For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] The title of Raymond Antrobus’s debut collection, The Perseverance, derives from the name of the London pub the poet’s father used to frequent, an establishment whose doors were shut upon young Raymond, with “50 p. to make [him] disappear,” many an afternoon. Deaf from birth, the boy would stand in front of this everyday … Read more
[ad_1] A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, features Hanif Abdurraqib’s considerable talents as a poet, essayist and thoughtful social commentator. Reading this book reminded me of listening to the late-night DJs of my youth—I especially remember Alison Steele, the Nightbird—who used songs as the starting point to improvise a jazz … Read more
[ad_1] “I saw my mother raise a man from the dead,” Libertie Sampson tells us at the beginning of Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel. Libertie is a young girl living with her mother, a trained physician, in a community of free Blacks in Brooklyn, and the man is an escaped slave she calls Mr. Ben who … Read more
[ad_1] After a storytelling show a couple of years ago, years after the Weinstein news was everywhere, I mentioned to a group of women who gathered around me after my performance that I had been sexually assaulted twice in my twenties. My point wasn’t to discuss my harm. My point, I went on to tell … 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 Nicola … Read more
[ad_1] When regarding works of art, Kandinsky asked the viewer, listener, reader to consider “[…] whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world.” Before this request was an imperative: “Stop thinking!” This can be read as a rejection of searching for a deeper meaning, or engaging in excessive interpretation … Read more
[ad_1] “I want to tell you about making people disappear,” says intelligence agent Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales to a reporter at Cauce magazine. His defection arrives in the middle of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. It is—was—August 27, 1984. “I keep mixing up my tenses,” admits the narrator of Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone. In this … Read more
[ad_1] To believe colonialism is a relic of the past is as absurd as believing we live in a post-racial society. This is one of the lessons learned in Andrea Lee’s Red Island House, a novel set in the villages and on the beaches of Madagascar. Reading this book reminded me at times of the … Read more
[ad_1] In a 2018 interview with the Public Voice Salon, Vivian Gornick responded to a question regarding her role in the revival of the memoir genre by saying, “I did not do anything extraordinary; it was a genre whose time had come.” She echoes this opinion in many of her interviews. According to her, memoir … Read more
[ad_1] Exploring the problems of the gig economy and pondering the rights of artificial intelligence, S.B. Divya’s debut novel, Machinehood, is packed with ideas. The setting is arguably a dystopia, but the plot is action-packed and character-driven enough that you might not notice. Somewhat hampered by clunky exposition and unexamined assumptions, the novel is nonetheless … Read more