Episode 24: Brendan Short

By Christopher Hudgens

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Brendan Short is the author of “Dream City,” which has been called “powerful” (Chicago magazine) and “complex and compelling…highly recommended” (Library Journal). He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His stories and poems have appeared in several literary journals, including The Literary Review and River Styx. A former writer-in-residence at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., he currently lives in the Chicago area. Please visit his website, www.brendanshort.net.

In this episode of The Parlor, Brendan reads from his debut novel, “Dream City” (MacAdam/Cage), which follows dreamer Michael Halligan from a childhood in Depression-era Chicago through an adulthood spent trying to collect the comic-book stories he loved as a kid and make sense of an arbitrary and unkind world.