Art Fox, whose photograph of a man carrying a ladder was chosen as the cover of Chicago Quarterly Review 2009, has a beautiful photography exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center titled ‘Walls.’ Don’t miss it if you’re in the Chicago area!

Next week Northwestern University’s Annual Writer’s Festival commences.  While writing workshops are open only to Northwestern students, author readings as well as a guided discussion by writers Brian Bouldrey, Rachel Webster, and Eula Biss are open to the public.

New to the Festival this year is author David Shields, whose controversial book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has been heralded by James Wood of The New Yorker as “highly- problematic” and “imprecise” and by Chuck Klosterman as what “might be the most intense, thought- accelerating book of the last 10 years”.  Shields is also the author of New York Times Bestseller The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead.  In his most recent anthology The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death twenty writers were asked to address the concept of death. Publishers Weekly names the result “a collection of extraordinary essays […].”

The festival begins on Tuesday April 12^th at 5:30pm with a reading by Nami Mun, author of Miles from Nowhere.  Mun was named Best New Novelist by Chicago Magazine in 2009.  All public events take place at the Hilton Orrington of Evanston, Illinois.  Shields’ reading on April 14^th at 5:30pm will conclude the festival.  You can read more about the conference and its authors here.

We’re very excited to announce the release of Senior Editor Syed Afzal Haider’s new novel, To Be With Her (Weavers Press). To mark the release of the novel, and the release of CQR 2010, readings will be held at the Booksmith in San Francisco on Thursday, November 11, 2010; and the Capitola Book Cafe on Monday, November 15, 2010 in Santa Cruz, California. Join us for this joint celebration which will feature Haider along with CQR contributors Timothy Crandle, Lynn Martin, Roberta Montgomery, Peter Sheehy, Don Skiles and Laura Wine Paster in San Francisco; John Chandler, Caitlyn He, Vanessa Hemingway, and Randy Splitter in Capitola.

We’ll be celebrating the upcoming release of our 2010 issue of Chicago Quarterly Review with two West Coast readings, one in San Francisco on Thursday, November 11 at the Booksmith and the other in Santa Cruz at the Capitola Book Cafe on Monday, November 15.  This issue of CQR is our most ambitious ever. We’re thrilled that we’ve been able to give space to twenty-nine excellent writers. If you live in the Bay Area we hope very much you’ll be able to join us.

We’d like to dedicate this 2010 issue of CQR to Mark Cullison, our dear friend and dedicated editor who died suddenly at his home this fall. Mark was a talented playwright, a sensitive and thoughtful editor, a great friend to many people, and above all a devoted husband and loving father to his two children.

Clara Sereni, Italian writer, journalist, translator and former Deputy Mayor of the City of Perugia, read from her book Casalinghitudine at the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago in early November 2009.  Casalinghitudine, (Keeping House: A Novel in Recipes), was recently translated into English by Giovanna Miceli-Jeffries and Susan Briziarelli, and published by the SUNY University Press Women Writers in Translation Series.

As Miceli-Jeffries writes in her introduction, “There is at least one recipe for every significant character that takes hold of the memory and the imagination of both the narrator and reader…”

Read more…