Pastry chef Maya-Camille Broussard is having a big fall. Broussard, who was a finalist for outstanding baker at this year’s James Beard Awards, is set to open her Justice of the Pies pastry shop in Calumet Heights (1500 E. 87th St.) and is returning for a second season of Netflix’s Bake Squad. There’s more: Her … Read more
“With a lot of my stuff, whether it be sad or angry, there’s ultimately a sense of excitement and, hopefully, joy,” says the multilingual and multidisciplinary musician Nnamdï. “The ultimate intention is to be uplifting in some way.” His new album, Please Have a Seat (out October 7), excels, much as his previous four did, … Read more
Before Bela Lugosi, before Christopher Lee, before Frank Langella, Gary Oldman, Willem Dafoe, and legions of other actors doing their menacing best — before them all came cinema’s foundational bloodsucking ghoul portrayed by the aptly named Max Schreck (his surname means “fright” auf Deutsch) in Nosferatu. Now celebrating its 100th anniversary, the vampire classic was long ago … Read more
“We have to preserve what we have of our Puerto Rican identity,” says Iraida Rodríguez-Negrón, a curator at Puerto Rico’s Museo de Arte de Ponce. That’s why her institution is loaning 21 important paintings to Chicago’s National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture for the exhibition Nostalgia for My Island, opening September 20. Chosen … Read more
Haymarket Books, the local font of socialist literature, is also, lo and behold, a publisher of Moscato-fueled existential poetry. Super Sad Black Girl (out December 13), the debut collection from 33-year-old Diamond Sharp, doesn’t reprove the investor class, the speculator class, or other gangsters of capitalism. Instead, it lays bare, in seriocomic fashion, the mental … Read more
In her highly anticipated new book, Ling Ma, who teaches writing at the University of Chicago, has penned eight hilarious and haunting stories about the frequent dissatisfactions of contemporary life. Like her critically acclaimed first novel, 2018’s Severance — which balanced millennial coming-of-age workplace satire with full-on zombie apocalypse horror in a world stricken by a plague … Read more
Vaslav Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring might be the most successful failure of all time. Based on a pagan ritual sacrifice, the ballet asked dancers to assume inelegant postures and stomp their feet to Igor Stravinsky’s driving, discordant music. A near riot broke out at the 1913 Paris premiere, and Rite was forced to close … Read more
On “Sheepskin Lady,” the lead single off Ari Lindo’s solo debut Cost of Giving (out October 7), the 26-year-old singer-songwriter muses about “jumping in the deep end of the pool” and finding a reset in the form of a new relationship. Having contributed to an eclectic set of local bands (Late Nite Laundry, the Devonns, … Read more
