The Chicago Review of Books is proud to announce the shortlist for the 2026 Chicago Review of Books (CHIRBy) Awards! Since 2016, the CHIRBy Awards have honored the best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, ...

Matthew Prigge is an author and librarian at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has written several books, including Outlaws, Rebels, & Vixens, which was made into a feature-length ...

Education is supposed to be a path toward a better life. But what happens when the path becomes so competitive, expensive, and unforgiving that the pursuit of that better life begins to consume the ...

The Tale Becomes the Story: Michael Gorra’s “The Storytellers” by Robert Minto September 21, 2026 4 mins Read ...

Our review of Michael Gorra's new survey of 19th-century short fiction, "The Storytellers." The 19th-century tale is an altogether different beast than the modern literary short story—different in ...

Critics in Conversation is a “podcast on the page” feature in which contributors discuss a book or issue currently making headlines in the literary world. Read our piece on Angel Down here and ...

1992, the Dominican Republic. The dictatorship of Joaquin Balaguer is slowly waning, but the years of political imprisonment, torture, and deaths under his reign are still felt across the country.

Capitalism and parenting are incompatible. Motherhood demands the time and energy capitalism normally exploits for a profit. But what if big business could mitigate the impact of a pregnancy by ...

Hernan Diaz has never drawn from the same well twice. Or so it seems to the reader, who marvels at his increasingly varied output. This includes the Western setting of In the Distance, the ...

In Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang, college freshman Lily Chen travels to Taiwan for an intensive Mandarin program, hoping the trip will help her understand the culture she inherited as a heritage speaker ...

Everyone knows the classics. The widely read, widely praised, widely taught works of literature that form what we come to think of as literature itself. Within that canon are authors whose names echo ...