Chicago Instagram residency, days 4 & 5: Chicago flashback and my mood board View this post on Instagram Hi, Chicago! This is Caleb Crain, author of "Overthrow," which comes out on Tuesday. It's day 4 of my Instagram residency at the Chicago Review of Books, and today, in honor of your city, I have exhumed my undergraduate thesis about . . . Chicago! Or rather, about the myth of Chicago in the fiction of Nelson Algren. Alas, three decades later, the prose seems a little portentous, even to me. I was trying to make a link between Algren's fiction and the geographic analyses of the city made in the 1930s by several University of Chicago sociologists, so in my appendix, I had maps, one of which, for some reason, I reproduced by hand, not very legibly. A post shared by Chicago Review of Books (@chicagorevbooks) on Aug 25, 2019 at 6:05am PDT View this post on Instagram This is Caleb Crain, author of the novel "Overthrow," which comes out tomorrow from @VikingBooks. My husband says that people on the internet like mood boards, so here are some art postcards that hang over my writing desk. Above the bulletin board is a reproduction of Wilhelm Bendz's painting "Interior from Amaliegade with the Artist's Brothers," which I scissored out of the New York Times when it was reproduced there a few years ago. On the bulletin board proper, clockwise, from top left, and then snaking into the middle are postcards of the following: Frédéric Bazille's "Le Pêcheur à l'épervier," Jean-Étienne Liotard's "Trompe-l'oeil," Nicolas Poussin's "A Dance to the Music of Time," Félix Vallotton's "La Manifestation," Thomas Jones's "A Wall in Naples," Giovanni Bellini's "St. Francis in the Desert," Richard Diebenkorn's "Cityscape #1," William Scott's "Mackerel & Bottle," Claude Monet's "Les Roses," Luigi Ghirri's "Capri," a photo that I took of the Tower of London, and a medieval manuscript page with an illustration of a barge, taken from a Book of Hours made in Ghent in about 1480. I bought the Vallotton postcard at an exhibit of his work at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2013, about a year after I started writing "Overthrow," and we ended up using the image on the novel's dust jacket! A post shared by Chicago Review of Books (@chicagorevbooks) on Aug 26, 2019 at 5:42am PDT
