Local Heroes

In Newcity Chicago, Tom Lynch profiles Bayo Ojikutu, focusing on his sophomore novel, Free Burning. Ojikutu takes issue with the idea that his characters are "hopeless", preferring instead the term "desperate":

"I like the interpretation of 'desperation.' I don't like when people say that they are hopeless. Tommie is not hopeless. We live in a society that's shaped in the fashion where entrapment and desperation are functions of our commercial, political and social relations, particularly at the bottom of the social structure."

I paged through Free Burning at the bookstore last night, and it looks rather intriguing. (Here's an excerpt, published recently in Otium.) Yet another one for The List. Ojikutu had a strong contribution to last year's Chicago Noir compilation, a story called "The Gospel of Moral Ends" which added rather nicely to the "morally corrupt preacher" canon that dates back at least as far as Elmer Gantry.

Meanwhile, at The Elegant Variation, guest reviewer Jim Ruland raves about both Todd Dills' Sons of the Rapture ("a gloriously ambitious achievement") and Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails ("This isn’t a loss-of-innocence novel; it’s a novel about how to deal when your innocence has been smashed to smithereens"), and also offers up short interviews with each author. Dills and Meno were paired up for a Vermin On The Mount performance in L.A. over the weekend, and seem to be doing quite a few readings together lately. Of particular note is their upcoming reading at Chicago's Book Cellar on October 19th, as part of the Chicago Book Festival.