We started in the Big Apple and traveled to Nairobi, Kenya and Chicago. Drop by the Salon nearest you and meet other writers.

Upcoming Salons

January 15, 2012: Writers & Books for the New Year!

Sunday Salon is celebrating the new year with new books! Join us in welcoming four writers who’ll transport you to wondrous, urgent places. At Jimmys 43.

Called “disturbing, edgy and provocative” by Book Magazine, Terese Svoboda’s work is often the surreal poetry of a nightmare yet is written with such wit, verve and passion that she can address the direst subject. …

Chicago | January 29, 2012

We open 2012 with great readers and a new venue. Join us as we welcome 2011 Nelson Algren Prize winner Billy Lombardo  (The Man with Two Arms); Chicago journalist, fiction writer and poet Marco Buscaglia and DePaul and Northwestern professor Christine Sneed (Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry). We’ll pass the hat for our featured organization: Polyphony H.S., an international student-run literary magazine for high school …

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So many good books to read these days. Where to start? Check out our latest reviews, books by alumni and tempting recommendations.

{REVIEWED} Ask the Dust

By René Georg Vasicek
Ask the Dust is a dangerous book. Arturo Bandini, the narrator, is a terrorist of the mind. He explodes reality and makes you believe in the urgency of now: “Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

I didn’t think literature was possible in Los Angeles, and then I read Ask the Dust (1939) by John Fante. At the time I thought I was finished with American novels, too busy devouring the Europeans: Knut Hamsun, Robert Musil, Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald. Then one day I was killing time at the New York Public …

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