The eyes of the literary world will turn to the American Midwest next week when the latest issue of Granta magazine goes on sale. The quarterly, which publishes fiction, journalism, poetry and photography, has a long tradition. It began as a student magazine in England in the late 1880s and was revived in the 1970s. It has published (and occasionally helped launch the careers of) Richard Ford, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Graham Greene and Salman Rushdie.

Always an English-American hybrid, it has often felt more British than American, with the American influence mostly from New York. And now comes the Autumn 2009 issue, and it is devoted to Chicago, of all the surprising places.

The bright cover is by Chicago artist Chris Ware, and inside you'll find Sandra Cisneros, Richard Powers, George Saunders, Stuart Dybek, Neil Steinberg, Don DeLillo on Nelson Algren, Tony D'Souza, Alex Kotlowitz.

There is also a stunning photo essay by Camilo José Vergara, one of his signature time-lapse-over-decades essays, looking at Chicago housing projects from 1981 to 2009. All very impressive, but ... why Chicago?

Granta's acting editor is John Freeman, whose name some of you might know from the elegant book reviews that he writes for these pages. "Why Chicago?" he replies, via e-mail.

"The writers coming out of there, the sense that, like a lot of American cities, it is having to reinvent itself from its industrial past, the violence of the place, the way it accepts outsiders and immigrants and yet reflects the racial divisions of America, even as its self-proclaimed native son hopes all of us will transcend them, the feeling that more than New York it is a real American city, not clinging to the Atlantic by a finger but planted smack down in the heartland ... in the middle of the vastness which is America."

Granta is due on newsstands next Sunday.

Also ...

• The latest Hannah Swensen tale by Joanna Fluke is due out at the end of this month. "Plum Pudding Murder," a mystery with recipes, will be published Sept. 29 by Kensington Books.

• "Gophers Illustrated: The Incredible Complete History of Minnesota Football," "meticulously researched and drawn" by Al Papas Jr., has been published by the University of Minnesota Press. Sort of half graphic book, half reference book, it has tons of facts and graceful pencil illustrations.

• Douglas Wood, author of "Old Turtle," has a picture book out with Candlewick Press. "Miss Little's Gift" is set in Minnesota. It is an homage to the teacher who helped Wood learn to read. It is illustrated by Jim Burke.