Russell Banks

A great American fiction writer, Russell Banks is the author of many powerful works about individuals and societies in profound conflict, including Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, and The Darling. Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter have both been made into exceptionally fine films. Russell Banks' numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros, a poet and a fiction writer, was born and raised in Chicago, and the city plays a significant role in her work. Her saucy poems are collected in Loose Women and My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Cisnero's first novel, the groundbreaking The House on Mango Street, has been included on countless high school and college required reading lists, sold more than two million copies, and transformed American literature with its uniquely poetic take on that rite of passage known as coming-of-age, urban life, the immigrant experience in general, and that of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in particular. Woman Hollering Creek is a collection of funny, candid, and provocative stories about Mexican American girls and women. The extraordinarily rich and enveloping Caramelo is a many-faceted multigenerational family saga that weaves back and forth between Chicago and Mexico, and the complications of private life and the influence of cultural icons. Cisneros has received numerous prestigious awards, including the American Book Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Cisneros appeared on Open Books in 2003.

Kathryn Davis

Beginning with Labrador, a complex, otherworldly tale of two sisters, Kathryn Davis has cast a spell that has held readers transfixed over the course of six original and affecting novels. The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf tells the story of two women, one a composer working on an opera based on a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. Hell is a blend of mystery and surreal fantasy. The Walking Tour metamorphoses from a literary novel about two couples traveling in Wales into a mystery that stealthily acquires the aura of science fiction. In Versailles, Davis creates a curious form of historical fiction.

Davis traces the great singing web of life and the long-fingered shadow of death, and in The Thin Place, animal and plants are brought to conscious life as she explores the permeable divide between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine. This conversation took place when Kathryn Davis came to Chicago in February 2006.

Stuart Dybek

A quintessential Chicago writer, Stuart Dybek grew up in the working-class neighborhood known as Pilsen, the setting for many of the stories in his celebrated collections, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed with Magellan. A writer preternaturally attuned to both beauty and absurdity, the real and the surreal, Dybek's penetrating vision of Chicago's steely reality and penchant for risk-all romance underlies his exquisitely crafted, urban and down-to-earth, mischievously funny, and ravishing short stories and his poems, which have been collected in Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their Own Ink. A generous teacher and mentor, Dybek inspires and supports many emerging writers. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Poetry, and The Paris Review; Dybek has received many awards, including several O. Henry Prizes, a PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize, and a Whiting Writer's Award.

Jennifer Egan

Egan is both a captivating storyteller and an incisive social observer. Creative and venturesome, she has taken a different approach in each of her fictional works, and all are shaped by her beautifully calibrated lyricism, precise psychology, uncanny insights into cultural trends, and keen satire. Egan is fascinated by the interplay between the world of appearances and the inner realm of feeling and thought, and considers with open-mindedness our longing for transcendence.

This preoccupation with the Wizard-of-Oz-like aspect of existence and our spiritual impulse shaped her accomplished first novel, The Invisible Circus. Emerald City and Other Stories is an outstanding collection of elegant and poignant short stories. In the novel Look at Me, Egan combines a penetrating look at the culture of the image, the fashion industry, and the shift from the industrial age to the information age. Writing before 9/11, Egan anticipated the reality TV craze, Web cams, and YouTube, and presciently imagined a Muslim terrorist in a Midwestern town. In The Keep, a cleverly constructed riff on gothic novels, Egan carries forward her inquiry into our obsession with digital technologies and our sense of connectivity even when we're terribly alone. Jennifer Egan spoke about her work in Chicago in September 2006.

Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon is fascinated with deception and contradiction, religion and art, family secrets and social upheavals. A consummate short story writer, Gordon is renowned for her potent and risky novels, including Final Payments, The Other Side, The Rest of Life, Spending, and Pearl. Mary Gordon has also written a brief life of Joan of Arc, and three galvanizing memoirs notable for their candor, artistry, and unsettling disclosures: The Shadow Man, Seeing Through Places, and Circling My Mother.

Jane Hamilton

Perhaps living and working on a Wisconsin apple orchard inspires Jane Hamilton to take risks in her fiction. Nature, after all, is a grand experiment in the reconciliation of extremes as years of human effort can be erased in a matter of hours while life persists in the harshest and most volatile of circumstances. In each of her five novels, she orchestrates seasons of suffering and amplitude, harrowing storms and epic droughts as she weighs the good and the bad in the repertoire of human behavior. Lyrical yet earthy, tragic yet droll, her complex tales of human quests for understanding are seeded in the stoic Midwest and rooted in extended families. Jane Hamilton has been an Oprah Book Club twice for her first two novels, The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World. The author of The Short History of a Prince, Disobedience, and When Madeline Was Young, Hamilton has also been awarded the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Jane Hamilton appeared on Open Books in September 2006.

Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid is a persistently autobiographical writer whether she's writing about family, colonialism, or gardening, and her work is charged with a sense of urgency as she seeks understanding of the past and of how it shapes the present. Born Elaine Potter Richardson in Antigua, came to the U.S., changed her name, and became a staff writer for The New Yorker (many of her essays are collected in Talk Stories). Kincaid's fiction debut was the impressionistic story collection At the Bottom of the River. Annie John was her first novel, and the dawning of her signature voice with its deft interweaving of inner and outer realms, its exacting yet poetically resonant descriptions, and its incantatory musicality and stream of consciousness. Other novels followed, including the intense and cathartic expression in The Autobiography of My Mother and Mr. Potter. Kincaid also writes potent and distinctive nonfiction, including My Brother and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. Jamaica Kincaid spoke on Open Books in 2002.

John McNally

The author of a short story collection, Troublemakers, John McNally proved himself to be a smart and nimble comedic novelist in The Book of Ralph, a marvelously inventive coming-of-age story set in Burbank, Illinois, a seedy old suburb south of Chicago. In his second satiric tale of Midwest angst, America's Report Card, an even more mordantly hilarious and right-on tale, McNally returns to Burbank to tell the story of Jainey O'Sullivan. On the verge of turning 18, she is burdened with a family beyond dysfunctional. McNally's flair for the absurd, poker-face humor, and hilarious critique of the fear-mongering Bush years, are matched by his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, sure pacing, and tender regard for humankind.

A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, McNally is also a dynamic anthologist. He has created High Infidelity: 24 Great Short Stories About Adultery, Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories, Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by Writers of Color, The Student Body: Short Stories about College Students and Professors, and When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School . John McNally appeared on Open Books in Chicago in July 2006.

Joe Meno

Comedic, imaginative, empathic, and romantic, Chicago writer Joe Meno is particularly attuned to the intelligence and sorrows of children, and to the ways childhood haunts our adult lives. And as different as each of his works are--from his short story collection Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir to his novels Tender as Hellfire, How the Hula Girl Sings, Hairstyles of the Damned, and the truly remarkable The Boy Detective Fails -- Meno is consistently compassionate in his approach to loneliness and loss, the poignancy of our effort to combat chaos with reason, and the terror of realizing that the everyday world is full of menace. And yet, Meno's characters discover that there is power in kindness, intelligence, and persistence.

Meno, a recipient of the Nelson Algren Award and the Society for Midland Author Award, teaches in the Fiction Department at Columbia College Chicago. Joe Meno was a guest on Open Books in September 2004.

Lydia Millet

The bewitchment of Millet's unusual fiction derives from its fusing of lyrical realism with precisely rendered far-outness, her heightened social conscience, and her gift for cloaking moral and spiritual inquiries within inventive plotlines and the psyches of deep-feeling characters. My Happy Life (2002), winner of the PEN-USA Award for Fiction, is a harrowing yet poetic tale of one woman's suffering and transcendence. In Everyone's Pretty (2005), a pornographer, his pious sister, a midget, a math prodigy, a bombshell, and a Christian Scientist ponder sex, God, and the search for meaning. Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is a brilliant and madcap novel about the collision between science and faith and the dark discovery that forever altered life on earth, the making of the atomic bomb. How the Dead Dream is a haunting novel about suffering of animals as humankind becomes the dominant force on the planet and we enter an age of extinction. A profoundly humanist and satirical writer in the constellation that includes Twain, Vonnegut, Murakami, and DeLillo, Millet is a write ascending.

Harry Mark Petrakis

Harry Mark Petrakis is a quintessential Chicago storyteller, one of the most compelling and venerable writers ever to walk this blustery city's streets and look into the heart of its struggling and blessed citizens. The author of nine novels, including A Dream of Kings, which was made into a film starring Anthony Quinn, The Hour of the Bell, Nick the Greek, Days of Vengeance, Twilight of the Ice, The Orchards of Ithaca, Petrakis has also written short story collections, including the must-have Collected Stories and his most recent, Legends of Glory and Other Stories. Petrakis is also a memoirist and essayist; his collections include the wonderfully candid and very moving Tales of the Heart.

A legend and an inspiration to many, a man of warmth and wisdom, Harry Mark Petrakis has seen many changes in life and literature. He appeared on Open Books in March 2004.

Susan Straight

Susan Straight writes empathic and dramatic fiction about family, race, class, immigration, men and women, and the long shadow of slavery. She is the author of six powerful novels: Aquaboogie, I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, Blacker than a Thousand Midnights, The Gettin' Place, Highwire Moon, a National Book Award Finalist, and A Million Nightingales, a lyrical historical novels and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards. Straight is also a superlative essayist and writes commentary for National Public Radio. The recipient of a Lannan Foundation Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, her lifelong hometown. Susan Straight spoke on Open Books in May 2006. Read an excerpt of the transcript of her interview.

Jean Thompson

Heartland writer Jean Thompson forges adept and imaginative tragicomedy fueled by her fascination with just how awry things can get and just how outrageously we can run amok. Evincing a dry and precise wit and an impressive fluency in inner monologues induced by long-stoked anger, self-loathing, and loneliness, she portrays people on the edge in her moody short story collections -- The Gasoline Wars, Little Face and Other Stories, and Who Do You Love, a finalist for the National Book Award -- and her well-wrought novels, including Wide Blue Yonder and City Boy, a portrait of a catastrophically malignant marriage. Thompson continues to explore the dynamics between men and women, as well as the diminishment of rural life, family weirdness, what being female is really about, and living in war time in her spectacular collection of pitch-perfect short stories, Throw like a Girl. Jean Thompson appeared on Open Books in June 2007.

Stephen Asma

Stephen T. Asma, a philosophy professor at Columbia College Chicago, is the author of Buddha for Beginners and Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads. He wrote his spiritual travelogue, The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha after a teaching stint at Phnom Penh's Buddhist Institute. In an electrifying and frank mix of hair-raising anecdotes and expert analysis, he explicates the vast difference between text-based Buddhist teachings and daily life in a poor and politically volatile Buddhist society. Amid tales of massage parlors, marijuana-spiced pizza, and bloodshed, he cogently explains how Theravada Buddhism, the form practiced throughout Southeast Asia, differs from the Buddhism Westerners are familiar with, and how entwined it is with animistic beliefs. This fusion of Buddhist rationalism with superstition is but one of many juxtapositions Asma relishes as he assesses the terrible scars left by the Khmer Rouge and the profound self-possession of the people he meets.

Left: Michael Williams; Right: Richard Cahan

Richard Cahan with Michael Williams on photographer Richard Nickel

Richard Cahan, author of A Court that Shaped America, and Michael Williams have teamed up to create unique and powerful books that pair great photographs with incisive commentary. They All Fall Down: Richard Nickel's Struggle to Save America's Architecture is the cornerstone biography of Chicago photographer and groundbreaking architectural conservationist Richard Nickel. An ardent admirer of the work of architect Louis Sullivan, Nickel was a lone voice protesting the ill-considered and hasty destruction of Sullivan's Chicago masterpieces during the 1950s and 1960s. Nickel salvaged whatever ornamentation he could lay his hands on, and extensively photographed buildings before and during their demolition. Nickel's tireless efforts to document and preserve Sullivan's work led to his tragic death in 1972 at age 43. In Richard Nickel's Chicago: Photographs of a Lost City, Cahan and Williams present 250 of Nickel's elegant and resonant photographs, many never printed before, accompanied by Nickel's writings to create a volume of heartbreaking beauty. Their next book, created with Bruce Moffat, is Chicago: City on the Move, a spectacular selection of historic photographs from the Chicago Transit Authority. Richard Cahan and Michael Williams spoke to Open Books in December 2006.

Connie Fletcher

Connie Fletcher, a journalism professor fascinated by police work, is the author of a unique set of books about crime -- vivid, insider works of oral history that have been praised by mystery and crime writers Barbara D'Amato, Elmore Leonard, and Joseph Wambaugh: What Cops Know, Pure Cop, Breaking and Entering, and Every Contact Leaves a Trace: Crime Scene Experts Talk About Their Work from Discovery to Verdict.

In Every Contact Leaves a Trace, Fletcher recounts truly amazing stories of crazy crimes and the patient and exacting men and women who solved them. Fletcher speaks with 80 specialists, from evidence technicians to detectives, blood spatter experts, DNA experts, trace analysts, forensic anthropologists, a forensic botanist, firearms examiners, cold case detectives, medical examiners, crime lab directors, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. The always surprising and affecting discussions cover the practical, such as the challenges of outdoor crime scenes, and such metaphysical concerns as feelings about death and the quest for truth. Connie Fletcher appeared on Open Books in July 2006.

Elizabeth Grossman (High Tech Trash -- with Giles Slade)

In this edition of Open Books, we talk trash, e-waste that is, with the "e" standing for electronics. E-waste, also known as high-tech trash, consists of all the computers, TVs, cell phones, CD players, and other digital gadgets we throw out without stopping to think about what they contain or where they go, how they're processed, whose water, soil, and air they pollute, and whose health they endanger. Environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman, author of Watershed: The Undamming of America, and Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail, presents galvanizing and unprecedented reports on the consequences of the manufacture and disposal of our digital machines in High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxins, and Human Health. See Giles Slade, below, for our second high-tech expert guest. This discussion took place on Open Books in June 2006.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl is a poet, an essayist, and a remarkably artistic and creative memoirist. Writing of both earthly pilgrimages and the inner journeys they precipitate, she brings a poet's love of language, fluency in patterns and modulations, and fascination with the life of the mind to unusual inquiries into matters aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural. Hampl's intrepidly candid, incisive, witty, and elegantly sensual works of discovery include A Romantic Education, Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, and I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory.

A painting by Matisse is the catalyst for Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, a many-faceted paean to art and the art of contemplation. In The Florist's Daughter, Hampl portrays her temperamentally oppositional parents with humor and poignancy, creating a spirited tale of nature and nurture that illuminates our bred-in-the-bone need for beauty, purpose, and love. Patricia Hampl appeared on Open Books in December 2006.

Leonard Kniffel

Leonard Kniffel is a librarian, a journalist, and the editor of American Libraries. He is also the author of A Polish Son in the Motherland, a richly detailed and involving chronicle of his journey to Poland to search for long lost-family members, especially relatives of his grandmother, who played a key role in Kniffel's Michigan childhood. Kniffel's Polish adventures include planned genealogical research and serendipitous meetings, moments of terror on the highways and embracing pleasure in the company of newly discovered family and "hard-won friends made in the mother tongue." Detailed descriptions of food, his struggles with the language, the countryside, the lives of newspaper reporters and a wine merchant, the excitement of meeting fifty cousins in five days, and startling family history, including the story of his great-great-grandmother who outlived 6 husbands had famously tiny feet, make for an anecdotal feast, and grant readers a fresh view of Polish life and culture. Leonard Kniffel spoke with Open Books in April 2005.

Jeff Libman

As talk about immigration and immigrants' rights become even more heavily politicized and polarizing, it is important to remember that we are not talking about statistics, but about men, women, and children struggling to live safe and productive lives. Like our great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and ourselves, today's immigrants are often forced to leave home under traumatic and tragic circumstances, only to face daunting challenges in their new world. Jeff Libman is a musician (his new CD is December Wave), an English as a Second Language teacher on the staff of Harry S. Truman College in Chicago, and author of An Immigrant Class: Oral Histories from Chicago's Newest Immigrants. In this unusual, clarifying, and generously proportioned book illustrated with photographs by Steve Kagan, Libman shares the stories of 20 immigrants from all around the world who are creating new lives in Chicago. Jeff Libman spoke to Open Books in December 2005.

Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate has written fiction, poetry, and architectural and movie criticism, but he is best known as an adept and urbane essayist. His frank and nervy autobiographical essays run the gamut from confessional to hilarious, elegiac, piquant, and curmudgeonly. Over the years Lopate's vivid and involving essays have been gathered into various collections, including Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Getting Personal: Selected Writings.

Lopate's authoritative The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present has become a much cherished standard. In a tour de force, Waterfront: A Journey around Manhattan, Lopate combines his knowledge of New York culture, architecture, and literature with the more visceral understandings he has acquired as an avid walker and city explorer to create a thought-provoking history of the city's once bustling, long-neglected, now rediscovered waterfront. Lopate continued his inquiry into the history of maritime New York in Seaport: New York's Vanished Waterfront (2004), a sterling collection of historical photographs, and has authored a stunning monograph on photographer Rudy Burckhardt. Phillip Lopate appeared on Open Books in March 2004.

Bill McKibben

Beginning with his prescient treatise on global warming, The End of Nature (1989), environmentalist and hard-working journalist of conscience Bill McKibben has been tirelessly investigating and elucidating some of the most intriguing, obdurate, and baffling aspects of our lives. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, McKibben has written about overpopulation in Maybe One, and our enthrallment to technological innovations in Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. In other works, he assesses our television habit, what we learn from pushing our bodies and minds to the limit, and appreciation for the glory of nature. In Wandering Home, he hikes his beloved home turf in Vermont and the Adirondacks, stopping to visit with people who have found ecologically nurturing ways to work and live. In Deep Economy, McKibben takes measure of the unintended consequences of our oil-fueled growth-oriented economy, and issues a call for a new economic paradigm, that of a "deep economy" born of sustainable and sustaining communities anchored in local resources.

A remarkably active and generous writer, McKibben pops up everywhere, contributing to literary projects, supporting other writers by writing illuminated introductions for their books, organizing grassroots campaigns, and appearing in the documentary, The 11th Hour. Bill McKibben spoke with Open Books in October 2006.

James McManus

Chicago writer James McManus is a poet and a novelist, his novels include Going to the Sun and Chin Music. He is also a nervy practitioner of immersion journalism, and a mega-serious poker player. McManus has written about high-stakes poker tournaments in his bestseller, Positively Fifth Street. McManus has also written about the price of living an unhealthy life, and the luck of the draw when it comes to genetically based disease in Physical: An American Checkup. A mix of reportage and memoir, Physical begins with McManus' experience at the Mayo Clinic, where he undergoes an "executive physical." His moment-by-moment chronicle leads to a sharp critique of our health care system, family stories, and a great array of observations about illness and injury, the politics of medicine, the failings of health insurance, and all kinds of ironies and paradoxes. James McManus appeared on Open Books in February 2006.

Dan Mathews

Dan Mathews is an audacious animal rights activist, the vice president for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and the author of a mischievously funny and passionate book, Committed: A Rabble Rouser's Memoir. An "agitator by nature," Mathews mixes outrageous humor with dishy anecdotes and searing revelations to create a wildly entertaining memoir and a spirited overview of a serious social issue. Openly gay and steeled by the bullying he endured as a boy, Mathews has always felt empathy for animals. Initially a receptionist for PETA in 1985, he proved to be an outside-the-box thinker and daredevil protestor, and has advocated for animal rights all over the world, a calling that has landed him in jail all too often. The force of his convictions and his love of life electrify every page. Dan Mathews appeared on Open Books in April 2007.

Sy Montgomery

Renowned nature writer Sy Montgomery has traveled to wilderness regions all around the world, and writes radiant books about elusive animals and wild places with the lyricism and insights of a poet, and the knowledge and reasoning of a scientist. In Spell of the Tiger, Montgomery chronicles her journey to Sundarbans in Bengal, India, where tigers hunt humans. In Journey of the Pink Dolphins, she reports on her often baffling attempts to study the freshwater pink dolphin, long the subject of myth and nearly unknown to science. In Search for the Golden Moon Bear, Montgomery tells the story of her travels throughout Southeast Asia with evolutionary biologist Gary Galbreath on a quest for the rarely seen golden moon bear. Rather than traverse pristine wilderness, however, the searchers visit captive bears, and confront the horrors of the illegal wildlife trade (second only to drugs in scope and violence) and the grave suffering of endangered hill tribes. In her most personal book, The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary life of Christopher Hogwood, Montgomery writes about life with her much-loved 750-pound pig companion. A highly intelligent and very kind pig, Christopher was known for miles around as people brought food, and children fussed over him like the pasha he was. Christopher helped Montgomery overcome her shyness, and brought her profound solace. Christopher's "bliss was contagious" in life, and remains so on the pages of this funny, revealing, and deeply moving story of the profound bond between animals and people. Sy Montgomery has appeared twice on Open Books. See Writers on the Air for our first conversation. This one took place in July 2006.