The body eclectic

Every year, the Chicago Humanities Festival is the stealth hideaway for bookish Chicagoans. While Printers Row Book Fair (or, Lit Fest now) and a handful of other literary fairs target the literati and lure them in with big names, the CHF has necessarily had a wider reach. Still, the savvy among us have always known that the CHF sneaks some of the more intriguing literary events of the year in among the art chats, dance and whatever other humanities humans like.

This year, though, it’s even a little stealthier. In fests past, CHF has brought in big names to tackle their themes, but with “The Body” on this year’s agenda—and writers being notoriously demure—at first glance it seems that writers fell off a bit this year. But that’s not to say there aren’t some literary treasures buried deep in the first week’s schedule. We took some time to tease them out for you.

Prize-winning historians appear to be the order of the day. Lady Antonia Fraser, widow of the playwright Harold Pinter, discusses her memoir about their time together, Must You Go? (Nan A. Talese, $28.95). It’s just out now in the States, but was released in Britain in January, and was notable for being something that almost no memoir has ever been: restrained. Rather than dip into the prurient, Nelson was lauded for combing through the quotidian. Admirers of the playwright or British propriety should find the afternoon illuminating.

Admirers of midcentury pandemics will be happy to fork over the ten bucks to hear historian David Oshinsky, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Polio: An American Story (Oxford University Press, $35). The book looks at the race to create a polio inoculation, the controversy over whether to create a live vaccine or not, and the role of FDR in popularizing the efforts.

If all of this sounds a little sleepy, you might want to catch Laura Kipnis’s talk. Remember the astronaut-in-a-diaper story from a few years back? Or that unhealthy shot of schadenfreude you got from the James Frey kerfuffle? Kipnis uses both of those (as well as others) as guiding principles in her new book, How to Become a Scandal (Metropolitan, $24). It’s like Perez Hilton, but with a brain, a heart and actual writing.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is an actual writer of 11 books, but until 2001, she published under the name James Boylan. After coming out as transgender, Boylan published the memoir She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (Broadway, $14.95) in 2003, winning a Lambda Literary Award and placing her on Oprah’s chesterfield. She’ll largely be speaking about that book, but lately she’s also an accomplished young-adult novelist, and you may want to ask about her 2008 memoir, I’m Looking Through You (Broadway, $14.95) about growing up in a haunted house.

Aleksandar Hemon and the Stories on Stage folks will also team up to bring some of the stories from The Best European Fiction 2010 (Dalkey Archive Press, $15.95) to life, and gynecologist Cheryl Kinney will talk about the body in Jane Austen’s work, which has to be at least as unexpected as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Bill Hayes’s memoir Sleep Demons (Washington Square, $24.95) sounds as if it’s about haunted houses, but it’s actually about the author’s battle with insomnia. Hayes has carved out a cool career niche writing about the body with books such as Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood (Random House, $14.95); and The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy (Bellevue, $16.95). He’ll talk about his writing process and, of course, his body of work.

To order tickets, visit chicagohumanities.org.

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