For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] R.F. Kuang’s dark thriller Yellowface deftly paints the worst of the publishing industry and literary community and tackles questions of cultural appropriation, exploitation, and dispossession with a stunning wit. June Hayward is out celebrating with her friend Athena Liu at a rooftop bar in Washington DC. Both were rising literary stars when they graduated … 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 … Read more
[ad_1] Reading Marta Balcewicz’s debut novel, Big Shadow, I couldn’t deny my subjectivity. In 1998, I was the same age as Judy, the novel’s inexperienced 17-year-old narrator. And like her, I desperately wished to make a living as an artist. I haunted NYC’s East Village, near my home; I held court with some unusual characters … Read more
[ad_1] “The first rule of in vitro fertilization is to never talk about in vitro fertilization,” Isabel Zapata tells us from the waiting room of the IVF clinic, where she refrains from asking the other women how they got there, where they are in the process, how they’re responding to the medications. But there are … Read more
[ad_1] The twenties have been wild for the Internet. Titanic companies like Facebook and Twitter have gone through major changes. Millions have been laid off, and in the past month alone, two popular online journalism portals, Buzzfeed and Vice News, trimmed their operations with the former completely shutting down. Is the Internet, as we know … Read more
[ad_1] In the central pages of The Leaving Season, Kelly McMasters decides to leave her marriage. Together with her husband, a painter, she had moved from New York City to rural Pennsylvania to enjoy a slower pace of life, start a family, and later open a bookshop. The decision to leave upends it all. In … Read more
[ad_1] When I was in middle school, I was haunted by the Boomtown Rats’ song “I Don’t Like Mondays.” A local radio station in Atlanta played the song every Monday morning, and it would remind me of dreary weeks at school and what I thought was my sad, inevitable march toward adulthood. The song features … Read more
[ad_1] “I hid my queerness for years,” Daniel Allen Cox writes in I Felt the End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah’s Witness, his memoir-in-essays about coming of age within two conflicting identities: “I knew there was something wrong with me because the books and magazines told me so.” In these reading materials, … Read more
[ad_1] Climate change has been the focal point of environmental concerns with the threat of rising seas, flooding, droughts, and food shortages attributed to it. Apocalyptic outcomes are on the horizon, and so many speculative narratives in recent years have projected end-of-world scenarios tied to the calamity. Sarah K. Jackson’s debut novel, Not Alone, finds … Read more
[ad_1] From the Kenzie and Gennaro novels that established him as a master of new noir, to the haunting crime thriller Mystic River and his magnum opus of the 1919 Boston Police Strike, The Given Day, Dennis Lehane has captured Boston neighborhoods with more grit, vitality, and unerring precision than any writer in recent memory. … Read more