By The Guild Literary Complex

If urban design is the language of the city, where is the story – and who tells it? In the final reading of a two-part Applied Words series, the Guild Literary Complex invites writers to examine our relationships with the built environment.
“Re-Built” will take place on Saturday, October 19 from 2 – 4 p.m., in the “original” Sears tower at 930 S. Homan Ave, and is free to the public.
The venue, a 14-story brick tower in a Neo-Classical style, was once part of the world’s largest commercial building, a 3.3 million square foot warehouse for the old Sears Roebuck and Company.
Our feature reader, the award-winning playwright and librettist Sandra Seaton, worked her first summer job in the old Sears complex.
Her stories will be woven with the words of Nwaji B. J. Harris and Benjamin van Loon, and a complex narrative of many perspectives will be built “brick by brick.” Young authors from nearby Henry Ford Academy: Power House High will also contribute stories. The program commences with an open mic.

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Posted on September 30, 2013

Plus: Stories Inspired By Thorne Miniatures & Broken Windows

1. Sharks Are Sublime.
“Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and other authors of the Romantic era saw a special emotion in our recognition of nature’s terrifying side, the paradoxical pull of the imagery of pain and danger they called the sublime,” Edward Tenner writes for the Atlantic. “And no creature evokes this sense more vividly than the shark.
“Despite our fears, sharks are among the most negligible threats to human life. As the dust jacket of the award-winning National Geographic contributing photographer Thomas P. Peschak’s new book, Sharks & People: Exploring Our Relationship With the Most Feared Fish in the Sea, points out, fewer than a half dozen humans are killed each year by sharks, while we have been slaughtering 38 million of them annually.”

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Posted on September 26, 2013

Plus: Scrabble For Literacy

1. Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Datebook Volume One 10th Anniversary Edition.
“[A] terrific look at the ‘loose’ work of one of the world’s best living illustrators,” Mark Frauenfelder writes for Boing Boing.
(ENLARGE)

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Posted on September 17, 2013

And Neither Are They

1. Book One.
“The first American book – and one of the most valuable – is coming to town,” the Tribune reports.
“In advance of it being sold at auction, the work known as the “Bay Psalm Book,” printed in 1640, will be on display at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday.”

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Posted on September 10, 2013

More Than 70 Years In The Making

“Brian Dolinar’s new book, The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers, was released this summer, and if the title sounds dated it’s because the book began its long road to publication in the late 1930s but was sidelined by two formidable obstacles – World War II and a rejection letter,” Dawn Turner Trice writes in the Tribune.
“How Dolinar came to complete the book is a story of a nearly decade-long effort to do justice to work started by a team of more than 100 African-American writers hired to document black life and history for one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration programs.

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Posted on September 9, 2013

Plus: Poets Meet Muse

1. Lemony Snicket Does Poetry.
“The September 2013 issue of Poetry magazine features a portfolio of 20 poems selected and annotated by children’s author Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) and illustrated by Caldecott Award-winning artist Chris Raschka.
“The portfolio, entitled Poetry Not Written for Children That Children Might Nevertheless Enjoy, is, according to Snicket, a collection of poems ‘all strange in some way, because all great literature is strange, the way all good slides are slippery.’ Snicket’s portfolio was born out of what might have otherwise been an unfortunate event.

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Posted on September 4, 2013