Chicago Review of Books

Cool Machine is the final installment of Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy heist. This series portrays the reckoning of career criminals who can’t turn off their thieving instincts. Whitehead separates the book into three sections of “jobs” that take pl...

Banning a children’s board book comes off as frivolous, innocuous, and even preposterous, when, in fact, it is a clear indication of how threatened the powers that be are to free thought.

When I was asked to write J is for Justice: An Activism Alphabet...

In her latest poetry collection, PULSE, Maria Nazos ushers her readers across the lines of passion and suffering, of love and cruelty, and of the obsessions that drive us. In poems that are as equally tender as they are brutal, Nazos transports her readers across space ...

I’m thinking of a male American author who was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Yale University, has previously taught at Princeton University, and has won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. I am, of course, thinking of Chang-rae Lee, but if you thought of John Knowles, then you’re almost right – Knowles won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The uncanny simi...

The romance/romantasy genre is in a boom time. Since 2020, the industry has more than doubled—it continued growth in 2025. The romance bookstore—a physical store that sells exclusivel...