For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] The first story in any collection sets the tone and expectations, so Cara Blue Adams’ decision to begin her linked collection, You Never Get It Back, with a rather metaphorical story is striking. But Adams isn’t afraid to make bold choices in her fiction, and it’s little wonder this debut collection won this year’s … Read more
[ad_1] Oxford Professor of English Literature Joe Moshenska has done something arguably long overdue in Milton studies. Approaching the Olympian of English letters from a mix of new historical and reader-response positions, Moshenska buries himself deeply into an imagined psyche of the poet and polemicist, propagandist and Latinist, John Milton while also digging down into … Read more
[ad_1] In this latest collection Siri Hustvedt demonstrates her tremendous range as an essayist, with topics ranging from motherhood to reading during a pandemic to misogyny to Jane Austen’s expertise in rhetoric. Even within individual essays in Mothers, Fathers, and Others she jumps from topic to topic, and this diversity presents a dichotomy of sorts. … Read more
[ad_1] On December 9, 2021, we celebrated the 2021 CHIRBy Awards, co-presented by StoryStudio Chicago. Now in its sixth year, the CHIRBy Awards is a celebration of the Chicago literary community that honors the best Chicago-focused fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and short essays. Congratulations to this year’s winners and to our incredible finalists! (You can read … Read more
[ad_1] Tabitha Lasley’s new memoir is built upon a flawed premise. When she explains her plan to travel to Aberdeen and talk with offshore workers to discover “what men are like with no women around,” her editor points out “you’ll be around.” One of the men Lasley interviews responds to the same explanation of the … Read more
[ad_1] Sitting in his family’s ancestral cemetery, Saša Stanišić ponders a snake in a sorb-apple tree. The town grows emptier each year, and soon it will be left only to the horned vipers to keep watch over the sheep. He thinks of the dragons said to make their homes in the peaks of the hills … Read more
[ad_1] Lisa Harding’s second novel, Bright Burning Things, follows single mother Sonya Moriarity, as she slides in the abyss of alcohol abuse, enters a recovery program, and attempts to rebuild her life. The emotional center of the novel is Sonya’s love for her son, Tommy, and her internal struggle to be the mother he needs. … Read more
[ad_1] Van Gogh’s self-portraits are among his most famous and beloved works; presidential autobiographies fly off the shelves when they inexorably appear a year out of office. For the novelist, however, no such allowances are made. A common refrain from that amorphous, ominous entity public opinion seems to be that novelists are far too interested … Read more
[ad_1] Neel Patel’s Tell Me How to Be opens with both narrators spent: Akash and his mother, Renu, are weary and anxious. Decisions they made years ago have grown burdensome, seemingly inescapable: “No one ever told me that happiness was like a currency: that when it goes, it goes.” This is from Patel’s short story … Read more
[ad_1] The persecution of “fallen women” is a well-documented phenomenon in Western history, stemming back to the story of the first biblical woman, Eve. Yet records of girls and women shunned into Magdalene laundries throughout Ireland have long been hidden and destroyed. Such institutions were run as late as 1996, usually by Roman Catholic orders … Read more