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] The ghosts of Dennis Mombauer’s The House of Drought are many, as many as there are allegories. The established fact of extraction, the ritual of sacrifice, the deviance of the unknown—these are its themes. None of these beasts are as powerful as the global narrative that has already been spinning: the irreversibility of climate … Read more
[ad_1] Being an aspiring artist can feel like an uphill battle: you look around and notice the world in flames, both literal (climate change) and figurative (everything else), and it’s hard not to feel hopeless about the future. It makes sense that so many contemporary novels feature disaffected, disinvested millennials being apathetically carried on the … Read more
[ad_1] Aviva Rosner is many things: punk folk singer, contrarian, potty mouth, feminist, Jew, occasional vegan, fan of Amy Winehouse. She is also a woman approaching her mid-thirties who really wants a baby, but seems unable to have one—at least not without the intervention of assisted reproductive technology, to which she is philosophically and even … Read more
[ad_1] Is the world of our everyday reality the only world we live in, and the realest one we can apprehend? For McPhail, the protagonist of Jonathan Geltner’s novel Absolute Music, the world of fantasy—“the other world that has no name or too many names,” a “world behind the world”—is not only real but all … 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 this week is … Read more
[ad_1] Award-winning journalist Sopan Deb made his fiction debut this July with Keya Das’s Second Act, a novel about a Bengali American family from suburban New Jersey. Shortly after coming out as gay to her family, the teenaged Keya Das dies in a car accident, leaving behind a play she and her girlfriend, Pamela, had … Read more
[ad_1] Lidia Yuknavitch knows misfits. Much of her writing concerns people—especially girls and women—on the margins, on the edges of experience, surviving, resilient, and magical, but never quite fitting in. Their trauma and suffering, and their regeneration through the act of storytelling, are reflective of Yuknavitch’s own: “Writing, making stories, drawing and painting and making … Read more
[ad_1] In my parents’ house there is a shelf set aside for over a dozen yearbooks, stowed away and rarely seen or even thought about, and Shashi Bhat’s The Most Precious Substance on Earth brought to life that dusty shelf and its contents. The packaging of memory in glimpses. The fleeting impressions of former lives. … Read more
[ad_1] In her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin suggests that the “Hero story,” the one of conquest and knife-thrusting, is not the only form of storytelling available, even though it has become the dominant one. The alternative concept Le Guin offers is the bottle: “Not just the bottle of … Read more
[ad_1] In the nineteen journalistic profiles that comprise The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba, Carlos Manuel Álvarez represents cross sections of Cuban life. Translated from Spanish by Frank Wynne and Rahul Berry, Álvarez’s literary portraits depict, among others, the New York Yankees pitcher José Contreras, the dissident poet Rafael Alcides, a migrant couple fleeing through Central … Read more