For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Middle children often don’t get their due and that’s frequently the case for short fiction as well, wedged between poetry, flash and full-length novels. Yet in the hands of those with a talent for shaping entire worlds in brief pages, they are as powerful as the most economical poem and the weightiest novel. In … Read more
[ad_1] The feeling of being haunted has a way of collapsing one’s sense of direction and space. The presence of something blankets the world like mist, lingering, but impossible to locate. The feeling is inevitably followed by the question, “is it all in my head?” Maybe I’m projecting the rumblings of my psyche out into … Read more
[ad_1] Jake Goldsmith’s memoir opens with both a statement and a confession: “I am very ill. That would be the first and most obvious thing to know.” Suffering from a unique form of cystic fibrosis, he knew early on that he would die far sooner than his peers and that the deterioration of his body … 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 is Jean Thompson, … Read more
[ad_1] Alison B. Hart’s incisive debut novel, The Work Wife, captures one day in the lives of esteemed Hollywood director Ted Stabler’s three wives—his ex-wife, his current wife, and his work wife. Each of these women struggles, with varying levels of success, to balance her relationships and creative goals with work and its attendant power … Read more
[ad_1] For over 35 years, the Wild Cards universe has been entertaining readers with stories of superpowered people in an alternate history. In Carrie Vaughn’s “Grow”, ace Maryam Shahidi makes a big splash in the news after one of her “experiments” goes awry. Spring 1994 Leeds “Give me that,” Maryam said, reaching … Read more
[ad_1] Swedish writer Lina Wolff established herself as a literary master of the carnal long before releasing her latest novel, Carnality [Köttets tid (The Time of the Flesh)]. The English PEN Award-winning novel The Polyglot Lovers (2019), for instance, features a middle-aged Spanish man who moves between the bed of an octogenarian matriarch and the … Read more
[ad_1] An appropriate response to biosphere collapse is screaming, and Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker is screamingly, bleakly funny. Beauman has a superlative knack for quotable, witty, and wince-inducing lines, stuffing every page with the kind of exhilarating humor borne of both despair and empathy. A thriller motivated by deep-sea mining destruction and mass extinction, a … Read more
[ad_1] If you want to get to know the debut author Nada Alic, you should read her new collection Bad Thoughts. And once you read it, you will realize, yes: you already know her, and maybe, in fact, you are her. The protagonists of her stories are all different sides of the same person, different … Read more
[ad_1] Jack Wolcott was only twelve years old when she and her twin sister Jill, descended the impossible staircase and found herself in the Moors, a world of drowned gods and repugnant royals.After abandoning her sister to a vampire lord, and under the tutelage of a mad scientist who can do impossible things with flesh … Read more