Book Reviews

[ad_1] What happens when a son returns home and he’s sick with the most feared disease of our time? This is the question at the heart of Carter’s Sickels second novel, The Prettiest Star. This question is posed by a charismatic TV host in the novel and it serves as a guiding question throughout the … Read more

[ad_1] In January, weeks before Iowa’s first-in-nation presidential caucuses, I met Saundra, a 73-year-old Republican from rural Iowa. Saundra thinks American politics are broken. Like so many of her neighbors, she voted for Donald Trump, the only candidate who promised “a change, something different,” Saundra told me. “You couldn’t get too much different than Donald … Read more

[ad_1] In Fracture, Spanish-Argentine writer Andrés Neuman manages to merge disaster, memory, and distance into a single cohesive map. Tracing the flow of time, tragedies both individual and global, and our memories of what occurred, Neuman leads us into the lives and loves of his characters, filling in the gaps between one character’s memories with … Read more

[ad_1] In our current state of semi-solitude, trying to write sentences about other sentences feels alien. I spend too much time staring at screens and reading the news, my mind is quick to tilt towards anger at those in power. Reading anything literary is difficult, hard to connect with. Everything is a political polemic.That includes … Read more

[ad_1] While there’s no shortage of historical novels set in Paris, no other recent novel both embraces and transcends its Parisian setting like Alex George’s new book, The Paris Hours. Set over the course of a single day, with plenty of detours into the fascinating backstories of its four main characters, The Paris Hours brims … Read more

[ad_1] The world still feels strange, but the publishing industry continues to bring us fun, thoughtful, and deliciously written books. Here are the CHIRB editors’ 11 favorites hitting shelves this month. VagablondeBy Anna DornUnnamed Press “Vagablonde is a darkly humorous, rollercoaster ride through the Los Angeles music scene about a woman who wants two things, the … Read more

[ad_1] Set in the fictional, Hudson Valley village of Clapham, Emma Straub’s All Adults Here explores the city dweller’s pastoral fantasy. Goat farms, a five-and-dime lined main street, and a gilded age manor house serve as the setting for this family drama. All Adults Here follows Straub’s formula of a sprawling cast of intimately connected … Read more

[ad_1] In the sixty-seven years since its designation as a buffer zone to the border demarcating North and South Korea, the 4-by-250-kilometer area that is the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) has gone undeveloped by humans. Today, it exists as one of the most heavily militarized borders on the planet and the site of a de … Read more

[ad_1] “Since so long ago, can we say that the animal has been looking at us?” the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, once pondered. Chris Flynn’s third novel, Mammoth, occasions such possibility. An original work – in both concerning the origins and constructing the uncanny – Mammoth brings to life a 13,000-year-old extinct American mastodon. Inside … Read more

[ad_1] It became clear to Jia Jia that Chen Hang must not have considered, not even for a moment, that such a place was improper for a death. These are the thoughts that surface for Jia Jia mere moments after she finds her husband dead in their bathtub. As Jia Jia awaits an ambulance, she … Read more