For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] It’s a tricky thing to infuse a story set in our actual, current world with giant supernatural problems and potentials. Call it “the problem of allegorical interference.” If we’re aware of actual injustices in the world—and their often-thorny causes—then it becomes, at best, weird to blame them on vampires or aliens, to focus on … Read more
[ad_1] When I was a liminal fifteen in Reagan’s dire 1980s, my desperately-needed imaginative transport took the form of cable reruns of The Twilight Zone. Having been met at the departure terminal of the fantastic some years earlier by Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, I quickly discovered that Rod Serling’s “land of both shadow and … Read more
[ad_1] In her 1938 essay, “The Three Guineas,” Virginia Woolf christened herself, along with her literary predecessors, as “the daughters of educated men.” Though she referenced only three fathers by name, the paternal influence she described can indeed be applied to a remarkable number of female writers from ages past. For varying reasons, Fanny Burney, … 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? This week’s guest is Elaine … Read more
[ad_1] Blanche DuBois. Hamlet. Scarlett O’Hara. Heathcliffe. Has any celebrity couple created more memorable characterizations that linger in the public imagination than Vivien Leigh and Sir Laurence Olivier? In addition to their prolific work on stage and screen, modern audiences may not be aware they were also two of the first global celebrities. Obsession with … Read more
[ad_1] A cottage industry of likability discourse manifests with regularity, and Jerks, Sara Lippmann’s new collection of stories, will no doubt inspire a certain level of curiosity with the subject. The characters are not nice, they are not kind, they are not good people; they are, as the title suggests, jerks. That isn’t to say … Read more
[ad_1] The subtitle of Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation is revealing yet misjudged. The description tells us a lot about Emba’s understanding of her own work but does not accurately describe the book, which frustrates rather than provokes. The issue is not just that its conclusion, that the “best sexual world is perhaps a … Read more
[ad_1] In the conversation surrounding Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation, I expect to see discussion of her carefully crafted satire, her inclusion and destruction of campus tropes, and the meticulous unpacking of Asian American identity in the lens of violence and fetishism. These should all be discussed, but I hope the conversation also includes … Read more
[ad_1] It’s perhaps an unfortunate aspect of art that the value we perceive in it is at least partially derived from public opinion. Who was the work’s creator, and from what circumstances was it made? In Portrait of an Unknown Lady, the second novel from Maria Gainza that has been translated into English by Thomas … Read more
[ad_1] If you take the Amtrak from Chicago to Springfield, you run smack into time as you enter Illinois’s capital city. The train crawls along bricked roads and Springfield’s history-soaked downtown, the Capitol itself just blocks from the tracks. That journey in time and space is also taken by Ray Long in The House That … Read more