Book Reviews

[ad_1] In her sophomore novel, Hex, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight delivers a thesis on love and poison as if they are one and the same. Amidst the cataclysm of Nell Barber’s expulsion from her graduate level biology program, Nell is determined to continue her research and keeps meticulous notes. This research has been unconventional lately, because … Read more

[ad_1] With all that’s going on today, it’s easy to nostalgically reflect on 2012 or 2013 as less chaotic and technologically overwhelming. The deluge of tweets and posts, viral memes, doom-and-gloom news, and content creation seems endless. Each passing year, it’s the same and different. There are so many directions in which to look. The … Read more

[ad_1] At first glance, My Morningless Mornings appears to be the simple musings of a teenage insomniac. The short work details author Stefany Anne Golberg’s quiet adolescence, which featured little parental monitoring and the ability to skip class without immediate consequence. Throughout her days avoiding the hours before noon, Golberg didn’t stay up to do … Read more

[ad_1] The COVID-19 crisis has hit the publishing industry hard. Book events and tours have been cancelled, and many bookstores have closed their physical doors out of safety for their workers and customers. That means authors need our help more than ever. Below are 10 books out this month that editors at the CHIRB loved. … Read more

[ad_1] Fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin has a well-deserved reputation for blowing readers’ minds with her beautifully detailed, fully breathing worlds, and her new novel The City We Became is no exception. It’s also different from her recent work in substantial and important ways. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy began in a wrecked, post-apocalyptic world. The … Read more

[ad_1] April is National Poetry Month, which was first organized in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. We at the Chicago Review of Books are big fans of poetry, especially poetry in translation and published by small presses. To celebrate these incredible poets, translators, and presses, I’ve curated a list of some of my … Read more

[ad_1] There is an alarming timeliness to Katie M. Flynn’s debut novel The Companions: the book opens in a futuristic California during a quarantine lockdown due to a highly contagious virus that has killed large swaths of people. If you’re trying to avoid the terror of germs and health crises in general right now, don’t … Read more

[ad_1] When I was a graduate student, I enrolled in a medical ethics course, and one of the first things we discussed was the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. This was a twentieth-century effort to study the effects of syphilis in African-American men and resulted in hundreds of people not receiving adequate treatment simply to understand … Read more

[ad_1] Check the back of any book totaling over 350 pages, and you’ll likely find a chorus of praises highlighting its length, including any variety of the nouns epic, saga, or odyssey paired with adjectives such as expansive, broad, or astounding. The long novel is commonly heralded for its achievements in scope, its ability to … Read more

[ad_1] It’s a dream many of us have had. Stepping through the gauzy curtains of the subconscious, we emerge in an unfamiliar place — a school, a restaurant, a church we’ve never attended — and, after an apprehensive look around, are approached by a strange person who calls us by name. Cue dread, perhaps even … Read more