For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water opens with a map of the state of Kerala. All its regions, ranging from the mountainous Wayanad to the urban Cochin to the southernmost point of Trivandrum. It is akin to any detailed map in an epic fantasy, and in many respects that is the narrative Verghese has … Read more
[ad_1] Chicago Review of Books is excited to feature the cover reveal of Nada Samih-Rotondo’s debut memoir, All Water Has Perfect Memory (out September 2023 with Jaded Ibis Press). The blurb, author bio, and quotes that follow are all courtesy of the book’s publicist, Addie Tsai/ Levee Break Lit: “Life changed forever for six year … Read more
[ad_1] Chicago Review of Books is excited to feature the cover reveal of Nada Samih-Rotondo’s debut memoir, All Water Has a Perfect Memory (out September 2023 with Jaded Ibis Press). The following blurb, author bio, and following quotes are all courtesy of the book’s publicist, Addie Tsai/ Levee Break Lit: “Life changed forever for six … Read more
[ad_1] While all her friends’ fish are changing into mermaids, is 12-year-old Anissa’s fish becoming something else? Anissa touches the small round bone sprouting from the fish’s back. The fish is a small, electric blue acara, with black eyes. It’s cute but it’s only a fish. Anissa feeds pellets to the fish as … Read more
[ad_1] In her debut novel, Things We Found When the Water Went Down, Tegan Nia Swanson asks a lot of her readers. The initial pages of the book offer a list of characters and a map, and footnotes accompany the reader throughout, but it is nevertheless easy to become disoriented in this layered, complex story … Read more
[ad_1] Stories about story-telling itself always risk a kind of self-congratulatory triteness. As lovers of narrative, we’re already aware of the power of story, and hopefully self-aware enough to see how stories change our perception of ourselves, of the world; breathless paeans to the medium itself generally leave me, pardon the pun, uninspired. Tautology bordering … Read more
[ad_1] Scientists are still studying exactly how our nerves’ collective activities transcribe our experiences into memories and, while a noble study, a certain question persists: isn’t memory so intoxicating because it’s so elusive? Memory’s pliability makes it a rich playing ground in fiction; it can manipulate and subvert what characters think they know and is … Read more
[ad_1] “Two deaths you cannot have and one you cannot avoid.” So goes a Russian saying Mikhail Iossel remembers in his excellent new collection Love Like Water, Love Like Fire. Funny thing about Iossel’s stories of Soviet life, though: they are filled with men and women living second lives, drunks who avoided death (to their … Read more
[ad_1] Open Water, the debut novel by Caleb Azumah Nelson, begins when a barber notices the unnamed protagonist exchanging gazes in the mirror with a woman getting her hair cut. The barber says: “You two are in something. I don’t know what it is, but you guys are in something. Some people call it a … Read more
[ad_1] An uncontrollable plague has left the city in ruins and trapped in perpetual quarantine. A thief hires a guide to lead him safely through the city’s many dangers to the one person who can give him the travel papers he needs to escape. It took him months to find the right guide. … Read more