For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In her 2018 short story collection Half Gods, Akil Kumarasamy drew upon both the imagined and the real in her intricately crafted tales of the Sri Lankan diaspora, whose characters were haunted by the impact of the Tamil genocide. In Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, her debut novel, we feel the same hauntedness … Read more
[ad_1] Brenda Lozano’s Witches, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary, tells the story of the lives of two Mexican women: Feliciana, an aging curandera, or folk healer, living in a small rural village in Oaxaca who has gained an international reputation, and Zoe, a young journalist from Mexico City. Zoe is dispatched to interview … Read more
[ad_1] Authors have spared few words when writing about the beauty and bruises of Chicago throughout its history as a literary muse. But for every story that leans into nostalgia and earnestness, rarely have we seen fiction that explores the more absurd aspects of the city and those who lead it. Nelson Algren once wrote … Read more
[ad_1] I’ve long been fascinated by the composition of our lives—how pains and traumas, tiny joys, and mundane moments collide with others’ experiences and are set against global catastrophes. I remember wishing I could find a novel that conveyed this, but I didn’t find one that quite did until Coco Picard’s debut novel, The Healing … 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? Our guest this week is … Read more
[ad_1] I somehow ended up reading two books about deer at the same time: Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and Dashiel Carrera’s debut novel, The Deer. After striking a doe on a lonely road at night, Carrera’s narrator, Henry Haverford, fumbles … Read more
[ad_1] Anyone who has lost a beloved pet knows the profound grief that can accompany this experience. And yet, while there are many codified rituals for mourning a human loved one, mourning a pet’s death can be more amorphous. In her compassionate and revelatory new book Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, author … Read more
[ad_1] Much of Adam Langer’s finely wrought, raucously funny, and startlingly insightful new novel, Cyclorama, occurs within “The Annex,” an insular and endlessly drama-steeped theatrical enclave of a magnet high school just north of Chicago. True to its title, which refers to a 360-degree canvas in a theatrical rotunda, fashioned to provide a changeable visualization … Read more
[ad_1] There’s a certain meme that made its rounds throughout the queerer parts of Tumblr and Twitter several years ago, and still sometimes appears in conversation. In it, a person sees another person, and wonders, “do I want to be with them, or do I want to be them?” Lio Min’s new YA novel, Beating … Read more
[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