Aimee Levitt

Riverfront Times — Two hundred eighty-three drawings: all done in crayon and colored pencil on ledger paper bearing the imprimatur of Missouri State Hospital No. 3, a mental asylum in Nevada, dated between 189_ and 191_. There were portraits of men and women with thin, compressed lips and wide, staring eyes, dressed in old-fashioned clothes and elaborate hats. There were circus processions and full-body illustrations of strongmen and baseball players. There were lions and wildcats and deer and Civil War battle horses, trees with twisted branches, sharply sloping hillsides. There were toy boats and trains and motorcars and intricately detailed buildings. Most of the drawings were flat and two-dimensional; a few seemed to flirt with perspective. They might have been images from a dream, but the figures were clear, the lines, precise. The drawings had been assembled, sequenced and bound in a hand-sewn cover made of cardboard, cloth and leather.

www.riverfronttimes.com — In Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, everyone rises with the roosters, and by 8 a.m. the unpaved streets outside Hospital Justinien are jammed. Taxicabs and pickup trucks, some painted with religious slogans and turned into makeshift buses called taptaps, jostle for space on the narrow thoroughfares, dodging potholes and negotiating chaotic corners unregulated by traffic lights. Amid the exhaust and swirls of dust, pedestrians hustle alongside the roar of traffic. Men push wheelbarrows filled with electronics and blocks of ice. Women balance trays of eggs and bananas atop their heads. Little girls hurry on their way to school, dressed in neat white blouses, kilts and lacy socks, a half-dozen bows in their hair.

Chicago Reader — The Dil Pickle Club was beautiful. So was Urbus Orbis. And Maury's bookstore. And Logan Beach. And Ralph Clarkson's tenth-floor studio in the Fine Arts Building. It was like Paris in the 20s! Everywhere there were people making art. You can still get a sense of it by flipping through Ben Hecht's memoirs, or a novel by Henry Blake Fuller, or by looking at an old photo of a group of drunk-looking adults sitting in school desks in a nightclub, or listening to Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville. But you'll never get to be there.

Riverfront Times — In late August 1894, the Wilder family - Almanzo, Laura and their seven-year-old daughter Rose - arrived in Mansfield, Missouri. They'd spent the past six weeks on the road, traveling the 650 miles from De Smet, South Dakota, in a covered wagon called a hack that looked more like a Model T than a prairie schooner. They had two horses, some furniture, a stray dog named Fido Laura had adopted somewhere in Kansas and their life savings in the form of a $100 bill hidden in Laura's lap desk.

Riverfront Times — If death is the final, irrevocable cessation of life, the concept of life after death is a paradox and completely illogical. Once you stop believing in Santa Claus, it's only a short jump to stop believing in Heaven, too, at least the one where there are people in white robes and halos playing harps all day, and then to start scoffing at people who swear they were Catherine the Great or the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III in a past life. Why is it never acceptable to say you were once a cockroach? Maybe your dog will die, or your grandpa, and you'll feel sad for a little while, maybe mess around with a Ouija board and light candles on Halloween and try to summon back their ghosts. At some point, ancient Greek philosophy may be thrust upon you, and, on long car rides late at night, you'll wonder about the notion of a soul and where all those souls go. But not (heaven forfend!) to Heaven. Maybe a soul is just confused with personality, a mess of protoplasm and electrical charges that, in the end, gets folded into a wooden box and dumped in the ground. If you believe all that, you're a definite minority at the Afterlife Awareness Conference.

www.chicagoreader.com — If it weren't the sort of cold, drizzly evening at the time of year when melting snow turns the entire world into a sea of mud that clings to dog paws and sometimes splashes up their legs and onto their bellies, and if he weren't a 110-pound cane corso, a breed that is capable of killing not only wild boar but also tame humans (at least according to urban legend), and if he weren't a prize show dog whose single drop of sperm is probably worth more than my entire monthly salary, Paradiso B?ekitna Przystan-known to his loved ones as Ivo-and I would be off together having an adventure, maybe splashing in the surf at Montrose Beach or lazing on the deck of a fishing boat or frolicking in the snow in Cumberland Park.

Chicago Reader — If Howard Goldblatt is doing his job well, no one realizes that he's doing it at all. This is because his job is translation, which, if done correctly, is invisible-with all the characters, plot points, descriptions, and, most challengingly, the jokes reading as seamlessly as though they'd been originally created in English. Yet readers who pick up an English translation of a book by Mo Yan, Wang Shuo, Su Tong, or any other contemporary Chinese novelist are, more likely than not, reading Goldblatt. "It's all my words," he says. "If they're reading a translated novel, they're reading the translation and hope that the translator got the story, style, and characters right."

Riverfront Times — The flight of Elliana Grace the Human Cannonball closes the first act of The Greatest Show on Earth, and it lasts less than a minute, from the moment she slides into the mouth of the cannon to her final bounce into the safety of the oversize air mattress she uses in lieu of a net. "Do not blink," bellows ringmaster Andre McClain as she disappears, "because this memory of a lifetime will be over in one! fleeting! flash! of glory! Elliana! Are you ready?" "Yeah!" comes a small voice from the inside of the cannon.

www.chicagoreader.com — There are many improbable stories about the pool hustler Freddy "the Beard" Bentivegna. Like the time he married a Playboy bunny. Or the time a crew of pool-loving FBI agents recruited him to infiltrate Chicago's "head houses" to find Bernadine Dohrn. Or the time he took up meditation and his sister found him levitating in the bathtub. But maybe the best place to start is where Freddy himself usually starts, with the story about the time he hustled Archie Karas out of a million dollars. He's told it so many times he's got all the timing and details down cold.