“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.”
(fiction)
Tag: Another Chicago Magazine
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.
(fiction)
“With therapists like this, who needs parents?” reviewer Natania Rosenfeld asks.
(review)
We can’t all be like Lotta Tornberg, environmental crusader. I, for one, never had her strength and confidence, her resilient spirit. She remained optimistic to the end, certain that her peaceful protests, with the speeches and marches and sit-ins, would actually make a difference.
(fiction)
It’s the last corner of paradise, here, evaporating like spit on a hot sidewalk.
(nonfiction)
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.
(nonfiction)
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.
(fiction)
Red’s may not have been nice, but it was ours.
(fiction)
I didn’t used to tell the ski jumpers about the time they have to endure at the top, but in the more than thirty years I’ve worked at the Lake Placid Olympic Jumping Complex—meeting the competitors at the base of the K-120 long jump and directing them to the start—I’ve come to realize that it’s better to get this information on the table immediately. Otherwise, they grow restless. We all do. And that’s when the real accidents happen.
(fiction)
The professor should have burned the letters. He had no right to give them to a stranger.
(nonfiction)
In December 1989 in Romania, the crowds spilling into the streets chanted: “We will die and we will be free!”
(nonfiction)
“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.
(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. ”
(nonfiction)
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.
(nonfiction)
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.
(fiction)
Almost seventy years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and while the Hong Kong protests continue, Richard Wirick looks back at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the violent government crackdown.
(nonfiction)
The bid-whist-playing, gin-drinking, chit’lin-cooking, barbecuing, party-loving Pattersons. That was Mama’s family–loud, boisterous and slightly disreputable. Miss Jonita declared them “country,” though the Pattersons had been established in Chicago a good half-century before Miss Jonita’s people came Up North, or as Black folks ironically deemed it, “Up South” from Arkansas.
“It is, in so many ways, a novel about waiting. Lara waits to become an adult. The artists wait for the boat of their artwork to arrive in Mexico from Germany. They wait to feel inspired. Time is at once abundant, and yet, as concentration camp survivor, Konrad, is infinitely aware, terrifyingly brief,” Sarah Sorensen writes.
(review)
It becomes increasingly clear, then, that the government does not intend to use its army as an institution of pure militaristic purpose. If it did, then it would have focused on quality over quantity
(nonfiction)
I glare at the construction crews. I search for where they’ve hidden the dynamite. They don’t know that I’m in the warehouse. I keep myself hidden. I’d like to sneak in and light it off, watch the fireworks. I imagine Rowan watching, too, knowing that it’s me.
(fiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 