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] 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] Swedish writer Lina Wolff established herself as a literary master of the carnal long before releasing her latest novel, Carnality [Köttets tid (The Time of the Flesh)]. The English PEN Award-winning novel The Polyglot Lovers (2019), for instance, features a middle-aged Spanish man who moves between the bed of an octogenarian matriarch and the … 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
[ad_1] If you want to get to know the debut author Nada Alic, you should read her new collection Bad Thoughts. And once you read it, you will realize, yes: you already know her, and maybe, in fact, you are her. The protagonists of her stories are all different sides of the same person, different … Read more
[ad_1] There are two elements to playing a good cover song. The first is that the band must remember what made the song great in the first place: don’t rewrite the whole song, don’t forget your roots, don’t venture too far from the original. The second (somewhat contradictory) element is that the musicians need to … Read more
[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] In the past two decades, there has been a resurgence in the use of the word “feminist,” which now appears on t-shirts, in the titles of best-selling nonfiction, and in interviews with politicians, executives, and celebrities in a way that would have been all but unthinkable in the late twentieth century, with its vapid … 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] “Sorry about the fuel queues! It was the same in Lebanon last summer,” was Zeina Hashem Beck’s response to my email written after I returned home from waiting in the serpentine queues with my aging father, to fill up our car at a petrol pump in one of the affluent suburbs of Colombo city. … Read more