For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s second full-length collection of poetry, Basic Needs, is a love letter in three movements, written as the Brooklyn poet watches capitalist America in slow and seeping collapse with a steady, unflinching eye. The collection is not an elegy for this moment in time, but rather an homage to the lives built … Read more
[ad_1] Cathy Curtis’s subject in A Splendid Intelligence: the Life of Elizabeth Hardwick is mighty. A writer whose career spanned decades—a ‘literary lion’. It is a chronological account of the writer’s life. The first couple of chapters trace Hardwick’s origins. It draws a portrait of a young Elizabeth whose “bookish tastes made her an anomaly … Read more
[ad_1] The Chicago literary tradition was built by the foot. Where Los Angeles had the glamour and New York had the grandeur, some of the most influential writers made Chicago come alive on the page through the most intimate depictions of the most intimate of landmarks, from a street in Bronzeville to a house on … Read more
[ad_1] The artist Winfred Rembert accomplished unbelievable things in his seventy-five years, and he was the first to admit how unbelievable they seemed. But he wants you to know what drove him from picking cotton at age nine to being a local basketball star to surviving a lynching, working chain gangs, and gaining renown as … Read more
[ad_1] In 2000, a hefty treatise, tagged with the bold red title Empire and illustrated with a stock image of the planet from satellite’s view, quickly attracted interest from academics and popular audiences alike. The cover, with its primitive Y2K design, gave the book the aura of a revolutionary political pamphlet—one, though, that was almost … Read more
[ad_1] First published in 1929, the extended essay by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, advanced the idea that women’s creative liberation could be garnered by securing two things: time and solitude. In material form, Woolf likened time and solitude to a room and independent, financial means. At the center of this landmark feminist … Read more
[ad_1] If you’re anything like us at the CHIRB, you’ve reached September and are asking yourself that old Talking Heads chestnut: “How did I get here?” Traditionally a time of harvests and returns, with shorter, colder days on the horizon, it’s also a big month for books and we could fill an entire second list … Read more
[ad_1] New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones flashes his mastery of horror film history and raw teen angst in his novel, My Heart is a Chainsaw. Fresh off a double win at the Shirley Jackson Awards for his previous novel, The Only Good Indians, and novella, Night of the Mannequins, Jones lets his … Read more
[ad_1] David Schuman’s prose chapbook Best Men simmers with questions about why people act the way they do at weddings. Over the course of five stories, Schuman introduces a diverse cast of unconventional “best men” who find themselves swept up in events beyond their control. At once surprising and suspenseful, Best Men upends popular notions … Read more
[ad_1] The literary critic James Wood once wrote dismissively of historical fiction, saying that it is “merely science fiction facing backwards.” We inject the concerns of the present into the past, Wood suggests, the same way that we do when we write about the imaginary future, and this can result in a text that feels … Read more