An Interview with Kelly McMasters on “The Leaving Season” – Chicago Review of Books

An Interview with Kelly McMasters on “The Leaving Season” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] In the central pages of The Leaving Season, Kelly McMasters decides to leave her marriage. Together with her husband, a painter, she had moved from New York City to rural Pennsylvania to enjoy a slower pace of life, start a family, and later open a bookshop. The decision to leave upends it all. In … Read more

Proximity to the Natural World and Loving What is Broken in “Shy” – Chicago Review of Books

Proximity to the Natural World and Loving What is Broken in “Shy” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] When I was in middle school, I was haunted by the Boomtown Rats’ song “I Don’t Like Mondays.” A local radio station in Atlanta played the song every Monday morning, and it would remind me of dreary weeks at school and what I thought was my sad, inevitable march toward adulthood. The song features … Read more

An Escape from a Stifling World in “I Felt the End Before It Came” – Chicago Review of Books

An Escape from a Stifling World in “I Felt the End Before It Came” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] “I hid my queerness for years,” Daniel Allen Cox writes in I Felt the End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah’s Witness, his memoir-in-essays about coming of age within two conflicting identities: “I knew there was something wrong with me because the books and magazines told me so.” In these reading materials, … Read more

A Hope-Starved World in “Not Alone” – Chicago Review of Books

A Hope-Starved World in “Not Alone” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Climate change has been the focal point of environmental concerns with the threat of rising seas, flooding, droughts, and food shortages attributed to it. Apocalyptic outcomes are on the horizon, and so many speculative narratives in recent years have projected end-of-world scenarios tied to the calamity.  Sarah K. Jackson’s debut novel, Not Alone, finds … Read more

Coming to Terms with Boston’s Racist Legacy in “Small Mercies” – Chicago Review of Books

Coming to Terms with Boston’s Racist Legacy in “Small Mercies” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] From the Kenzie and Gennaro novels that established him as a master of new noir, to the haunting crime thriller Mystic River and his magnum opus of the 1919 Boston Police Strike, The Given Day, Dennis Lehane has captured Boston neighborhoods with more grit, vitality, and unerring precision than any writer in recent memory. … Read more

“Arrangements in Blue” – Chicago Review of Books

“Arrangements in Blue” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Poet Amy Key’s first foray into nonfiction, Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone, uses Joni Mitchell’s Blue as a foundation for a personal meditation on long-term singledom that has endured into middle age. Using the album’s tracklist as a thematic guide, Key probes her lifelong desire for romantic love from various … Read more

An Interview With Jen St. Jude About “If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come” – Chicago Review of Books

An Interview With Jen St. Jude About “If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Full disclosure first: I worked with Jen St. Jude at Chicago Review of Books for a number of years. Like many of the creative professionals here, I knew they were at work on a book though I didn’t know many of the details. Reading If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come first offers the pleasure of seeing … Read more

The Limits of Historical Saga in “The Covenant of Water” – Chicago Review of Books

The Limits of Historical Saga in “The Covenant of Water” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water opens with a map of the state of Kerala. All its regions, ranging from the mountainous Wayanad to the urban Cochin to the southernmost point of Trivandrum. It is akin to any detailed map in an epic fantasy, and in many respects that is the narrative Verghese has … Read more

Seeing Through the Kaleidoscope of “Ordinary Notes” – Chicago Review of Books

Seeing Through the Kaleidoscope of “Ordinary Notes” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] The whiplash changes that mark our days have made us ripe for new forms of expression that can help us see our way through. Even as 2021 saw the Black Lives Matter movement attain global impact, Confederate and colonialist monuments come down, and institutions grapple with ways to respond appropriately to calls for equality, … Read more