For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Demystifying the world is central to many coming-of-age stories. Often in these stories we find a wide-eyed, hopeful young person who journeys out into the world seeking to manifest their ideals, only to face impersonal cruelties and structural tragedies which force them to reassess who they are, who they want to be, and the … Read more
[ad_1] Kiki de Montparnasse. Such a great name. It’s an exciting name, an erotic name, a name that evokes a certain place and a certain time. But it’s not a name that we immediately recognize, although her image is. I asked my small circle of friends and associates—most of whom have more than a passing … 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] In her essay “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale,” Kate Bernheimer balks at critics who pan fairy tales, fabulism, and other genres where magic insinuates itself in everyday experience. Bernheimer instead points out that the fairy tale’s grimness and infinite possibilities energize even writers of literary realism and every fiber of their … 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] Upon returning to Nuremberg after two years in Venice, an inspired Albrecht Dürer decided to combine the Italian and Germanic styles in a study of human form. He would paint a life-size diptych depicting a male and female nude, an expansion of an engraving he had carved before embarking on his Venetian trip. He … Read more
[ad_1] How would it feel to realize that your father or mother holds a muted distaste for you because your skin has suddenly ceased to be white? They no longer embrace you, or the conflicting tension in their eyes before welcoming you is too visible to ignore. Such is the premise of Mohsin Hamid’s latest … Read more
[ad_1] Sue Mell’s debut novel Provenance (Madville Publishing, July 19, 2022) focuses on DJ, a fifty-something writer living in Brooklyn, who is grieving his wife’s early death by blowing the insurance money on second-hand guitars, vinyl records, and vintage ephemera. When his apartment building is going to be sold, he moves in with his newly … Read more