Open Stacks

Tricky narrators and learning spaces: Pulitzer Prize winning author Andrew Sean Greer takes listeners through a break up with an excerpt from Less, University of Chicago professor Malynne Sterstein parses Nabokov's Pnin, and Co-op booksellers recount some of their favorite campus novels (with expanded takes on the genre).

Open Stacks returns from summer break with fresh ears and shelf-browsings: Peter Coviello takes a walk through the stacks, Stephen T Asma speaks on Why We Need Religion, and the Co-op's eminent booksellers talk about Middlemarch.

This week on Open Stacks, the second episode of our occasional Biblio-files series, featuring Co-op friends and legends, with professor emerita and former University of Chicago president Hanna Holborn Gray.

This week on Open Stacks, we're celebrating Chicago's own legendary Gwendolyn Brooks on her 101st birthday. Reginald Gibbons, Angela Jackson, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Georgia Popoff, Troy Harden, and Cheryl Clarke join us for conversations and readings about her life and legacy.

This week on the program, cities shifting and shifted, and the people, institutions, and social structures that make it so. Ben Austen recounts the dissolution of Cabrini Green, America's most iconic public housing project, on Chicago's west side and tells a story of America's public housing experiments and failures; LaDale C. Winling examines the role of universities on the shape of their neighborhoods and towns; and Gordon Douglas considers how DIY planning takes place, and who participates, within urban contexts.

This week on Open Stacks, French lit part deux. Join us for tete-à-tetes with translators Jonathan Larson on Francis Ponge's Nioques of the Early-Spring and Jordan Stump on Marie NDiaye's My Heart Hemmed In, as well as University of Chicago fellow Katie Kadue on Rabelais and domestic georgics.

This week, a further look at the mechanisms of incarceration. 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning professor, legal scholar, and author James Forman, Jr. discusses Locking Up Our Own and prisoners rights advocate Sarah Shourd recalls and contextualizes her own and others' experiences in solitary confinement.

This week on Open Stacks, the inaugural episode of our occasional Biblio-files series, featuring Co-op friends and legends, beginning with prolific author, esteemed anthropologist and professor, and publishing partner of the Co-op, Marshall Sahlins.

This week on Open Stacks, lit for the little ones: it's Children's Book Week! Writers Javaka Steptoe and Elizabeth Acevedo join us, Colin interviews Franny, special selections from storytime, and more.

This week on the podcast, we traverse the poetics of place and shared space with Andy Fitch, Miquel Àngel Llauger, Joshua Beckman, & Patrick Morrissey.