Motherhood, Daughterhood, and Loss in “Owner of a Lonely Heart” – Chicago Review of Books

Motherhood, Daughterhood, and Loss in “Owner of a Lonely Heart” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Halfway through Owner of a Lonely Heart, Beth Nguyen writes: “What would it take to make someone, to make you, to make me—leave everything known? The history of my family is also the history of multiple wars, of colonization, of imperialism, of loss and diaspora.” This line characterizes Nguyen’s full body of work, which … Read more

All the Lonely People in “Reward System” – Chicago Review of Books

All the Lonely People in “Reward System” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] The six stories in Jem Calder’s debut collection, Reward System, paint our contemporary world in the hues of a dystopia. The tales play out across greater London—although without knowing that at the onset, it would be easy to confuse the setting as any major Western city. The same dilemmas facing Calder’s young characters could … Read more

The Hauntings of Tension and Unease in “A Lonely Man” – Chicago Review of Books

The Hauntings of Tension and Unease in “A Lonely Man” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Tentative and fogbound, writer Robert Prowe, the protagonist of Chris Powers’s A Lonely Man, finds himself in the middle of his life much like the Dante of The Divine Comedy. But for the city of Berlin in 2014 instead of a darkened wood, an unfinishable manuscript in his hands instead of those same hands … Read more