The front door to Maze Books in Rockford, Illinois sticks and bangs with a distinct double-clunking sound. Rather than updating for modern convenience, we have grown to embrace the thudding as the bookshop’s unofficial doorbell. The button on the door handle has to be held down completely or the latch bolt doesn’t clear the strike plate. When that happens, you get the clunkin...

Lately I’m hearing more complaints about rising gas prices and continued grumbles of how expensive food is, but fewer people talking about healthcare. How expensive it is, how everything isn’t covered. (Who among us doesn’t have a pending medical bill that needs to be paid?) It’s almost like we’ve come to accept crappy coverage as part of life. Dreams of universal healthcare ...

Inevitably, when a city shines in a movie or book, someone will say that it’s “almost like another character.” It’s a disappointing cliché because it fails on inspection: a city doesn’t have parents, it doesn’t eat breakfast or reminisce about its first love. The cliché  feels true and clever the first time you hear it because the comparison begins to touch the edges of ...

In honor of the 10th anniversary of the Chicago Review of Books, The New Chicago Renaissance series revisits exemplary works of literature about Chicago from the last 10 years and explores their continued relevance. Join us all year long as 12 leading writers and artists explore books that they love and why they’re meaningful to our understanding of modern Chicago.

In Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill, touch is restricted, bodies threaten to contaminate one another, and hybridized mushroom women sprout fungal growths that are shaved away so they appear more human. Cranehill’s debut novel follows one of these women, Nicole, who...