John Warner

5 days ago | chicagotribune.com | John Warner

Some novels feel not so much written as conjured, as though the author has absorbed something from the larger ambient culture and distilled it into the characters and narrative. The result is like being put under a spell, an invitation to join some other mind in a shared dream. Not all books necessarily intend to do this, but when it happens, it can be a startling and powerful experience.

1 week ago | chicagotribune.com | John Warner

I have a bit of a hot and cold relationship with our big celebrity book clubs: Oprah, Reese and Jenna. On one hand, anything that gets people into books is A-OK with me, and each of these women has a monthly megaphone that moves hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of books.

2 weeks ago | chicagotribune.com | John Warner

It’s hard to know who to trust these days. Our media is fractured, long past the days of trusted, broadly accessed news sources. Information crops up on social media decontextualized and severed from its origins or even from a coherent chronology. Artificial intelligence can be used to spoof voices, images and even video, so we literally cannot believe what we see with our own eyes if we encounter it online.

3 weeks ago | chicagotribune.com | John Warner

Within the first 20 pages of David Szalay’s new novel, “Flesh,” I knew that I would be writing about the book, but I truthfully had no clue what I might have to say. Several days after finishing the novel, I find myself in the same state of mind, which is a testament to the novel’s unusual approach, and because of that approach, its haunting power.

1 month ago | chicagotribune.com | John Warner |Paul Theroux

It seems like every family has a bit of ancestral folklore, and Joe Dunthorne’s is better than most, a tale of his great-grandfather Siegfried spiriting his family away from Nazi Germany in 1935, followed by a 1936 return during the Berlin Olympics in which they made off with the contents of the home they left behind.