A Conversation with Patricia Smith About “Unshuttered” – Chicago Review of Books

A Conversation with Patricia Smith About “Unshuttered” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] A list of Patricia Smith’s achievements in poetry could take up much of this interview. A poet, playwright, essayist, educator and mentor, she’s deservedly won nearly every accolade and award, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, and earlier this year she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. … Read more

Blurring Relationship Boundaries in “Thirst for Salt” – Chicago Review of Books

Blurring Relationship Boundaries in “Thirst for Salt” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Our unnamed narrator meets Jude, a local antique dealer and washed-up actor, while on vacation with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Jude is forty-two. Our narrator is twenty-four. Jude recognizes her copy of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. Our narrator is smitten. And so we embark on a doomed romance serving as … Read more

Three Generations of Witches and Female Power in “Weyward” – Chicago Review of Books

Three Generations of Witches and Female Power in “Weyward” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Perhaps there are no more famous witches than Shakespeare’s three “weyward” wenches. The crookedness of the Bard’s (and Britain’s) witches represented a cultural fear of an empty womb—the childless, the menopausal. Women were to be coupled and birthing. If they were not, they were witchy. Evil. Monstrously magical. But, for the reader, the witches … Read more

Dan Egan’s “The Devil’s Element” – Chicago Review of Books

Dan Egan’s “The Devil’s Element” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Dan Egan writes, “An exquisitely balanced phosphorus exchange existed for billions of years before humans corrupted the element’s flow through the environment.” Egan’s task in his new book, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance, is to explore that “exquisite exchange,” detailing the element’s breakdown and passage through wetlands and across … Read more

Capital and Morals Collide in “Birnam Wood” – Chicago Review of Books

Capital and Morals Collide in “Birnam Wood” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Full confession: I read, but did not finish Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Booker Prize-winning, 900-page novel, The Luminaries. I don’t recall the reason. The book may have simply worn me out; and, of course, there are times in one’s life when the next book waiting is simply more desirable. Catton’s latest work, Birnam Wood, clocks … Read more

Voluntary Disappearance in “The Unfortunates” – Chicago Review of Books

Voluntary Disappearance in “The Unfortunates” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] J.K. Chukwu’s debut, The Unfortunates, is so much more than a novel. It is visual art, emotional plea, nostalgia bomb, and bildungsroman all wrapped up in one. While the powerful themes explored in the novel can and will resonate in some way with anyone, this story particularly speaks to the isolation Black students often … Read more

Place, History, and Mythmaking in “Homestead” – Chicago Review of Books

Place, History, and Mythmaking in “Homestead” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Melinda Moustakis’ fiction is an expert tutorial in braiding a story’s environment with its characters’ paths, as much as it is an unveiling of how that braid is not a braid at all but an inseparability, place inextricable from human life. In her debut collection, Bear Down, Bear North, which won the Flannery O’Connor … Read more

Getting into the Gray Area in “I Have Some Questions for You” – Chicago Review of Books

Getting into the Gray Area in “I Have Some Questions for You” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Our lives aren’t movies, no matter how much we may dream of the cinematic pan out of a “happily ever after” conclusion. In real life, juries don’t reach a verdict within a 90-minute runtime, the killer doesn’t always face justice, and memories don’t play back clearly like a full scene. Oftentimes the truth is … Read more

Author Sarah Terez Rosenblum on Sharing Your Work and Why You Should Wear Black When Teaching – Chicago Review of Books

Volumes Bookscafe’s Rebecca George on Backlists, Sales, and Why Authors Shouldn’t Call a Bookstore on a Weekend – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] In the latest episode of The Chicago Writers Podcast, Dan Finnen talks with Sarah Terez Rosenblum, author of Herself When She’s Missing, about using teaching to learn craft, knowing when to share your work, giving yourself permission to say “I don’t know,” and more! The Chicago Writers Podcast is a Stories Matter Foundation series … Read more