Nate Marshall, author of Wild Hundreds, winner of UPP’s Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, talks about his love for Chicago’s South Side, hip-hop culture’s influence on his work, and fantasy football. UPP: You are very passionate about the South Side of Chicago, as evidenced in Wild Hundreds, in various interviews and on social media. How would you explain that passion? NM: The South Side is a beautiful place. It can be a hard and complicated place but those are the most rewarding loves. It’s like what Algren says about loving Chicago “you may well find lovelier lovelies but never a lovely so real.”…

As Cuba and the United States work to normalize relations, we feature a number of books on the island nation. Here’s a sampling: Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art Edited by Alejandro de la Fuente and Elío Rodriguez Valdés   Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba Edited by Alejandro de la Fuente   The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy Patrick Haney and Walt Vanderbush   The Cuban Economy Archibald Ritter  

White Spots— Black Spots Difficult Matters in Polish-Russian Relations, 1918–2008 Edited by Adam Daniel Rotfeld and Anatoly Torkunov RUSSIAN HISTORY/ POLISH HISTORY   “A remarkable book. Analyzes most of the big issues between the countries, from the Polish-Soviet war following the Bolshevik revolution, through the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939, the mass murder of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet security forces at Katyn in 1940, all the way to relations between Putin’s Russia and today’s Poland, a leading member of NATO and the EU. . . . This is a specific Polish-Russian story, but we all…

Brigitte Le Normand, author of Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade, shares some of her favorite places in the former Yugoslavia. Brigitte offers a vast array of locations, from a hotel where one can relax over coffee and pastry, to an outdoor market! Having studied the history of Yugoslavia for more than a decade, I’ve had the fortune to travel extensively in this beautiful region, primarily in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia Hercegovina. I occasionally get requests for travel recommendations, which led me to reflect on my most memorable experiences. I present them to you here, with…

Lynn Emanuel is celebrating the fall publication of her new volume, The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected. We sat down together to learn more about her life and writing process. UPP: Do you remember writing your first poem? How old were you and what was it about? LE: I don’t remember my first poem, although I do remember a line from an early poem. It was about a distant church’s sharp steeple looking like a needle pricking the sky’s blue cloth! I’m not sure what age I was—young enough to be surprised by praise, old enough to be…