For The Book Obsessed
[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] When World War II comes to an end in Siegfried Lenz’s The German Lesson, our young narrator, Siggi, is looking through a microscope at some fish eggs. His biology teacher has forced his class to learn about fish reproduction, even as anti-aircraft guns fire just off the North Sea coast. Siggi is disappointed in … 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] From the first time I read Rachel Kushner’s novels, I thought about nonfiction. The biting yet elegant voices of her narrators reminded me of literary criticism, and the detailed renderings of people and places I thought resembled journalism. I was evidently not alone in this response: James Woods praised her fiction as possessing “the … Read more
[ad_1] Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul by the Indian writer Taran Khan is exciting in the way unclassifiable things are exciting. It’s no surprise that it was recently announced as the winner of the 2021 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. It is a refreshing work of nonfiction, but also an exercise in … 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