Book Reviews

[ad_1] At first glance, My Morningless Mornings appears to be the simple musings of a teenage insomniac. The short work details author Stefany Anne Golberg’s quiet adolescence, which featured little parental monitoring and the ability to skip class without immediate consequence. Throughout her days avoiding the hours before noon, Golberg didn’t stay up to do … Read more

[ad_1] The COVID-19 crisis has hit the publishing industry hard. Book events and tours have been cancelled, and many bookstores have closed their physical doors out of safety for their workers and customers. That means authors need our help more than ever. Below are 10 books out this month that editors at the CHIRB loved. … Read more

[ad_1] Fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin has a well-deserved reputation for blowing readers’ minds with her beautifully detailed, fully breathing worlds, and her new novel The City We Became is no exception. It’s also different from her recent work in substantial and important ways. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy began in a wrecked, post-apocalyptic world. The … Read more

[ad_1] April is National Poetry Month, which was first organized in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. We at the Chicago Review of Books are big fans of poetry, especially poetry in translation and published by small presses. To celebrate these incredible poets, translators, and presses, I’ve curated a list of some of my … Read more

[ad_1] There is an alarming timeliness to Katie M. Flynn’s debut novel The Companions: the book opens in a futuristic California during a quarantine lockdown due to a highly contagious virus that has killed large swaths of people. If you’re trying to avoid the terror of germs and health crises in general right now, don’t … Read more

[ad_1] Check the back of any book totaling over 350 pages, and you’ll likely find a chorus of praises highlighting its length, including any variety of the nouns epic, saga, or odyssey paired with adjectives such as expansive, broad, or astounding. The long novel is commonly heralded for its achievements in scope, its ability to … Read more

[ad_1] The Glass Hotel is the title of her fifth novel, and the key to entering novelist Emily St. John Mandel’s world; the glass hotel first appears in her second novel, The Singer’s Gun.  The office tower where Anton works is reflected in the glass hotel adjacent: “He tried to watch every reflected window at … Read more

[ad_1] As an experiment, I shut my eyes and flipped through the pages of Nick Flynn’s new book, Stay. Eyes still closed, I stopped flipping, jabbed my index finger at the open page and decided to write down whatever line I was pointing to. When I opened my eyes, this is what I read: “All … Read more

[ad_1] If the saying is that “sex sells,” I feel confident that in the year 2020, politics may have stolen its mantle. In Docile, K. M. Szpara unites both. Pitched as a dystopian parable about love and sex, it centers around Elisha Wilder, a young man from rural Maryland whose family has been ruined by … Read more

[ad_1] We have been living in the future for a while now: drones deliver packages, watches track vital signs, meat substitutes grow in labs. No matter the modern problem, there’s an app for that. Even the self-driving car seems a plausible possibility. Despite these innovations, none of us seem happier for it. Political polarization, melancholy, … Read more