Our five picks for readings and lectures
Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne PhillipsScribner (October 15)
A peek into Chicago’s thriving live-lit scene
Junot Diaz and others on what animal they’d be
New blood at the Poetry Foundation
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Quiet Dell isn’t so much a whodunit or a whydunit as a howdunit. Phillips’s account of the investigation and trial is spooky and compelling. Its greatest fault is Emily Thornhill, who was based on Phillips’s mother and has no faults at all. You’d hope for this in the memory of a mother, but not in a fictional character who ought to be as human as the rest of us. —Aimee Levitt
Phillips reads at the Book Stall’s Women Writer’s Luncheon; call 847-446-8880 to RSVP. Thu 10/17, noon, Avli restaurant, 566 Chestnut, Winnetka, thebookstall.com, $30.
Downers Grove resident Janice Deal gave up her career as a librarian to focus on writing. Maybe she misses the stacks. All of the main characters in her debut collection, The Decline of Pigeons, are dealing with some kind of personal tragedy: a deceased spouse, a miscarriage, disfigurement by fire (don’t smoke in bed, kids). These are regular midwestern folks (along with a couple ne’er-done-wells) trying their best to cope with loss.
The only football team I’ve ever loved, aside from the Dillon Panthers of Friday Night Lights, were the 1985 Chicago Bears. This was the team of Ditka and McMahon and Payton and Singletary and the Fridge, the team of “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” with its endearingly amateurish rapping and dancing. And I was a kid in Chicagoland, which had not seen a victorious sports team since the Bears won the NFL championship in 1963. How could I not love them?
George Saunders
