We're halfway through the year, but there's plenty to look forward to in 2024! Here are the Chicago books you should keep an eye out for.
View Part I of the list here.
June
Chorus of the Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside Their Rivalry to Save the Nation
By Edward Robert McClelland
Pegasus Books
June 4, 2024
An impassioned and timely exploration of Abraham Lincoln's long-time rivalry—and eventual alliance—with Stephen Douglas, Chorus of the Union is the story of how Lincoln and Douglas put aside their rivalry to work together for the preservation of the Union has important lessons for our time.
The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration
By James Kilgore and Vic Liu
PM Press
June 4, 2024
This concise, illustrated primer is a collaboration between one of mass incarceration's sharpest opponents, James Kilgore, and information artist Vic Liu that brings to life the histories and means of daily survival for the marginalized people ensnared in the racist, ableist class-based oppression of mass incarceration. The book elegantly weaves together the most insightful activist scholarship with vivid testimonials by incarcerated people as they fight back against oppression and imagine freedom.
Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation
By Jonathan Connolly
University of Chicago Press
June 6, 2024
This study of Indian indentured labor in Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad explores the history of indenture's normalization. In this book, historian Jonathan Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process.
The Material
By Camille Bordas
Random House
June 11, 2024
Can comedy be taught? Someone, at some point, seemed to think so. The Chicago Stand-Up MFA program has enrolled young comedians for nearly a decade. Its teachers and students all know how bits work—in theory, at least. They know that there's a line between sharp and cruel, that sad becomes funny at the right angle, that the worst is the best, the truth is the worst, and any moment of your life that isn't a punch line will either get you to a punch line or force you to become one. The Material examines life through the eyes of a reluctantly assembled ensemble, a band of outsiders bound together by the need to laugh and the longing to make others laugh even harder.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
By Ananda Lima
Tor Books
June 18, 2024
At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true. Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they'll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences—of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging—and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.
Same As It Ever Was
By Claire Lombardo
Doubleday Books
June 18, 2024
Claire Lombardo may no longer live in Chicago, but we're proud to still claim the Oak Park native. Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. She's unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor's edge.
Art in Pursuit of Common Cause
Edited by Abigail Winograd
Delmonico Books
June 25, 2024
This publication examines the development and reception of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 (TCC), a citywide project in Chicago that included the work of 29 artists installed at 19 venues throughout the city. The volume commemorates the widely discussed exhibition, which sought to underscore art's power to catalyze change and to unleash the imagination on pressing social challenges, including environmental justice, public health crises, economic inequality, and others.
July
Best of the Rust Belt
Edited by Anne Trubek
Belt Publishing
July 2, 2024
Everyone has an opinion on the Rust Belt—whether it's the "real America" or a place that no longer exists called by a name that has long outlived its usefulness, as our own president has said. But undeniably, there's something that connects the post-industrial cities. Maybe the question isn't what defines that connection, but who. Best of the Rust Belt presents the best personal essays from a contest region, from Belt Publishing's ten years as a press.
Interrupting Violence: One Man's Journey to Heal the Streets and Redeem Himself
By Cobe Williams and Josh Gryniewicz
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
July 2, 2024
Part memoir, part call to action, Interrupting Violence is a blueprint for cities across America looking for a new way to address community violence. For over a decade, Cobe Williams has been a violence interrupter, a highly trained conflict resolution expert working to stop the killing. Alongside thousands of workers across the country, many of whom he trained, Cobe intervenes in street conflicts before they result in murder. Interrupting Violence follows Cobe as he undertakes his redemption journey, offering new hope for the nation's most violent communities.
Made for You
By Jenna Satterthwaite
MIRA
July 2, 2024
Synthetic woman Julia Walden was designed for one reason: to compete on The Proposal and claim the heart of bachelor Josh LaSala. Her casting is controversial, but Julia seems to get her fairy-tale ending when Josh gets down on one knee. Fast-forward fifteen months, and Julia and Josh are married and raising their baby in small-town Indiana. But with haters around every corner, Julia's life is a far cry from the domestic bliss she imagined. Then her splintering world shatters: Josh goes missing, and she becomes the prime suspect in his murder.
Banal Nightmare
By Halle Butler
Random House
July 16, 2024
Banal Nightmare follows Moddie as she abruptly ends her long-term relationship and moves back to her hometown, throwing herself at the mercy of her old friends as they—all suddenly tipping toward middle age—go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, dream of wild triumphs, and indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious East Coast artist to take up a winter residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become. As the day of reckoning approaches, friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and old loyalties will be tested to their extreme.
The Best Lies
By David Ellis
G.P. Putnam's Sons
July 23, 2024
Leo Balanoff is a diagnosed pathological liar with unthinkable skeletons in his family's closet. He's also a crusading attorney who seeks justice at all costs. When a ruthless drug dealer is found dead and Leo's fingerprints show up on the murder weapon, no one believes a word he says. But he might be the FBI's only shot at taking down the dealer's brutal syndicate.
In Their Ruin
By Joyce Goldenstern
Black Heron Press
July 30, 2024
In Their Ruin opens in the colorful, parochial Chicago suburb of Cicero, beginning in the late 1940's when the remnants of the gang once led by Al Capone still existed and ethnic prejudices colored people's opinions. Chester, the Stone family's troubled father, is a bookie as well as a mathematical savant, and his brother is a hitman. Gladys, the mother, is from South Dakota and her family is equally influential in the development of the three children—brothers—teaching them folk tales and family legends and how to hunt and fish during long summer vacations. As time passes, street gangs exert their power over the brothers' activities, and Gladys worries about her sons' safety as well as her husband's deteriorating mental health and the family's growing financial instability. It all becomes too much for her, and ultimately the brothers are left to raise themselves in both conventional and unconventional ways. Their diverging paths and lingering psychic wounds lead to mutual estrangement, setting each brother on an individual journey to redemption.
August
The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany
By Pamela D. Toler
Beacon Press
August 6, 2024
For fans of unheralded women's stories, a captivating look at Sigrid Schultz—one of the earliest reporters to warn Americans of the rising threat of the Nazi regime. The Chicago Tribune's Berlin bureau chief and primary foreign correspondent for Central Europe from 1925 to January 1941, Schultz witnessed Hitler's rise to power and was one of the first reporters—male or female—to warn American readers of the growing dangers of Nazism. In The Dragon From Chicago, Pamela D. Toler draws on extensive archival research to unearth the largely forgotten story of Schultz's years spent courageously reporting the news from Berlin, from the revolts of 1919 through the Nazi rise to power and Allied air raids over Berlin in 1941.
The Murmuring Grief of the Americas
By Daniel Borzutzky
Coffee House Press
August 6, 2024
In The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, 2016 National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky holds to account the private interests driving Western humanitarian decisions, laying bare the immense toll of exploitative labor practices and the self-serving nature of authoritative bodies. These powerful, musical poems explore our hemispheric grief under the yokes of labyrinthine immigration policies, militarized policing, and mass capitalism.
Chicago House Music: Culture and Community
By Marguerite L. Harrold
Belt Publishing
August 13, 2024
Chicago house music originated in the city's Black, gay underground in the late seventies and became one of the most popular musical genres in the world by the end of the century. In Chicago House Music: Culture and Community, Marguerite Harrold tells the story of the genre's rise and the prolific creators who have sustained it for decades. Full of interviews and first-hand accounts from the people who stood behind the turntables, carried crates of records, or danced until dawn, Chicago House Music is the history of an art form that continues to be a force for social interaction, spiritual liberation, and community today.
The Registry of Forgotten Objects: Stories
By Miles Harvey
Mad Creek Books
August 15, 2024
In this haunting debut collection, best-selling author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. Harvey—whose work Dave Eggers called "ludicrously unputdownable"—delivers a constellation of stories that explore the gravitational pull of material things: how they drift into and out of our hands, how they assume new meanings, and the ways they serve as conduits between the present and past, the everyday and incomprehensible. Most of all, he explores how these objects have the power to reveal strange and moving facets of the human condition.
Rise and Divine
By Lana Harper
Berkley
August 20, 2024
To save both her town and the woman who loves her against all odds, a witch haunted by loss must reckon with her turbulent past, in the next magical romance in the Witches of Thistle Grove series by New York Times bestselling author Lana Harper.
September
Malort: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit
By Josh Noel
Chicago Review Press
September 3, 2024
Known primarily for its intense bitterness, the infamous Chicago liqueur has been compared to "a forest fire, if the forest was made of earwax." Yet lurking in the horror and the mockery lies the truth of Malört: we keep going back for more. Author and beer expert Josh Noel unpacks a uniquely American tale, equal parts culture, business, and personal relationships—involving secret love, federal prison, a David vs. Goliath court battle, and, ultimately, the 2018 sale of Jeppson's Malört, which made Pat Gabelick, a 75-year-old Chicago woman who spent much of her life as a legal secretary, into an unlikely millionaire.
The Haunting of Moscow House
By Olesya Salnikova Gilmore
Berkley
September 3, 2024
In this elegant gothic horror tale set in post-revolutionary Russia, two formerly aristocratic sisters race to uncover their family's long-buried secrets in a house haunted by a past dangerous—and deadly—to remember.
The Mesmerist
By Caroline Woods
Doubleday
September 10, 2024
A tightly plotted page-turner ripped from the headlines of history, as three very different women must work together to stop a killer and save the truest home they've ever known. Rich with tension, suspicion, and sharply observed characters, Caroline Woods reimagines a classic American genre through the eyes of three bold, unforgettable women.
How to Hide in Plain Sight
By Emma Noyes
Berkley
September 10, 2024
On the day she arrives in Canada for her older brother's wedding, Eliot Beck hasn't seen her family in three years. Eliot thinks she's prepared to survive the four-day-long wedding extravaganza—until she sees her best friend, Manuel, waiting for her at the marina and looking as handsome as ever. He was the person who, when they met as children, felt like finding the missing half of her soul. The person she tried so hard not to fall in love with... but did anyway. Manuel's presence at the wedding threatens to undo the walls Eliot has built around herself. The fortress that keeps her okay. If she isn't careful, by the end of this wedding, the whole castle might come crumbling down.
The True, the Good, and the Beautiful: The Rise and Fall and Rise of an Architectonic for Action
By John Levi Martin
Columbia University Press
September 17, 2024
We have many histories of social theory—what different authors attempted to do as they responded to previous theories. But we know precious little about how they did this in structural terms—what scaffolding they adopted and adapted to make their claims. Yet today's social thoughts largely employ structures passed down from previous generations, structures that were developed to solve problems that are no longer ours. In The True, the Good, and the Beautiful, John Levi Martin explores these structures, the resulting tensions, and their broader significance for sociological thought.
I'll Get Back to You
By Becca Grischow
Penguin Books
September 17, 2024
A charming home run of a queer holiday romance where two former classmates' plan to fake-date their way to freedom goes immediately awry—but, perhaps, exactly the way they need it to. A story about opening your heart to possibility, I'll Get Back To You is a giddy love letter to anyone in need of a bit of bravery to step up to the plate—and to the unending process of finding yourself.
Snake Oil
By Kelsey Rae Dimberg
Mariner Books
September 17, 2024
Rhoda is a quintessential girlboss: the founder of billion-dollar wellness company Radical, she's equally admired for her business acumen as for her flawless skin and enviable Instagram presence. But behind her perfect veneer, Rhoda is riddled with an all-consuming desire to keep growing her empire, and fear that it could all be taken away from her. Dani found Radical at a low point in her life, and it took her less than a month to sell her house, board a red-eye across the country, and apply for her dream job. But as she's drawn into Rhoda's inner circle, she begins to question Rhoda's motives and suspect that something sinister may be going on behind Radical's walls. Cecilia spends her days dealing with customer complaints as part of Radical's "Customer Worship" team, and her nights running an anonymous Twitter account dedicated to exposing Rhoda as the hypocrite she believes her to be. These tensions all come to a head on the night of Radical's company party, when a shocking tragedy strikes the company. In the aftermath, the women of Radical will be forced to confront their loyalties and figure out what's real, and what's just snake oil.
A Place to Hide
By Ronald H. Balson
St. Martin's Press
September 17, 2024
Teddy's job is to process visa applications, and by 1939, refugees from Nazi-conquered Poland, Austria, and other countries are desperate to secure safe passage to America. As Hitler sweeps through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Holland, the screws tighten and law after virulent law is passed to threaten the lives, indeed the very existence of the Jewish people. When Teddy and his girlfriend Sara are introduced to an orphaned young girl named Katy, who has been abandoned on the grounds of a nursery school, they agree to adopt her. Teddy comes to realize that he holds the key to saving lives, whether five, fifty, or five hundred—and makes the dangerous and selfless decision to join with underground groups and use his position at the Consulate to rescue those with no other avenue of escape.
The Repeat Room
By Jesse Ball
Catapult
September 24, 2024
In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant's lived experience, to see as if through their eyes. Artful in its suspense, and sharp in its evocation of a byzantine and cruel bureaucracy, The Repeat Room is an exciting and pointed critique of the nature of knowledge and judgment, and a vivid framing of Ball's absurd and nihilistic philosophy of love.
October
The Sound of a Thousand Stars
By Rachel Robbins
Alcove Press
October 8, 2024
Oppenheimer meets Hidden Figures in this sweeping historical debut where two Jewish physicists form an inseverable bond amidst fear and uncertainty. Inspired by the author's grandparents and sure to appeal to fans of Good Night, Irene, The Sound of a Thousand Stars is a propulsive novel about love in desperate times, the consequences of our decisions, and the roles we play in history.
Disturbing the Bones
By Andrew Davis and Jeff Biggers
Melville House
October 15, 2024
A propulsive debut political thriller set in the aftermath of a global nuclear weapons crisis—from the acclaimed filmmaker of The Fugitive and an award-winning journalist. Chicago detective Randall Jenkins has not been back home to the historic Civil Rights hotspot of Cairo, Illinois since the disappearance of his mother, a well-known journalist, several decades ago. That all changes the day Dr. Molly Moore, an ambitious young archaeologist in the national spotlight for her groundbreaking high-tech discoveries, uncovers a set of strange bones at a huge 12,000-year-old site at a highway construction project. With retired military general and contractor William Alexander breathing down her neck to cover up the dig, Molly and Randall soon find themselves in the middle of a wild military conspiracy.
Remember You Will Die
By Eden Robins
Sourcebooks Landmark
October 22, 2024
A search. A puzzle. Sixty protagonists—all of whom are dead. Told entirely through obituaries and ricocheting through time, Remember You Will Die is an innovative, genre-bending epic about the messy tapestry of human history and the threads that connect us, told through the eyes of Peregrine, an AI mother grappling with the unexpected death of her human daughter, Poppy.
Metal from Heaven
By August Clarke
Erewhon Books
October 22, 2024
For fans of The Princess Bride and Gideon the Ninth, this is a bloody lesbian revenge tale and political fantasy set in a glittering world transformed by industrial change—and simmering class warfare. Metal From Heaven is a caustic, dizzying eco-fantasy that addresses labor politics, corporate greed, and the relentless grind of capitalism, while also embodying a visceral lesbian revenge quest against the people and institutions who control and oppress the helpless.
Usurpation
By Sue Burke
Tor Books
October 29, 2024
After her rollicking standalone Dual Memory, Sue Burke returns to her Semiosis series and the world of Pax in Usurpation, which combines the thrill of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening with the eco-empowerment of VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts.
November
Carson the Magnificent
By Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas
Simon & Schuster
November 5, 2024
A much-anticipated biography—twenty years in the making—of the entertainer who redefined late-night television and reshaped American culture. Zehme illuminates one of the most inscrutable figures in entertainment history: a man who brought so much joy and laughter to so many millions but was himself exceedingly shy and private. Zehme traces Carson's rise from a magic-obsessed Nebraska boy to a Navy ensign in World War II to a burgeoning radio and TV personality to, eventually, host of The Tonight Show—which he transformed, along with the entirety of American popular culture, over the next three decades.
The Future of Everything
By Aleksandar Hemon
MCD
December 3, 2024
The Future of Everything distills Aleksandar Hemon's humor and heart through life's vast mysteries and into verse. The poetry collection is rooted in the experiences of war and the failure of America, where language and memory are the tools of investigation of the poet's position in a disintegrating world and in a disintegrating body. Capturing moments that exemplify the strength of humanity's bonds, and what is simultaneously divine and mundane about all that we are capable of doing to one another, The Future of Everything elucidates the indelible beauty of being alive and the immense value of love in the face of this world's horrors.
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