Nelson Algren

It may not rank with literature's greatest opening lines — “Call me Ishmael”; “It was a pleasure to burn”; or “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant...

This is David Hernandez: "I grew up here "I know the streets like the back of a passenger's head on the subway train." Yes, he did: Puerto Rican by birth, he was a Chicagoan by virtue of his passion, upbeat personality and the power of his poetry....

On a recent January night, about 100 people gathered in the Tribune Tower to discuss the art of the short story and to kick off the 2013 Nelson Algren Short Story Award contest. Five Algren Award winners — David Michael Kaplan, Joe Meno, Billy...

You have, no doubt, heard about the new Carl Sandburg poem. Perhaps you have read it too. It is titled "A Revolver," and it was discovered a few weeks ago by Ernie Gullerud, a former professor of social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-...

In these free, privileged United States, the phrase "Sex in the City" conjures up a premium-cable experience of hot nights, cool fashion, heavy appetizers and relationship angst so light it might fly away on the West Village breeze. But whither real sex...

A Storify gallery of a fun evening in the Tribune Tower, as witnessed by our visitors. Heads up: This gallery is running nicely for me in Firefox and Chrome, but not in Internet Explorer. Trying to find a fix here on our web staff. Meanwhile, anybody...

The Nelson Algren contest has discovered writers, including Stuart Dybek and Louise Erdrich, who have gone on to distinguished careers. This year, we’ve also expanded the awards to 10, with plans to publish these new stories in Printers Row Journal....

Jack Lew, nominated for treasury secretary, uses a series of loops as his signature. Which is fine for him personally, but may appear odd on U.S. currency. President Barack Obama said Lew "assures me that he is going to work to make at least one letter...

An honor like the Nelson Algren Short Story Award can be a boon to a writer. It can give him or her the confidence to slog through rejections and trudge forward with literary endeavors. When we asked former Nelson Algren Award recipients what winning...

Chicago makes a claim on many writers — Nelson Algren, David Mamet, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg — even if those scribes spent only a portion of their lives within its sweet confines. But Thornton Wilder, the author of such iconic plays...

Just before N. Scott Momaday won the a 1969 Pulitzer Prize for "House Made of Dawn," Marshall Sprague reviewed the book for the New York Times and began: "This first novel, subtly wrought as a piece of Navajo silverware, is the work of a young Kiowa...

If home is a concept a child might visually articulate in, say, six quick lines, by adulthood it's a notion much more diffuse — a shape-shifter, a Rorschach blot. In her frank and expansive new memoir, "Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in...