Last April the author Kim Brooks had a book launch party in Andersonville for her novel The Houseguest. There was a reading at Women & Children First and then drinks up the street at the Brixton, where people stayed chatting about books until 1 AM. Brooks and three other local writers, Zoe Zolbrod, Rebecca Makkai, and Aleksandar Hemon, wondered if there was a way to replicate the energy of that night and generate more interest in the city’s literary community....

As always, I’ll be rooting for the Saint Louis Cardinals in their coming series with the Cubs. But this time around I have a queasy feeling. Unlike other Cubs teams that found themselves in the playoffs, this 2015 team isn’t there by accident. The Cardinals won most of their 100 games early in the year; the Cubs won most of their 97—now 98—in the second half. They might be the best team in the majors....

In April, as part of the Frequency Series I book at Constellation, I had the pleasure of presenting the Chicago debut of Nordic Affect, a remarkable quartet from Iceland who perform contemporary music on Baroque instruments—though admittedly you’re only likely to notice anything unusual about the instrumentation when Gudrun Óskarsdóttir plays harpsichord. Nordic Affect’s repertoire consists of all-new work written for the ensemble by other Icelandic composers, many of them women (like all four members of the group)....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Mayor Rahm Emanuel swears the Lucas Museum won’t cost taxpayers a cent. We might want to ask a few questions anyway. Soon after George Lucas gave Mayor Emanuel the thumbs-up, the mayor’s press office issued one of its classic good-news press releases. And Jorge Ramirez, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, said: “This is a major win for Chicago and our workers.” Actually, the mayor has released almost no details about this project....

Charity Hope Valentine, the sweet, psychologically wounded, eternally hopeful taxi dancer at the center of this 1966 Tony Award-winning musical, originally directed and choreographed on Broadway by Bob Fosse, is a hard character to get right. Play her too soft and she seems like a dope and pushover (she seems to have spent her life falling for lazy louts, like the guy at the start of the musical who takes her purse and pushes her into the lagoon in Central Park)....

This haunting adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin (1867) has good performances from Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis) and Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter franchise). But it’s most remarkable as a pairing of two inspired actresses with four decades separating them: 25-year-old Elizabeth Olsen, the bewitching star of Martha Marcy May Marlene, and 64-year-old Jessica Lange, who made her screen debut in King Kong (1976) and for the next decade or so played the sort of smart, sexy blonds that are now Olsen’s specialty....

Michael Gebert Karen Herold in the entry of Studio K, which serves to show some of the textures she likes to use in her restaurant projects We’re close to the point of believing in an auteur theory of restaurants, in which they spring fully formed from the heads of chefs, so maybe it’s time to remind ourselves that there are also restaurant owners (who are like producers) and other kinds of professionals involved in our total experience as diners....

Creepin’ Comedy troupes have come a long way from shouted one-word audience suggestions to conjure inspiration for improv sets. Nowadays, half the game is coming up with clever jumping-off points based on live interviews or found material to inform truly original, in-the-moment premises. Under the Gun Theater has made that something of a specialty over the years, finding great gags in sources from board games to pop culture franchises to remaindered books....

Virginia trio Pontiak—brothers Jennings, Van, and Lain Carney—have spent years developing and refining a particular strain of groove-based hard rock, their indelible, fuzzed-out guitar riffs cycling hypnotically to summon a levitating power. Yet unlike so many bands purveying a similar stoner-rock sound—viscous, flanged guitar solos uncoiling luxuriantly but rudely over rhythms worthy of gentle headbanging—this trio construct their work around the voice. On their new album Dialectic of Ignorance (Thrill Jockey) the Carneys reveal a heightened ability to sing chantlike melodies with measured, beguiling grace....

At a recent performance at the Laugh Factory, stand-up Carly Ballerini got onstage and yelled out, “Is anybody here gay?” No one in the crowded room responded. But Ballerini persevered, and she put on a set filled with jokes about her bisexuality. Often audiences think she’s straight, she says, so she needs to pronounce her queerness right away. As an alternative, she wanted to create a safe and celebratory space where performers are assumed to be queer....

In 1988, Reader staff writer Harold Henderson wrote a memorable 7,300-word cover story on tiny, financially strapped Shimer College. It was a happy thing just to know that a place as unlikely as Shimer—which, eschewing textbooks and lectures, assigned only primary texts, taught through discussion, and admitted promising students without ACT scores or high school degrees—could exist. Now there’s been a final move: when the fall term opens, on September 11, Shimer students will be trekking out to Naperville, where they’ll attend the Shimer School of Great Books at North Central College....

Q: I’m a 62-year-old woman. I was married for 33 years and left five years ago. We hadn’t gotten along for years, but he never stopped wanting or valuing me for sex—in spite of treating me like a household appliance and cheating on me regularly. Not long after the marriage ended, I met a guy online (my same age) who ticked nearly every box on my partner checklist—one of which was an ongoing interest in maintaining sexual relations....

The David Foster Wallace Industrial Complex that’s sprung up in the seven years since his suicide has birthed an unlikely new film out this month. Called The End of the Tour, it’s based on writer David Lipsky’s memoir Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. It stars Jason Segel as the late author and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky, who was sent by Rolling Stone to profile Wallace in 1996 as the late novelist promoted Infinite Jest....

This fall the Hyde Park Art Center celebrates its 75th birthday. That’s an advanced age for an arts organization, but HPAC’s administrators and curators hope it’s still in the middle of its life. Its latest exhibit, “The Chicago Effect: Redefining the Middle,” considers the idea of middleness in terms of age, geography—Chicago is, after all, in the middle of the country—and in other, more metaphorical ways. It’s also a tribute to the way the arts are practiced here, particularly at places like HPAC, which is neither the largest and richest art center and gallery in the city nor the smallest and poorest but—you guessed it—in the middle....

To test what I call the Chris K. theory of pothole politics, I’ve taken to the streets, riding my bike up Ravenswood Avenue through Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s very own 47th Ward. I suppose our streets aren’t as bad as some unpaved country roads in an impoverished third world county. “I love Scott for his independence,” Chris said. “But I guess we pay for it.” It’s time to set this straight. The truth is that the suck-ups aren’t able to keep their streets in any better shape than the independents....

Sergei Bachlakov Jessie, Zack, A.C., Lisa, Kelly, and Screech versions 2.0 Even among not-terribly-avid viewers of the terribly unfunny late-80s teen sitcom Saved by the Bell, it’s common knowledge that the episode when Jessie Spano becomes addicted to caffeine pills was the show’s landmark moment. The 20-second clip of a manic Elizabeth Berkley straining every acting muscle in her body—a sort of thespian gusto we wouldn’t see again until the pool-sex scene in Showgirls—and wailing “I’m so excited....

Editor’s note: Michael Patrick Thornton has been replaced for the final two weeks of the run by fellow Gift ensemble member Gabriel Franken. So it’s interesting to see how Pakistani-American actor Kareem Bandealy handles the title role in Gift Theatre’s gutsy new modern-dress Othello, directed by Jonathan Berry. Yet as Iago’s insinuations take hold, Bandealy’s increasingly disoriented Moor reverts to behaviors that seem to well up from some suppressed part of him....

Angaleena Presley is probably the least-known member of brash all-star country trio the Pistol Annies, where she’s flanked by Miranda Lambert and Ashley Monroe, but judging from the release of her second solo album, Wrangled (Mining Light Music/Thirty Tigers), she might ultimately emerge as the most talented. She wrote or cowrote every tune, and follows the same no-bullshit template as her more famous cohorts. On “Groundswell” Presley rejects the suffocating rules of Nashville and laments the sheer grind (“It’s a rainy night in Georgia / And I’m praying that the T-shirts and records will sell”), while on the title track she refuses patriarchal prescriptions over an irresistible country-soul melody (“The girls down at church can go to hell / Ironing shirts and keeping babies quiet / Ain’t no life, it’s a live-in jail”)....

Several years ago, Peter Nickeas had to make a big career decision: landscaping or journalism? He chose the latter, to the detriment of many lawns in suburban Addison, where Nickeas ran Green Pete’s Lawn Care, and to the general betterment of Chicago crime reporting. As one of the Tribune‘s overnight “violence and mayhem” newshounds, the 28-year-old works 10 PM till 8 AM four nights a week. During at least one of those grueling graveyard shifts—which demand a little writing and lots of driving to crime scenes—he’ll daydream about the safe, pastoral monotony of mowing grass....

Erica Fletcher Oneida This is the week leading into Lollapalooza, so preparty shows are popping up like crazy. On Wed 7/30, there’s Courtney Barnett at Schubas, Twin Shadow at Metro, and Interpol at House of Blues. If Lolla bands aren’t your thing, there are bunch of other great shows to catch during the first half of the week. Long-running New York experimental act Oneida comes to Empty Bottle on Wednesday....