Tom Lynch

Pushcart Prize-winning author and Iowa State University English professor Debra Marquart has written one of the year's best memoirs in "The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere," her recounting of a childhood and adolescence spent in North Dakota amongst the endless farming chores and farm boys aching to plant their "seeds." It's a marvelously written piece of work, poetic prose injected wherever possible, bringing to life the beauty, monotony and frustrating landscape of her home. Marquart, hungry for contact with the outside world, leaves her home as soon as she can, only to return when her father passes, and she's left to examine her life, her desire to leave Dakota and how her father lived, how his life reflects hers, how she can come to terms with her roots and her eventual decision to leave them. A wonderfully crafted book, through and through.

Debra Marquart discusses "The Horizontal World" October 6, as part of the Chicago Book Festival, at The Book Cellar, 4736 North Lincoln, (773)293-2665, at 7pm. Free. (2006-10-03)

Also by Tom Lynch

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What a year for The 1900s. With only one EP--"Plume Delivery," a subtle, gorgeous and boundlessly promising collection of six songs--the local septet has garnered overwhelming praise from the Sun-Times, Tribune, Pitchfork, Punk Planet, Newcity and more
(2006-09-26)

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Atmospheric, edgy and often beautiful, Denmark's Mew has been compared to Sigur Ros, Radiohead and My Bloody Valentine, but the ambient-rock band successfully dodges any sense of derivativeness with "And the Glass Handed Kites," its first record to be released in the U.S., a muscular, forceful and haunting album full of wailing highs and somber, intimate lows
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Tip of the Week
Shawn Decker was a normal 11-year-old kid who loved WWF wrestling (Ric Flair, to be specific) and fantasized about the female body. He was also a hemophiliac who learned, at that age, that he had contracted HIV from tainted blood. The year was 1987
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Brazen Bazan
Earlier this year, Seattle musician David Bazan, the Pacific Northwest's king of indie gloom, announced he was calling it quits with Pedro the Lion and going solo. An interesting surprise indeed, given that he primarily was Pedro the Lion
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Soundcheck
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Only the Lonely
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Tip of the Week
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Tip of the Week
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The Moving City
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Tip of the Week
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