Chicago Review of Books

The Chicago Review of Books, created by StoryStudio Chicago, aims to broaden the literary dialogue by featuring varied genres, publishers, voices, and formats. It highlights the literary culture of Chicago and provides a platform for discussing literature in the Midwest.

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Articles

“Why Aren’t We Solving This?” David Ambroz on “A Place Called Home”

1 week ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Rachel Leon

I’ve worked in child welfare on and off for over twenty years, and in that time, the limited media portrayals of foster care have disheartened me. Many depictions are flat and riddled with easy stereotypes, often written by people without lived experience within the system. An exception is David Ambroz’s memoir, A Place Called Home—released in paperback earlier this month.
Wartime Realism Prevails in Adam Kovac’s The Surge

2 weeks ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Joe Stanek

It can be difficult now to recall the peaks and nadirs that defined each phase of America’s decades-long war in Iraq. The prevailing fatalism of hindsight bias makes it sound like the war was always lost from the beginning. Yet for many, the 2007 troop surge was a time of great hope and confidence that the American military strategy was working. Initial reports from NPR and The Guardian praised sharp decreases in the number of car bombings and overall deaths.
A Posthumous Folk Hero: The Making of a Legacy in “The Afterlife of Malcolm X”

3 weeks ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Steve Nathans-Kelly

In the summer of 1991, as Spike Lee was making the last revisions to the shooting script for his Malcolm X biopic, poet and Black Arts icon Amiri Baraka staged a rally in Harlem to protest Lee’s involvement with the project. Insisting that Lee had neither the directing chops nor the political understanding to bring Malcolm’s radical message or story to the screen, Baraka declared, “We will not let Malcolm X’s life be trashed to make middle-class Negroes sleep easier.
Rewriting Your Story in "Run for the Hills"

3 weeks ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Lucy Rees

My golden rule is that if Kevin Wilson is writing it, I’m reading it. I could read his grocery list and still feel a punch to the gut. Run for the Hills is no exception. It’s wacky and full of heart, but in between each laugh I felt gutted. It is a story of family and the many shapes it can take, but it is also much more, asking why the ones who leave and the ones who lie are always the epicenter, always the focal point.
Tarot and Private Investigators in “Death in the Cards”

3 weeks ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Elisa Shoenberger

While many people may not think that tarot cards and private investigating could go together, Mia P. Manansala’s debut young adult novel, Death in the Cards, makes the pairing as natural as peanut butter and jelly. She is the author of the award-winning Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series. Her new series focuses on Danika Dizon, a high schooler at Lane Tech High School in Chicago. Danika wants two things.
Unpeeling the History of Citrus in Katie Goh’s “Foreign Fruit”

3 weeks ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Ian MacAllen

Oranges, and derivative products such as juice, are so ubiquitous in the modern supermarket, most consumers take the fruit for granted. Yet, it wasn’t so long ago that citrus was a rare luxury cherished as a gift and reserved for the upper classes. Amazingly, the fruits we eat today are mainly cultivated hybrids grown from cloned trees and shipped all around the globe far from their place of origin.
The Paradox of Existence and Extinction: An Interview with Mai Der Vang on “Primordial”

1 month ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Mandana Chaffa

“Absence • behind me, • absence in • front of me • forever reaching at • a ghost.”Primordial, the rich and rewarding new collection by Mai Der Vang, is deeply engaged with the absence—and presence—of a genus, a people, a language, and life itself. By focusing on Saola, a spindle-horned, critically-endangered, and rarely-witnessed mammal, Vang explores the fate of the genus with that of Hmong people, each impacted by generational and environmental violence, and reclaims their agency.
"As a writer, your job is to pay attention": An Interview with Karen Bender

1 month ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Rachel Leon

Some authors get deemed “writers’ writers,” meaning their work is so skillful, sharp, and brilliant, we writers flock to it. Lydia Davis, James McBride, Joy Williams, Clarice Lipspector, Lorrie Moore, Susan Choi, Denis Johnson, Jesmyn Ward—these are a few writers whose work other writers often revisit to study, for inspiration, and to marvel. I’d put National Book Award-finalist Karen E. Bender in this same category.
“Make them stop you”: An Interview with Sarah Schulman about “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity”

1 month ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Rachel Leon

Our country is especially divided today. Some of those issues have long been divisive, like abortion, climate change, and immigration. Others have grown on people’s radar these days—the destruction of Social Security, the need to stop genocide in Palestine, and how much control an unelected billionaire should have in our government. Many of us are asking ourselves how we can fix this mess, how to come together to fight for the respect, dignity, and justice of all people.
The Nature of the Self in "Open Up"

1 month ago | chireviewofbooks.com | Ian MacAllen

Emotional intimacy is at stake in Thomas Morris’s latest story collection, Open Up. The stories feature characters struggling to find connection with others, and not often succeeding. These results are particularly depressing given that many of the relationships Morris explores are those of families—fathers and children, especially. Too often these characters, who are expected to be close, end up with distance between them.