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] In 2000, a hefty treatise, tagged with the bold red title Empire and illustrated with a stock image of the planet from satellite’s view, quickly attracted interest from academics and popular audiences alike. The cover, with its primitive Y2K design, gave the book the aura of a revolutionary political pamphlet—one, though, that was almost … Read more
[ad_1] First published in 1929, the extended essay by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, advanced the idea that women’s creative liberation could be garnered by securing two things: time and solitude. In material form, Woolf likened time and solitude to a room and independent, financial means. At the center of this landmark feminist … Read more
[ad_1] If you’re anything like us at the CHIRB, you’ve reached September and are asking yourself that old Talking Heads chestnut: “How did I get here?” Traditionally a time of harvests and returns, with shorter, colder days on the horizon, it’s also a big month for books and we could fill an entire second list … Read more
[ad_1] New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones flashes his mastery of horror film history and raw teen angst in his novel, My Heart is a Chainsaw. Fresh off a double win at the Shirley Jackson Awards for his previous novel, The Only Good Indians, and novella, Night of the Mannequins, Jones lets his … Read more
[ad_1] David Schuman’s prose chapbook Best Men simmers with questions about why people act the way they do at weddings. Over the course of five stories, Schuman introduces a diverse cast of unconventional “best men” who find themselves swept up in events beyond their control. At once surprising and suspenseful, Best Men upends popular notions … Read more
[ad_1] The literary critic James Wood once wrote dismissively of historical fiction, saying that it is “merely science fiction facing backwards.” We inject the concerns of the present into the past, Wood suggests, the same way that we do when we write about the imaginary future, and this can result in a text that feels … Read more
[ad_1] I can safely say I’ve never read another book from the perspective of a foul-mouthed crow before I read Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton. A novel unlike any other, Hollow Kingdom is an apocalyptic story told from the point of view of Shit Turd, a pet crow who once belonged to a man named Big Jim. As … Read more
[ad_1] Jonas Eika—author of After the Sun, translated into English by Sherilyn Nicolette Helberg—has managed to do the impossible; or, at least, the very difficult. He’s written a book that both feels bleeding-edge now, and seems like it will still feel bleeding-edge in a decade. Certainly, the complexities of our modern world are no stranger … Read more
[ad_1] Horologist Thomas Mudge’s Fleet Street shop began offering watches which included the ingenious new mechanism of lever escapement sometime around 1769. Mudge’s design regulated the device’s movement with a T-shaped bit of gold or silver which pushed forward the timepiece’s gears to a much greater degree of accuracy. Soon lever escapement became a preferred … Read more
[ad_1] “Most literature, like life, is about how to have less and how to have more,” says Deborah Levy in Real Estate, the third volume of her “living autobiography” of her life as a writer and woman. In this latest chronicle, Levy wonders what it might mean to have more as she turns 60 and … Read more