For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] First thing, let me get something out of the way: I’ve known İnci Atrek, author of Holiday Country, for a long time. We went to Wellesley College together and both took an especially memorable travel writing class our senior year. I saw the earliest glimmers of Holiday Country in the personal essays Atrek shared … Read more
[ad_1] We live in a golden age of the armchair detective, a person who aims to help solve a real-life mystery without the official qualifications for such work. Global fascination with true crime has led to an explosion of documentaries, websites, online forums, and more; a 2023 Pew Research Center study1 found that true crime … Read more
[ad_1] If your fondest holiday memories also involve hiding in the bathroom (or closet, or floorboard, or passenger seat of your cool older cousin’s car) to get a moment’s peace from your [insert adjective] family, you’re probably already sold on a distraction. Books can’t yell at you! Or guilt you! Or punish you! Unless they … Read more
[ad_1] I both love and hate end of the year book lists—love because they’re fun roundups full of great titles. But they also make me cringe, even silently rage, because without fail, they leave out amazing books that deserve the spotlight, arguably more than the mega bestsellers often dominating the lists. But the cold mechanics … Read more
[ad_1] In the winter of 2016, in a classroom on the ground floor of the English department where I teach, my colleagues and I gathered to hear Sofia Samatar give a job talk for a tenure-track teaching position. The classroom had once been part of a large indoor pool, specifically the shallow end, whose only … Read more
[ad_1] This year’s Booker prize longlist has featured numerous introspective, hyperfocused character studies, and Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s All the Little Bird-Hearts is no exception. Centering Sunday Forrester, an eccentric woman who lives her life according to a highly structured, self-made routine, the novel takes an intriguing and slightly sinister turn as new neighbors move in: the … Read more
[ad_1] A few months into the pandemic, the apartment building across the street from mine had a parking lot party. Tucked away in the tree-lined Germantown section of Philadelphia on a hot summer day this was unusual. Over the months leading up to that afternoon, my neighborhood of buses, cars, and a lively population had … Read more
[ad_1] In her debut novel, Here in the Dark, prize-winning culture reporter and theater critic for the New York Times Alexis Soloski crafts a psychological thriller around Vivian Parry, a Manhattan-based theater critic notorious for her acerbic reviews and her predilection for mixing sex, booze, and pills to quell the anxiety and grief she feels … Read more
[ad_1] On December 7, 2023, we came together for the 2023 Chicago Review of Books (CHIRBy) Awards, co-presented by StoryStudio Chicago! Now in its eighth year, the CHIRBy Awards honor the best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and short essays and stories that feature Chicago and our strong literary community. Congratulations to this year’s winners and to … Read more
[ad_1] Book influencers are popular on virtually all social media platforms—the biggest being TikTok, Instagram and YouTube—and one of the most popular content to create is a book haul. One YouTube video shows the unboxing of an Amazon purchase of over 40 books. While Amazon is not the place to support the book industry and … Read more