For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] I both love and hate end of the year book lists—love because they’re fun roundups full of great titles. But they also make me cringe, even silently rage, because without fail, they leave out amazing books that deserve the spotlight, arguably more than the mega bestsellers often dominating the lists. But the cold mechanics … Read more
[ad_1] Censorship is something Thai American author Sunisa Manning is all too familiar with. Her thrilling and heartfelt debut novel A Good True Thai follows three young people whose paths converge at university leading up to the 1970s pro-democracy student movement in Thailand, their lives upended after a massacre of student demonstrators—a historical event that … Read more
[ad_1] In the winter of 2016, in a classroom on the ground floor of the English department where I teach, my colleagues and I gathered to hear Sofia Samatar give a job talk for a tenure-track teaching position. The classroom had once been part of a large indoor pool, specifically the shallow end, whose only … Read more
[ad_1] Building a “Best Books of the year” list is an impossible task. For every one book we honor, there are hundreds of beautiful and well-deserving titles that go unrecognized. As a writer or reader, it’s easy to look at these 2023 lists with a mix of intrigue and dread, as they look to see … Read more
[ad_1] This year’s Booker prize longlist has featured numerous introspective, hyperfocused character studies, and Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s All the Little Bird-Hearts is no exception. Centering Sunday Forrester, an eccentric woman who lives her life according to a highly structured, self-made routine, the novel takes an intriguing and slightly sinister turn as new neighbors move in: the … Read more
[ad_1] A few months into the pandemic, the apartment building across the street from mine had a parking lot party. Tucked away in the tree-lined Germantown section of Philadelphia on a hot summer day this was unusual. Over the months leading up to that afternoon, my neighborhood of buses, cars, and a lively population had … Read more
[ad_1] In her debut novel, Here in the Dark, prize-winning culture reporter and theater critic for the New York Times Alexis Soloski crafts a psychological thriller around Vivian Parry, a Manhattan-based theater critic notorious for her acerbic reviews and her predilection for mixing sex, booze, and pills to quell the anxiety and grief she feels … Read more
[ad_1] What do we ask of art? How, indeed, can we know what it is? On this, the philosophers tend to disagree. At some level, we know it when we see it, as the Supreme Court once said about some other hard-to-define thing. In the twenty-first century, it is probably the most politic to say … Read more
[ad_1] In a 2018 interview, author Stacy Hardy cited Sylvia Wynter as one of her favorite authors and theorists; Hardy specifically noted her admiration for Wynter’s work on the social strictures and boundaries that form a shared concept of “humanity.” Hardy, like Wynter, is deeply invested in the liberatory potential of asking, What does it … Read more
[ad_1] On December 7, 2023, we came together for the 2023 Chicago Review of Books (CHIRBy) Awards, co-presented by StoryStudio Chicago! Now in its eighth year, the CHIRBy Awards honor the best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and short essays and stories that feature Chicago and our strong literary community. Congratulations to this year’s winners and to … Read more