Böcker av Keir Graff

Let Keir Graff take you inside Chicago's Fine Arts Building - a building that hides worlds behind its doors. Exploring the Fine Arts Building’s warren of hallways is like stepping into a time machine. It’s not a museum—it’s a place of work. The walls reverberate with timeless music. Sopranos soar up to the high notes as violin bows draw tunes from strings. Someone plays a piano so busily they must have twelve fingers. Dancers’ feet thud against wooden floors. A tuba burps out “Ride of the Valkyries” as the doors of the manually operated elevators provide percussive slams. And more quietly, behind closed doors, painters paint, writers write, and luthiers shave soft ribbons from billets of spruce.In Chicago's Fine Arts Building, celebrated writer and Fine Arts Building tenant Keir Graff takes readers behind the scenes of this cultural hub. Initially conceived as a space for artists' studios, a home for the city's working artists, the building was an immediate success, but the Great Depression brought a long, slow decline to the building. Graff explores the building's history, its revitalization, and its cultural place in the city of Chicago. Featuring interviews with current tenants and access to the building's archives, including historical photos and artifacts, Chicago's Fine Arts Building sheds a new light on this storied building and its long history.Other Chicago landmarks have more stunning architecture or are more perfectly restored, but none of them has aged so well—because in the Fine Arts Building, it’s the work that has been preserved. Two centuries have turned and its purpose remains the same: to provide artists and artisans space to pursue their callings, and community with other creatives, too, offering a living demonstration that something good happens when so many work so closely to each other. Which is not to say it’s always been easy. Whatever comes easily in the arts?

Twin brothers discover their new home is also a portal--for an hour a day--to a parallel dimension in this rollicking middle-grade adventure, perfect for fans of The Mysterious Benedict Society Colm and Mal are twins so identical their own mom can't tell them apart, but they're different in just about every other way. Mal's a pragmatist while Colm's a dreamer, and they bicker and battle constantly. Neither brother is excited to be moving to Chicago for a fresh start with their mom just after their dad's death. But nothing cures homesickness like intrigue--and their new home, Brunhild Tower, has plenty of it: mysterious elderly neighbors who warn against wandering the building at midday, strange sounds in the walls, and an elevator missing a button for the thirteenth floor. One day, that button appears--and when the doors open on the missing floor, the boys are greeted by the strangest puzzle yet: a twin building that is stuck in time and bustling with activity. All of Brunhild Tower's former residents live on in this phantom tower, where the rules of the real world don't apply. But when the brothers and their newfound friends discover they're all trapped by an ancient curse, they must band together to set everyone free before it's too late.