HOGTOWN

​In 2016, writer-director Daniel Nearing's film Hogtown announced the arrival of a genuinely original American voice. The Chicago Sun-Times called it "the most original film made in Chicago about Chicago to date." Ben Kenigsberg of The New York Times named it to his list of the ten best films of the year, writing that "Daniel Nearing has carved out an original and boldly unfashionable niche. Hogtown feels like a find from a forgotten archive." The Chicago Reader named it the best film set in Chicago, and the best film made in Chicago, "period."

 

Now Nearing — Guggenheim Fellow, MacDowell Fellow, and the Chicago Tribune's Chicagoan of the Year for Film — has returned to where Hogtown began: a draft novel started in 1995, adapted to the screen, and now finally realized in the form it was always reaching toward.

 

Hogtown the book is what the film always wanted to become: a full inhabitation of 1919 Chicago, of the unsolved disappearance of millionaire theatre owner Ambrose Greenaway, of a Black detective who cannot quite believe in his own existence, and of a twenty-year-old Ernest Hemingway learning, on these very streets, what to look at and what to look away from.

 

It is a novel about the city that made American literature — and about everyone the literature forgot.