For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] The successes of the vaccine rollout in the United States must not be allowed to obscure earlier failures to contain COVID-19. At the time of writing, almost six hundred thousand Americans have died of the disease. In his new book, The Plague Year, Lawrence Wright argues that they did not have to. He believes … 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 Jesse … Read more
[ad_1] My sister used to live on Wellington Avenue. I would drive in from Iowa, search for free parking on nearby Cannon Drive, and stay the weekend. We sometimes walked around, late at night, and I could hear people at all stages of love affairs conducting their lives in the street. Lakeview East happens to … Read more
[ad_1] As a cisgender white male, I am least interested in what cisgender white males have to say. Too often, too many suck the oxygen out of discourse leaving no space for others to speak and reducing everything down to another version of mansplaining. Their work seems to be in service of shaping the world … Read more
[ad_1] Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World is an intriguing exploration of the history of women’s health, specifically how women are perceived as individuals and members of a larger healthcare system. The theme, across countries and time periods, is centered on disbelief. The female body, long-held in a place of … Read more
[ad_1] The final story of Nana Nkweti’s debut short story collection, “Kinks,” bears the book title in a telling passage: “No matter how many boardroom doors Jennifer walked through, sometimes she felt her steps falter—in the Ghanaian beauty shop, at Awing tribal meetings, she felt like a counterfeit African, felt the unworthiness of the maid’s … Read more
[ad_1] Stories of family trauma, parent-child relationships, and sibling relationships are not new in literature. Compelling examples go as far back as the Bible. Unfortunately, writing about family trauma has also often been negatively characterized as confessional, as if certain life experiences are either too embarrassing or otherwise unworthy for literary exploration. The Brothers Silver, … Read more
[ad_1] For all the ink shed—in reviews, interviews, and criticism—about the trials and tribulations of navigating the literary world on the level of the individual novel, comparatively little space is provided to career-wide discussions. While this is understandable given the enormous challenge that writing and publishing just one book presents to the writer (not to … Read more
[ad_1] There’s always a certain sense of disbelief that comes with the arrival of June: have we really gotten halfway through the year already? Many of us might be finding that harder to believe than usual with all the strange and singular challenges 2021 has already brought us. But the good news is there’s no … Read more
[ad_1] Zakiya Dalila Harris’ debut novel, The Other Black Girl, is set in the predominantly white and fiercely competitive world of publishing. Nella Rogers is Wagner Books’ only Black employee, so she’s thrilled when another Black woman, Hazel, is hired. Initially, the women bond, but soon everything shifts, and Nella finds herself at the bottom … Read more