Book Reviews

[ad_1] As you may have heard, the coronavirus pandemic has caused a significant dip in advertising for digital publications. The Chicago Review of Books has not been immune to this trend. So the last month we’ve been using our advertising slot to promote ourselves. Or more specifically — we’ve been pushing a two-hour Story Studio … Read more

[ad_1] As the days blend together and our minds wander, many of us are looking for gripping reads that can hold our attention. While creepy short stories may not scream “stress relief,” successful horror rewards us for our complete attention with full-body thrills and chills. Here are some of the most memorable scary stories you … Read more

[ad_1] Burning Worlds is Amy Brady’s monthly column dedicated to examining how contemporary literature interrogates issues of climate change, in partnership with Yale Climate Connections. Subscribe to her monthly newsletter to get “Burning Worlds” and other writing about art and climate change delivered straight to your inbox. Young activists like Greta Thunberg, Xiye Bastida, and Isra Hirsi have changed … Read more

[ad_1] Women’s fight for equality is an old song. From Susan B. Anthony to Margaret Sanger to the #MeToo era, the struggle for equal gender opportunity and recognition is as American as a June Clever baked apple pie. Progress takes innovation, though, and innovation takes nerve. It also takes time and patience. This kind of … Read more

[ad_1] Early in Drifts, the narrator wonders: “How to fold time into a book?” How to write both the “full and the fleeting sensations. How to capture that? The problem with dailiness — how to write the day when it escapes us.” The result of this poundering, Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, is a novel of notes, … Read more

[ad_1] At fourteen years old I was assigned Paolo Coelho’s landmark novel The Alchemist for summer reading. I threw it on my bed in disgust, barely able to finish the slim volume. To my literal mind it read like nothing more than vague, repetitive abstractions, amounting to almost nothing in the end. Today, over ten … Read more

[ad_1] Upon initial inspection, the title of Rosanna Warren’s latest collection of poetry, So Forth, might seem like the self-deprecating wave of a too-weary hand: I’ve published for some time now. And I have these new poems, if you care to read them. The recipient of numerous literary honors, a former Academy of American Poets … Read more

[ad_1] What happens when a son returns home and he’s sick with the most feared disease of our time? This is the question at the heart of Carter’s Sickels second novel, The Prettiest Star. This question is posed by a charismatic TV host in the novel and it serves as a guiding question throughout the … Read more

[ad_1] In January, weeks before Iowa’s first-in-nation presidential caucuses, I met Saundra, a 73-year-old Republican from rural Iowa. Saundra thinks American politics are broken. Like so many of her neighbors, she voted for Donald Trump, the only candidate who promised “a change, something different,” Saundra told me. “You couldn’t get too much different than Donald … Read more

[ad_1] In Fracture, Spanish-Argentine writer Andrés Neuman manages to merge disaster, memory, and distance into a single cohesive map. Tracing the flow of time, tragedies both individual and global, and our memories of what occurred, Neuman leads us into the lives and loves of his characters, filling in the gaps between one character’s memories with … Read more