Chicago Review of Books

The fundamental brokenness of our world takes center stage in Choi Jin-Young’s daring novel Hunger, translated from Korean by Soje. In this novel, which became a cult classic in the mid-2010s in ...

I first met Sarah Wang at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She was fresh from Convent Arts—a residency at a one-time seaside retreat for nuns—and I couldn’t help but try to reconcile her grown up cool girl vibe and witty observations on the limits of cognitive behavioral therapy with the sort of monastic asceticism one tends to associate with nunneries. Kenyon is one of th...

To live in Guayaquil, Ecuador is to be at the mercy of the tectonic plates under your feet. Nicole and Noa, the young women at the heart of Mónica Ojeda’s latest novel, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, run away from home on the day that a ne...

Blair Palmer Yoxall’s debut novel opens with a swear, and readers immediately respond to twelve-year-old Niko’s direct and impassioned voice. It acts like a bridge for readers to cross decades in an instant—all those years since 1885—sharply declaring Treat Them as Buffa...

In a 2021 interview, author and historian Wesley Brown paraphrases Flannery O’Connor as saying that one of the obligations of fiction is to study what human beings lack. Brown’s slim new novel circles this idea of what is lacking in human nature. He begins with an enigmatic epigraph attributed to O’Connor in the first pages of his novel,