For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir Lessico Famigliare—Family Lexicon—for a college Italian class. Though that book is in a language I no longer understand as fluidly as I wish I could, it has accompanied me across all my moves since. This re-issue of Voices in the Evening, also translated by D.M. Low and recently … Read more
[ad_1] Madame d’Aulnoy was a literary leader of late 17th century France—ahead of even Charles Perrault in popularizing the literary fairy tale. As Jack Zipes notes in his introduction to this new collection of d’Aulnoy’s tales, The Island of Happiness, Madame d’Aulnoy was the inventor of the term “fairy tales.” She used this form of … Read more
[ad_1] Eric Nguyen’s debut novel Things We Lost to the Water is the story of a Vietnamese family that resettled in New Orleans after the Vietnam War. The novel is told from the perspectives of three characters: Hương, the mother, and her two sons, Tuấn and Ben. As Hương becomes gradually less hopeful about the … Read more
[ad_1] With the new translation of Solo Viola: A Post-Exotic Novel, Antoine Volodine inhabits the operating theater of the apocalypse. It’s a classic example of his post-exotic project. And there is alchemy in the night of surrealism. It’s dangerous to characterize the writing of Antoine Volodine because he so intentionally self describes writing. Volodine employs … 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 Sanjena … Read more
[ad_1] Matt Mitchell’s debut collection of poetry, The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, examines identity through the eyes of its eponymous archetype, depicting a nomadic traveler, saddled to his horseback, slipstreaming every passing moment into another literary confessional. The Neon Hollywood Cowboy represents an alter ego for Mitchell to funnel his own story through. An alter ego … Read more
[ad_1] By the time the Ottomans dissolved the Roman Empire in 1453 and took down Constantinople, the city had conceived the name Istanbul. It is now known as a city that embraces cultural diversity in the most enlightening ways despite, in Nektaria Anastasiadou’s words, “a monstrous confusion of civilization and barbarism” it has dealt with … Read more
[ad_1] Despite my Indian-American heritage, Partition to me feels as distant as any historical event. Though my grandparents were children in a pre-Independence India, Partition did not affect their lives directly as they lived in South India, far from the newly drawn borders of India and Pakistan. What I know of Partition comes from books, … Read more
[ad_1] While mental illness touches everyone’s lives in different ways, many people are especially affected after a horrific year of isolation and global strife. It’s a particularly important time to reflect on mental health and mental illness: the struggle and loss, the care and healing, the beautiful, heartbreaking humanity of it all. We asked thirteen … Read more
[ad_1] Tentative and fogbound, writer Robert Prowe, the protagonist of Chris Powers’s A Lonely Man, finds himself in the middle of his life much like the Dante of The Divine Comedy. But for the city of Berlin in 2014 instead of a darkened wood, an unfinishable manuscript in his hands instead of those same hands … Read more