www.annemoore.net

Greetings from my stay-in-place perch. I’ve always worked from a home office, so that part of lockdown hasn’t been a change. I dress in the morning, eat breakfast, read the newspapers, walk, practice piano and French, and get to my desk by nine. I write until noon, have lunch, run errands — well, no more

I curate the literature listings in Crain’s Chicago Business quarterly Guide to Culture. I feature visits by blockbuster authors, the U.S. poet laureate, scientists, historians. For this list I am always on the lookout for Chicago-based authors. This season I am newly and happily acquainted with three local writers. I read Dave Reidy’s The Voice Over

Living in a city beside an inland sea, my morning walk sometimes yields trash, or an odd hello: a washed up, desiccated raccoon, its teeth bared. Dried vomit. Charging geese. Our harmless resident crazy, who mistakes me for Hillary Clinton, and asks after Bill. Why keep walking? Because there’s treasure to be found: a mother

Good friends made it easy to show off Chicago’s rich offerings of art, architecture, parks, museums and food this weekend. Affable and curious, they had ideas of what they wanted to see and experience while in town, but didn’t overdo it. With just a few hours left on Sunday, could they get to Ernest Hemingway’s

With the year coming to a close it’s a good time to reflect on the offerings that enriched my days and nights. I read newspapers, magazines, works of nonfiction, but my true love is fiction. In these three novels, the characters and situations were so alive to me I didn’t want their stories to end: Jonathan

In the months after summer’s heat, Chicago’s crisp sunny days pull me, and my dog, to the beach. There’s no one there! My North Avenue beach is banked by man-made dunes. Get yourself beyond those and the beach offers a wide swath of sand pebbled with crushed shells. Also washed-up wood slabs from wave-smashed piers,

After a particularly brutal winter and a long, cold spring we here in Chicago are desperate for sun and warmth. People stand at street corners or outside office buildings, faces lifted to the sun. Not waiting for the Rapture. Or sneaking a smoke. They’re jones-ing for a hit of sunshine. So it’s understandable that we

I confess: I loved Borders. I spent many hours and countless dollars there. Not the store on North Avenue so much, but the one on Michigan Avenue. HIgh ceilings, four full floors of pricey real estate, a cafe with a spectacular view of the avenue, deep collections of poetry, travel, photography and fiction (who cares

I’m posting this out of frustration with the bland, dated advice in yesterday’s New York Times Travel section. A couple celebrating their 25th anniversary plans to spend a few days in Chicago in early December. What to do, where to go? Agreed. It will be cold. Let’s review the reasons to visit Chicago any time

From all the press I’d read, I felt certain I was going to walk into a market of French foods. Instead, this market is global, with 30 local vendors putting out native produce, Vietnamese sandwiches, Mexican fare, Polish sausage, Italian coffee, exotic pastas, fish and meat, French pastries, artisan soaps, cut flowers, crepes — and