For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Neal Stephenson’s new novel Termination Shock is an effective ecological thriller, which looks to foment meaningful change for humanity as we face the greatest threat to our existence since the unleashing of the atomic bomb. In his essay, ‘Innovation Starvation’ published in Project Hieroglyph, Stephenson posits that “Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out … Read more
[ad_1] The world of You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is all apocalypse and debris, bare shambles coagulating into a familiar dystopian world order. The novel is marked as an “alternate history” of the early twentieth century, except that it doesn’t feel like one. The timelines are certainly murky, the laws are new, the … 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 Mina … Read more
[ad_1] Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s second full-length collection of poetry, Basic Needs, is a love letter in three movements, written as the Brooklyn poet watches capitalist America in slow and seeping collapse with a steady, unflinching eye. The collection is not an elegy for this moment in time, but rather an homage to the lives built … Read more
[ad_1] Cathy Curtis’s subject in A Splendid Intelligence: the Life of Elizabeth Hardwick is mighty. A writer whose career spanned decades—a ‘literary lion’. It is a chronological account of the writer’s life. The first couple of chapters trace Hardwick’s origins. It draws a portrait of a young Elizabeth whose “bookish tastes made her an anomaly … Read more
[ad_1] The Chicago literary tradition was built by the foot. Where Los Angeles had the glamour and New York had the grandeur, some of the most influential writers made Chicago come alive on the page through the most intimate depictions of the most intimate of landmarks, from a street in Bronzeville to a house on … Read more
[ad_1] The artist Winfred Rembert accomplished unbelievable things in his seventy-five years, and he was the first to admit how unbelievable they seemed. But he wants you to know what drove him from picking cotton at age nine to being a local basketball star to surviving a lynching, working chain gangs, and gaining renown as … Read more
[ad_1] In 2000, a hefty treatise, tagged with the bold red title Empire and illustrated with a stock image of the planet from satellite’s view, quickly attracted interest from academics and popular audiences alike. The cover, with its primitive Y2K design, gave the book the aura of a revolutionary political pamphlet—one, though, that was almost … Read more
[ad_1] First published in 1929, the extended essay by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, advanced the idea that women’s creative liberation could be garnered by securing two things: time and solitude. In material form, Woolf likened time and solitude to a room and independent, financial means. At the center of this landmark feminist … Read more
[ad_1] If you’re anything like us at the CHIRB, you’ve reached September and are asking yourself that old Talking Heads chestnut: “How did I get here?” Traditionally a time of harvests and returns, with shorter, colder days on the horizon, it’s also a big month for books and we could fill an entire second list … Read more