For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] With the beginning of spring, warmer weather, and longer days, we’re looking forward to spending more time outside and really focusing on our mental health. These books already helped get us through the long winter, and now we can’t wait to read, journal, and color somewhere other than our couches. If you’re also looking … Read more
[ad_1] By looking beyond the surface clues to deeper and more unsettling realities, the detective story lends itself well to horror, even cosmic horror. There are no elder gods or supernatural terrors lurking in Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanderMeer’s newest novel, but I found myself reading with that kind of dread. A grippingly-paced and paranoid eco-thriller, … Read more
[ad_1] The surrealist painter Leonora Carrington is enjoying a renaissance of late, with renewed interest in both her visual art and literary work. The last few years have seen the publication of The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (Dorothy Press), the memoir Down Below (New York Review Books), and, just this January, Carrington’s masterpiece The … Read more
[ad_1] My first introduction to Helen Oyeyemi’s work was her story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, and I found it curious and unlike anything else I had read up to that point. Her following two novels Boy, Snow, Bird and Gingerbread are similar in their fantasticism, but it’s her newest novel Peaces … Read more
[ad_1] Since her connection with American and European surrealist groups of the 1960s (Arsenal, Phases) Rikki Ducornet has deployed tactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit. Ducornet’s early novels form … Read more
[ad_1] I was first introduced to Kirstin Valdez Quade’s writing in a graduate workshop, when the professor led a discussion on the short story “Nemecia,” from her debut collection Night at the Fiestas. Since then, I return to this story whenever I reach the distinct point of writer’s block where I need to remind myself … 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? This week’s guest is Morgan … Read more
[ad_1] Yemeni American poet and translator Threa Almontaser won the 2020 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets for her brilliant debut poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen. Her poems touch on young rebellion, the thin veil of protection a language grants you, and how history is often stored in the body. … Read more
[ad_1] In a powerful essay for The Nation, Toni Morrison recalled “feeling helpless” in 2004’s political climate. A friend called, cheering her. “This is precisely the time when artists go to work,” he said. “Not when everything is fine, but in times of dread.” Morgan Jerkins has already shown herself as a writer who goes to work … Read more
[ad_1] Across his fiction, journalism, and letters, Fyodor Dostoevsky spoke in many voices. He spoke as a radical who would face mock execution and years in prison for plotting against the tsar. He spoke as a Russian Orthodox believer excoriating liberal society for its smallness and lack of faith. He spoke as a prophet carrying … Read more