For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In Lulu Wang’s film The Farewell—the story of Billi, a young Chinese-American woman who returns to China after several years to spend time with her dying grandmother, who remains ignorant of her own condition—there is a scene between Billi and her uncle in which he explains the difference in their perspectives. Billi believes the … Read more
[ad_1] Middle children often don’t get their due and that’s frequently the case for short fiction as well, wedged between poetry, flash and full-length novels. Yet in the hands of those with a talent for shaping entire worlds in brief pages, they are as powerful as the most economical poem and the weightiest novel. In … Read more
[ad_1] The feeling of being haunted has a way of collapsing one’s sense of direction and space. The presence of something blankets the world like mist, lingering, but impossible to locate. The feeling is inevitably followed by the question, “is it all in my head?” Maybe I’m projecting the rumblings of my psyche out into … 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 is Jean Thompson, … Read more
[ad_1] Alison B. Hart’s incisive debut novel, The Work Wife, captures one day in the lives of esteemed Hollywood director Ted Stabler’s three wives—his ex-wife, his current wife, and his work wife. Each of these women struggles, with varying levels of success, to balance her relationships and creative goals with work and its attendant power … Read more
[ad_1] The ghosts of Dennis Mombauer’s The House of Drought are many, as many as there are allegories. The established fact of extraction, the ritual of sacrifice, the deviance of the unknown—these are its themes. None of these beasts are as powerful as the global narrative that has already been spinning: the irreversibility of climate … Read more
[ad_1] Being an aspiring artist can feel like an uphill battle: you look around and notice the world in flames, both literal (climate change) and figurative (everything else), and it’s hard not to feel hopeless about the future. It makes sense that so many contemporary novels feature disaffected, disinvested millennials being apathetically carried on the … Read more
[ad_1] Aviva Rosner is many things: punk folk singer, contrarian, potty mouth, feminist, Jew, occasional vegan, fan of Amy Winehouse. She is also a woman approaching her mid-thirties who really wants a baby, but seems unable to have one—at least not without the intervention of assisted reproductive technology, to which she is philosophically and even … Read more
[ad_1] Is the world of our everyday reality the only world we live in, and the realest one we can apprehend? For McPhail, the protagonist of Jonathan Geltner’s novel Absolute Music, the world of fantasy—“the other world that has no name or too many names,” a “world behind the world”—is not only real but all … 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