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] Anyone who has lost a beloved pet knows the profound grief that can accompany this experience. And yet, while there are many codified rituals for mourning a human loved one, mourning a pet’s death can be more amorphous. In her compassionate and revelatory new book Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, author … Read more
[ad_1] Much of Adam Langer’s finely wrought, raucously funny, and startlingly insightful new novel, Cyclorama, occurs within “The Annex,” an insular and endlessly drama-steeped theatrical enclave of a magnet high school just north of Chicago. True to its title, which refers to a 360-degree canvas in a theatrical rotunda, fashioned to provide a changeable visualization … Read more
[ad_1] There’s a certain meme that made its rounds throughout the queerer parts of Tumblr and Twitter several years ago, and still sometimes appears in conversation. In it, a person sees another person, and wonders, “do I want to be with them, or do I want to be them?” Lio Min’s new YA novel, Beating … Read more
[ad_1] The six stories in Jem Calder’s debut collection, Reward System, paint our contemporary world in the hues of a dystopia. The tales play out across greater London—although without knowing that at the onset, it would be easy to confuse the setting as any major Western city. The same dilemmas facing Calder’s young characters could … Read more
[ad_1] In Lulu Wang’s film The Farewell—the story of Billi, a young Chinese-American woman who returns to China after several years to spend time with her dying grandmother, who remains ignorant of her own condition—there is a scene between Billi and her uncle in which he explains the difference in their perspectives. Billi believes the … Read more
[ad_1] Middle children often don’t get their due and that’s frequently the case for short fiction as well, wedged between poetry, flash and full-length novels. Yet in the hands of those with a talent for shaping entire worlds in brief pages, they are as powerful as the most economical poem and the weightiest novel. In … Read more
[ad_1] The feeling of being haunted has a way of collapsing one’s sense of direction and space. The presence of something blankets the world like mist, lingering, but impossible to locate. The feeling is inevitably followed by the question, “is it all in my head?” Maybe I’m projecting the rumblings of my psyche out into … 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 Jean Thompson, … Read more
[ad_1] Alison B. Hart’s incisive debut novel, The Work Wife, captures one day in the lives of esteemed Hollywood director Ted Stabler’s three wives—his ex-wife, his current wife, and his work wife. Each of these women struggles, with varying levels of success, to balance her relationships and creative goals with work and its attendant power … Read more
[ad_1] An appropriate response to biosphere collapse is screaming, and Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker is screamingly, bleakly funny. Beauman has a superlative knack for quotable, witty, and wince-inducing lines, stuffing every page with the kind of exhilarating humor borne of both despair and empathy. A thriller motivated by deep-sea mining destruction and mass extinction, a … Read more