For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Kerri ní Dochartaigh wanted to leave behind her hometown of Derry, Ireland from the start. She grew up in a fractured household with a Catholic mother and Protestant father – an abnormal pairing in the Irish community at the height of the Troubles. Her family home in the Protestant Waterside area shattered into pieces … 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] Alaska is a place of extremes: geography, isolation, weather—even daylight. These extremes sit at the center of Leigh Newman’s new story collection Nobody Gets Out Alive, as the collection probes the limitations and impact of the unique environment. Alaska serves as a common thread linking the narratives and defines the collection. Newman’s 2013 memoir … Read more
[ad_1] Cancer is the word nobody wants to speak. We’d rather discuss anything else—with anyone we can find (did you see the clouds this morning?)—than confront the illogical and arbitrary suffering that cancer brings. Any talk that does exist seems to occur behind closed doors, never crossing the threshold of public life. Yet there are … Read more
[ad_1] There is a rather odd aversion to the “unlikeable” character in the novel, as if fiction is to cloak itself in the sunny vestments of children’s television and portray the world only through the lens of those protagonists that pass some illusory morality test. But if fiction is to be an authentic—and, to some … Read more
[ad_1] In the 1970s, Love Canal, an otherwise peaceful neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, was afflicted by environmental oddities resembling Biblical plagues. Thick, viscous scum roiled on the surface of local streams. Rocks in the local playground would occasionally burst into flames. A noxious stench invaded basements and kitchens, seeped into clothes, and burned … Read more
[ad_1] Ruins are scars. Some are in the process of healing, succumbing to gravity, dirt, and time, covered in roots and soon to be buried. Others still hurt, poking at the sky, or, more pointedly, at the transformation and defacing of a people’s dignity. No matter their state of decay, the remnants of buildings, monuments, … Read more
[ad_1] Like many, I’ve been eagerly anticipating Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother, his second collection of poems following the success of Night Sky with Exit Wounds and his debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. But whether it’s a sign of our temporally unrooted times or my increasingly scattered mind, I found myself considering … Read more
[ad_1] “This book is not fiction,” Samatha Hunt asserts at the beginning of her new, ostensibly nonfiction book, The Unwritten Book. “My father is writing a novel disguised as a journal entry. However, much of his partial book is true to his life, tempting me to ask, is it all true? Then, as someone who … 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