For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] If I could only have one book on my coffee table, it would be Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award. Field Study skillfully synthesizes writing genres and resists general categorization, upending the conventions of poetry, memoir, and autoethnography with the author admitting that “some of the characters here are … Read more
[ad_1] Set about 200 years in the future, Neil Sharpson’s When the Sparrow Falls is narrated by Nikolai Andreivich South, a low-ranking state security bureaucrat in the Caspian Republic. Earth has been transformed by the emergence of super-powerful artificial intelligences and technology allowing people to transfer their consciousness to the digital realm. The Caspian Republic … Read more
[ad_1] The U.S. release of Vertigo & Ghost—already the winner of the 2019 Forward and Roehampton Prizes in the United Kingdom—should gain Fiona Benson a much-deserved wider audience. Her poetry is in turn thrilling, dizzying, devastating, lyrical, distinctive, and this is a bombshell of a collection. The first section uses classical mythology as a structural … Read more
[ad_1] Men and women often have an unequal share of power in their relationships. In the debut story collection, Objects of Desire, Clare Sestanovich explores the relationships men and women share, and examines the power dynamics between them. The men primarily escape without consequence while the women bear the emotional and literal burdens the characters … Read more
[ad_1] Cover reveal time! The Moth Girl by Heather Kamins follows the story of Anna. She runs track with her best friend, gets good grades, and sometimes drinks beer at parties.But one day at track practice, Anna falls unconscious . . . but instead of falling down, she falls up, defying gravity in the disturbing first symptom … Read more
[ad_1] Fantasy worlds with magical power systems often include the idea of inherited magical ability, with magic handed down from one generation to the next or manifesting in a particular “chosen one” invested with special importance. But is that a good way to hand down power? What if those inheriting the power don’t want it? … Read more
[ad_1] After bursting onto the literary scene with last year’s Real Life, Brandon Taylor is back with another book—this time a collection of stories called Filthy Animals. Filthy Animals sees Taylor revisit many of the same themes that he first tackled in Real Life, with many characters being scientists or mathematicians, both since-reformed and unrepentant, … Read more
[ad_1] Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat is a genre-bending autofictional book about one woman’s “crush”—on a poem written three centuries ago. In the narrator’s first encounter with the “Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire,” written by the eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill after her husband was murdered, and while she was pregnant … 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 episode marks the Season … Read more
[ad_1] The title of Cody Lee’s debut screenplay, The Everys, refers to the family at the heart of this ode to the family sitcom. Normal yet far from normal, the Everys reflect the positionings and scriptings of all that we’ve come to expect from the sitcom form. And yet, there’s something about the family’s clay … Read more