“Chicago is a tale of two cities,” headlines declare. This narrative has been gaining steam alongside reports of growing economic divisions and diverging outlooks on the future of the city. Yet to keen observers of the Second City, this is nothing new. Those who truly know Chicago know that for decades—even centuries—the city has been defined by duality, possibly since the Great Fire scorched a visible line between the rubble and the saved. For writers like Alex Kotlowitz, the contradictions are what make Chicago. And it is these contradictions that form the heart of Never a City So Real.

The book is a tour of the people of Chicago, those who have been Kotlowitz’s guide into this city’s – and by inference, this country’s – heart.  Chicago, after all, is America’s city. Kotlowitz introduces us to the owner of a West Side soul food restaurant who believes in second chances,  a steelworker turned history teacher, the “Diego Rivera of the projects,” and the lawyers and defendants who populate Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building.  These empathic, intimate stories chronicle the city’s soul, its lifeblood.

This new edition features a new afterword from the author, which examines the state of the city today as seen from the double-paned windows of a pawnshop. Ultimately, Never a City So Real is a love letter to Chicago, a place that Kotlowitz describes as “a place that can tie me up in knots but a place that has been my muse, my friend, my joy.”

Throughout the last two centuries, a controversial question has plagued the field of education of the deaf: should sign language be used to communicate with and instruct deaf children? Never the Twain Shall Meet focuses on the debate over this question, especially as it was waged in the nineteenth century, when it was at its highest pitch and the battle lines were clearly drawn. In addition to exploring Alexander Graham Bell's and Edward Miner Gallaudet's familial and educational backgrounds, Never the Twain Shall Meet looks at how their views of society affected their philosophies of education and how their work continues to influence the education of deaf students today.

Epiphanic and rich with striking imagery, Anita Skeen’s new collection of poetry documents the fragmentary nature of life and celebrates the desire to make a meaningful narrative from momentary experience. In Never the Whole Story, the past is never past, and the present comes filled with the miracle of small gestures—singular moments that have the power to transport the mind from one geographic place to the next, one emotional world to another. Memory is incomplete, events unfold from multiple perspectives, and secrets unspool from the ordinary. Following in the tradition of James Wright, Maxine Kumin, Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, Robert Hass, and other writers whose work is grounded in the detail of ordinary life, Never the Whole Story will be a welcome addition to the libraries of those who turn to literature to find deeper connections between their own lives and the natural world.