For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] The ghosts of Dennis Mombauer’s The House of Drought are many, as many as there are allegories. The established fact of extraction, the ritual of sacrifice, the deviance of the unknown—these are its themes. None of these beasts are as powerful as the global narrative that has already been spinning: the irreversibility of climate … Read more
[ad_1] In the past two decades, there has been a resurgence in the use of the word “feminist,” which now appears on t-shirts, in the titles of best-selling nonfiction, and in interviews with politicians, executives, and celebrities in a way that would have been all but unthinkable in the late twentieth century, with its vapid … Read more
[ad_1] Being an aspiring artist can feel like an uphill battle: you look around and notice the world in flames, both literal (climate change) and figurative (everything else), and it’s hard not to feel hopeless about the future. It makes sense that so many contemporary novels feature disaffected, disinvested millennials being apathetically carried on the … Read more
[ad_1] “Sorry about the fuel queues! It was the same in Lebanon last summer,” was Zeina Hashem Beck’s response to my email written after I returned home from waiting in the serpentine queues with my aging father, to fill up our car at a petrol pump in one of the affluent suburbs of Colombo city. … Read more
[ad_1] Aviva Rosner is many things: punk folk singer, contrarian, potty mouth, feminist, Jew, occasional vegan, fan of Amy Winehouse. She is also a woman approaching her mid-thirties who really wants a baby, but seems unable to have one—at least not without the intervention of assisted reproductive technology, to which she is philosophically and even … Read more
[ad_1] Is the world of our everyday reality the only world we live in, and the realest one we can apprehend? For McPhail, the protagonist of Jonathan Geltner’s novel Absolute Music, the world of fantasy—“the other world that has no name or too many names,” a “world behind the world”—is not only real but all … 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] When I was seventeen I wrote what I considered my greatest work to date, a short story about an erratic high school pitcher coached and romanced by a groupie of the game. It felt highly original at the time and over the years I wrote and rewrote the story until I chucked it in … Read more
[ad_1] Award-winning journalist Sopan Deb made his fiction debut this July with Keya Das’s Second Act, a novel about a Bengali American family from suburban New Jersey. Shortly after coming out as gay to her family, the teenaged Keya Das dies in a car accident, leaving behind a play she and her girlfriend, Pamela, had … Read more
[ad_1] Lidia Yuknavitch knows misfits. Much of her writing concerns people—especially girls and women—on the margins, on the edges of experience, surviving, resilient, and magical, but never quite fitting in. Their trauma and suffering, and their regeneration through the act of storytelling, are reflective of Yuknavitch’s own: “Writing, making stories, drawing and painting and making … Read more