Authors Electric

  Dino Moro Sanchez, c 2012 Two phone numbers stare at me from a yellow, 3"x5"  Post-It note on a bulletin board next to my computer. They are the last two clues I uncovered in my search for a long-lost friend. I make an excuse and vow to try the numbers soon. Coward, I call myself.  Like Schrödinger's cat, my erstwhile friend would exist both alive and dead until I dialed those numbers and, if I was lucky, discovered what had become of him.But nothing was certain, only probability curves. The numbers could turn out to be dead ends. I might not discover either possibility conclusively.  From what I could gather searching records and reports extensively over the past weeks, my friend no longer lives at his last known address- - a Hollywood Hills house he owned for decades. He could be alive, but institutionalized. A ten-year-old LAPD report listed him as missing and suffering from dementia, "possibly abducted." That missing person's report included a phone n...

CQR founder Syed Afzal Haider The other day I was pleased to lunch once again with Syed Afzal Haider , genial founder of  Chicago Quarterly Review  as well as CQR's fiction editor, friend and retired Chicago Tribune book editor John Blades . Haider has published this literary gem since 1994, making it the Windy City's oldest continuously in-print literary journal, no small feat amid the sea of changes in publishing since then.  Decidedly nonprofit - with emphasis on the "non," CQR has always been entirely self-sustaining and independent. It is a labour of love, cover-to-cover, a success in the most unconventional terms. It is simultaneously an anachronism and an example of cashless future Utopianism. It's both forward looking and set in its ways.  It maintains a handsome Internet presence in the form of its Website and Facebook page, but crankily insists on remaining available only in print, with no ebook editions.   I'm proud to have been ...

UT ponders process at AWM Six years in Chicago and I no longer feel like a tourist. Still, I like it when visitors come and give me an excuse to rubberneck the Windy City's attractions. I doubt this will wear off. I lived in San Francisco for 30 years and never tired of taking friends and family around, always discovering something new. I was ready for another round this July when my eldest daughter, Alicia and her husband Brian paid my inamorata Eleanor and I a visit, as they do from time to time. They were on their way home to Mexico City, where they run American and English literature programs at an international school, having done that sort of thing on four continents. They had just spent fortnight in Ireland visiting Brian's mother. Right off, Brian, an author and musician as well, announced in his lyrical Irish brogue: "I must see your Writers' Museum." "Writers' museum?" I hesitated. "I didn't know we had one." In fac...