The Best Books for Your Enneagram Type

The Best Books for Your Enneagram Type

[ad_1] The Enneagram is a personality test that matches people with variations of nine different types, which are meant to be explored as a way of understanding your core desires, patterns of thought and action, and areas for growth. While everyone has a basic type that they return to throughout life, there is room for … Read more

Canonical Queerness and Gothic Horror in “Plain Bad Heroines” – Chicago Review of Books

Canonical Queerness and Gothic Horror in “Plain Bad Heroines” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] In 1902 at The Brookhants School for Girls, The Story of Mary MacLane is found on the bodies of Flo and Clara, two girls, in love, stung to death by yellow jackets in an apple orchard. The little red book mysteriously disappears, only to be found again and again by the women who need … Read more

A Return to the Outworlds in “This Virtual Night” – Chicago Review of Books

A Return to the Outworlds in “This Virtual Night” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] This Virtual Night returns us to “The Outworlds,” C.S. Friedman’s quietly intriguing science-fictional universe. The world Friedman painted in 1998’s This Alien Shore, a cyberpunk-flavored space adventure, felt ahead of its time: entire cultures built around physical and mental diversity, with strange and evocative embellishments. In this future, humanity settled distant planets using a … Read more

Unwashed, festering, and still poignant poetry in “Ground Zero” – Chicago Review of Books

Unwashed, festering, and still poignant poetry in “Ground Zero” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Marc Kelly Smith, nicknamed “Slam Papi,” founded international slam poetry in the 1980s when he started the monumental Uptown Poetry Slam series at the Green Mill. Each Sunday night, he attracted misfits and poets from across Chicago and its suburbs to exchange words, including the likes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Patricia Smith, who provides … Read more

Poetic Fables and Guarded Secrets in “The Lost Shtetl” – Chicago Review of Books

Poetic Fables and Guarded Secrets in “The Lost Shtetl” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Deep in the forests of eastern Poland, the town of Kreskol lies forgotten. Through an improbable combination of bureaucratic negligence, unfriendly relations with other Jewish towns, and favorable geography, the Jews of Kreskol — the world’s last shtetl — have escaped the great onslaughts of the twentieth century (the Great War; the Holocaust; Polish … Read more

Sonic Relationships and Semantic Rhythms in “Field Music” – Chicago Review of Books

Sonic Relationships and Semantic Rhythms in “Field Music” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Alexandria Hall’s National Poetry Series-winning book, Field Music, possesses a poetic maturity born less from extensive experience than from piercing vision and sensitivity. Hall, a finalist in the 2018 “Narrative 30 Below Contest” has lived some, undoubtedly, but somehow manages to sidestep the typical language registers of youth—the naiveté, the callowness, the arbitrary ambiguity. … Read more

Joy Harjo on the Power of Poetry, and on Building a Comprehensive Canon of Indigenous Poems – Chicago Review of Books

Joy Harjo on the Power of Poetry, and on Building a Comprehensive Canon of Indigenous Poems – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] “It is poetry that holds the songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming, and it is poetry we turn to when we travel those places of transformation, like birth, coming of age, marriage, accomplishments, and death. We sing our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren: our human experience in time, into and through existence.” So begins the … Read more

A Planet Built for Three in “Earthlings” – Chicago Review of Books

A Planet Built for Three in “Earthlings” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Society is one of these concepts we might fail to adequately define, but we all know what it means. Ironically, even more universal than this implicit understanding is the feeling that one just does not belong. This is certainly a feeling familiar to Sayaka Murata, and it’ll be familiar to readers of her first … Read more

The Anxiety of the Unknown in “Leave the World Behind” – Chicago Review of Books

The Anxiety of the Unknown in “Leave the World Behind” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] In our overly connected world, it is a rare moment to not have all the information. We feel more secure with the constant feed of data, even when that information foretells doom and gloom. Rumaan Alam plays on our anxiety of the unknown in his third novel Leave The World Behind, a fast-paced and … Read more

Announcing the 2020 CHIRBy Awards Shortlist – Chicago Review of Books

Announcing the 2020 CHIRBy Awards Shortlist – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] For the fifth year in a row, the Chicago Review of Books is thrilled to present the CHIRBy Awards to recognize the best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and short essays published by Chicago-based writers. Below are the finalists in each category for 2020, along with a list of this year’s judges. Congratulations to all of these incredible writers! … Read more