Kevin Nance

The radical underground movement of the 1970s is a distant memory growing ever more distant. Aside from TV flashes of old Patty Hearst photos and, in Chicago, the occasional burst...

The Chicago-area writer Luis Alberto Urrea is a literary jack-of-all-trades, publishing novels, short stories, nonfiction and poetry with success in all these modes. His nonfiction book about Mexican immigrants in...

To adults of a certain age, actor LeVar Burton will always be Kunta Kinte, hero of the epic 1977 miniseries about slavery in America. But for a generation of younger...

In an impressive series of literary crime novels including "Clockers" (1992), "Freedomland" (1998) and "Lush Life" (2008), Richard Price hasn't so much mined the police procedural as hijacked it. Largely...

All of Sara Gruen's novels, including her massive 2006 best-seller "Water for Elephants," feature animals — horses, apes, the eponymous pachyderms — and her new book dangles the possibility of...

On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1944, two college basketball teams laced up and squared off against each other in Durham, N.C. The game wasn't advertised; almost no...

In young-adult novels such as "Punkzilla" and plays such as "Finer Noble Gases" (in which a dissolute band member urinates noisily into a tom-tom drum in full view of the...

Best known for "The Devil in the White City," his best-seller about the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the serial killer H.H. Holmes, Erik Larson has made a career...