chris borrelli Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

chris borrelli

A genre-trip full of detours into history, folklore, memoir and art, moving state by state, told by a Chicago native determined to push past the archetypes of one region to get at the ways in which the entire country’s legacy of contradictions protects us from hard truths.

chris borrelli

Chaon has been an underrated gem for so long it’s nice to say his latest reads like a breakout: A Big Lebowski-esque drifter navigating a crumbling country learns his time in Evanston left a strange, unsettling legacy. To say more would spoil it.

chris borrelli

⁦@TheGillianFlynn⁩ and the Mystery of the Next Gone Girl. (Twist spoiler: She’s a part-time publisher now; first book, a terrific thriller about a punk nun by ⁦@MargotDouaihy⁩) https://t.co/v0bRFQ0gfB

chris borrelli

An allegorical satire of the ruling class in an African nation... documenting the cruelty of the old regime and the performative promises of the new one. The result is an epic that argues with laughter and a lot of anger for the boundlessness of storytelling.

chris borrelli

I wrote about the new biography of Lorraine Hansberry, who you know from A Raisin in the Sun. Yet her father took their housing discrimination suit to the Supreme Court. She wore fur coats to grade school. She was a radical who died before her time. https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-lorraine-hansberry-biography-20220120-5aikum6nlbgqrcmeoajjihtaru-story.html

chris borrelli

A big smile of a read. That academic title is a wink. Dylan selects more than 60 of his favorite songs then leaps into freewheeling history, lots of associative memories and, here and there, thoughts on songwriting and creativity and even a few subjects he has long avoided...

chris borrelli

Katherine Dunn, who died in 2016, leaving one bona fide cult classic (“Geek Love”), finished the previously unpublished “Toad” (Nov. 1) while tending bar in the ‘70s. It’s as melancholy as “Geek Love” was winsome, a tale of ‘60s campus life, from the vantage of regret.

chris borrelli

[The book provides] a street-level view of Canada’s most controversial (and rich) landscape. History rears up, as well as sexual harassment, but also a humane profile of struggling workers, the sorts who produce sneakers, smartphones and fossil fuels but remain faceless.

chris borrelli

If you have read Rachel Cusk — and if you haven’t, there’s your summer reading list — you’re safe to assume her latest novel about creative life, “Parade” (June 18), starts with a darkly funny come-on (an artist paints a portrait of his wife, makes it ugly and it sells), only to end up very far afield.

chris borrelli

Vintage noir, with an air of “Heart of Darkness,” played at America’s Southern border, for all the racism and heartache that implies. What you’re not expecting is magic realism (and that bit of horror) paired to pitch-dark crime fiction about cyclical violence.