Books Archives - Pittsburgh Quarterly

2024 Fall Reading Room

Walter Turns to AI Fiction with Doppelganger

Noted sci-fi novelist and pioneering computer scientist Vernor Vinge wrote in a 1993 paper for NASA that “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” If so, this tipping point, which he called a “technological singularity,” is upon mankind, one in which …

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Demystifying Creative Nonfiction

For some, Pittsburgh is french fries on salads, rabid Steelers fans and Iron City beer. For others, it’s Andy Warhol, steel mills and pierogies. For Lee Gutkind, it’s the city where creative nonfiction, that nebulous, energetic literary genre he continues to champion, grew into prominence. In his latest book, aptly titled The Fine Art of …

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All Things Random, Edible and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love and Food

Until the closing of Carmody’s Restaurant in Franklin Park after 62 years, turtle soup remained a fixture on its menu. Once a staple of fine dining, turtle soup typically came paired with a shot of sherry to both sweeten and thin the stew-y broth. For local writer Sheila Squillante, a first bowl of this dated …

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Miss Me Forever Hits “Home” with Bhutanese Protagonist

Tulsi Gurung is in a jam. that could be the abridged version of Erie native Eugene Cross’s latest novel, Miss Me Forever, in which his likable protagonist gets put through the paces. A more nuanced look at this highly readable story, set in Erie and Pittsburgh, might be that the orphaned Nepalese immigrant who arrives …

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Edgy Road Adventures Lift Anne Ray’s Debut Scenic Overlook

Part monomyth, part road-trip adventure, Scenic Overlook, Carnegie Mellon University grad Anne Ray’s debut collection of linked stories has the feel of a throwback. Mostly set in the analog, though not uncomplicated, time of the late 1990s, Ray uses 13 narratives to build something novelistic as her protagonist, Katie Hight, a 21-year-old college student on …

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Is China Invincible?

by Dennis Unkovic

Many in the West are convinced that modern China is an invincible regime. We watched China transition in just a few decades from a poor agricultural society into a manufacturing and industrial colossus. We witnessed Xi Jinping become the undisputed leader of China in 2013 and emerge even more powerful than Mao Zedong at the …

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Ed Simon and the Plight of Milton’s Satan

The notion behind IG Publishing’s “Bookmarked” series is to allow contemporary authors to reflect on how a particular book influenced their journey to becoming writers. “Part autobiography, part literary criticism,” the series aims to guide readers through a deep dive of a single book. The latest installment, Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost, features Pittsburgh writer …

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Remembering the Beehive

A recent study by apartmentguide.com says Pittsburgh ranks sixth highest among 483 U.S. cities for coffee availability, based on population density and coffee establishments per square mile. It wasn’t always that way, before the iconic Beehive Coffeehouse opened in 1989 on East Carson Street. Readers and regulars alike can thank local journalist David Rullo for …

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Lockett’s Short Stories Provide Authentic View of Appalachian Life

Learning an obscure Mauritanian language may not mean much around his central Pennsylvania hometown of Phillipsburg, but for Michael Lockett, now a transplanted North Sider, his time in the Peace Corps led to humility, empathy, and understanding different perspectives. Those three qualities color his narrative approach throughout a standout debut collection of short stories, In …

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Longing for Limelight

Hollywood has been alternately described over the years as “a tissue thin façade full of self-important narcissists” and “a place where dreams come alive.” This year’s winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Kelly Sather, paints her protagonists as dreamy, never-will-bes who dwell in the shadows of fame. The California native and former entertainment lawyer …

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Buying Fragments of God: The Crazy Art World of the 1980s

by Stuart Sheppard

If the 1960s changed America’s consciousness for the better, the 1980s certainly changed American commercialism for the worse. And to have lived during this latter period in New York City was to have felt the first tremors of this change, much like living near the epicenter of an earthquake and experiencing its initial shockwaves before …

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Real-life Heroes

On Jan. 25, 1904, 179 mostly teenaged miners died in a massive explosion at the Harwick Mine near Cheswick, where today a stone memorial marks their mass grave. A single survivor, Adolph Gunia, was pulled from the rubble by the mine’s designer, Selwyn Taylor, and his assistant, James McCann. Volunteers like Daniel Lyle dug through …

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Dougherty’s Debut Highlights the Bonds Among Five Female Friends

Of her debut novel, Pittsburgh native Marianne Dougherty says it’s “about the power of female friendships to sustain us” — an accurate portrayal of what plays out over 380 brisk-reading pages. With a host of well-regarded freelance work in both local and national platforms, Dougherty has penned a tale about what bonds her strong feminine …

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His Father’s Son

by David J. Garrow

For the first 37 years following his 1945 birth, August Wilson was a Pittsburgh nobody, abandoned by his white German father, Frederick August Kittel, and disdained by his black mother, Daisy Wilson, once he dropped out of school in the ninth grade. Self-educated thanks to thousands of hours spent in multiple Carnegie Library branches, Freddy …

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The Making of the Mafia

There’s a scene in season one of “the Sopranos” when teen daughter Meadow asks, “Who invented the Mafia?” The question leaves Tony to consider how to respond with a mouthful of mu shu pork. That she then names those five New York City families with ease exemplifies the way La Cosa Nostra has become ingrained …

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From Basket Ball to the NBA

While the debate over Pittsburgh’s status as a basketball town continues on barstools and radio waves across the region, what’s been settled by Claude Johnson, Carnegie Mellon University grad and author of The Black Fives: The Epic Story of Basketball’s Forgotten Era, is the important role that a black player from Homestead, once a “basket …

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The Allman Brothers Band – and Me

The road may go on forever, but it began in my brother’s bedroom on Inverness Avenue, where he handed me a copy of the Allman Brothers Band’s Eat A Peach and told me to listen to it, when I was in seventh grade. I put on some headphones, lay down on the yellow shag carpet, …

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The Rebellious Spirits Still Haunting Pittsburgh

by Stuart Sheppard

Some historical events seem so fantastical that they sound like myths when retold, while others are so intrinsic to our nature that they could be today’s news, and actually help us understand our contemporaneous existence more deeply. After reading The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis by Brady J. Crytzer, I would …

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The Allman Brothers Band – and Me

The road may go on forever, but it began in my brother’s bedroom on Inverness Avenue, where he handed me a copy of the Allman Brothers Band’s Eat A Peach and told me to listen to it, when I was in seventh grade. I put on some headphones, lay down on the yellow shag carpet, …

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Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town

Amid outcry over the recent train derailment and subsequent leak of vinyl chloride in nearby East Palestine, Ohio, and environmental rights groups’ concerns about emissions from Shell’s ethylene cracker plant in Beaver County, dialogue over the balancing act between commerce and public health continues. In his well-researched new book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and …

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Pittsburgh’s Orphans and Orphanages

by Joann Cantrell

For as long as I can remember, every time my grandmother spoke of her childhood, it made me sad. Margaret Schall, affectionately known as “Tootie,” was raised in the Odd Fellows Home for Orphans on the North Side of Pittsburgh from 1920 until 1933. She was an orphan of circumstance, rather than by the death …

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A Satiric End of the World

What might the end of the world be like? According to Michael Simms in his debut novel, Bicycles of the Gods: A Divine Comedy (Madville Books, $ 19.95), it could happen a bit like a “screwball comedy” as he navigates a wacky scenario by using “apocalyptic satire” to boldly comment on the troubled state of …

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