Welcome to Chicago Literary Galaxy where you will see planets of reading series, moons of publishers, star clusters of authors, black hole bars, sun-sized universities and a comet-like literary festival that comes around once a year. Your guide will be Lindsay Hunter, author of Daddy’s, Don’t Kiss Me and Ugly Girls. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the multitude of brilliant literary constellations you are about to see, please increase the output on your oxygen tank and breathe slowly and deeply. If at the end of the tour, or anytime during, you feel you can’t handle the awesomeness, simply crack open your helmet and say Goodbye. We will all miss you.

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Chicago is a big city, but it’s a city of neighborhoods. I mean that in every sense of the word. Each neighborhood has its own culture, its own complexion, and when you meet a new person and you ask, “Where do you live?” you are asking because the answer will inform your impression of this person. If he says “Lakeview,” home of Wrigley Field and bro bars, inside you’ll smirk, unless he then says “I like living close to iO,” which means he’s a hopeful improviser. Slightly better news for him. If your new friend says, “I live in Uptown,” you’ll feel afraid for her; it’s in the process of being gentrified and there is violence. If your new friend says, “Pilsen,” you’ll nod and think, “Ah, a hipster.” If he says, “the south side,” you’ll nod solemnly or say “Oh awesome!” because the north side and the south side are still way too segregated, and you live on the north side and feel ashamed for not living or venturing to the south side. Unless he says, “Hyde Park,” at which point you’ll think “Ah, he wants to brag that he lives on the south side, but he lives in fancy-ass Hyde Park, so whatever.”