Journalism used to be prix fixe. You paid one price for your morning paper and everything came with it: news, sports, stock tables, and comic strips. Culture, scandal, and punditry.
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“Literature is another form of news,” she tells me, “and with fewer and fewer newspapers, books are taking up the cause of educating people and enlightening them.” In her view, Printers Row has two big jobs to do. “We need to offer critical appraisal of new books,” she says. “I also think it’s important to inspire people to read widely and encounter new authors and ideas—to feel invested and follow literature as they would follow news, to think of authors as people to follow.”
On April 1, Printers Row published what Taylor considers a “perfect feature story.” The Tribune’s Mary Schmich wrote about Clare Cavanagh, a professor of Slavic languages at Northwestern and the translator, from Polish into English, of the late poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won a Nobel Prize in 1996.
“One thing I didn’t expect to be as popular as it is is the fiction insert,” Taylor continues. When the Tribune stopped publishing the winners of its annual Nelson Algren Awards competition, it built up a stockpile of unprinted short stories, and Printers Row gives Taylor a chance to tap it. “Even the 2011 winner, ‘Clover,’ by Billy Lombardo hadn’t been printed,” she says. “I love this contest. It’s completely blind. The judges never see the names. So a famous writer or somebody just starting out—it’s an even playing field.”
We have a BAT winner!
The last night of Major League Baseball’s 2011 regular season will long be recalled as one of the most dramatic in the national pastime’s history—two wild card playoff positions determined by four games, three of them decided by one run, two in extra innings. But far more hung in the balance than just a couple of postseason berths. To the baseball writers of Chicago, virtual immortality was at stake.
Ginnetti was in good company. Eleven of the 12 Golden BAT contenders picked at least one of those two teams to make the playoffs, and seven picked both. Only Wittenmyer didn’t think either one would make the playoffs. He was wrong almost all year long, but at the wire he was right.
