For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Chicago-born author Lorraine Hansberry was one of the most significant playwrights of the twentieth century. In 1959, her work A Raisin in the Sun became the first play written by a Black woman to be performed on Broadway. Its brilliance has never dimmed: the play continues to be performed regularly on both professional and … Read more
[ad_1] What truly makes a home? While this is a pretty common question literature has posed to its readers, oftentimes authors have a number of deeper considerations to make when writing about something so fundamental to who they are. How can a writer rebuild a home from words alone? How is that connection with the … Read more
[ad_1] In Primo Levi: An Identikit, the Italian critic Marco Belpoliti pieces together Primo Levi’s life as a writer, Jewish citizen of Italy, public intellectual, and survivor of Auschwitz. Like an identikit, or composite sketch, the book presents a mosaic image of the author composed of stories of different parts of his life and work. … Read more
[ad_1] In the acknowledgments of the novel Dreaming of You, author Melissa Lozada-Oliva includes the following credit: “Thank you Olivia Gatwood, for being so obsessed with dead girls & dying with me.” At this point in her career, such an expression of gratitude is no surprise; poets Lozada-Oliva and Gatwood’s work have been integrally intertwined … Read more
[ad_1] Ruth Miner, a young woman living in a brutal 17th-century New England, can’t seem to catch a break. She flees her hometown after allegations of witchcraft and becomes a stowaway on a ship with her childhood friend Owen Townsend as the first mate, but danger abounds amidst the other lecherous crew members. And this … Read more
[ad_1] Hanya Yanagihara is not merely a maximalist; she is more specifically a writer of extremity. In internet terms, her novels are a lot: long, serious, and interested in the psychology of horrible people, or of un-horrible people trapped in horrible situations. They attempt to be less stylistically or conceptually dense than emotionally dense. A … 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 Jami … Read more
[ad_1] Your appreciation of Gunnhild Øyehaugh’s Present Tense Machine, translated by Kari Dickson, will be partially predicated on how much you think about multiverses, or déjà vu, or ever have had the indescribable sense of something missing, in yourself, in others. What elevates this novel beyond the admittedly fascinating realm of such scientific ruminations is … Read more
[ad_1] Jami Attenberg and I both hail from the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. Early in her new collection of essays, she even mentions my hometown by name, and from this entry point, I anticipated kinship. Her musings on the writing life, on self-actualization, on finding home in a variety of places, these all felt wholly relatable … Read more
[ad_1] Please note, this review contains mentions of sexual assault. Several years ago during a dinner party at my home, a friend from South Africa noticed that I had a copy of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace on my bookshelf. It became an instant conversation piece. The friend reported that the book, published in 1999, had caused … Read more