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] Chris Stuck knows what he’s doing. In Give My Love to the Savages, his debut short story collection, deliberation and intention shine through. These are stories centered around the anguishes of Black men, rendered here as both heroes and antiheroes. The stories are forthright with their unpacking of masculinity, grief, and identity. And at … 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? This week’s guest is Dean … Read more
[ad_1] Before creating his world-beating radio program The Best Show, Tom Scharpling wrote punk zines, covered the NBA, produced the TV show Monk, and auditioned (unsuccessfully) for The New Monkees. Every indie musician’s favorite comic, Tom writes and performs with Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster and has directed videos for artists including Kurt Vile, Aimee Mann, … Read more
[ad_1] I was first introduced to Willa C. Richards’s The Comfort of Monsters in a 2018 graduate-level writing workshop when Willa brought in two early chapters for discussion. It was the type of reading experience a reader never forgets. In the excerpt, the narrator Peg remembers going to a bar in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood … Read more
[ad_1] Though the COVID-19 pandemic has understandably dominated most of the conversation around public health in the last year and a half, it has been running alongside—and intertwining with—another crisis: the “loneliness epidemic.” For years leading up to 2020, experts have been warning us about the effects that modern-day loneliness can have on our minds … Read more
[ad_1] A middle-aged white woman walks down the street to the grocery store and convinces herself that she’s different than the other women she’s passing by. That the self-reflexive thoughts she’s having, the awareness of being a privileged white person, who voted for Hillary Clinton, and didn’t want any of this to happen, and has … Read more
[ad_1] In Runner, Tracy Clark’s newest crime novel, Chicago is built on networks: the safety nets that catch the vulnerable as they fall—foster home placements, a night bus full of snacks and blankets—but also the webs spun to catch those who slip through when the first nets fail. Runner is the fourth in Clark’s series … Read more
[ad_1] A while ago there was that obviously bad take that “horror cannot be set in space,” which, if nothing else, gave folks an excuse to revisit the space-horror splendors of films like Alien and Event Horizon. Space is a great setting for written horror, as well—the brutally unforgiving vacuum, the possibility of alien monsters, … Read more
[ad_1] The characters in María Ospina’s debut collection are haunted by the marks that time and trauma have left upon their bodies. Variations on the Body (translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary) features a cast of loosely connected characters, all hailing from Ospina’s hometown of Bogotá, Colombia. Thematically, with its emphasis on the complex … Read more
[ad_1] The experience of reading, like any intimately subjective experience, is a challenge to fathom, perhaps as tricky for us as it was for Augustine, staring in wonder at his Milanese mentor Ambrose seeming to read without speaking the text aloud. What actually occurs in a reading mind? What goes on in that spooky, liminal … Read more