Fans of The Instructions and Bubblegum will recognize the off-kilter Illinois that often serves as the backdrop for his fiction.

Set in a postapocalyptic Chicago, Levin’s third novel weds natural disaster, Judaism, and standup comedy in an unsettling, timely romp. It’s the spiritual follow-up to her 2017 YA novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, which is in the works as a Netflix feature and America Ferrera’s directorial debut.

The Cicero native and DePaul professor continues her burgeoning writing career with this memoir in essays about sex, depression, and her ’90s childhood as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants. It soon did: Hanna chronicles fascism’s flight-spurred rise in the United States and abroad. Subtitled The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the Golden Age of Aviation, and the Rise of Fascism, this book by a New York high school history teacher digs into the exposition that brought Italian and German experts here to praise zeppelins and airplanes as technology that would change humanity. This introspective, careful work probes the point where government policy and lives touch. Set in 1999, it follows teenage Fe Fe as the public housing high-rise her family calls home faces demolition. The South Side’s Robert Taylor Homes, where Wolfe was raised, feature in her debut novel. Fans will be glad to hear it’s the first in a planned trilogy Caña describes as “tropetastic.” Last Summer on State Street By Toya Wolfe Chaos - and, unsurprisingly, romance - ensues. A Proposal They Can’t Refuse By Natalie Cañaįast-gentrifying Humboldt Park is the backdrop for this debut novel, the enemies-to-lovers tale of a Puerto Rican chef and an Irish American whiskey distiller forced into a fake engagement by their meddling abuelo and granda. The fate of her curricula, scuttled thanks to Cold War conservatism, is especially relevant today amid the moral panic over critical race theory. The Stanford professor traces 1940s Chicago educator Madeline Morgan’s “supplementary units,” which taught public school students about the Black diaspora, the Middle Passage, and slave revolts.

Marrying the Ketchups follows Oak Park’s Sullivan clan in the aftermath of three earth-shattering events: a Cubs World Series win, Donald Trump’s election, and the death of Bud, the family’s patriarch and a beloved burger-joint founder.

Close, who grew up on the North Shore, has a knack for writing novels that capture families at their worst.

A Worthy Piece of Work by Michael Hines