Hachette Book Group Despite what the cover looks like, this is not a sweet and whimsical book, and thank goodness for that. If you’re lucky, this summer you’re going to have a long plane ride or a few long afternoons beside a large body of water, and you’re going to need a book to keep you company. If you’re less lucky, you’re going to log hours riding on the el with other hot, smelly commuters and loud, drunk baseball fans, and you’re going to need a book not just for company, but for distraction....

[Editor’s note: This post was taken off-line shortly after it was originally published on May 17. It has been amended and republished to correct factual errors and to include additional information, sourcing, and reporting.] Asked about the fate of the Reader on Thursday, Sun-Times editor and publisher Jim Kirk offered the following statement via e-mail: In February 2016, Ferro left the Sun-Times to oversee the company that publishes its longtime competitor....

Even during the most tumultuous times in her life, Dorothy Day would wake up early every morning and spend several hours drinking coffee and reading the psalms. I am not one for psalms, but in these past tumultuous weeks, I have found comfort in reading about Day, specifically the lovely new biography Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, by her granddaughter Kate Hennessy. If it’s difficult to be a saint, it may be even harder to live with one....

This past January, local singer-songwriter Andrew Smith began taping flyers to lampposts around Chicago. He started in Edgewater and worked his way south to Pilsen, going as far west as Cragin. Smith eventually put up about 300 of them. “My name is Andrew and I make music under the name Jungle Green,” the flyers read, in Smith’s orderly handwriting. “I record music at home with my piano and Panasonic tape recorder....

Everyone in the four-man sketch comedy troupe Asperger’s Are Us is on the autism spectrum, but the group’s material doesn’t raise awareness of Asperger’s syndrome. Nor do they self-deprecate or write what one member, Noah Britton, describes as “Hallmark cards”—maudlin sketches that resemble the sports-underdog film Rudy. The company’s website shows Britton wearing a T-shirt that says I DON’T WANT YOUR PITY. Comedy-savvy audiences, like those in Chicago, understand that troupe names are usually nonsensical....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: This chilling account of the cross-examination of the accuser in the St. Paul’s rape case? —Aimee Levitt Greg Howard on the fight for leadership in the Black Lives Matter movement? —Tal Rosenberg The story of David Denson, the Brewers minor-leaguer who recently came out as gay, the first player in an MLB organization to do so?...

Once upon a time Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike would’ve been considered the stuff of collegiate spoof—a spiritual cousin to events like the University of Chicago’s annual latke vs. hamentaschen debate. Lavishing loads of erudition on a little conceit, the comedy pulls bits from a variety of sources, Aeschylus to Walt Disney, but particularly Anton Chekhov’s four theatrical masterpieces (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and Three Sisters)....

Jeffrey Bivens Beau O’Reilly in Sixty Story Animal Beau O’Reilly turns 60 this year, on May 16. I haven’t done a hard count, but an educated guess would put the number of stories, songs, and plays he’s written in his time at “a lot.” A teacher as well as a founding member of the Curious Theatre Branch—which has so far produced 25 annual Rhinoceros Theater Festivals—O’Reilly has also fostered loads of work by a multitude of his fellow artists....

Regular readers of this space might have noticed my longtime affinity for the music of Brazilian singer, songwriter, and producer Lucas Santtana, one of the most restless and creative contemporary figures from his homeland. I’ve been wanting to write something about his latest album Sobre Noites e Dias (No Format!) since it was released last year, but I held off in hopes that it might get released in the U.S., or at least in the UK....

This week Austin Lunn, mountain-man mastermind of black-metal project Panopticon, completes a trilogy of albums he began three years ago, releasing Autumn Eternal via Bindrune Recordings. The 2012 masterpiece Kentucky started the series, fusing black metal and bluegrass in an arresting homage to the Appalachians—as well as to the courage and suffering of the ordinary people who fought the coal companies despoiling those mountains. Roads to the North, a more orthodox black-metal album, followed in 2014, and Autumn Eternal—which features John Becker of Chicago goth-pop group Vaskula playing violin on two tracks—comes out tomorrow....

Also known as Linda Oh, bassist Linda May Han Oh chose to use her full name with the release of her strong new album Walk Against Wind (Biophilia). (The New York-based musician was born in Malaysia and grew up in Australia, where she was given the name Linda to help her assimilate.) I’m not sure why she decided to make the change now, but I’d venture it’s in part because she’s never been more assured in her musicianship and imagination as a composer, here crafting a sleek collection of probing postbop with a first-class band of cohorts....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, January 17, 2016. Obama grants interviews to local Chicago TV reporters for the first time in his presidency The White House invited five Chicago TV reporters to Washington, D.C., for four-minute interviews with President Barack Obama for the first and last time in his eight-year presidency. The administration didn’t give an interview to Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg and instead let him provide local press pool reports during Obama’s farewell address visit to Chicago....

In a key scene from The Founder, a new drama about the making of McDonald’s, 52-year-old salesman Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) tries to persuade the McDonald brothers, Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac (John Carroll Lynch), to let him franchise their revolutionary fast-food business across the nation. The brothers are small-time operators, content with their thriving restaurant in San Bernardino, California, but Kroc, an Arlington Heights entrepreneur who’s been chasing business opportunities all his life, has a special feeling about McDonald’s....

Five years ago Chicago’s brewpub scene was as quiet as its brewery scene—and since then it’s grown almost as quickly. The original stalwarts—Piece, Goose Island, and Rock Bottom (plus Moonshine, which closed last year)—now have lots of company. Hamburger Mary’s began brewing its own beer in 2009 (the brewery side is now called Andersonville Brewing), followed by the higher-profile Revolution Brewing in 2010 and Haymarket Pub & Brewery in early 2011....

Midway through the first act of Terrence McNally’s 2007 Some Men, a surface-skipping journey along a singularly privileged arc of modern gay history, Michael and Camus connect in an AOL chat room. Amid the cruisy, bitchy chatter they find a deeper bond, at least momentarily. It turns out the last book both men read was the Bible. Michael seems something of a biblical scholar; when Camus mentions the verse that led him to turn to the scriptures—”Son, observe the time and fly from evil”—Michael can instantly cite it....

Trouble in Paradise, a meeting of the minds between tastemaking Chicago label Trouble in Mind Records and North Carolina’s heady Paradise of Bachelors, takes place over the same weekend as Riot Fest, but this intimate Empty Bottle-based festival offers a musical and philosophical opposite to its sprawling counterpart. There’s no nostalgia, overhyped reunions, or overblown egos, just some of the freshest, most innovative, and most interesting indie-rock sounds out there. The distinctive identities of the two labels are represented across the festival, with a mix of artists from both rosters appearing each night....

During his year as a children’s attendant in Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, Mark Dostert loses count of the number of boys he meets who’ve been shot. Eventually their “names, faces, and disfigured flesh patches blur into a single mass of resignation, the boys’ and mine.” Many of Dostert’s fellow attendants are even more cynical about their jobs and about the kids they’re trying to keep in line. They look the other way at abuse by colleagues and cover up incidents with phony reports....

In January 2017, Houston rapper Tobe Nwigwe uploaded a YouTube video called “#getTWISTEDsundays {Chill Bill},” the first in a series in which he freestyles while getting his hair twisted by his girlfriend, Fat (the two got married later that year, and she took his last name as her own). Tobe, a 31-year-old first-generation Nigerian American and former linebacker for the University of North Texas, had released a prolific string of singles, punched up by his raw skill, lyrical craft, and unique charm, but his magnetism is most evident in the #getTWISTEDsundays videos....

The federal government charged Internet activist Aaron Swartz with 13 counts of fraud and other offenses before he committed suicide. The Internet’s Own Boy: the Story of Aaron Swartz isn’t a movie designed to leave audiences ambivalent about its subject. We mourn our martyrs, and we shake a fist at the powers-that-be that drive them to martyrdom. Swartz hanged himself 18 months ago at the age of 26, and director Brian Knappenberger wants that fist shaken....

Deana Lawson’s current exhibition at the Art Institute consists of 14 photographs that, according to the AIC member magazine, are designed to propel dialogue by “investigating black culture and speaking to the ways in which the body can channel personal, social, and political histories.” However, the exhibition lacks cohesion, and largely fails to produce much that is worth more than a passing glance. The photographs vary in style, from live action to staged portraits, from color to black and white, and include found photos as well as originals....