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With the overwhelming array of events scheduled for ALA’s upcoming annual conference in Chicago, we wouldn’t blame you if you just couldn’t decide where to begin. Need some suggestions? How about taking in a few of the events where Booklist editors serve as judges, moderators, interviewers, or organizers? From award ceremonies to in-booth chats, we’ve never [...]

Gain valuable publishing experience by becoming an intern for Booklist Publications in Chicago. For over a century, Booklist has helped more readers find more titles than any other publication. Published by the American Library Association, Booklist delivers over 8,000 recommended-only reviews of books, audiobooks, reference sources, videos, and DVDs each year. Spotlight issues provide coverage [...]

Booklist editors will have a strong presence at this weekend’s Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest. (Still shorthanded by most Chicagoans as “Printers Row.”) If you’re in town, we hope to see you there! (For your convenience, Booklisters are in boldface.) SATURDAY 11:45 a.m. “Young Adult Fiction: Young and Restless,” with Stephanie Hemphill, John Coy, Daniel Kraus, [...]

Summer is the season for exploration and discovery, and readers of all ages, interests, and tastes would love to visit the American Writers Museum—if only such a place existed. Although we have national museums celebrating the luminaries of baseball, rock and roll, the visual arts, various ethnic traditions, and science and technology, to categorize but [...]

Last night, I attended the annual awards banquet of the venerable Society of Midland Authors. It was a modest crowd but a truly enjoyable evening—being in the company of people who value books and authors so highly has a way of raising my spirits. Master of ceremonies and prolific author Jay Bonansinga kept things light as [...]

Here at Booklist, we’re well-established bookworms. I count myself among the best of them, as evidenced by the teetering pile of books on my nightstand, on my coffee table, and on the floor in front of my overflowing bookshelf. But when I ventured into The Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2 for those in the [...]

If you have anything remotely to do with kids’ lit in Chicago, get your butt over to the Harold Washington branch of the Chicago Public Library on Wednesday, November 16, from 6 to 8pm in the Pritzer Auditorium, to experience the madness that is the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, the first in what is planned [...]

This year’s Chicago Tribune Book Prizes were awarded this weekend at the Chicago Humanities Festival. The Literary Prize went to Stephen Sondheim, renowned musical theater lyricist. The Heartland Prize, given to one nonfiction and one fiction author, awards works “embodying the spirit of the nation’s heartland.” Here are the winners! Freedom By Jonathan Franzen The [...]

Step one, read Saul Bellow’s lengthy masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March. That is this fall’s selection for One Book, One Chicago, the 10th anniversary of the Chicago Public Library program. I read Augie March years ago, and was amazed to find that I remembered most vividly the sections set in Mexico, and recalled little [...]

Some fifty years and nearly twenty miles from the site of operation of the notorious Chicago gang the Almighty Black P Stone Nation, nearly sixty people gathered recently to discuss the book of same title that examines the rise and fall of that gang and its leader. The setting was the main library in Oak [...]