For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] The best thing about Kamila Shamsie’s eighth novel, Best of Friends, is the story isn’t hinged on a friendship gnarled with sexual, bodily, or intellectual envy. The conflict is more nuanced, primarily marred by a class difference, but more implicitly by the contradictions that exist within a life-long friendship. At times, the characters feel … Read more
[ad_1] The opening chapter of Rachel Gillig’s debut novel One Dark Window, is itself a dark window, inviting readers to look into the misty woods where shadows stalk, explore the medieval town of Blunder with its superstitions and prejudices, and collect the arcane “Providence” cards (not unlike a Tarot deck or a set of Oracle … Read more
[ad_1] “And now,” writes George Prochnik in his new memoir, I Dream with Open Eyes, “I have left America because the country became alien to me, or because I believe that somewhere out there in the great beyond I might still find a place that sings home?” On that subtle “or” hangs an inquiry. After … Read more
[ad_1] This year marks one hundred years since a Viennese newspaper first serialized Felix Salten’s novel Bambi. A new translation by Jack Zipes emerged from Princeton University Press earlier in the year. This fall, a reissue from New York Review Books Classics—translated by Damion Searls, with an afterword by Mark Reitter—offers readers another look at … Read more
[ad_1] Margot Highsmith is 30,000 feet in the air, crammed into the airplane bathroom dabbing at a bloody lip she hadn’t realized was bleeding. Behind in New York: family despair and romantic anguish that might actually just be humiliation. (Sometimes it’s hard to disentangle the two.) But outside of Bozeman, Montana is an empty house … Read more
[ad_1] During the year I lived in France, I read Annie Ernaux insatiably. For months, I returned to the library to get her books, one copy after another. Faced with the loneliness of living abroad, I threw myself into reading. Into Ernaux. I liked the way she juxtaposed a detached style with intimate stories. Those … Read more
[ad_1] When Joey is tasked with creating a self-portrait at art school, she decides to remake Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. Slightly complicating matters is the fact that she’s never actually seen the movie, but Joey’s not one to be dissuaded. Over the course of the semester, readers follow Joey through deeply relatable stages of creation and … 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? Our guest this week is … Read more
[ad_1] Kibogo by French-Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Mark Polizzotti, recreates mid-20th-century Rwanda, at the time a Belgian colony. The novel begins during the Second World War, some 13 years after Musinga, the Rwandan king, was deposed for his refusal to convert to Catholicism. In the subsequent years, Rwandans were willingly or forcibly converted, … Read more
[ad_1] Elissa Bassist, a writer known best for her poignant essays on rape culture and as an editor for The Rumpus’s Funny Women column, has taken a new direction in her debut memoir, Hysterical. A play on words, Hysterical follows the author’s search for a diagnosis of a mysterious illness that befalls her after the … Read more