Michael Lesy

Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip has been a strangely enduring cult phenomenon. First published in 1973, Lesy’s indescribable marriage of photographs and text, alternately chilling and hilarious, chronicled a late-nineteenth-century epidemic of madness and mayhem in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. A photographic historian, Lesy has kept busy since then, producing a batch of books that, even if they don’t quite capture Death Trip’s weird magic, share its obsession with photographs and history. The title of his latest, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties, pretty much says it all. Rain Taxi sponsors this talk and signing, a kickoff for Lesy’s Murder City tour. 165 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-824-5500; www.guthrietheater.org