For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Mayor Lori Lightfoot represented a lot of firsts when she became mayor of Chicago in 2019. The city’s first Black, gay woman elected mayor, she promised a new vision for the office and a progressive approach to crime and neighborhood investment on the South and West Sides. In a crowded race, she set herself … Read more
[ad_1] I first took notice of April Gibson when she stirred up her students by assigning James Baldwin and Jimmy Santiago Baca in entry-level courses. She pushed them to think critically, insisting they could deliver. And they did. I couldn’t have known then that she was also carrying around a universe in her pocket, that … Read more
[ad_1] Clear, a new short novel from Carys Davies–author of West and The Mission House–concerns the HIghland clearances from between 1750 and 1860, when landlords seeking larger incomes evicted tenant farmers from the Scottish Highlands and islands, and in many cases replaced them with sheep. The story, though, is set in motion with the establishment … Read more
[ad_1] The Translator’s Voice is a new monthly column from Ian J. Battaglia here at the Chicago Review of Books, dedicated to global literature and the translators who work tirelessly and too often thanklessly to bring these books to the English-reading audience. Subscribe to his newsletter to get notified of new editions as well as other notes on … Read more
[ad_1] Six years ago, as I wrote the first lines of my novel What’s Not Mine, fentanyl was just starting to hit the news. I never set out to write about addiction, though the toll taken by drugs and alcohol had been in my family for a long time. It shook me that the existing … Read more
[ad_1] The much acclaimed—but sadly now shuttered—Andersonville restaurant Passerotto delivered checks to their patrons inside used paperbacks. What a novel idea (forgive me)! While it likely wasn’t their intention, the practice had the potential to introduce diners to new books and new writers. One night my check happened to be delivered in Ben Tanzer’s Lost … Read more
[ad_1] The much acclaimed—but sadly now shuttered—Andersonville restaurant Passerotto delivered checks to their patrons inside used paperbacks. What a novel idea (forgive me)! While it likely wasn’t their intention, the practice had the potential to introduce diners to new books and new writers. One night my check happened to be delivered in Ben Tanzer’s Lost … Read more
[ad_1] April showers are in the forecast here in Chicago, but thankfully with the arrival of spring comes a downpour of new book releases! This month is a celebration of lyricism in all forms, from masterful poetry collections and insightful memoirs to fiction that prods at the connections we make with one another. There’s something … Read more
[ad_1] James—the latest novel from the prodigious (and finally widely-read) Percival Everett—is many things: a relentless code-switching satire, a meditation on the constructedness of racial identity, a love letter to the written word, and, yes, I suppose, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Before reading James, I imagined this review would likely hone … Read more
[ad_1] Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a book borne from an urgent moment. It is not so merely because gender is being taken up as a catch-all term for a variety of political aims but because the question of transgender existence has become mainstream, upsetting past gender theories—even Butler’s—and becoming the center of the gender … Read more