Authors say writing a book is like going on a popular ride at Disneyland. There’s a two-hour wait, followed by about 45 seconds that are pretty exciting. On the other hand, a writer can’t write his own reviews. And a publicist can’t assign them—hard as she might try. “I am always fairly aggressive with the New York Times,” Stephanie Elliott of Wesleyan University Press tells me, “sending galleys and review copies to a variety of columnists and freelancers in addition to sending books to the [Times] Book Review editor....

Back in January I previewed a performance by jazz trio Typical Sisters, a group that includes the Chicago-bred, LA-based guitarist Gregory Uhlmann. He returns to his hometown this week to show off a much different side of his musical personality, found on the lovely, tender singer-songwriter album, Odd Job (Dog Legs Music), he released in February. Uhlmann plays just about everything on the recording, but the delicate vocal harmonies of Cari Stevens and Alina Roitstein and the weightless strings of Lauren Baba and winds player Andrew Conrad add a gorgeous, spectral depth to the performances, accenting Uhlmann’s beautiful melodies with somber, baroque arrangements....

Early on, as with their 2012 seven-inch “Radiation” b/w “Personal Planes,” D.C.’s Priests were propelled by the sheer will to be a raging mass of hell and punk protest. Vocalist Katie Alice Greer writhes and grits her teeth over stiff, stripped-away rhythms and discordant, busted guitar lines that pretend melody before being fed into a baler, shredding any semblance of it. The tracks are all guts and nerve, each threatening to fracture under its own tension like a pane of spider-webbing glass....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: • That CBGB is reopening as a restaurant at Newark Airport? —Robin Amer • Or watch R. Kelly’s contentious interview with HuffPost Live? —Jake Malooley • That Chief Keef’s label, FilmOn, filed a lawsuit against Keef’s associates? —Leor Galil • Or see the New York Times‘s year in pictures? —Robin Amer • Flavorwire’s picks for the best literary criticism of 2015?...

AP Photo/Danny Moloshok Donald Sterling The saga of Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, is like a dog run for our pent-up feelings about racial justice. Whatever strong convictions in that area we might wish we had more occasion to exercise—well, we can turn them loose on Sterling and let them frolic. Whoever these people around him might be, they represent to him the only world that matters....

In its $5.5 million venue on the Mag Mile next door to Water Tower Place, Lookingglass Theatre Company produces big-budget, movement-based spectacles, often adapted from literary sources. “You know, we talk about Chicago as an ensemble town, and we almost always mean it in the Steppenwolf model. And no shade to Steppenwolf,” Paz Brownrigg says, “but we have a tradition in Chicago that predates that—the ensemble practice we’re talking about here, [which] you see dating back to Hull House....

Michael Gebert After watching the ingredients of Sunday Dinner Club‘s cassoulet being prepared Monday morning (see part one here), I returned Tuesday afternoon to Honey Butter Fried Chicken and found that the dining room tables had been rearranged into a single line stretching to the door. Aluminum pans ran down the length of the tables, which amounts to a pretty good slide into third. Michael Gebert Saucisson à l’ail (garlic sausage) Meanwhile, the various trays and bins of meats have been stacked or rolled out in the dining room, and Cikowski gathers the staffers, from both Honey Butter and Sunday Dinner Club, who are helping today....

VENUE All films reviewed here, except for Miss Julie, screen at River East 21, 322 E. Illinois. A half century of CIFF milestones, from Scorsese’s debut to Lee Daniels’s achievement award Read our reviews of 15 revival films screening at CIFF. Read our reviews of CIFF week one. Film festivals are usually front-loaded, with all the best stuff at the beginning. But the “best stuff” isn’t always the best stuff—it’s just the stuff with the biggest names and the loudest buzz....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Lil Peep I haven’t made up my mind about this LA rapper, whose vocals make him sound like a third-stringer for the Used’s Bert McCracken. Pitchfork has called him “the future of emo,” but I’m curious to see how music outlets that have historically been allergic to anything remotely emo will approach him....

Q: I’m a straight 26-year-old man who wants advice on helping my fiancee realize a particular fantasy. We have been dating for three years and are in a happy monogamous relationship. I was always vanilla, but she enjoys rougher sex and light bondage. We’ve incorporated some of this into our sex lives, and we are both happy with how fun it is. She has expressed interest in a rape fantasy. Both of us want to be safe when we do this, and we trust each other completely....

The much-loved 1969 historical novel Patience and Sarah, penned by lesbian writer and activist Alma Routsong under the name Isabel Miller, inspired this chamber opera by composer Paula M. Kimper and librettist Wende Persons, which premiered in 1998 at New York’s Lincoln Center. It’s the story of two small-town women in 1816 Connecticut who fall in love and hatch a plan to travel together as a pioneer couple. Patience White, a genteel “spinster” who lives with her brother and his wife, spends her time painting Bible-themed folk art; the much poorer Sarah Dowling, who dresses like a man while helping her pa out with chores, yearns to leave home and invites Patience to join her....

AP Photos Sportswriters have gone after NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for his tepid response to domestic violence by star Ray Rice—but is he the only one to blame? There are two great literary explorations into the kind of repeated endeavor that gives life purpose even if not always accomplishment. One is Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The other is the nursery rhyme “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Jarrett Bell, USA Today: “In a statement, the NFL again reiterated that it was ‘not aware of anyone in our office who possessed or saw the video before it was made public Monday....

There’s a visual-media sea change happening in Chicago right now. A growing crop of local production companies—focused on creating webseries, short films, and even commercials—is providing new opportunities for people of diverse races, sexualities, and genders. WOTN is hosting a series of workshops and initiatives this spring intended to help women develop their production skills and strengthen their voices in a male-dominated industry. “There’s a camera workshop where we’re going to encourage a bunch of femmes to sit down and learn more of the technical end of the camera,” says Laura Day, WOTN’s creative producer....

Sun-Times Media from WBBM TV In 1999 Alstory Simon confessed to killing two people 17 years earlier. He and his champions now say he’s innocent. If Alstory Simon is innocent of killing two people, it’s despite confessing that he did it, and despite the dramatic 1999 courtroom scene in which Simon, tears in his eyes, told the mother of one victim, “I didn’t mean to hurt her—your daughter never did anything to me....

Hrebejk’s genial sex farce 4Some screened as part of the 2013 European Union Film Festival. Read part one of this interview. As for sex being part of everyday life. . . [chuckles] sure. The way the characters talk about sex has more to do with the screenwriters than the actors, because we rarely improvise those scenes. When Michal Viewegh [a popular novelist who wrote Shameless and 4Some] talks and writes about sex, it’s always with a slight humor and a sense of romance....

Mike Sula A fungal mother-in-law, River Valley Farmer’s Table Maybe you’ve visited the River Valley Ranch and Kitchens farm store in Burlington, Wisconsin, not far from the Illinois border—but if not, that’s too bad, because it’s a wonderland of edible fungi: fresh, pickled, dried, and deployed in soups, salads, spreads, pasta sauces, salsas, and dips. It’s more likely you’ve run across their stands at farmers’ markets all over the city, pretty much every day of the week during the summer....

“I didn’t want my nose broken. I was the only one of my brothers who hadn’t had it broken yet.” That line comes from young Joe Walsh, the narrator of Bill Hillmann’s near-500-page debut novel, The Old Neighborhood, published in April by local outfit Curbside Splendor. Hillmann’s a onetime champion amateur boxer; when he describes an ass whoopin’, you know he knows what he’s talking about. And there’s a whole lot of ass whoopin’ in the old neighborhood....

Shortly after Bonelang dropped Pleasure Palace, an April 2015 EP that levitates as its vocal harmonies recall the effervescence of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the rapid-fire elasticity of Aesop Rock’s Bazooka Tooth, MC Samy.Language told hip-hop site One Throne that the Chicago rap duo’s sound had gelled just “in the last couple months.” Pleasure Palace sounds like it was made by musicians who know each other as well as they know themselves, and it helps that Samy and his bandmate, Matt Bones, spent about six years together playing indie rock before launching Bonelang....

On his debut album, Blkswn (Zero Fatigue/Downtown), Chicago-based rapper Chris Smith Jr. (aka Smino) makes a point of telling you where he came from. “Netflix and Dusse,” a gussied-up track filled with clipped tropical-house beats and come-on raps, ends with a recording of a phone call between Smino and what seems to be his grandfather, who once backed Muddy Waters on bass. “I’m blessed to be able to look and see my history in it though, and just know how I ended up where I’m at,” Smino says....

The world may never catch up to Chicago rapper Vic Spencer—not that he seems to mind. He’s been dependably prolific and undeniably fierce on the mike throughout 2018, starting with January’s Spencer for Higher, a collaboration with UK producer SonnyJim. Since then, he’s dropped three solo albums: June’s Duffle of Gems, August’s A Smile Killed My Demons (which you could only get by sending Spencer $20 via PayPal), and November’s compact Stupid, which he released on the Backcourt label....