to say that I was a capable man.
Our father was a design engineer whose best invention was figuring out how to disappear.
Actually, don’t bother measuring. The audience won’t know how to taste for the right textures and flavors anyway. It only matters to them that it’s an authentic recipe. The only recipe that your abuela—your last known living relative and the only brown person responsible for teaching you culture—gave you.
“He was the president of Quordoba from the early fifties until 1981, when he was deposed,” said Jean. “Of course, he was just a puppet, Alberto Machano held all of the power.”
Surely, this was a cry for help. Generally, the Governors wanted the staff to stay out of the lives of passengers. There were some things going on that passengers wanted to believe nobody noticed. There were couples swapping partners, both with and without the knowledge and consent of the people they’d arrived with. There were orgies with all kinds of drugs, especially among the senior citizens.
“With therapists like this, who needs parents?” reviewer Natania Rosenfeld asks.
It’s the last corner of paradise, here, evaporating like spit on a hot sidewalk.
Oak Woods Cemetery is located in the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Grand Crossing, and the Confederate Monument towers over the gravesite of the Chicagoan suffragist and anti-lynching activist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, a former slave.
After a moment of ‘studying,’ Horsecollar said, “That’s a mighty iffy saying of Lincoln’s, but it makes a lot of sense.” He slightly nodded, but I wasn’t at all sure we understood one another.
“I was in the convent at the time. I knew that I was lesbian. I was twenty-six. I was in a new program that allowed us more latitude than your ordinary canonical novice has. I had heard about, probably read an article in the newspaper, about this uprising, and it’s as if it drew me – not the riot, but the act of rebelling,” Ginny Apuzzo tells Tamika Thompson.
“The singer experienced considerable challenges during [the 1980s] : On the positive side, she recaptured the wide public’s attention with her hit 1985 album “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” But she also lost her father, C.L. Franklin, in 1984 after a 1979 gunshot put him in a five-year coma,” music critic Aaron Cohen writes.
The professor should have burned the letters. He had no right to give them to a stranger.
In December 1989 in Romania, the crowds spilling into the streets chanted: ‘We will die and we will be free!’
“In this breathtaking book, Tim Mackintosh-Smith takes us through 3,000 years of Arab history. The unifier is not, as one might guess, Islam,” Richard Wirick writes in his book review.
Now, I sometimes want to go back to that time and say, “Goddammit, kid, what the hell is wrong with you? You don’t seek comfort in the same hands that dangled you off a ledge; you always keep your back up when around a person who’s low enough to attack you from behind; and, if someone cuts off a chunk of your flesh, you stay away. “
I should note, as a white person among the white majority of Americans, that white people need to be more reminded of this history because it’s easier for white people to ignore that history.
African American children have to be educated about contemporary racism because they are still victims of it. Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old kid in Cleveland, can be shot and killed by the police because he intimidated those police even though he was a child.
Bike riders get a chance to see the sites of the 1919 Chicago riots.
I asked why I was being taken aside. A woman in uniform and gloves told me I had to be screened for bomb paraphernalia.
“Do you speak English?” she asked me. This was after I had asked her why I was being taken aside, in perfect English.
I can’t conceptualize the poverty. None of us can. How do you make something of yourself in a new country when you came here with nothing?? When you’ve been starving for years in your own country and come here to a land with so much food, so much sweet smelling, fattening, beautiful food … and you with no money to buy it.
In the book, a Dakota “spirit” reminds Mary Todd Lincoln that despite Abe’s mainstream legacy as the hero who ended slavery, “Lincoln’s actual record on racial equality is fraught with violence and oppression,” Sarah Sorensen writers.
After a while, I started to think she might fall for me. I thought she might leave her husband and come live with me in my small one-bedroom along the river. We’d find our own space eventually, maybe get a dog. It would be hard at first—I’d have to adjust to her working all the time, but we’d make it through.
