Book Reviews

[ad_1] Remaining insulated from the real world is no longer an easy choice for Wallace in Brandon Taylor’s novel, Real Life. After discovering his grad school biochem research had been contaminated by a jealous and racist peer, setting him back weeks if not months, he leaves the lab to meet with friends only to spend … Read more

[ad_1] Need to escape from the dire state of the world? Try reading one of these transporting short stories, all published in 2019 or 2020. Crossing the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction, these stories offer escapes into worlds even stranger than ours. (Full transparency: I’m including all four stories I commissioned for … Read more

[ad_1] When asked about the best ways to prepare one’s children for the “coming chaos,” the protagonist of Jenny Offill’s new novel Weather responds, “You can teach them to sew, to farm, to build.” Then, more importantly, she adds, “Techniques for calming a fearful mind might be the most useful though.” As the title suggests, … Read more

[ad_1] Books, perhaps more so than other media, have the remarkable ability to stay timeless after generations on end. The author’s dilemma is finding balance between establishing setting through concrete detail without allowing the material to become dated. But what happens when the author throws this idea out the window? Jeet Thayil’s Low could only … Read more

[ad_1] How will the climate crisis impact the planet’s most marginalized communities? That question is at the heart of the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Anne Charnock’s latest novel, Bridge 108. Like her three previous novels, this one reveals how large, systemic problems like economic stratification and climate change are tightly entwined. Her latest is … Read more

[ad_1] In the world of Interior Chinatown, Asian Americans don’t get to play the dashing leads in TV shows. They don’t even get to be the everyman. Limited to one-dimensional roles like Egg Roll Cook, Young Dragon Lady, and Striving Immigrant, there’s no way to advance beyond the exoticism or “perpetual foreigner” status that comes … Read more

[ad_1] Today the founding editor of the Chicago Review of Books launches a new passion project. Say hello to the Southern Review of Books, a site dedicated to Southern literature that’s run by an all-volunteer team. The site was launched in partnership with the Queens University of Charlotte’s MFA program, and senior editors and contributing … Read more

[ad_1] Cathy Park Hong’s latest book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, asks readers to be open to nuance and hold two sometimes contradictory notions simultaneously. The Los Angeles-born writer details the peculiarities of identifying as Asian American—a term stretched to encompass a broad swath of people whose ancestors emigrated from the same continent. As Hong … Read more

[ad_1] The Torture Letters, the new book by Laurence Ralph, an anthropologist and professor at Princeton University, grapples with the conditions that led to decades of police torture in Chicago. He frames this lyrical and poignant examination of police violence as a series of open letters. He writes to the youth of Chicago, future city … Read more

[ad_1] At some point during my maiden reading of The Snow Collectors, I felt compelled to turn to the person sitting beside me and explain the book’s plot. This person—a friend who is by no means coy about taunting me for what she might deem my “less accessible” taste in novels—arched an eyebrow and said … Read more