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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 Artist, a first novel set mostly in Chicago, about two brothers, the mother they lose, the father they abide, their professions (one is an improvisor, the other a voice over artist) and, most convincingly, the women in their lives.

One of the brothers, who stutters, made himself mute as a child and much of this story is Simon’s struggle to speak confidently and, eventually, professionally. The improv sections read true — Reidy credits the stage work of my friend David Pasquesi and T.J. Jagodowski — as do the tangled affairs of secondary characters.

To be published in November, it’s an impressive debut.

Next I read two works by Joe Meno. Office Girl is a bittersweet tale of Chicago hipsters. Odile makes age-appropriate poor decisions (an affair with a married man, hand jobs in the office broom closet) while Jack, whose wife has left him, records sounds. “The sound of her empty gray pillow…the sound of Monday, February 2…the sound of the traffic light making its alterations overhead…” Precious? Yes, but Jack and Odile are smart and delightful as they fall in and out of love. These are fully drawn characters making their way to who they’ll become.

Meno’s Marvel and A Wonder, newly published, is more my kind of read. It’s long, engaging and beautifully written, like Faulkner but also its own thing. (That is, I didn’t set it down to read Faulkner, as I do when I (try to) read Cormac McCarthy.) Meno’s story is set in Indiana, on a failing chicken farm. There, its aging owner lives with, and tries to understand, his mixed-race teenage grandson, who has been left behind by his drug-addict mother. When a white race horse comes into their possession, the story takes off, violently.

Meno told me he wrote the book as an homage to his father in law and men of that generation, men who could make and fix things with their hands. It’s a wholly satisfying read, one that will go on my Literature of the Midwest shelf, beside John Williams’ Stoner, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding.

Finally, I read Vu Tran’s Dragonfish. (Tran teaches writing at The University of Chicago.) This is being hawked as crime fiction — and there is plenty of violence — but it reads more like a journey of discovery by a white cop unraveling the mystery of his former wife Suzy, a Vietnamese immigrant. It’s a well plotted, enchanting read — though I’m still not sure what she was running from, or to. Loved the duffel full of cash as endnote.