For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] This Virtual Night returns us to “The Outworlds,” C.S. Friedman’s quietly intriguing science-fictional universe. The world Friedman painted in 1998’s This Alien Shore, a cyberpunk-flavored space adventure, felt ahead of its time: entire cultures built around physical and mental diversity, with strange and evocative embellishments. In this future, humanity settled distant planets using a … Read more
[ad_1] Marc Kelly Smith, nicknamed “Slam Papi,” founded international slam poetry in the 1980s when he started the monumental Uptown Poetry Slam series at the Green Mill. Each Sunday night, he attracted misfits and poets from across Chicago and its suburbs to exchange words, including the likes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Patricia Smith, who provides … Read more
[ad_1] Deep in the forests of eastern Poland, the town of Kreskol lies forgotten. Through an improbable combination of bureaucratic negligence, unfriendly relations with other Jewish towns, and favorable geography, the Jews of Kreskol — the world’s last shtetl — have escaped the great onslaughts of the twentieth century (the Great War; the Holocaust; Polish … Read more
[ad_1] Alexandria Hall’s National Poetry Series-winning book, Field Music, possesses a poetic maturity born less from extensive experience than from piercing vision and sensitivity. Hall, a finalist in the 2018 “Narrative 30 Below Contest” has lived some, undoubtedly, but somehow manages to sidestep the typical language registers of youth—the naiveté, the callowness, the arbitrary ambiguity. … Read more
[ad_1] “It is poetry that holds the songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming, and it is poetry we turn to when we travel those places of transformation, like birth, coming of age, marriage, accomplishments, and death. We sing our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren: our human experience in time, into and through existence.” So begins the … Read more
[ad_1] Society is one of these concepts we might fail to adequately define, but we all know what it means. Ironically, even more universal than this implicit understanding is the feeling that one just does not belong. This is certainly a feeling familiar to Sayaka Murata, and it’ll be familiar to readers of her first … Read more
[ad_1] In our overly connected world, it is a rare moment to not have all the information. We feel more secure with the constant feed of data, even when that information foretells doom and gloom. Rumaan Alam plays on our anxiety of the unknown in his third novel Leave The World Behind, a fast-paced and … Read more
[ad_1] For the fifth year in a row, the Chicago Review of Books is thrilled to present the CHIRBy Awards to recognize the best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and short essays published by Chicago-based writers. Below are the finalists in each category for 2020, along with a list of this year’s judges. Congratulations to all of these incredible writers! … Read more
[ad_1] Can people in love ever really understand one another? That is the question at the center of Xiaolu Guo’s latest novel, A Lover’s Discourse. The titular lover is an unnamed woman from southern China, newly arrived in London to complete a Ph.D. program. She develops a relationship with a German-Austrialian landscape architect, also nameless … Read more
[ad_1] I’m tempted to say the modern idea of genre is a joke, except that it’s not funny. A sincerely curious, skilled, and committed writer can basically write whatever she wants, genre be damned. Yet certain genres are still elevated and others dismissed; the New York Times “By the Book” feature still regularly asks writers … Read more