Some things you fall for a little too fast and a little too hard. Not that long ago, a novelist friend urged this novel on me, the way your novelist friends are wont to do. “You’ll like it,” he said ...

Peter Coviello
Peter Coviello is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he specializes in American literature and queer studies. His most recent book, Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs, appeared from Penguin Books in 2018. His next book, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2019.
“Say Chi City”
If you want to fall wrackingly, despairingly in love with a place, here’s what you do: leave it. When I was young and wintering out my graduate years, marooned in the penitential bleakness of upstate ...