For The Book Obsessed
[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 Nghi Vo, … Read more
[ad_1] There are good reasons why love triangles appear so often in literary plots. Triangles are inherently unstable. They force characters to make choices through constant negotiation and compromise. As far as triangles go, the one in Lillian Fishman’s debut novel Acts of Service is a perfectly messy inquiry into the nature of power and … Read more
[ad_1] “There’s a way to be playful even in times of really terrible doubt,” posits the narrator of Ali Smith’s new novel Companion Piece. It’s hard to think of an author more playful than Smith, whose work consistently breaks the conventional rules of contemporary fiction as taught in most American MFA programs—with consistently incandescent results. … Read more
[ad_1] Conception is a dynamic process of bringing the self and the other into that most intimate proximity. If books about motherhood and pregnancy constitute a literary genre, then conception—and its conceptual location between sexual reproduction and artistic production—is this genre’s most frequent trope. For English-speaking readers, Rivka Galchen’s 2016 Little Labors and Sheila Heti’s … Read more
[ad_1] Courtney Maum’s new memoir, The Year of the Horses, uses her story of falling in love with horses and playing polo as an adult to reckon with how to exist not only as a mother, but also as a human. Maum, a writer propelled by deadlines and busyness, wrestles with the all-consuming question of … Read more
[ad_1] Journalist Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, takes us to a dark future where humans are “Shareholders” governed by a global corporation. Decisions are made not by human heads of state, but through a master algorithm called Algo. There is no longer a need for currency, as Shareholders’ labor is evaluated by … Read more
[ad_1] Brooke Hayward describes her years married to Dennis Hopper as “the most wonderful and awful of my life.” In Mark Rozzo’s hands, this goes double for the 1960s, a decade their marriage almost perfectly spanned. His new book Everybody Thought We Were Crazy is an exhaustively researched portrait of Hopper and Hayward’s marriage as … Read more
[ad_1] Steve Almond fans have waited long and hard for his debut novel and crustaceous hell does it deliver. All the Secrets of the World is a masterful, nervy, complex and confrontational work that flays the white beasts of power, excoriates the American dream, and serves up a ferocious indictment of the Fourth Estate, all … Read more
[ad_1] Narrative structure impacts when we take in information, and how we read a story. Doubtful Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go would have the same impact if we knew from page one what was happening, and surely Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony wouldn’t be as masterful if narrated linearly. In the same way, Michelle Hart’s … Read more
[ad_1] Jennifer Saint’s 2021 debut novel Ariadne, a Sunday Times bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Month released in the US by Flatiron, brought fascinating women from Greek myth to life. She now turns her attention to the famous House of Atreus and the women of the Trojan War in Elektra, sharing the intertwined stories … Read more