For The Book Obsessed
Should you read that book you’ve had your eye on? Will it totally rock or sink like a stone? Check out these book reviews from book lovers like you to help you find your next great read!
[ad_1] Chen Chen traverses a wide ground in Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, past and present, personal and universal, and does so with irreverence to the conventions of didactic poetry and the white western canon. In these past fraught years of Trumpism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and upticks in Asian American violence, Chen approaches … Read more
[ad_1] Mostly written during the last several years, the poems in Normal Distance, Elisa Gabbert’s highly-anticipated new collection, speak to the disjunctive nature of our times. Yet the juxtaposition of the philosophical and quotidian, often playfully rendered, belies the dexterity involved in crafting these striking poems. Also a well-regarded critic and essayist, Gabbert’s charming, inquisitive mind … Read more
[ad_1] In her insightful and ambitious debut novel, Habilis, Alyssa Quinn takes us on a destabilizing journey through the experiences of several beings by means of a single, muddled existence, illustrating the connectedness of all life and challenging the notion of a discoverable, and inherently meaningful, point of human origin. Through techniques and analyses both … Read more
[ad_1] On weekends, Caroline Macon Fleischer totes her typewriter to street festivals to write poems on demand. She volunteers for the Chicago collective Poems While You Wait, which delivers poetry in unexpected places. Poetry is often condemned for being unlikeable, but the evidence to the contrary is in her sign-up list. Given topics that range … Read more
[ad_1] Welcome to another installment of a collaboration between the Chicago Review of Books and the Your Favorite Book podcast. Malavika Praseed, frequent CHIRB contributor and podcast host, seeks to talk to readers and writers about the books that light a fire inside them. What’s your favorite book and why? Our guest is Joe Meno, … Read more
[ad_1] Toño the Infallible, a novel by the Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and Victor Meadowcroft, is a shockingly twisted character study of one man’s malice towards society. Rosero explores the depths of remorseless hatred and how it grows when there is no balancing opposition to stop it. Set … Read more
[ad_1] In Jonathan Escoffery’s debut short story collection, If I Survive You, a mother, a father, and their two sons move between Jamaica and Miami together, apart. Alone. At turns cruel and harsh, and tender and loving, this collection is a gut punch. It circles around race, home, family, masculinity, and the elusive, torturous American … Read more
[ad_1] Summer brings warm weather and even hotter new releases, especially in Chicago. If you’re looking for a book to nestle up with as you dig your toes in the sand along Lake Michigan or another distant beach, our neighborhood authors are here to please. Here are some of the best Chicago-inspired fiction, poetry, nonfiction, … Read more
[ad_1] Stories about story-telling itself always risk a kind of self-congratulatory triteness. As lovers of narrative, we’re already aware of the power of story, and hopefully self-aware enough to see how stories change our perception of ourselves, of the world; breathless paeans to the medium itself generally leave me, pardon the pun, uninspired. Tautology bordering … Read more
[ad_1] Who among us doesn’t enjoy the idea of escaping the hectic pace of existence for a faraway, uninhabited island—a haven from life’s challenges and woes? For Artt, the enigmatic scholar and priest at the center of Emma Donoghue’s new novel Haven, set in seventh-century Ireland, the decision to turn his back on the sinful … Read more